Chapter 6
The air in the basement grew suffocatingly dense. Clara stared at the welded iron door, her mind desperately trying to bridge the impossible gap between the voice and the gravesite in the local cemetery.
"Eighteen months?" Clara whispered, turning on Julian and Helena with a look of pure horror. "Mother died eighteen months ago. We buried her. I held the handle of the casket!"
"You buried an empty shell, Clara," Helena said, finally stepping down off the stairs and into the damp chill of the cellar. She didn't look triumphant anymore; she looked exhausted, the lines around her eyes carved deep by decades of shared complicity. "Mother didn't die of a stroke. Not the night you all think. That was the night we had to make a choice."
Julian pulled out his gold-banded fountain pen, clicking the cap on and off with a monotonous, maddening rhythm. "In 1994, little sister, a man died on this property. Not in a car crash. Right here, on the kitchen floor, during a fight over the family inheritance. And Julian—the real Julian—took the fall and ran."
"No," Clara breathed, backing away until her shoulder hit the rough stone wall next to David. "No, Julian died in New York. The police report said—"
"The police report was written by an uncle who took a very large bribe," Julian interrupted, his voice dropping its polished veneer, revealing a harsh, desperate edge. "I am Julian. I swapped identities with the hitchhiker we picked up outside of Scranton. We put his dental records in my car, pushed it off an embankment, and set it on fire."
Clara stared at her cousin—her dead cousin—and felt the foundations of her entire life dissolve into ash. Every memory, every holiday card, every tear shed at a closed-casket funeral was a meticulously constructed lie designed to cover up a murder.
"And the person in the cellar?" Clara asked, her voice a hollow shell.
"The real owner of the deed," Martha’s voice drifted down from the top of the stairs as she finally joined them in the basement. She held a heavy crowbar in her hands, her purple dress swirling around her ankles like spilled ink. "The person who tried to stop the sale this morning."
Martha dropped the iron crowbar onto the concrete with a deafening crash.
May you like
"Open the door, Julian," Martha commanded coldly. "It’s time Clara met her real mother."
***
