Dennis stood six feet away beside the butcher-block island. In his right hand, gripped at his side, was the eighteen-inch steel crowbar from the foyer. The iron chisel was scarred with gray mortar chips, its weight pulling his shoulder into a fighter’s crouch.
"Step away from that hasp, Beth," Dennis said, his knuckles whitening around the iron shaft. "Hand over that folder and get away from the door."
"Unlock it, Dennis," I said, pointing the glass ampule of enoxaparin at his chest. "Unlock it right now. If she throws a pulmonary embolism behind this door, that isn't a civil dispute over a timber deed. That is an intentional homicide indictment."
A cold, sickening smile touched Dennis’s mouth.
"You think you’re holding the cards because you work at Memorial," he said softly, tapping the iron tip against the floor. "You think you’re going to call the sheriff’s department. Pull your phone out of your pocket, Beth."
I kept my back pressed to the wood, reached into my coat with my left hand, and tapped the screen.
In the upper corner, where cellular bars usually registered, the icon showed a gray circle slashed with a line: No Service.
"I killed the breaker to the booster on the silo before you pulled in," Dennis whispered, taking a step forward and raising the crowbar. "There isn't a cell tower within nine miles that can penetrate this hollow. The notary is coming from town in his own truck, and he knows me as the executor of your mother’s estate."
Behind my back, the chime inside the pantry abruptly ceased its triple pulse.
For three agonizing seconds, the kitchen fell entirely silent, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the ragged sound of Dennis’s breathing.
Then, a long, piercing, unbroken electronic tone shrieked through the sealed floorboards. The Baxter pump had suffered a complete pressure collapse. The line had occluded, the safety shutoff had tripped, and Jenna's venous reserve was running out.
I gripped the edge of the doorframe behind me, my muscles locking into place as Dennis shifted his weight to lunge. Pleading was over. Reasoning was over. The only way Jenna survived the next ten minutes was if I took that iron bar out of his hands.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
I did not pause to trade blows. I kicked the crowbar hard beneath the butcher-block island, grabbed the handle of the skillet with both hands, and brought it down against the steel hasp on the pantry door. The impact jolted through my wrists, but the brass padlock held fast.
Behind the wood, Jenna let out a ragged, muffled sob. "Beth... it hurts to breathe. Everything is spinning."
"Hang on, Jenna! Cover your head!"
I dropped the skillet, dropped to one knee, and retrieved the crowbar from under the island. Dennis was already pushing himself off the counter, his left hand cradling his bruised right knuckles, his face mottled with dark, furious blood. As he lunged forward to tackle me against the cabinets, I jammed the beveled claw of the crowbar straight into the gap between the doorframe and the steel hasp mounting plate. I planted my left boot against the casing and levered my entire weight backward.
The dry pine groaned, cracked, and tore. Four three-inch wood screws stripped out of the aged timber with a sound like pistol shots. The hasp tore free from the wall, dangling uselessly from the locked brass shackle, and the pantry door swung wide.
Inside, the pantry was stripped of food. The floorboards had been sawed through years ago to create a square maintenance opening above the dry masonry cistern. A rough-hewn pine ladder dropped eight feet down into the shadowed cellar below.
The shrieking electronic alarm of the Baxter pump rose from the damp darkness like an electric drill boring through stone.
"Don't go down there, Beth!" Dennis bellowed, stumbling across the kitchen with his teeth bared. "You don't know what you're destroying!"
I did not answer. I scrambled through the opening, caught the rough side rails of the ladder, and dropped down into the cold, subterranean air of the cistern.
The floor was cracked fieldstone, sweating with ground moisture and smelling of iron and mold. In the far corner, illuminated only by the gray morning light filtering through the pantry hatch above, Jenna lay curled on a mildewed foam mattress. She was shivering violently, her lips tinged with faint blue hypoxia. Her left leg was immobilized in the fiberglass post-surgical brace, rigid and elevated on a stack of water-damaged books. Her hands were clutching her upper chest, where the clear plastic infusion line led into the sterile dressing over her subclavian vein.
The Baxter ambulatory unit lay beside her pillow, its liquid crystal screen flashing a continuous crimson alert: OCCLUSION - LINE BLOCKED - FLOW TERMINATED.
"Jenna, look at me," I said, dropping to my knees beside the mattress and peeling my gloves off with my teeth.
Her skin felt ice-cold, clammy with shock. "Beth... he made me... sign two papers before my leg started throbbing," she gasped, her pupils dilated and unfocused. "Then he took the bag... he said if I didn't stop crying, he wouldn't bring my medicine down."