Chapter 22 - Ash Over Cedar
The screaming sirens of the Boston Fire Department shattered the winter silence four minutes later, but four minutes in an accelerant-fueled blaze felt like an eternity inside a furnace.
By the time the ladder trucks and three squad cars violently careened around the corner, black ice sending their tires skidding across the asphalt, Eleanor was gone. In her place, she had left a blackened, smoldering carcass of what used to be my grand portico, the entranceway scorched to bone-like charcoal, with firemen in heavy yellow gear aggressively dragging hoses through the freezing slush, drowning the remnants of her madness in high-pressure foam.
I stood on the snowy sidewalk wrapped in an emergency wool blanket, the fabric smelling of damp wool and industrial detergent. Detective Mark Miller, a broad-shouldered man with exhausted eyes and a winter coat dusted with soot, stood over me, his breath puffing in rhythmic white clouds.
"She’s in the wind, Claire," Miller said, snapping his notebook shut. "The pickup was stolen two days ago from a salvage yard outside Providence. We found it abandoned three blocks over, resting on the curb with the keys still in the ignition. No phone, no purse, no paper trail."
"She had help," I said, my teeth chattering not from the cold, but from the residual adrenaline crashing through my bloodstream. The smoke clung to my hair, tasting of burnt varnish and ruined history. "There was a car in the alley. A black sedan. Someone was watching the fire. Someone was recording it."
Miller frowned, his jaw tightening under his stubble. "Are you sure it wasn't a rubbernecker? In this neighborhood, people look out their windows."
"Rubberneckers don't idle in an unplowed alley during a level-four blizzard with their lights off," I snapped, looking directly into his tired gaze. "Chloe is out there. Arthur might be rotting in a federal holding cell awaiting trial for wire fraud, but Chloe didn't get that five hundred thousand dollars out of the company accounts by herself. There’s an enabler. Eleanor didn’t have the mental coherence to plan this alone."
Miller sighed, looking back at my ruined porch. Firefighters were using axes to peel away smoldering cedar, the sickening stench of charred structural timber thick in the air. "We're issuing an aggravated attempted murder warrant for Eleanor Vance. If she shows her face anywhere within state lines, we have her. But Claire... you can't stay here. The structural engineer says the fire compromised the support joists under the entryway. Until the fire marshal signs off, this property is a crime scene."
"I have no intention of staying," I said, dropping the blanket onto the snow-crusted hood of Miller's cruiser. "The locks are melted, the security system is dead, and the woman who birthed me just tried to turn me into a funeral pyre. Call me when you find her body or her handcuffs."
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I pulled my coat tight around my chest, turned my back on the smoldering ruins of the home I had bled my savings to rebuild, and walked away into the dark, relentless snow. I didn't cry. Tears were a luxury Eleanor had beaten out of me years ago. Instead, an icy, lethal resolve settled into the marrow of my bones. They had spent my entire life taking things from me—my childhood, my peace, my money, and now my sanctuary.
It was time to stop defending. It was time to hunt.
