Chapter 11 - The Voice From The Grave
The metallic click of the automated operator echoed like a gunshot through the silent bedroom.
Neither of us dared to breathe.
Jonah stared down at his trembling hand holding the phone against his ear.
For ten years, my husband had carried the peaceful lie that Arthur Vance was buried six feet under the frozen soil of northern Minnesota.
For ten years, Jonah had believed the tyrant who stole his football dreams and forged his chains was turning to ash.
Now, a robotic voice was asking him to accept a collect call from a state medical prison.
“Jonah,” I whispered, resting my hand on the broad ridge of his shoulder blade.
His muscle felt like cold, coiled steel beneath my palm.
Without a word, Jonah pressed the number one on the screen with a stiff finger.
A burst of static filled the room.
Then came the heavy, rattling wheeze of lungs suffocating on their own fluid.
“Jonah?” a voice rasped through the speaker.
The voice was hollow, paper-thin, and cracked with age, yet it carried that unmistakable, barbed cadence of a man who had ruled through fear.
Jonah’s throat bobbed hard, but no sound escaped his mouth.
“I know you’re listening, boy,” the voice coughed, a dry and brittle sound that scraped along my spine.
“Don’t hang up on your old man.”
“You died ten years ago,” Jonah managed to say, his deep baritone dropping to an icy, subterranean register.
A bitter, wheezing chuckle spilled through the receiver.
“Is that what your little brother told you?”
“Luke always was a clever little rat when his back was against the wall.”
Jonah stood up abruptly from the mattress, towering over the dark bedroom.
“What are you talking about?” Jonah demanded, his hand tightening on the phone until the plastic groaned.
“The timber yard went bankrupt six months after you took off to college,” Arthur whispered, pausing to suck in another rattling breath of air.
“I owed half a million dollars to men who don’t take payment plans.”
“So I torched the equipment yard for the insurance money.”
“The insurance investigator was too smart, and an old mechanic got trapped inside the burning garage.”
My stomach turned violently, a cold nausea spreading through my veins.
“Luke helped me fake the drowning up north so the state troopers wouldn't freeze our accounts,” Arthur continued with sick satisfaction.
“Then I took off with what was left of the payout.”
“I lived like a king in Florida until the feds caught up with me at a dockside motel six years ago.”
“I’ve been rotting in this cell ever since.”
Jonah leaned one massive arm against the wall, his head hanging low as the room seemed to tilt beneath him.
Every foundation of his past was crumbling in real time.
“Why are you calling me now?” Jonah asked, his voice shaking with a dangerous, simmering heat.
“Because my liver is shutting down, Jonah.”
“The doctors give me three weeks before they wheel me into the prison morgue.”
“I’m petitioning for compassionate medical parole.”
“The warden won’t release an inmate without an approved sponsor and a ten-thousand-dollar bond on file.”
“You’re my firstborn, Jonah.”
“You owe me this.”
“You owe me for the roof over your head, the food you ate, and every log you ever hauled.”
Jonah stared blankly at the dark window, listening to the very man who had stolen his youth try to put the yoke back around his neck.
“You told me I was a monster,” Jonah whispered into the phone.
“You told me I was built to destroy people.”
“You told me that if I ever left the yard, I’d end up in a cage.”
Arthur’s wheeze turned sharp, almost defensive.
“I did what I had to do to keep you in line!”
“A boy your size needs to know his place!”
“If I hadn't put the fear of God into you, you would have walked over me!”
“Now bring the bond money down to Blackwood, or so help me God, I’ll make sure everyone knows you let your own father die behind bars!”
Jonah looked at me across the shadowed bedroom.
His eyes were not wide with panic anymore.
They were cold, clear, and steady as mountain stone.
“Die where you are, Arthur,” Jonah said calmly.
Before the dying old man could scream another curse, Jonah pulled the phone from his ear and tapped the red button.
The line went instantly, blissfully dead.
Jonah dropped the phone onto the nightstand and turned to grab his work boots from the closet.
“Where are you going?” I asked, scrambling out of bed and throwing on my flannel robe.
May you like
“I’m going to the Fourth Street motel,” Jonah replied, pulling a heavy sweater over his broad chest.
“Luke has five minutes to explain why he lied to me before I tear that room apart.”
