Part 2: My grandmother thought my student loans were paid off years ago, completely unaware that my father had been pocketing her monthly payments while leaving me in debt.

Three weeks after my graduation classes began, spring storms rolled violently across the valley.

Thunder rumbled like artillery over the Appalachian foothills, rattling the windowpanes of the old farmhouse. The clock above the fireplace struck midnight. Grandma was asleep upstairs, and I was sitting at Grandpa’s old oak desk in the den, finishing an economics paper under the warm glow of the brass lamp.

The rain beat down in relentless sheets against the siding.

Suddenly, above the howling wind, came a sound that made my blood run cold.

*BAM. BAM. BAM.*

Heavy, frantic blows slammed against the kitchen back door.

I froze, the pen dropping from my hand. The farmhouse was nearly two miles down a dirt road; nobody came out here in the middle of a storm, especially not at midnight.

*BAM. BAM. BAM.*

"Halley! Open the door! Halley, please!"

It wasn't my father’s voice.

It was a woman’s voice—shivering, cracked with terror, and gasping for breath.

I ran to the kitchen, switched on the outdoor floodlights, and peered through the small curtained window of the back door.

Standing on the rain-soaked porch, shivering violently in soaked clothes, was Linda. Her hair was plastered to her face, her coat was torn at the shoulder, and in her trembling arms, she was clutching a water-damaged leather briefcase to her chest like a shield.

I immediately unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open. "Linda?! What happened? What are you doing here?"

Linda practically fell through the threshold, collapsing onto the linoleum floor. She was hyperventilating, her teeth chattering so violently she could barely form words.

"He... he didn't just take your money, Halley," Linda gasped out between ragged breaths, her fingernails digging into the leather of the case. "Richard... Richard is coming here right now."

Grandma’s footsteps sounded quickly on the stairs, coming down in her robe. "Linda? What on earth?"

Linda looked up at us, her eyes wide with unadulterated panic.

"When I was packing up the storage unit for the divorce... I found it," Linda choked out, pushing the briefcase toward us. "Elwood didn't have a stroke in 2022. He didn't just get sick. Richard was slipping his heart medication into the tractor oil in the barn, replacing his real pills with sugar tablets."

The room spun. Grandma stopped dead in her tracks, her hand flying to her mouth.

"Richard was in debt to loan sharks in the city for over two hundred thousand dollars," Linda sobbed. "The boat was just the cover story! He needed Elwood dead to get the farm deed, and now that Arthur revoked it... those men gave Richard until tonight to get the money or sign over the farm's mineral rights. He stole a gun from his brother's truck, Halley. He’s coming down the driveway right now!"

Before I could reach for the phone to dial 911, the kitchen floodlights suddenly flickered—and died.