Chapter 13 The Grand Preview and Curious Suspects #3
Down the stone pathway from the old caretaker's cottage came Mrs. Martha Gable.
The former housekeeper of Blackwood Manor was seventy-two years old, but she walked with the unyielding momentum of an iron locomotive.
Dressed in a drab wool dress of faded charcoal, with a thick black shawl pinned across her sunken chest by a tarnished silver brooch, her gray hair was scraped into a bun so tight it pulled her skin taut over her cheekbones.
In her right hand, she gripped a heavy wooden cane, planting it into the gravel with sharp, venomous thuds.
As she mounted the veranda steps, her rheumy, deep-set eyes locked onto me.
Buster didn't retreat. He stepped squarely between me and the top stair, his golden ruff bristling along his spine, his head lowered as that deep, warning growl rumbled steadily in his throat.
"Get that mongrel out of my path, Margaret Callahan," Mrs. Gable croaked, her voice like grinding millstones.
"Buster is fine where he is, Mrs. Gable," I said, resting a calming hand on Buster’s trembling shoulder. He leaned back against my knees, never taking his amber eyes off the old woman. "The preview is open to the public. Are you here to register for a bidding paddle?"
Mrs. Gable stopped three feet away, leaning heavily on her cane. A cold, contemptuous sneer twisted her thin lips as she looked past me toward the crowded foyer.
"Bidding paddles?" she spat, her gaze burning with decades of hoarded bitterness. "Buying and selling like thieves in the temple. Eleanor’s ghost will choke every last one of you before the weekend is out. You think you can catalog a century of sin and slap yellow price tags on it?"
"We are conducting a lawful estate dispersal under contract with the executor, Mrs. Gable," I replied, keeping my voice level despite the chill creeping up my neck.
"There is no law on this mountain that Eleanor didn't buy with blood money," the old woman hissed, leaning closer.
The pungent odor of camphor, stale lavender, and damp earth radiated from her heavy wool shawl.
"The Vance name was built on a lie. The land under your feet, the roof over your head, the very silver in those velvet boxes—none of it belonged to her.
It was taken. Swindled from honest folk who died in the dirt while the Vances drank out of crystal. "
She tapped her cane sharply against the flagstones, inches from Buster’s front paws. Buster let out a sharp, booming bark that echoed across the lawn, standing his ground without yielding an inch.
"And you, Margaret Callahan," Mrs. Gable whispered, her pale, watery eyes boring into mine with frightening intensity.
"You poke and pry into things that don't concern you. You think because you polish old cherrywood you understand what’s buried beneath it.
Julian Croft thought he was clever, too.
He thought he could steal the family bones and sell them in Atlanta. "
Her hand tightened on the crook of her cane until her knuckles turned white.
"Be careful, child," she muttered, her voice dropping to a raspy, venomous cadence that made the hair on my arms stand straight up.
"The dead don't like their secrets traded for gold. And the person who silenced Julian Croft is standing under this roof right now, watching you make a mockery of Eleanor’s grave. "
Without waiting for a response, Mrs. Gable turned on the heel of her heavy orthopedic shoes and shuffled into the house, her cane clacking a relentless, menacing rhythm against the hardwood.
I stood frozen on the sunny veranda, one hand buried deep in Buster’s warm fur. The dog had stopped growling, but he pressed his head hard against my thigh, letting out a soft, anxious whine.
Across the lawn, the sugar maples rustled in the autumn breeze, drifting scarlet leaves over the parked cars.
Through the tall parlor windows, I could see the crowded house: Vanessa Vance standing near the archway, her knuckles white around her cigarette case; Sly Gable lurking near the dining room sideboard, pretending to examine a silver soup tureen while his beady eyes tracked every person in the hall; and Gregory Vance, who had just arrived from the driveway, his expensive suit rumpled, arguing in hushed, furious tones with Birdie at the registration table.
Every one of them had a motive. Every one of them was hiding something that could destroy the estate.
And standing in the center of that grand, beautiful, cursed house was Eleanor Vance’s cherrywood desk—its secret compartment empty, its missing ledger holding the key to a century of small-town deception.
I looked down at Buster, whose intelligent amber eyes looked right back up into mine.
"You felt it too, didn't you, boy?" I whispered softly.
The preview had only just begun, but the stakes were no longer about chipped china or high-end appraisals. The killer wasn't hiding in the shadows of the carriage house anymore.
The killer was inside the house, smiling among the antique hounds, waiting for the auction hammer to fall.