Chapter 20 - The Midnight Arsonist
Six months later, the ghost had finally been buried.
Mercer County had liquidated the Sterling estate. The land had been carved up by regional developers, the ugly velvet tracksuits auctioned for fifty cents on the dollar, and the memory of Arthur and Eleanor Sterling scrubbed from the civic registers like grease from a countertop.
Arthur was sitting in a medium-security cell in Terre Haute, Indiana, spending his days sorting industrial laundry. Eleanor had taken a plea deal—three years of home confinement in a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Gary, Indiana, stripped of her notary commission and barred from holding any financial instrument in her name for the rest of her life.
Chloe had taken the bus to Minneapolis. Nathan’s investigators reported that she had lasted two weeks in the vocational dorm before disappearing into the northern suburbs, working as an assistant at an auto-repair shop under an assumed middle name. Humbled, perhaps. Broken, certainly. But alive.
As for me, Vance Regional Logistics had completed its Great Lakes expansion. I had been named Executive Vice President, my stock options fully vested, my reputation across the Midwest logistics corridor untouchable.
It was a Friday night in late November. The first real blizzard of the winter was rolling in across Lake Michigan, howling against the high-rise glass of my new home—a quiet, sprawling townhouse I had purchased in an exclusive, historic neighborhood north of the loop.
The fireplace crackled with dry birch logs. The aroma of roasted garlic and simmering beef filled the kitchen. I sat at my drafting table, sketching the preliminary blueprints for an automated intermodal depot in Milwaukee, a glass of full-bodied Cabernet sitting beside my ruler.
Peace. Hard-earned, iron-clad, unshakeable peace.
At 11:42 PM, my private cell phone buzzed on the drafting table.
Not my corporate line. My private number, known only to Marcus Vance, Nathan, and my closest three colleagues.
The screen flashed: *UNKNOWN CALLER.*
I picked it up, my thumb swiping accept. "Claire Sterling."
Silence filled the receiver.
Not the dead silence of an automated dialer, but the rhythmic, ragged sound of heavy, panicked breathing over a howling wind. In the background, the unmistakable sound of a car engine revving high—a battered four-cylinder engine struggling through deep snow.
"Hello?" I said, standing up from my stool, every muscle in my body locking into sudden, cold alertness.
A voice cut through the static—thin, trembling, and twisted by something feral, desperate, and completely unhinged.
It was Eleanor. But it wasn't the voice of the fragile mother in the cardigan. It was a voice drenched in the madness of someone who had lost everything and found freedom only in the flames.
"You thought you won, didn't you, Claire?" Eleanor whispered, her teeth audibly chattering through the receiver.
"Eleanor? Where are you? You are violating your home confinement order. If you leave your county, the marshals will revoke your bond within the hour."
"The marshals?" Eleanor let out a high, sickening laugh that turned into a coughing fit. "The marshals are at my apartment, Claire. Looking at the severed ankle bracelet I dropped in the toilet an hour ago."
My blood turned instantly to ice water. "Eleanor. Turn yourself in."
"Arthur was a coward," Eleanor spat, her voice dropping into a vicious, ragged hiss. "He let you break him. He let you put him in a cage because he thought you were still his daughter. But I know what you are. You're the cancer that killed this family. You took my home. You took my husband. You drove Chloe into the gutter. And you thought you could just buy a pretty house in the city and pretend you were born from nothing."
Through the receiver, I heard the sound of tires skidding on black ice, followed by the heavy thud of a vehicle mounting a curb.
"Look out your front window, Claire," Eleanor whispered.
My heart seized.
I dropped the phone. I crossed the hardwood floor in three long strides, pushing aside the heavy velvet drapes of my second-story living room window.
Down on the quiet, snow-covered street below, directly beneath the flickering yellow glow of the historic gas lamps, an old, rusted pickup truck was idling in the middle of the road, exhaust pluming white into the freezing blizzard.
The driver’s side door swung open.
Eleanor stepped out into the swirling snow. She wore an oversized winter coat stained with motor oil, her gray hair whipping wild across her gaunt, hollow face. In her right hand, she dragged a heavy, red plastic five-gallon fuel canister across the pristine white powder.
She looked up at my window. Even through the falling snow and the double-paned glass, her eyes locked onto mine with the glowing, incandescent fury of a demon that had climbed out of the grave to drag its maker down into the pit.
She didn't run. She didn't hide.
She unscrewed the yellow cap of the fuel can, tilted it, and began splashing a thick, dark line of gasoline across the dry wooden steps of my front porch.
May you like
Then, Eleanor reached into her pocket, pulled out an emergency road flare, and pulled the strike cap.
A blinding, chemical-red phosphorus flame erupted into the midnight blizzard, illuminating the falling snow like drops of fresh, glowing blood. She looked directly into my eyes, raised the flare above her head, and smiled.
