Chapter 36 - The Living Dead
The room went dead silent, save for the hum of the overhead fluorescent bulb and Sarah’s muffled sobbing.
Margaret felt the cellar floor tilt beneath her feet. "What did you say, Clara?"
Clara smiled, tilting her head with theatrical innocence. "You heard me, Margaret. You spent forty years playing the grieving mother who took in an abandoned infant from the county steps. Did you really think you were the only one who kept secrets in this town?"
Clara set the bone saw down on the metal tray with a deliberate *clink*. She pulled off one yellow glove, tossing it onto the table, revealing a hand covered in old chemical burns.
"Forty years ago, Margaret, your husband Richard was sleeping with half the county. Including my younger sister, Evelyn. When Evelyn got pregnant, Richard panicked. He begged me to make it go away. But I don't destroy valuable assets, Margaret. I manage them."
Clara walked slowly toward the plastic sheeting, trailing her fingers along the edge. "Evelyn died in childbirth in this very basement. Richard took the boy—you, Ethan—and brought you to Margaret, claiming you were a foundling left in a basket at the clinic. Margaret was so desperate for a child after three miscarriages she didn't ask questions. She took you in, raised you, smothered you in love."
Ethan’s arms began to shake, the barrel of the revolver dipping slightly. "You're lying. You're a sick, lying psycho."
"Am I?" Clara laughed, a dry, rattling sound. "Why do you think Arthur Sinclair was so obsessed with your bloodline, Ethan? Why do you think he paid twenty million dollars for Noah? Because Noah wasn't just any child. Noah was Richard Vance’s grandson. And Arthur had a blood feud with Richard that went back fifty years to the copper mining syndicates."
Clara turned her predatory gaze onto Sarah, who was thrashing against the ropes, tears cutting clean lines through the dirt on her cheeks.
"And then you brought Sarah into our world," Clara continued, her voice hardening like cooling lava. "Sweet, nosy Sarah. She started looking into the infant registry when she was pregnant with Noah. She found out that eighteen babies who 'died' in Millfield Memorial between 1990 and 2010 were currently living under new identities in Switzerland, London, and Manhattan."
"You sold them," Margaret whispered, horror gripping her soul. "You used your position at the morgue to stage deaths, and you sold them to Sinclair."
"I gave them to families who could afford them!" Clara screamed, her pleasant facade shattering into a mask of pure, demonic rage. "I took gutter trash from teenage mothers and placed them in palaces! I built an empire beneath your feet, Margaret! And Sarah was going to destroy it all with one call to the state attorney general!"
Clara stepped behind Sarah’s chair, her hand dipping into her apron pocket. When it emerged, she was holding a heavy detonator switch with a glowing green light.
"Sarah didn't die in that crash," Clara sneered. "I dragged her out before the gas tank blew. I put a stray Jane Doe from the morgue behind the wheel and filed the dental records. And for four years, Sarah has lived down here, pumping milk, watching through that camera while I introduced Vanessa into Ethan's life to take the boy."
"Vanessa worked for you?" Ethan shouted, his voice cracking.
"Vanessa was my niece," Clara spat. "Evelyn’s second daughter. Your half-sister, Ethan. Though neither of you knew it. She was supposed to deliver Noah to Sinclair’s transport team last week. But you... you old witch," Clara hissed, glaring at Margaret, "you ruined thirty years of work in forty-eight hours."
Clara’s thumb hovered over the red button on the detonator.
"Now, the buyers are gone. Arthur is arrested. The feds are crawling all over the state. There is nothing left to salvage. But I am not going to a federal penitentiary."
Clara grinned, her teeth stained with tea and nicotine.
May you like
"We are all staying right here. In Richard’s soil."
***
