Chapter 6 - Shattered Glass and Boiling Water
Julian stood frozen on the dewy grass, his hands clamped over his ears as if the chime of the *Blue Danube* were an ice pick driving straight into his skull. His breath rattled in his throat, each ragged gasp clouding in the dawn air.
"Julian!"
The screen door slammed back against the cedar siding of the main house. Stacey stormed out onto the porch, cinching the belt of her silk robe with a violent tug. Her eyes were rimmed with dark circles, but her face held none of Julian’s terror—only a cold, razor-sharp fury.
"What on earth are you screaming about?" she hissed, marching across the damp patio. "The whole cove can hear you! Get inside before the neighbors start poking around!"
Julian didn’t look at her. He pointed a trembling, bone-white finger toward the dock. "The mug, Stacey... look at the damn dock!"
Stacey stopped. Her gaze flicked past the boathouse, landing on the center piling at the edge of the water. The ceramic mug sat there, dark and unmistakable, Robert’s heavy fishing emblem facing squarely toward the house. A delicate ribbon of steam continued to spiral up into the gray morning mist.
For three seconds, Stacey did not breathe. The calculated mask she wore cracked, just around the corners of her mouth.
"Where did you get that?" she demanded, her voice dropping into a harsh, vibrating whisper. "Julian, did you bring Robert’s mug out of the crawl space?"
"No! I swear to God, Stacey, I didn't touch it!" Julian took another frantic step backward, his boots skidding across the wet clover. "It was in the basement box with his tackle. And the music... didn't you hear it? It was playing in the boathouse!"
"Shut up," Stacey snapped, though her own eyes darted toward the water with sudden, twitchy caution. "Shut your mouth and think. Robert has been dead three years. Your mother went to the bottom twelve hours ago. Dead people don't brew coffee, Julian."
She strode down the wooden walkway with aggressive, deliberate steps, her bare heels slapping against the damp pine boards. She was trying to prove her dominion over the property, over the morning, over the dead.
From the darkened upper loft of the boathouse, I peered through the crack between the cedar planks, holding my breath. My muscles were coiled, my ribs aching from the swim, but my mind was clearer than it had been in a decade.
Stacey reached the end of the dock. She looked down into the black water where my wheelchair had vanished the night before. Then she looked at the mug. Slowly, almost gingerly, she reached out and touched the rim with her manicured fingertip.
She flinched. The coffee was boiling hot.
With an oath that curdled the quiet dawn, Stacey swept her arm out. The heavy mug went sailing off the piling, turning over twice in the air before smashing against a submerged boulder with a hollow *crack*. Shards of ceramic and a dark swirl of warm liquid sank beneath the surface.
"Someone is on this property," she whispered, turning back to Julian. Her skin was waxy, her eyes narrow and vicious. "Someone knows."
"Who?" Julian whined, hugging his chest. "Wren? Did Wren find something?"
"Wren is nineteen and crying in her college dorm because her daddy told her Granny took a turn for the worse," Stacey spat, marching back up the ramp toward him. "She doesn't know a thing. But whoever put that mug there knows about the pond. They know about Robert."
She grabbed Julian by the collar of his fleece jacket, pulling his face down within inches of her own. The viciousness in her was magnificent and terrible.
"Get the truck," she commanded. "We go to the bank the moment the doors open. We file the temporary guardianship decree, we clear out the safety deposit box, and we sign the deed transfer with Miller's lawyer. If an investigator or an extortionist is playing games with us, they won't have anything to squeeze us for once the assets are in our names. Do you hear me?"
Julian swallowed hard, nodding like a puppet whose strings had just been yanked taut. "What about... what about her? The divers haven't found her yet."
"She’s an old cripple weighed down by fifty pounds of steel in forty feet of silt," Stacey sneered, letting him go with a shove. "She’ll float up in three days bloated like a pig, or the turtles will take care of her. Now get dressed."
They hurried back inside the house, the door clicking shut behind them.
Up in the boathouse, I leaned back against the rough pine wall and closed my eyes. The word *cripple* still hung in the air like foul smoke. They truly believed my legs were dead. They truly believed I was helpless.
I looked down at my hands. Steady. Strong. Calloused from forty years of tending the garden and hauling firewood before Julian and Stacey took over the chore of slowly killing me.
They were going to the bank at eight o'clock. That gave me precisely one hour and forty-five minutes.
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I crept down the ladder, my bare feet silent on the wood. I had a second key to the back mudroom buried under the stone well-cap, placed there twenty years ago by Robert for emergencies. It was time to enter my own home as an intruder and find out just how long my son had been planning to murder me.
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