Chapter 19 Stalling for Time in the Shadows
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The wind slamming against the diamond-paned leaded glass of Blackwood Manor’s library sounded less like an October gale and more like a mountain locomotive jumping the tracks.
Outside, rain lashed the towering hemlocks, their ancient boughs thrashing against granite masonry with heavy thuds that rattled the crystal pendants overhead.
Inside, the only light came from the violent crimson embers of the stone hearth, casting long, wavering shadows across two centuries of leather-bound volumes, hand-carved chestnut paneling, and one thoroughly unhinged antique dealer holding a snub-nosed revolver.
At my feet, Buster let out a low, vibrating growl, like distant thunder trapped inside eighty pounds of golden retriever.
The fur along his spine stood in a rigid ridge.
I kept one palm pressed against the crown of his head, feeling the taut bunching of his neck muscles, praying he wouldn’t leap.
Buster was brave and loyal, but he was unequipped to catch a bullet.
"Slide it over, Maggie," Sly snarled, his voice cracking over the roar of the fire. "Right across the boards. Toe of your clogs, gentle and flat. Don't test me. I swear to God, don't test me."
Between my feet rested the prize: the 1845 calfskin ledger, bound in scuffed oxblood leather and secured with a tarnished brass clasp engraved with the Moravian star.
Its deckle-edged rag pages contained seventy-three handwritten folios of North Carolina land covenants, colonial timber boundaries, and the original, unrecorded deed proving Eleanor Vance had never owned Blackwood Ridge outright—she had held it in perpetual trust for the Blue Ridge Appalachian Conservancy.
It was the single document that turned four hundred acres of prime mountain land from a fifty-million-dollar developer's goldmine into an untouchable preserve.
Three feet behind Sly, the massive fireplace crackled, its roaring heart of hickory logs burning hot enough to turn two centuries of legal history into ash in seconds.
"You really don't want to burn that, Sly," I said, keeping my voice deliberately soft and level—the exact tone I used when an anxious consignor discovered their grandmother’s silver was merely plate.
"You know what happens to early nineteenth-century binding in a high-thermal hearth.
Calfskin doesn't just burn; it shrieks. It smells like sulfur, and the glue in the spine is bone collagen.
You'll choke on the fumes before you make it down the driveway. "
"Shut up!" Sly jerked the gun forward, knuckle whitening on the trigger. "You think this is an appraisal, Maggie? That book is twenty-eight million dollars in commercial timber! It's my ticket out of this miserable valley!"
"It's a murder charge, Sly," Luke Sterling said from my left.
Luke hadn't moved an inch, but every line of his six-foot-two frame was coiled like an industrial spring.
He stood angled slightly in front of me, work boots anchored on the heart-pine floorboards.
He held his hands at chest height in apparent surrender, but his hazel eyes were measuring the four feet of polished floor between himself and the heavy, two-tiered drop-leaf oak tea cart beside the rug.
The cart was an absolute monster of nineteenth-century joinery, built from three-inch white oak slabs, fitted with cast-iron casters, and laden with Eleanor Vance's collection of heavy cast-iron kettles, an enameled Victorian tea urn, and three brass trivets.
It weighed at least one hundred and twenty pounds.
If Luke could get leverage, it was a rolling battering ram.
"Don't lecture me about murder, Sterling!
" Sly spat, eyes wild. "Croft brought this on himself!
The arrogant bastard thought he could double-cross me!
I brought him the Vance job! I told him about the Moravian secretary desk and the hollow bottom in the central drawer!
We were supposed to authenticate the covenant, suppress it, certify the title as unencumbered fee-simple, and split the developer's finder's fee fifty-fifty! "
"Until Julian realized you were desperate," I said gently, shifting half a step sideways to draw Sly's focus away from Luke.
"Julian Croft was a predator, Sly, but a sophisticated one.
Once he had the original ledger in his hands, he didn't need a small-town dealer.
He could cut you out, sell the deed straight to the Piedmont Development Syndicate in Charlotte, and leave you holding an empty inventory sheet.
So you followed him to the carriage house. "
A twitch pulled at the corner of Sly's mouth.
"He laughed at me. He stood beside Eleanor's wicker pony cart, packing his briefcase, and called me a country bumpkin.
