Chapter 23 - THE VOICE ON CELL BLOCK 4
Daniel moved toward the kitchen as if wading through waist-deep mud. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to smash a window, to drag his wife and daughter out into the torrential rain. But the phantom ring of his childhood home held him captive by invisible strings.
He lifted the receiver. He pressed it to his ear.
"Danny?"
The voice was unmistakable. Smooth, aristocratic, entirely unaffected by the screeching feedback of a correctional facility monitor. It was Margaret.
"Mother," Daniel gasped, his fingers crushing the plastic handset. "Where are you? What did you do to this house?"
A dry, elegant chuckle drifted across the wire. "A mother always protects her investments, darling. I told you years ago that certain floorboards should never be raised. You always were so sentimental about that nursery. You wanted your little girl to sleep in the room where you grew up. I warned you. I told you the house had bad bones."
"Julian is here," Daniel snarled, hot tears spilling over his bruised cheeks. "He broke the concrete. Arthur... Father is down there, isn't he? You murdered him and put him under the beams!"
Silence hung on the line for three agonizing seconds. When Margaret spoke again, her voice had dropped its maternal mask, replaced by a razor-sharp venom that made Daniel’s blood curdle.
"Your father was a weak, pathetic drunk who threatened to take half of everything I built and give it to his mistress in Portland," Margaret said coldly. "He was going to ruin us, Danny. He was going to leave you and Julian penniless. What I did in that basement, I did to preserve the Vance name."
"You killed him!"
"Arthur made his choices. But you should be far more concerned with who is standing outside your pantry right now, Danny."
Daniel froze.
"Did you really think Julian was acting alone when he broke out of St. Jude's?" Margaret whispered, the background clatter of prison bars audible behind her voice. "Julian didn't have the wits to forge release papers. He didn't have the money to hire a driver. I arranged his release, Danny. Because thirty years ago, your father wasn't the only thing we put beneath those floorboards. There was a second ledger. The bank account numbers. The bearer bonds. And the deed to the harbor property."
"You set Julian loose on us?" Daniel shouted, his voice cracking with rage. "You sent a violent, sick man into the house with my child?!"
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"Julian isn't sick, Danny. Julian is obedient," Margaret said with chilling finality. "Now hand the phone to your wife. She is the only one in that room with the spine to make a trade."
***
