Chapter 7 - THE KEY IN THE CHANDELIER
“Clara!” Daniel slammed his shoulder against the solid mahogany parlor door, but the two-inch oak timber reinforced with a brass deadbolt didn’t budge.
Outside in the foyer, Clara’s voice came through the keyhole, trembling and choked with tears.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sterling! I’m so sorry!” Clara sobbed from the other side of the wood. “Dr. Vance’s men are at the clinic in Guadalajara right now beside my sister’s dialysis bed! He called the kitchen five minutes ago and said if I didn’t turn the main basement valve for the parlor fireplace line and lock the door until 7:45, they would pull her tubing out!”
“Clara, there’s a seven-year-old boy and my eighty-year-old mother in here!” Daniel shouted, hammering his fist against the panel. “The pilot light in the hearth is still burning! If the gas concentration hits the chimney embers, this whole wing will blow!”
Only the sound of Clara’s retreating footsteps echoed across the marble foyer as the front door clicked shut.
Inside the parlor, the faint, sweet-rotten smell of natural gas was rising steadily from the brass floor vents.
Marcus immediately grabbed the heavy Persian rug, rolled it into a thick cylinder, and jammed it tightly over the main floor grates, while Daniel grabbed the crystal water pitcher from the bar cart and doused the glowing embers in the fireplace until only thick gray steam hissed up the flue.
“The terrace French doors!” Emily cried, running toward the back windows and yanking on the brass handles.
They didn’t move. While Daniel and Marcus had been out at the boiler room, someone had slid the exterior iron storm pins into the patio security shutters from the outside lawn. The shatterproof hurricane glass—installed when Daniel renovated the estate—was built to withstand a sledgehammer.
Leo began to cough, burying his face against Margaret’s cardigan. “Dad, my eyes sting.”
“Get down low near the floorboards, buddy, the gas rises first,” Daniel instructed calmly, picking up the heavy iron fireplace poker and striking the corner of the hurricane glass with all his strength. The iron bounced off with a dull ring, leaving only a white spiderweb scratch on the polycarbonate laminate.
Margaret didn’t panic. Kneeling beside Leo on the floor, she looked up at the twelve-arm crystal chandelier hanging from the center of the fourteen-foot ceiling.
“Daniel, stop hitting the glass,” Margaret said clearly, holding her handkerchief over Leo’s nose and mouth. “When your father bought this house in 1994, he hated the electronic security locks the previous owner installed. Look at the brass chain holding the chandelier just above the lowest crystal tier.”
Daniel looked up, squinting through the stinging air.
“Your father hung the master mechanical override key for the storm shutters right in plain sight, disguised as a brass pendulum finial at the bottom of the chandelier,” Margaret said. “He always said no burglar looks up when they’re looking for a safe.”
Marcus immediately locked his hands together like a stirrup near the mahogany table. “Get up there, Daniel. I’ve got your weight.”
Daniel stepped onto the table, planted his boot into Marcus’s linked hands, and launched himself upward, catching the heavy bronze central rod of the chandelier with one hand while ripping the six-inch brass finial loose from its wire hook with the other.
He dropped back down to the carpet, sprinted to the wall box beside the French doors, and jammed the antique notched brass key into the manual release slot behind the drywall plate.
With a loud mechanical clunk, the exterior iron storm pins retracted. Marcus threw his full weight against the French doors, bursting them open into the crisp, freezing night air of the rear gardens.
They poured out onto the stone terrace, coughing and drawing deep breaths of clean October air.
Daniel knelt to check Leo and Margaret first. Both were breathing steadily. When he stood up, Emily was holding out the keys to her silver Porsche Cayenne parked at the end of the driveway.
“Go,” Emily said, her face pale in the moonlight. “I know the direct service road through the port gate that bypasses the main security booth at Pier 14. Let me drive the SUV while you and Marcus figure out how to get the sluice cage open.”
“You’re not coming near Pier 14,” Daniel said firmly, taking the keys from her hand. “Stay here on the lawn with Mom and Leo until the police and the fire department arrive to shut off the house main.”
“If I don’t go, the private port guard Arthur hired won’t open the perimeter gate without calling him first!” Emily insisted, grabbing Daniel’s coat sleeve. “He knows my face and my car! Daniel, I helped my father build this trap out of greed and stupidity—let me help you tear it down so Frank Miller doesn’t die in that pit!”
Margaret looked at her daughter-in-law for a long, quiet moment. The elderly woman reached into her pocket, pulled out the broken silver rosary from the scrub bucket, and wrapped it around Daniel’s wrist.
“Take her, Daniel,” Margaret said softly. “A person who wants to face what they’ve done shouldn’t be left behind the fence. Leo and I will wait at the neighbor’s gatehouse with the guard.”
Ten minutes later, the Porsche Cayenne tore through the industrial fog along the East River waterfront, tires screaming as Emily flashed her headlights three times at the rusted chain-link gate of Pier 14. The sleepy guard waved the familiar SUV straight through toward the cavernous corrugated-iron warehouse of Slip B.
Daniel cut the headlights fifty yards out. He and Marcus crept through the side corrugated door onto the iron catwalk overlooking the sunken dry-dock basin.
May you like
Down below, under the yellow glare of a single work lamp, Dr. Arthur Vance stood beside a rusted iron maintenance cage suspended halfway down the flooded concrete pit. Dark river water was already swirling around the ankles of Frank Miller, who was handcuffed inside the cage alongside three corroded blue chemical drums.
As Daniel reached for the winch control box on the wall, Vance stepped out from behind a steel pillar ten feet away on the catwalk, a heavy steel wrench in one hand and his finger resting on the red emergency dump switch that would drop the cage twenty feet into the rising tide—and standing right beside Vance, holding a heavy flashlight, was the port guard who had just locked the warehouse doors behind them.
