Chapter 13 - The Ghost On Penn Avenue
The voice of Judge Harold Vance continued to buzz through the small brass speaker, frantic and venomous, unaware that the daughter of the woman he had buried was listening to every word.
“I’m heading north toward the Canadian crossing at Erie,” Vance muttered, his voice trembling over the roar of the tires.
“I have the duplicate certificates in my trunk.
If you boys want to stay out of a federal cage, you wire two million from the offshore trust to the account number I just sent to your secure terminal.
If I go down, Marcus, I take the Reynolds name with me into the dirt.”
I reached forward with a thumb and clicked the chrome disconnect button, severing the call with a blunt, mechanical snap.
The study descended into an awful, suffocating silence that made the ticking of the grandfather clock sound like sledgehammers hitting concrete.
Marcus was on his feet, his hands pressed hard against his forehead, pacing behind the desk like a panther trapped in a steel pen.
“He killed her,” Marcus muttered, his voice catching in his throat as he tore at his hair.
“The man who bought us our first lacrosse sticks...
the man who sat at our graduation dinners...
he killed our mother on the street and covered it up with forty thousand dollars and a grocery store credit card.”
Ethan sat motionless, his face buried in his hands, his broad shoulders shaking with silent, violent weeping.
I didn't move.
I stood perfectly erect behind the mahogany desk, my fingers resting on the black marble ledger that held the itemized cost of our family’s destruction.
The pain inside my chest was gone, burned away by a cold, incandescent rage that felt like liquid nitrogen pouring through my veins.
All those years on the docks, all those cold nights in the group homes, all the hours spent studying manifests until my eyes bled—I had thought Daniel Mercer was an eccentric kingpin with an unusual sense of honor.
I had believed he saw something resilient in a ten-year-old girl and decided to spare her brothers out of some twisted, noble debt.
It had never been nobility.
It had been guilt.
It had been the terrified, desperate attempt of an aging monster to balance an account that was drenched in human blood before God could drop him into hell.
“Lily,” Ethan choked out, lifting his tear-streaked face from his hands.
“What are you going to do?”
I picked up my federal credentials from the desk, slid the gold badge into my breast pocket, and picked up my coat.
“Where are the car keys to William’s sedan?” I asked, my voice devoid of any human warmth, as flat and deadly as an iron girder.
“You can't go after Vance alone,” Marcus said, rushing around the desk to grab my sleeve.
“He’s an hour ahead of you!
He’s heading for the border!”
I pulled my arm out of Marcus’s grip with a sudden, violent jerk that sent him back two steps.
“I am not going after Vance,” I said, looking through him as if he were made of smoke.
“The marshals will pick Vance up at the Erie toll plaza before sunrise.
I already flagged his passport thirty minutes ago while you were checking the corporate charters.”
Ethan stood up, his eyes wide with sudden panic.
“Then where are you going?”
“To the federal detention center on Sixth Avenue,” I replied, pulling my leather gloves on, finger by finger, pulling the cuffs tight around my wrists.
“I have one final entry to add to Daniel Mercer’s ledger.”
“Lily, please!” Marcus pleaded, stepping into the doorway to block my exit.
“He’s seventy-two years old!
He’s in a holding cell!
The law will handle him!”
I stepped up to Marcus until my forehead was inches from his chin, letting him see the nineteen years of ice that had frozen solid behind my eyes.
“The law didn't pull our mother’s body off the slush on Penn Avenue, Noah,” I whispered, using his real name like an executioner’s brand.
“The law took forty thousand dollars from his pocket and told a ten-year-old girl her mother died because she slipped in the snow.
Move out of my way.”
Marcus looked into my eyes, saw the absolute, terrifying void staring back at him, and slowly lowered his arms.
He stepped aside, his head hung low in defeat.
I walked out of the study, past Clara Reynolds who sat weeping on the staircase landing, and pushed through the heavy front doors into the freezing night air.
The sleet had turned into a thick, heavy snow that coated the hood of William Reynolds’s black sedan in an unbroken sheet of white.
I started the engine, the eight cylinders rumbling to life with a low, predatory growl that vibrated through the steering column.
As I backed down the crushed limestone driveway, the passenger door was suddenly yanked open.
Marcus slid into the seat, slamming the heavy door shut, his face pale and determined through the gloom.
Before I could tell him to get out, the rear door opened and Ethan climbed into the back, his jaw set, clutching our mother’s torn yellow blanket in his hands.
“You’re under house arrest,” I said, not shifting the car into gear.
“The monitors will alert the marshal dispatch before we clear the township line.”
“Let them alert,” Marcus replied, staring straight ahead through the sweep of the windshield wipers.
“We spent nineteen years living his lie, Lily.
If he’s going to answer for her blood, he’s going to answer to all three of us.”
I looked at Marcus, then back at Ethan in the rearview mirror.
May you like
For the first time since that December night in Mercer Market, the three of us were together in the cold, moving toward the same dark horizon.
I shifted the sedan into drive, slammed my foot down on the accelerator, and let the heavy car tear through the snow toward the glowing towers of downtown Pittsburgh.
