Chapter 20 - The Final Midnight
I didn't panic. The adrenaline surged through my bloodstream, cold, sharp, and intensely focusing.
I didn't turn on the flashlight. I knew the layout of the house by memory—every step, every board that creaked, every angle of cover. I picked up the 12-gauge shotgun from behind the pantry door, slipped two extra slugs into my jeans pocket, and moved silently toward the top of the basement stairs.
Down in the dark, water dripped onto the concrete floor. Footsteps—deliberate, slow, and heavy—were ascending the wooden steps.
"Riley?"
The voice wasn't Evelyn's.
It was a man's voice, raspy, strained, and filled with a strange, trembling manic energy.
"Riley, open the door, honey. It's Kenneth. Evelyn sent me... she told me where the second ledger was hidden. The one Grandma hid in the floor joists before she went into the home."
I racked the slide of the shotgun, the metallic *ch-chick* reverberating down the stairwell like thunder.
"Kenneth, take one more step up those stairs and you won't survive the climb," I commanded, my voice dropping into a register of icy, absolute certainty.
The footsteps stopped on the landing.
A flashlight beam suddenly snapped on from below, blinding me for a split second as it bounced off the whitewashed walls.
"You don't understand, Riley!" Kenneth's voice hitched, cracking into a desperate sob. "Evelyn doesn't have the ledger! She never had it! *He* has it! He's been running her the entire time!"
The air went still in my lungs. "Who, Kenneth? Sterling is in federal custody!"
"Not Sterling!" Kenneth cried out from the dark, his voice echoing off the concrete. "Sterling was just the banker! Your father, Riley! Robert didn't die in that boating accident in Mexico ten years ago! He’s alive! He set this whole thing up to strip the estate clean! And he's standing right behind me!"
Before the words could fully process in my brain, the flashlight beam in the basement swung wildly as Kenneth let out a choked, wet gasp.
A heavy, sickening thud rattled the bottom of the wooden staircase, followed by the sound of a body slumping down the steps into the dark water pooled below.
Silence fell over the basement.
Heavy, slow, measured footsteps began ascending the stairs, one deliberate riser at a time.
A shadow stretched up the wall into the pale moonlight filtering through the kitchen window—a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette holding a gleaming iron crowbar.
May you like
Then, a voice came out of the darkness—a voice I hadn't heard since I was twenty-one years old, a voice that had sung me to sleep as a child and supposedly drowned in the Gulf of California.
"Hello, Riley," the shadow whispered from the top of the landing. "You always were Helen's favorite. Now, put the gun down... before we have to settle this the hard way."
