Chapter 5 - The Snake in the Grass
Vanessa stepped onto the porch, her eyes darting between Ethan and Evelyn. The anger that had filled her earlier seemed to have vanished, replaced by a calculating, cold sharpness.
"If this is true," Vanessa said, her voice remarkably steady now, "then the Vance Group is finished. If the press gets hold of this—if they find out Richard Vance murdered people, faked his wife's death, and buried a John Doe to secure an inheritance—the stock will plummet to zero by tomorrow morning. The banks will call in our loans. We will lose everything."
She walked over to the table and picked up the photocopied documents. Her eyes scanned the pages with professional speed.
"These are copies," Vanessa noted, looking at Evelyn. "Where are the originals?"
"The originals are in a safe deposit box in a bank in Washington, D.C.," Evelyn said calmly. "Held by a lawyer who has instructions to release them to the federal authorities if anything happens to me."
"We can buy them," Vanessa said instantly, turning to Ethan. "Ethan, listen to me. We can pay her off. We can buy the lawyer. We can settle this quietly. She wants money, obviously! Why else would she show up now? We can give her a million dollars—ten million—and she can go live in Europe. Nobody ever has to know."
Ethan stared at his wife as if she were a monster. "Vanessa... she is my mother. She was imprisoned, drugged, and hunted for twenty years. And you want to pay her to go away so our stock price doesn't drop?"
"I am trying to save our lives, Ethan!" Vanessa hissed, stepping close to him. "Do you want to go to prison? Because if the federal government investigates the Vance Group for historical racketeering and fraud, they won't just go after your dead father. They will freeze our assets. They will take our house, our cars, our money. We will be ruined!"
"Maybe we deserve to be ruined," Ethan said, his voice dangerously quiet.
"Don't be a fool!" Vanessa snapped. "You didn't do anything wrong! You were an eight-year-old kid! Why should you pay for Richard’s crimes? We can bury this, Ethan. We have to."
"She’s right about one thing, Ethan," a new voice spoke from the shadows of the woods.
A tall, thin man stepped into the clearing. He wore a dark, expensive suit that seemed out of place in the wilderness, but his trousers were tucked into heavy mud boots. His hair was slicked back, and his eyes were cold and dead, like a reptile's.
Ethan recognized him instantly.
It was Thomas Grier. His father’s old fixer. The man who had allegedly set the fire at Blackwood Ridge. The man who had run the Vance Group’s "special projects" division for thirty years.
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"Mr. Grier," Vanessa gasped, taking a step back. "What are you doing here?"
"I followed you from the highway, Mrs. Vance," Grier said, pulling a sleek, black semi-automatic pistol from his jacket. "Richard always told me that Ethan was too soft. He told me to keep an eye on him, especially after Richard passed. It seems my instincts were correct. You should have kept driving, Ethan."
