Chapter 20 The Tea Cart and the Flying Retriever
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The grandfather clock in the corner of the Blackwood Manor library had stopped ticking three decades ago, but in the suffocating silence of the room, I could hear the erratic rhythm of my own pulse pounding like a bass drum against my ribs.
Outside, the October storm beat violently against the floor-to-ceiling leaded glass windows, throwing sheets of wind-whipped mountain rain against the dark panes.
Inside, the only light came from a single green banker’s lamp on the mahogany desk and the dying amber embers in the massive stone hearth.
The shadows stretched up the towering walls of leather-bound volumes, casting long, menacing silhouettes across the twenty-foot ceiling.
And standing ten feet in front of me, looking far more manic than any small-town antique dealer had a right to look, was Sterling “Sly” Gable.
The silver-plated .38 snub-nosed revolver in his right hand was unwavering.
His usually immaculate tweed jacket was soaked through from his trek across the grounds, clinging to his narrow frame like a wet shroud, and his thinning hair was plastered to his forehead in sodden clumps.
His pale eyes darted between me, Birdie, and Luke with the frantic desperation of a cornered coyote.
"You really should have stuck to refinishing nightstands, Maggie," Sly rasped, his voice whistling through clenched teeth. "You just had to dig. You and that ridiculous blue-ribbon friend of yours. If you’d only let Julian take the fall for Eleanor’s little family secret, everyone could have walked away with a piece of the pie.
But no. You had to go and find the deed. "
"The deed doesn't belong to you, Sly," I said, keeping my voice as steady as my trembling knees would permit.
My hands rested innocently against the curved mahogany handles of an Edwardian drop-leaf tea cart stationed beside the reading alcove.
"And Eleanor Vance wasn't your aunt to rob.
You killed Julian Croft in the carriage house because he figured out you were forging provenance papers to break the land trust. You bludgeoned him with an antique brass scale, and now you think shooting three people in a locked manor during a gale is going to cover your tracks? "
"Nobody will ever know," Sly spat, taking a half-step forward.
The barrel of the revolver rose until it was pointed dead center at my chest. "A tragic gas explosion.
An unfortunate electrical fire in a neglected Victorian relic.
By morning, the rain will wash the ash into the creek, and the probate court will award the mountain acreage to the only surviving claimant with documentation. Me."
Beside me, Birdie stood near the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Her turquoise cashmere wrap was askew, her cat-eye reading glasses perched dangerously on the bridge of her nose, but her jaw was set in granite. She didn’t look terrified; she looked personally offended.
Two paces to my right, Luke Sterling stood with his broad shoulders squared, his flannel-clad arms tense, deliberately angling his body to place himself between Sly's gun and me.
His jaw was clenched so tightly that a muscle jumped in his cheek.
He had slowly shifted his weight onto his back foot, like a man preparing to charge a freight train.
Down by Luke’s work boots, crouching low against the deep navy pile of the ancient Persian Heriz rug, was Buster.
My eighty-pound golden retriever mix wasn't wagging his tail. For the first time in the three years since I’d adopted him from the county shelter, Buster was completely still.
His golden ruff was puffed out like a lion's mane, his lips curled back just far enough to expose a gleaming row of teeth, and a vibration so low it resonated in the floorboards was rumbling in his chest.
"Step away from the cart, Maggie," Sly ordered, his finger tightening around the trigger. "Hands where I can see them. All three of you against the fireplace. Now."
None of us moved.
Sly’s face contorted into a sneer of pure venom. "Fine. We do it the hard way. I'm counting to three. One..."
My eyes dropped to the tea cart under my palms. It was solid quarter-sawn Appalachian white oak, built around 1905, weighing at least sixty pounds empty.
But it wasn't empty. Earlier that afternoon, Birdie had stacked the lower shelf with Eleanor Vance’s collection of heavy Victorian cast-iron kitchen kettles, three solid brass trivets, and a massive pewter samovar awaiting inventory tags.
And thanks to a fresh application of beeswax and mineral oil I’d applied only yesterday morning, its solid brass swivel casters were greased to perfection.
"Two..." Sly hissed, his knuckles whitening around the checkered walnut grip of the revolver.
In the antique business, timing is everything. You either spot the treasure in the pile of rust before anyone else, or you go home empty-handed.
"Three—"
"Patina this, you bastard!" I screamed.
