Chapter 8 - THE BELL TOWER PARAPET
"Go to Northwestern with Leo and the officers!" I told my mother at the ambulance door, pressing a kiss to her forehead before sprinting back to Marcus’s car. "I’ll be at the hospital in thirty minutes. I promise you, Mom, you’re never losing either of us again."
With a Chicago Harbor Police cruiser running point ahead of us with sirens screaming, Marcus and I made the ten-minute run from Calumet Harbor back up Michigan Avenue in six minutes flat.
When we skidded to a stop in front of St. James Cathedral, yellow police tape already cordoned off the limestone steps where rose petals still lay crushed against the stone. Two SWAT SUVs were pulling up to the curb, and fifty feet above the rose window, standing against the gray November sky on the narrow sandstone parapet connecting the twin bell towers, was the dark silhouette of my father.
Held tightly in front of him, wearing his miniature gray ring-bearer suit and clutching the stone balustrade with both small hands, was seven-year-old Toby.
I burst through the heavy bronze church doors and took the winding stone steps of the choir loft three at a time, past two uniform cops who were trying to pry open the ancient iron-bolted oak door at the top of the spiral stair.
"Step back!" I told the officers.
Hanging beside the portrait of the first bishop on the choir landing was the heavy brass ceremonial verger’s key—a secret every altar boy who had ever grown up in St. James Parish knew about because we used to sneak up to the belfry to watch the Air and Water Show on the lake.
I snatched the six-inch brass key off its velvet hook, jammed it into the iron lockplate, and threw my shoulder against the oak door just as the SWAT lieutenant reached the bottom of the spiral stairs.
The door gave way.
I stepped out onto the windswept sandstone gallery eighty feet above the street.
At the far end of the twenty-foot walkway, Chloe was on her knees on the stone floor in her torn white lace gown, her hands outstretched, sobbing silently as she tried to keep seven-year-old Toby calm.
And standing two feet from the low stone parapet railing, holding the back of Toby’s tiny suit jacket with one hand and a heavy steel wrench from the belfry clockwork in the other, was Arthur Vance.
The wind whipped his silver hair across his forehead. All the billionaire polish was gone; his eyes were bloodshot, wild, and fixed on the police cars filling the avenue below.
"Stop right there, Daniel!" my father shouted over the howling lake wind, pulling little Toby an inch closer to the sandstone ledge.
Toby looked at me with wide, terrified eyes, his small chin trembling, though he didn't scream.
"Uncle Danny," Toby said in a small, brave voice that broke my heart. "My hands are really cold."
"You’re doing so great, buddy," I said calmly, raising both my empty hands at my sides so my father could see them. "Keep holding onto the big gray stone with both hands, Toby, just like we practiced on the climbing wall at the gym, okay? Look right at me, not down at the street."
Toby nodded once and glued his eyes to my face, tightening his little fingers on the carved stone baluster.
I looked at my father.
"Let the boy go to Chloe, Dad," I said quietly, taking one slow step across the slate tiles. "Toby has nothing to do with 2001. He wasn't even born."
"If I let him go, those snipers on the hotel roof across the street will put a bullet through my chest before I reach the stairs!" Arthur rasped, backing his heels against the eighteen-inch stone curb. "Look at what she found in my briefcase!"
Scattered across the slate floor between Chloe’s knees were the contents of my father’s leather portfolio—including a yellowed 2001 hospital transfer order from Mercy Private Clinic and the original trust codicil signed by my late grandfather, Thomas Vance Sr.
Chloe looked up at me through her tears, holding up a single page stamped in red ink: PATERNITY & GUARDIANSHIP AUDIT — SEPT 12, 2001.
"Daniel," Chloe whispered, her voice shaking across the wind. "Your grandfather didn't try to disinherit Arthur in 2001 just because your mother was a waitress. Look at the blood-type records from the clinic when you and Leo were born."
I froze in the center of the stone walkway.
"What?" I looked from the paper in Chloe’s hand to my father’s ashen face.
"When you broke your arm falling off that bike in August of 2001," Chloe cried, reading from the hospital sheet, "the emergency room typed your blood as AB-positive! Arthur and his father are both Type O! It’s genetically impossible for a Type O father to have an AB-positive child!"
The wind roared between the stone gargoyles, carrying the sound of distant sirens, yet inside my head there was absolute silence.
I looked at my father—the man whose cruel approval I had spent twenty-five years killing myself at boarding schools and in boardrooms to earn.
"You aren't my biological father," I said slowly.
Arthur’s face twisted into an ugly, anguished grimace, twenty-five years of toxic pride and humiliation pouring out at once.
"Your grandfather adored Helen!" Arthur spat, tears of rage shining in his eyes. "And when I was in London for six months in 1995, Helen found out I was having an affair with Gregory’s wife, Katherine! She filed for separation and moved in with my younger brother, Michael—the golden boy, the artist who never worked a day at Vance Logistics before his sailboat capsized in Lake Superior in ’96!"
Uncle Michael. The framed portrait in the library that my father had taken down the week my grandfather died. The man with the dark eyebrows and the slight cleft in his chin.
"When my father found out in September of 2001 that you and Leo were Michael’s twin sons, not mine," Arthur shouted, his voice cracking over the wind, "he rewrote the entire trust to bypass me completely and leave one hundred percent of Vance Logistics to Helen as guardian of Michael’s sons! I was going to be thrown onto the street with nothing after giving thirty years of my life to that company!"
"Wait," Chloe said from the stones, looking up at Arthur with sudden revulsion. "You told me five minutes ago you were having an affair with my mother Katherine in 1995... until she moved into the Ravenswood basement apartment in 1998."
Chloe’s hand dropped slowly to her chest, her eyes widening as she looked from Arthur’s cold blue eyes to the mirror reflection of her own blue eyes.
"Oh, God," Chloe breathed. "I wasn't born in 1998 to a dead father named Novak. I’m your daughter. And you stood inside this church twenty minutes ago and watched me walk down the aisle to marry your nephew so you and Gregory could split the trust!"
Even Arthur couldn't meet her eyes at that. For a split second, his gaze flickered downward toward Chloe’s face in shame—and his grip on the back of seven-year-old Toby’s collar loosened by half an inch.
That half-inch was all I needed.
I lunged across the remaining six feet of sandstone.
With my left arm, I scooped Toby straight off the stone balustrade and shoved him into Chloe’s waiting arms on the floor. With my right hand, I caught Arthur’s wrist before he could swing the heavy steel wrench—and when his back heel slipped over the wet edge of the eighty-foot parapet, I didn't let him fall.
I grabbed the front of his charcoal morning coat with both hands, bracing my knees against the stone balustrade as his legs swung out over the drop, and hauled him back over the railing onto the flat slate floor while the SWAT team burst through the belfry door and snapped steel cuffs around his wrists.
May you like
I stood over him on the cold stone, catching my breath as the police hauled him to his feet.
"My mother came back into a burning building for me," I told him quietly as they led him toward the stairs. "And I just saved your life so you can spend the next thirty years in a six-by-eight cell remembering that you’re nothing to us."
