Chapter 8 - THROUGH THE ASH FLUE
Noah stared at the heavy steel kitchen scissors in Damian's palm.
The irony wasn't lost on me for a single second: the very blades Vivienne had tried to use to sever Noah from his past were now the only tool that could save him and his sister.
"Listen to me carefully, Noah," Damian whispered, crouching so his back completely blocked Paul Vance's view through the narrow window in the oak door. "You don't have to climb the vertical chimney—that has a steel fire grate. Three feet inside this vent, the brick tunnel levels out and runs right behind the carved wooden mantelpiece in the dining room. There's a brass clean-out door right behind your grandfather's portrait, four feet off the floor."
"I know which one," I whispered urgently, kneeling beside them as I unlatched the lower laundry chute panel with trembling hands. "I polish that brass door every Friday! The spring catch is stuck with old paint on the inside—you just have to wedge the tip of the closed scissors under the iron bar and push hard!"
"Can I take Zoe with me?" Noah asked, his eyes wide but steady.
"Yes," Damian said, his jaw tight. "Once Paul realizes what's happening, he'll shoot out the lock on this door to get the ledger. I want both of you inside that brick wall before he comes through. Do not come out into the hallway. Push open the brass panel directly into the dining room in front of all twenty-four guests—especially District Attorney Miller at the far end of the table."
Through the oak door, Paul Vance's fist banged hard against the wood.
"Ten seconds, Damian! Slide the book through the slot or I'm coming in!"
"It's stitched into heavy canvas, Paul! Hold your horses!" Damian yelled back, ripping a strip of damp linen from the laundry rack to mimic the sound of tearing coat lining.
I grabbed a thick wool blanket from the folding table and wrapped it around Zoe's shoulders so the rough bricks wouldn't scrape her arms, then helped Damian lift the cast-iron grate behind the industrial dryer.
The opening smelled of cold plaster and old cedar dust, not soot, because it was the secondary air-return duct for the hearth.
"You go first, Zoe," Noah whispered, holding his sister's hand. "Remember when we used to hide under the porch steps at the shelter? It's just like that. I'm right behind you."
Zoe looked at the dark square in the brick wall. She was eight years old, and she had spent the last four months locked in a basement laundry room being told that speaking a single word would destroy her brother.
She didn't cry.
She reached out, touched the three tiny knots on Noah's wrist for luck, and crawled straight into the narrow brick passage on her hands and knees.
Noah took the heavy kitchen scissors from Damian, shoved them handle-first into the breast pocket of his navy suit jacket, and scrambled in right behind his sister's bare feet.
Just as I shoved the heavy industrial dryer six inches sideways to hide the open grate, a deafening gunshot shattered the quiet of the service corridor.
Marta screamed and dropped behind the stone laundry tub.
The heavy brass deadbolt on the oak door splintered inward in a shower of wood and twisted metal, and Paul Vance kicked the door wide open, his nine-millimeter pistol leveled directly at Damian's chest.
Behind him in the corridor, Judge Arthur Cross was pale and sweating, while Vivienne stood pressed against the wall with both hands over her mouth.
"Where are the kids?" Vance snapped, his eyes darting instantly to the empty corner beside the potting table.
Damian stood calmly in the center of the greenhouse, holding Marco's torn navy pea coat in his left hand and the small oilskin ledger in his right.
"Inside the storm cellar under the orchid benches," Damian lied smoothly, nodding toward a heavy padlocked floor hatch across the room. "With a three-inch steel bar pulled from the inside. You aren't getting the girl, Paul."
Vance didn't bother checking the floor hatch. His eyes locked onto the oilskin notebook in Damian's hand.
"Throw it on the bricks. Right now."
"If I throw it on the bricks, you shoot me, shoot the two women, and blame it on a home invasion," Damian said, not moving a muscle. "You're an ex-cop, Paul. You know how staging a scene works."
"I don't want to kill you, Damian!" Judge Cross shouted from the doorway, his voice cracking with panic. "Just give him the ledger! Without those bank numbers, it's just the word of a housemaid and an eight-year-old child! Nobody will ever touch your family!"
"My brother bled to death on a motel mattress in Indiana while you cashed checks from orphan trusts!" Damian roared, the veins in his neck standing out. "And you let my ten-year-old son cry himself to sleep for seven hundred nights wondering if his little sister was dead or cold or hungry!"
I stood right beside Damian's elbow, my heart hammering so loud I was certain Vance could hear it. From inside the brick wall behind the dryer, I could hear the faint, muffled scritch-scritch of steel scissor blades scraping against a painted iron latch.
Vance's finger tightened on the trigger of his pistol. "I'm not counting to three, Damian. Drop the book or I put a bullet through the maid's knee first."
He swung the barrel two inches to the right—aiming squarely at my chest.
Damian shifted his weight immediately to step in front of me, raising the oilskin ledger toward the open laundry boiler fire-box as if to toss it in.
"Don't move!" Vance barked, taking two steps into the greenhouse.
From thirty feet away down the corridor, beyond the butler's pantry, came a sudden, earsplitting metallic crash—the sound of a three-foot brass fireplace screen and a tray of crystal champagne flutes hitting the marble floor of the dining room.
Followed immediately by a woman's scream and twenty chairs scraping violently back against the stone floor.
And then a ten-year-old boy's voice, ringing clear and loud through the mansion's high archways:
"MR. MILLER! CALL THE POLICE! PAUL VANCE HAS A GUN ON MY DAD IN THE GREENHOUSE AND JUDGE CROSS KILLED MY UNCLE MARCO!"
Vance froze, his head jerking toward the corridor.
That split-second distraction was all Damian needed.
He didn't throw the ledger. He swung the heavy, water-soaked navy wool pea coat—weighted down by twelve solid brass harbor buttons—straight across the gap and whipped it around Vance's gun arm.
The gun went off with a blinding flash, shattering an overhead glass pane in the greenhouse roof and raining soil and orchid petals down on us before Damian's tattooed fist drove squarely into Vance's jaw, sending the former detective crashing backward into Judge Cross's chest.
Both men went down in a tangle of limbs in the corridor just as the dining room doors burst open and four men in tuxedos—including the Cook County District Attorney and two off-duty state marshals who were guests at the table—came running down the hall with their service weapons drawn.
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Vivienne didn't run toward her father.
She sank onto her knees in the corridor beside the spilled red wine on the carpet, staring down at the diamond engagement ring on her left hand as the marshals kicked Vance's pistol across the tiles.
