Chapter 18 - The Midwife Who Knew Too Much
The back door slammed shut as we loaded Nathan into his rear-facing car seat in the back of my truck. The baby didn't cry; he merely blinked up at us with wide, milky eyes, lulled by the rhythm of the rain hammering down onto the canopy.
"Take the back roads through Concord," Khloe instructed, her face pale in the dashboard illumination. She had the key to Vault 402 gripped tightly in her palm, the metal edges digging deep into her flesh until her knuckles turned ivory. "If we hit the interstate, Catherine's private investigators will track the license plate cameras. She works for the municipal transit board; she has access to real-time traffic monitoring."
"When did your sister become this?" I asked through gritted teeth, throwing the transmission into reverse and backing down the long gravel drive without turning on the headlights. "In the hospital, she acted like the reasonable one. She sat in the waiting room with coffee. She held your hand."
"Because Catherine doesn't commit murder with a knife, Mark," Khloe said, her voice dripping with bitter venom. "She commits it with paperwork, NDAs, and deliberate isolation. When my mother died, Isabella went crazy. Isabella acted out, partied, bought expensive cars, threw herself into business failures. But Catherine? Catherine moved into Dad's study. She started organizing his files when she was nineteen years old."
I steered the truck down the wooded dirt path behind our property, bypassing the front street where the black Audi remained parked. The mud sucked at the heavy tires, but the four-wheel drive gripped the slick earth, carrying us away into the deep shadow of the pine forest.
"We can't just walk into Bay State Vaults at three in the morning," I pointed out, glancing at the clock on the dash. It was 3:45 AM. "Private depository facilities don't open until eight. Even with the key, we need credentials, identification, and biometric access."
"We're not going directly to the vault," Khloe said. She pulled her phone from her purse, rapidly scrolling through an encrypted contacts list that she had hidden beneath an innocent-looking banking app. "We're going to see Evelyn."
"Evelyn? The midwife who delivered Nathan?"
"Evelyn wasn't just my midwife," Khloe said, her eyes burning into the dark highway ahead as we cleared the woods and merged onto Route 119. "Before she went into private maternal care, she worked as a senior palliative nurse at Massachusetts General thirty years ago. She was the head nurse in the private wing when my mother died."
My grip tightened on the steering wheel. "You think Evelyn knows what Catherine was talking about on that tape?"
"When I was in labor," Khloe whispered, her breathing ragged, "Evelyn looked at my blood chart. She asked me three times if I was certain about my maternal medical history. I told her what Dad always told me—Stage IV leukemia. She gave me this look, Mark. A look of pure, agonizing pity. Then she muttered under her breath, *'Anthony promised he would tell you before he passed.'* At the time, I was having contractions every two minutes. I thought she was talking about Dad's trust fund. But she wasn't. She was talking about my mother."
Forty minutes later, we pulled into the gravel drive of a modest cape-cod style home nestled deep in the rolling hills of Harvard, Massachusetts. The house was dark, completely swallowed by the dripping canopy of weeping willows.
I kept the engine running, keeping the headlights aimed at the front porch. "Stay in the truck with Nathan. Keep the doors locked. If anything looks wrong, hit the horn."
"Mark, be careful," Khloe pleaded, her hand catching my sleeve. Her fingers were ice. "Evelyn lives alone, but Catherine knows who she is. Catherine was the one who approved Evelyn's retainer for my home delivery."
The cold rain soaked through my jacket within seconds as I walked up the flagstone path. The air smelled of wet pine needles and ozone. I stepped onto the wooden porch and raised my fist to knock, but before my knuckles touched the wood, I noticed the door.
It was ajar. Just half an inch.
A thin ribbon of yellow light spilled out onto the wet floorboards.
My instinct screamed at me to turn back. I reached behind my back, pressing my hand against the cold polymer grip of the Glock 19 tucked into my waistband.
"Evelyn?" I called out, pushing the door open with the toe of my boot.
The living room was quiet—too quiet. The television was on, muted, casting flickering blue shadows across floral armchairs and shelves overflowing with medical textbooks. On the coffee table sat a half-empty mug of tea, steam still rising from the ceramic rim.
"Evelyn?"
I moved down the narrow hallway toward the kitchen. The linoleum floor was slick with water. Muddy footprints—narrow, elegant, distinctively sized for a woman's designer boots—led from the back garden door directly toward the master bedroom.
I drew the firearm, keeping it low, and pushed the bedroom door open.
Evelyn was sitting on the edge of her unmade bed. Her hands were zip-tied behind her back. Her mouth was covered with heavy gray duct tape. Her silver hair was matted with sweat, and her eyes were wide with terror as she looked past me toward the closet door behind my left shoulder.
Before I could pivot, a hard, cylindrical object pressed firmly against the base of my skull.
"Don't move, Mark," a calm, patrician voice murmured behind my ear. "If you discharge that weapon, the sound will wake the baby in the truck. And we wouldn't want Nathan to grow up without both of his parents, would we?"
May you like
It was Catherine.
***