He said a man who couldn't tell transferware from Canton porcelain had no business playing with the big boys.
He turned his back on me to pick up his coat. "
"And the brass beam scale was sitting on the workbench," Luke murmured, voice deadly quiet. "Two and a half pounds of solid cast brass. You didn't even drop the weights."
"He was going to ruin me!" Sly shouted, veins bulging along his neck. "I owe three hundred thousand dollars to creditors in Greensboro! My showroom is mortgaged to the rafters! The bank was going to padlock my doors by November!"
To my right, beneath the mezzanine gallery, something shifted. A floorboard gave a microscopic groan, masked by the storm outside.
Birdie.
My indomitable, five-foot-two business partner was executing the stealth maneuver of a lifetime.
While Sly’s manic attention was riveted on me, Birdie had slipped three paces back toward the heavy mahogany track supporting the rolling brass library ladder.
Her turquoise cashmere wrap was gone, ditched soundlessly over an armchair.
In her right hand, concealed behind the floral folds of her pleated skirt, she gripped an eight-pound bronze bookend shaped like a Renaissance gargoyle.
Birdie caught my eye through the gloom. Her expression was pure steel. She looked personally insulted to be held at gunpoint by a man in synthetic fibers.
She tilted her chin, cleared her throat with an exaggerated sniff, and stepped boldly into the amber firelight.
"Well, if that isn't the most pathetic sob story I have ever endured," Birdie announced, voice dripping with southern venom.
Sly flinched, the gun wavering toward her before darting back to me. "Shut up, Birdie!"
"Oh, save your breath, Sly Gable," Birdie scoffed, resting a hand on her hip and taking an insolent half-step left, drawing his peripheral vision toward the ladder track.
"You’ve been failing at everything in this county since Mrs. Abernathy held you back in fourth grade for eating paste.
Do you honestly think anyone believes you're a criminal mastermind?
Look at you! That jacket looks woven from recycled bus station upholstery.
And that polyester turtleneck? In October?
You're sweating through your collar like a guilty deacon at a poker game. "
"Birdie—" Sly snarled, face turning mottled eggplant.
"Don't you 'Birdie' me, Sterling Gable! You couldn't run an antique shop if inventory was handed to you on a silver platter—which Eleanor Vance's mother did in 1974, and you still sold it for scrap! You are a disgrace to the trade, and your mother ought to take a switch to your backside!"
That struck a nerve. Sly's jaw clenched until his molars ground. "Leave my mother out of this!"
"How can I?" I cut in smoothly, catching the baton before Birdie pushed him too far. "Your mother lived in the caretaker's cottage at the foot of Blackwood Ridge for forty-two years, Sly. She was Eleanor’s devoted housekeeper. When Sheriff Lawson found Julian’s blood on the antique scale, who did you try to frame? You planted Eleanor’s stolen onyx mourning brooches in your mother’s pantry. "
Sly’s eyes flickered, guilt and panic warring across his damp features. "She was old. Nobody sends an eighty-one-year-old with arthritis to prison. Lawson would have thought it was elder confusion. A suspended sentence—it would have bought me time to clear Croft's rental car and find the ledger!"
"You framed your own mother, Sly," I said with cold revulsion. "A woman who baked biscuits for the entire Baptist congregation every Sunday for thirty years. You set her up for grand larceny and murder just to pocket a kickback and buy a condo in Hilton Head."
"I was going to take care of her!" he yelled, spitting with fury. "I was going to buy her a place on the coast! A nurse! Everything she needed!"
"She doesn't want a condo in Hilton Head, Sly," Luke said, voice dropping into that deep register that commanded room.
He took a subtle three-inch diagonal slide forward, shoulder aligning with the tea cart's handle. "She wants to sit on her porch in Black Walnut Cove, look at the ridge, and believe her son is an honest man. But when Lawson finishes examining the grease-pencil rubbings you left on Croft’s desk, she’s going to know. The whole county will know."
"No, they won't!" Sly shrieked. "Because there's no proof without that book!
That's why Julian hid it in the chimney flue!
Without the 1845 signature page, Eleanor's handwritten trust covenant doesn't exist under North Carolina probate law!
The heirs get clear title, the syndicate buys the mountain, and I get my cut! "