Chapter 5 - The Ledger in the Lining
"How much gas do you have?" Chloe cried out, noticing the rhythmic pinging of the low fuel warning. Her face was gray in the dim glow of the dashboard lights.
"Enough to reach the old mill, not enough to hit the highway," Margaret replied grimly, keeping her foot pressed down as the Volvo bounded over frost-heaved dirt tracks. Behind them, the pickup's blinding halogen lights surged closer, bouncing wildly with the terrain. David knew these logging trails better than anyone; he had surveyed them for the timber company for over a decade.
Lily lifted her head from Chloe's lap. The little girl reached down into the soggy waistband of her leggings. "Grandma..." she whimpered, her voice tiny amidst the roaring engine. "I didn't drop it in the lake."
Margaret glanced quickly into the rearview mirror. In Lily's tiny, blue-tinged fingers was a small, plastic-wrapped packet, no thicker than a deck of playing cards, secured tightly with black electrical tape.
"What is that, baby?" Margaret asked, swerving sharply to avoid a fallen birch branch.
"Daddy hid it inside my teddy bear," Lily sniffled, wiping her nose with her wet sleeve. "He told me it was a secret game. But then Mommy found it, and Daddy hit Mommy, and Mommy said Daddy was going to make us disappear like Uncle Julian."
Chloe buried her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving with fresh sobs of shame. "David found Julian's secret accounts," Chloe confessed, her voice muffled behind her hands. "Julian was blackmailing the county syndicate—the men funding the unauthorized clear-cutting in the reservation. When Julian refused to hand over the digital keys, David... David didn't stop them, Margaret. He stood by and let them stage Julian's overdose. And then he stole the access codes so he could collect the blackmail money himself."
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Margaret felt a cold, sickening ache settle in her gut. Her own son. The boy she had bandaged, raised, and prayed for, standing over his own uncle's dying body for blood money.
Suddenly, a violent impact jolted the Volvo forward. Lily screamed as the pickup truck's steel bull-bar rammed into their rear bumper, sending the sedan fishtailing across the slick pine needles. Margaret fought the wheel, screaming as the tires lost traction, spinning out toward the sheer drop of Miller's Creek Gorge.
