Chapter 17 - The Blood on the Stairs
Daniel didn't wait for the police. He grabbed an iron fire poker from the hearth in the master bedroom and bounded down the darkened stairs, Emily right behind him with a kitchen knife clutched in both hands.
"Grace!" Emily screamed into the void of the house. "Grace!"
At the foot of the stairs, the beam of Daniel's flashlight caught a dark pool spreading across the white runner. It wasn't motor oil. It was blood.
Lying at the entrance to the kitchen was Marcus, the senior security guard Daniel had paid ten thousand dollars to watch the perimeter. His skull was fractured, his zip-tied wrists bound behind his back. He was breathing in shallow, wet gasps.
"Marcus!" Daniel dropped to one knee, checking the man’s pulse. "Who did this? Where did they take her?"
Marcus’s eyelids fluttered open, his lips stained with crimson foam. "Not... not her..." he wheezed, his fingers twitching toward the dining room. "Two men... ex-military... they had tactical gear... Lauren was in the van... she held the baby..."
"Which van?" Daniel shouted, shaking the guard’s shoulder. "What color? Where were they going?"
"The old... the old carriage house..." Marcus gasped before his eyes rolled back, slipping into unconsciousness.
The carriage house. The historic Whitmore estate on Long Island Sound, the sprawling sixty-acre property where Lauren had grown up—and where, on that infamous summer afternoon, she had leaned over the terrace railing and laughed as she released Grace into the air.
Emily’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was a FaceTime request from an unknown email address.
With hands that shook so violently she nearly dropped the device, Emily answered.
The screen flickered. The image resolved into a dimly lit room with high, arched stone ceilings and exposed timber beams. In the center of the frame sat Lauren Whitmore, dressed in an immaculate black turtleneck, sipping champagne from a crystal flute.
Behind her, resting on a velvet sofa near an open French door that looked out over the crashing black waves of the Atlantic, was a portable bassinet. Grace was asleep inside it, unaware of the nightmare swirling around her.
"Hello, Emily," Lauren purred, leaning toward the camera. "I see you got my little invitation."
"If you touch a single hair on her head," Emily snarled, her voice dropping into a guttural, feral growl, "I will tear your throat out with my bare teeth. I don't care about the police. I don't care about prison. I will end you, Lauren."
Lauren laughed—a high, musical, aristocratic laugh that made the hair on Emily’s arms stand up.
"Oh, Emily. You always were so delightfully lower-middle-class with your melodramatics. I don't want to hurt Grace. Not yet, anyway. She is, after all, the bargaining chip of a lifetime. I want my father's drive. The one Margaret just gave you. The key to box 414."
"I have it," Daniel shouted, stepping into the frame beside Emily. "I have the key, Lauren. Let Grace go. I will give you the key, I will sign over every share of the trust, and we will leave the country. You can have the Whitmore name. You can have the money."
Lauren’s smile vanished, replaced by an expression of pure, unadulterated venom.
"You really don't get it, do you, little brother? It was never about the money. It was about *power*. It was about the fact that Father looked at you—weak, emotional, pathetic Daniel—and saw his successor, while he looked at me and saw a decorative asset to be married off. Grace was supposed to fix that. If she had died on that terrace, Emily would have left you, you would have collapsed, and Mother would have handed the keys to the kingdom to me."
She stood up, walked over to the bassinet, and lifted the sleeping infant into her arms. Grace stirred, letting out a soft, confused whimper.
"You have forty minutes," Lauren said coldly. "Come alone. Both of you. If I see a single police cruiser on the causeway, Grace takes her second swimming lesson. And this time, Rosa isn't here to play catcher."
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The screen went black.
***
