Chapter 46 - The Corridor of Shadows
Graham stepped between Clara and the window, grabbing the silver watch and the two documents off the desk and shoving them back into his inner coat pocket.
"Did you tell them where you were going?" Graham whispered, his voice tense.
"No!" Clara hissed, grabbing her heavy winter jacket from the bed. "I told Richard’s firm I needed two days to think over their agreement. They must have put a GPS tracker on my rental car."
Outside, the heavy footsteps ascended the three wooden steps of the cabin porch. A firm, rhythmic knock rattled the door frame.
"Miss Vance?" a smooth, practiced voice called through the wood. "We know you’re inside. Mr. Mercer is very concerned about your safety in this weather. We’d like to review the escrow paperwork before the roads close."
Clara looked at Graham, her eyes wide with panic. "There’s no back door in these cabins."
Graham looked around the small room. Behind the bathroom was a small utility window designed for ventilation, barely wide enough for an adult to squeeze through, leading into the dense pine grove behind the motor lodge.
"Grab your bag," Graham whispered. "We go out the back."
"Graham, they're lawyers, not mobsters," Clara whispered back, though her voice shook.
"Lawyers who bought forged signatures from Caleb and spent twenty years hunting an old woman’s bank account don't drive through a blizzard at dusk just to offer you a cup of coffee," Graham said grimly. "They know the expiration date is four days away. If they take that key from you tonight, you have no leverage left."
The doorknob rattled violently. "Miss Vance? Open the door, please. Don't make this complicated."
Graham pushed open the bathroom door, climbed onto the edge of the porcelain tub, and shoved open the frosted utility window. Freezing mountain air poured into the room, carrying a flurry of fine snow. He knocked the aluminum screen out with his elbow, letting it fall quietly into the snowdrift outside.
"Up," Graham ordered, turning to offer his hand.
Clara didn't hesitate. She threw her backpack through the opening, scrambled onto the tub, and squeezed through the frame, landing with a soft thud in the three-foot snowbank behind the cabin. Graham followed immediately, wriggling through the narrow space and dropping down beside her just as the sound of a master key turning clicked against the cabin's front deadbolt.
"Run," Graham whispered.
They ducked low, moving through the thick stand of lodgepole pines that bordered the back of the motel property. The snow was knee-deep, pulling at Graham’s boots, but the adrenaline surging through his blood kept his legs moving. Behind them, through the trees, Graham heard the cabin door swing open, followed by a sharp, angry curse in the cold air.
"Search the perimeter!" a man shouted from the porch. "Check the tree line!"
Graham grabbed Clara’s arm, guiding her down an overgrown logging path that led toward an abandoned tractor shed three hundred yards down Route 9. He had played in these woods as a boy; every ridge, culvert, and frozen ditch was etched into his memory.
After ten minutes of breathless trudging through the whiteout, they reached the rusted corrugated iron of the shed. Graham pulled Clara inside through a broken sliding door, collapsing against a stack of dry cedar fence posts. Both of them were panting, their breath pluming into thick white clouds in the darkness.
Clara slumped against the wood, shivering violently. "My car... my luggage... they’ll search everything."
"Let them," Graham said, wiping snow from his eyebrows. "They won't find the key, and they won't find the watch. But we can't go back to my truck. They’ve got it blocked."
Clara looked at him through the dim light filtering through the cracks in the shed walls. "Where do we go?"
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"We walk to the bakery," Graham said. "It’s two miles across the frozen marsh. And when we get there, Uncle Caleb is going to look you in the face and answer for every single lie he told."
***