With every ounce of strength in my fifty-two-year-old body, planting my supportive orthopedic clogs into the weave of the Persian rug, I shoved the heavy oak tea cart forward like an Olympic bobsledder launching off the blocks.
The brass casters caught the polished oak floorboards beyond the rug and shrieked. The cart rocketed across the ten feet of open space with terrifying, sixty-pound momentum, gathering speed across the waxed expanse.
Sly’s eyes widened behind his wire-rimmed glasses, turning the size of saucers. He tried to pivot, tried to pull the trigger, but physics is an unforgiving creditor.
*CRACK.*
The solid oak front bumper of the cart slammed directly into Sly Gable’s shins with the sickening, wooden thud of a bowling ball hitting a single pin.
Sly let out a high-pitched, ungodly yelp that sounded like a stepped-on accordion.
The sheer kinetic force swept his legs clean out from under him.
As he pitched forward, the top-heavy cart buckled, overturning its contents in a cascade of domestic violence.
Three ten-pound cast-iron tea kettles and a solid brass trivet rained down across his kneecaps and shins like iron cannonballs.
"My legs! You broke my bloody legs!" Sly shrieked, clutching his shins, the revolver still dangerously gripped in his flailing hand as he scrambled backward across the parquet.
"Birdie, the ladder!" I yelled, stumbling back against the reading desk as my shoulder protested the violent shove.
Birdie didn't need to be told twice. She had already kicked off her right Italian leather flat.
With the fury of a high school track star and the precision of a woman who had spent thirty years maneuvering department store clearance racks, Birdie grabbed the brass handrail of the floor-to-ceiling library ladder and delivered a ferocious, barefoot drop-kick to the bottom oak rung.
The vintage brass rollers in the ceiling track let out a deafening, metallic shriek. The eight-hundred-pound rolling mahogany ladder shot down its iron rail like an out-of-control roller coaster.
Sly, struggling to push a cast-iron kettle off his thigh, managed to raise the revolver toward me. "I'll kill you—"
He never finished the sentence.
The mahogany upright of the runaway ladder struck him squarely in the left shoulder with the force of a lumberjack’s swing. The impact spun him completely around, knocking his glasses flying across the room and smashing his face against the floor.
"And that's for Eleanor's silver, you little worm!" Birdie bellowed from the stacks, brandishing her remaining shoe like a club.
Yet despite the pain and the battering, Sly's survival instincts were vicious. Groaning in agony, his face smeared with floor wax and dust, he rolled onto his side, his fingers clawing desperately around the revolver’s grip, raising the barrel toward Birdie’s unprotected chest.
"Birdie, down!" Luke roared, lunging forward.
He was too far away. Luke wouldn't reach him in time.
Buster did.
The sweet, lazy, biscuit-obsessed golden retriever who spent eighteen hours a day snoring on braided rugs suddenly ceased to be a pet and became an avenging angel of canine retribution.
Buster unleashed a mountain-shaking, thunderous roar—a sound so primal and deep it rattled the leaded glass panes in their frames. He dug his thick claws into the Persian carpet, tearing through the centuries-old weave, and launched his full eighty pounds of muscle and golden fur into the air.
It was not a nip. It was not a warning bark. It was a textbook, NFL-caliber flying linebacker tackle.
Buster hit Sly Gable dead center in the chest at full flight.
The breath exploded out of Sly’s lungs in a violent, wet *OOF!
* His skull bounced off the parquet floor with a resounding crack.
The eighty-pound dog landed squarely on the man's ribcage, planting both front paws directly on Sly's collarbones, baring two inches of gleaming white canine teeth six inches from Sly's nose, and emitting a guttural snarl that could have parted the Red Sea.
The revolver slipped from Sly’s numb fingers. It skittered across the waxed floorboards, spinning like a silver top until it clinked harmlessly against the brass fender of the hearth.
"Good boy, Buster! Hold him!" Luke’s voice boomed.
Luke arrived a heartbeat later. Dropping to one knee with the weight of a seasoned mountain craftsman, he pinned Sly’s gun arm to the floorboards with a heavy work boot.
In his right hand, Luke wielded the three-foot, hand-forged wrought-iron fireplace poker, laying its blackened, heavy shaft flat across Sly Gable’s throat with enough measured pressure to ensure the man couldn't swallow, let alone stand up.
"Don't you twitch," Luke growled, his voice dropping into a register so dark and lethal that even Buster paused his snarling to take note. "You move a single finger, Sly, and I will personally introduce you to nineteenth-century ironwork."