Chapter 13 - Midnight Shadows
I returned to the lake house as dusk was falling, painting the water in bruised shades of violet and slate. The woods were unusually still. The birds had stopped singing, and the air carried the sharp, electric scent of an early frost.
As I pulled through the gate, my headlights swept across the timberline. Something caught the glare—a sudden, sharp glint of glass hidden deep within the western cluster of pines.
I didn't tap the brakes. I drove smoothly up to the turnaround, parked in the garage, and killed the engine.
Instead of turning on the interior lights of the house, I slipped through the mudroom, grabbed a heavy tactical flashlight and my grandfather’s 12-gauge shotgun from the gun cabinet, and stepped out the side door into the shadows.
My boots made no sound on the thick carpet of pine needles. I had played in these woods since I was five years old; I knew every mossy rock, every fallen birch trunk, every dip where water pooled in the spring.
Fifty yards from my property line, crouched near the old stone boundary marker, was a figure dressed in dark workwear. He had a digital camcorder mounted on a low-profile tripod, aimed directly at my rear panoramic windows.
"Step away from the camera, or you leave this ridge in an ambulance," I said, stepping from behind a towering Douglas fir, the shotgun resting comfortably across my forearm.
The man froze, then slowly raised his hands. He turned his head. In the dim moonlight filtering through the branches, I recognized him immediately.
It was Kenneth—Evelyn’s younger brother, my uncle, the family enabler who had spent his entire life living off church charity and Evelyn's manufactured sob stories.
"Riley! Jesus, Riley, don't shoot!" Kenneth stammered, his teeth chattering in the mountain cold. "I’m on the easement road! I have a legal right to be here!"
"You're thirty feet over the surveyed property line, Kenneth," I replied coldly, stepping forward until the barrel of the shotgun was visible in the moonlight. "And that camera is pointed directly into my private bedroom. That is criminal voyeurism and felony trespassing. What are you doing here?"
"Evelyn... Evelyn needed proof," he stammered, pulling his collar up around his trembling chin. "Proof that you're running an illegal short-term rental. Proof that you're harboring Leo! She told the court Leo is an unhinged felon living on the premises without supervision!"
A cold fury ignited in my gut. Leo was turning his life around. He had sweated, stacked wood, taken his welding classes, and stayed clean. Evelyn was willing to drag her own grandson back into a jail cell just to construct a slander narrative against me.
"Give me the SD card," I commanded.
"No, Riley, look, I get paid five hundred bucks by the church for these footage drops—"
*Clack-clack.*
The sound of the shotgun chambering a round cut through the forest like a gunshot itself.
Kenneth dropped the camera instantly. "Take it! Take the whole damn thing! I didn't want to come, Riley! Evelyn and Sterling told me if I didn't help them build the nuisance case, the church would foreclose on my trailer park lot! They own everything, Riley! They own the sheriff’s deputy in the lower district, they own the zoning inspector—you can't beat them!"
May you like
"Pick up your tripod and walk," I said, my voice dead and flat. "Tell Evelyn that if she sends another dog into my woods, I won't use the camera to defend myself."
***
