Chapter 16 - The Poisoned Well
"Out! Out the side door!" I screamed, grabbing Amy by the waist and shoving her toward the bilco cellar doors that opened onto the eastern terrace.
We tumbled out onto the wet grass just as a dull, muffled *whump* shook the foundation of the Bradley mansion. A ball of orange flame flashed behind the basement windows, blowing out the leaded glass in a hail of singing shrapnel. Eleanor’s hired hand had cut the main propane line feeding the furnace.
Amy fell to her knees in the mud, Frederick clutched securely against her breast inside her down parka. The boy was wailing, terrified by the explosion and the freezing rain.
"My throat..." Amy gasped, tearing at her collar, her face turning a ghastly shade of chalky gray. "Connor... I can't breathe."
I dropped down beside her. Her lips were swelling, a bluish hue creeping across her fingertips.
"Amy! What is it? What did you touch?"
"The water..." she choked out, her eyes rolling back into her head as she went limp in my arms. "I made... Frederick’s formula... using the tap... I drank a glass... before the lights died..."
The well.
The private artesian well that supplied the Bradley estate sat three hundred yards back in the hemlock grove. Eleanor hadn't just tried to blow up the house; she had poisoned the aquifer.
"Hold on, Amy! Stay with me!" I roared into the storm.
I scooped Frederick up with one arm, hauled Amy over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and sprinted through the blinding deluge toward my truck parked near the carriage barn. Every breath burned my lungs like fire. My father’s ledger was stuffed inside my jacket, cutting into my ribs like an iron plate.
I threw Amy into the passenger seat, strapped Frederick into his car seat in the back cab, and turned the ignition. The engine roared to life.
I slammed the truck into reverse, spun out across the ruined lawn, and barrelled toward the main gate. The heavy iron gates were closed, padlocked shut with a massive logging chain that hadn't been there two hours ago.
"Hold on!" I screamed to Amy, who was barely conscious, frothing lightly at the corner of her lips.
I pinned the accelerator to the floorboard. The heavy steel bumper of my three-ton pickup struck the center of the wrought-iron gates at fifty miles per hour.
*CRASH.*
The cast-iron pickets bent, the hinge posts sheared out of their century-old masonry moorings with an explosion of pulverized granite, and the truck vaulted onto the paved county highway, sparks showering behind us like fireworks in the black night.
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I didn't head for the local clinic in town where Eleanor’s crony Dr. Croft held sway. I turned south, racing down the Merritt Parkway toward Yale New Haven Hospital—an ivory-tower medical fortress where small-town family influence couldn't buy a doctor’s signature.
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