Chapter 7
The heavy iron crowbar lay on the concrete between them like a fallen weapon. Clara stared at it, her chest heaving as the weight of the revelation pressed down on her lungs. Her real mother? The woman who had raised her—the bitter, severe woman buried under the granite stone in the Oakridge cemetery—wasn't her biological mother at all?
"Pick it up, Clara," Julian urged, nudging the crowbar with the toe of his expensive shoe. "You’re the one who wanted to sell the house so badly. You’re the one who signed the release with the historical society. You have every right to see what’s inside your inheritance."
Clara looked down at her hands. They were trembling. She glanced at David, who was still huddled against the foundation wall, rocking slightly back and forth with his eyes squeezed shut. Then she looked at Helena, whose green blouse was stained with a smudge of dark basement grime.
"Why?" Clara choked out, the word tearing at her throat. "Why keep her down here? If she was alive all this time... why did you bury an empty casket?"
"Because in 1994, when the police came sniffing around about the hitchhiker, Martha’s mother—our aunt Beatrice—refused to keep covering for us," Helena explained, her voice losing its defensive edge, replaced by a dull, hopeless fatigue. "She threatened to go to the state police with the original ledger. So we staged her heart attack. We held the funeral with a sealed casket, and we locked her down here where nobody would ever look for a dead woman."
Clara felt a hot tear finally break free, tracking straight through the stinging welt on her cheek where Helena had slapped her earlier. "You monsters. She was your mother!"
"She was a tyrant who controlled every dollar of the trust," Julian countered coldly, stepping closer to the iron door. "And she’s the one who hid the second will—the one that leaves this entire estate to the historical society, cutting all of us out entirely. That’s why you sold it, Clara. You didn't just want a clean break. You were hunting for the trust fund, weren't you?"
Clara froze. The yellow folder on the floor seemed to burn with a sudden heat. She hadn't been hunting for the trust fund; she had been running from her debts in Chicago. But Julian’s accusation hung in the damp air like a trap snapping shut.
With a sudden surge of adrenaline, Clara dropped to her knees, grabbed the heavy iron crowbar, and drove its wedge tip into the rusted latch of the root cellar door.
"Help me, David!" she screamed.
May you like
David hesitated, then slowly stood up, grabbing the other end of the iron bar. With a synchronized heave, the rusted padlock snapped, and the heavy door swung outward into the dark.
***
