Chapter 7 - The Woman in the Orchard
The rain had stopped by the time the sunrise broke over the Finger Lakes.
The morning sky was a bruised shade of violet and slate gray, illuminating endless rows of skeletal apple trees that lined the winding rural roads outside Ithaca. Chloe had fallen back asleep in her car seat two hours ago, clutching Barnaby to her chest, her soft breaths the only sound inside our dust-covered Honda CR-V.
David drove with both hands locked onto the wheel at ten and two, his eyes rimmed with red veins, coffee cups from three different gas stations rattling in the center console.
"There," I whispered, pointing through the morning mist toward a rusted mailbox half-hidden behind overgrown sumac bushes.
The numbers *412* were painted in faded yellow stencil on the side of the tin box.
Beyond it, a gravel driveway wound up a gentle incline toward an unpainted, clapboard farmhouse with a wrap-around porch that sagged slightly on its northern corner. Smoke curled lazy and gray from a brick chimney, carrying the scent of burning applewood.
David killed the engine at the base of the drive.
We sat in the idling silence for a moment, listening to the ticking of the cooling manifold.
"What do we say?" David asked, his voice raw. " 'Hi, I’m the brother you never knew you had, our mother faked your death thirty-four years ago, and now she’s trying to steal my daughter for forty-five million dollars'?"
"We tell the truth," I said, looking back at Chloe, who was still sleeping peacefully under her yellow fleece blanket. "The truth is the only weapon we have left."
David unbuckled his seatbelt, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the crisp autumn air. I opened my door, stepping onto the wet gravel, the cold morning wind biting through my denim jacket.
Before we reached the wooden steps of the porch, the front screen door creaked open.
A woman stepped out.
She wore heavy rubber work boots, a faded flannel shirt over a thermal henley, and canvas work pants smeared with damp garden soil. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a messy knot at the nape of her neck, secured with an old wooden pencil.
She couldn't have been older than thirty-five.
She held a pair of heavy iron pruning shears in her left hand, her knuckles scarred and weathered from years of physical labor.
David stopped dead at the foot of the porch.
The air left his lungs in a sudden, violent gasp.
I looked from the woman’s face to David’s.
It was like looking at twins separated by an alternate reality.
She had the exact same high cheekbones, the same sharp, straight nose, the same slight cleft in her chin. But most terrifying of all were her eyes—the Vance family eyes, a deep, piercing whiskey-brown that caught the morning light like polished amber.
The woman squinted at David through the morning mist, her brow furrowing with deep, cautious skepticism.
"The orchard’s closed until ten," she said, her voice husky and low. "And if you're here about the back taxes on the north parcel, I told the county collector they'll have the cashier’s check by Wednesday."
David couldn't speak. He took half a step forward, his hand rising instinctively, his fingers trembling in the cold air. "Julianna?"
The woman froze.
The color drained from her tanned face so fast it looked as if she had been struck across the cheek. Her fingers tightened around the handle of the pruning shears until the metal groaned.
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice dropping an octave, razor-sharp with danger. "Who told you that name?"
"My name is David," he whispered, tears finally breaking over his eyelashes, cutting clean tracks through the road dust on his cheeks. "David Vance. I'm... I’m your little brother."
The shears slipped from her fingers, clattering against the gray porch floorboards with a loud, metallic clink.
She looked at David, her amber eyes scanning every inch of his face—his jawline, the curve of his brow, the posture of his shoulders. She swayed slightly, reaching out to steady herself against a wooden support pillar.
"David," she whispered. The name came out of her like an echo from a dream she had spent three decades trying to forget. "Richard Vance’s son."
"Yes," David choked out. "Yes."
"She told me you were dead," the woman said, her voice trembling with an ancient, unresolved grief. "She came to this house when I was eighteen years old. She stood on this very porch, handed me an envelope of twenty thousand dollars, and told me that my father had died of liver failure and that my brother had died in a motorcycle crash in Europe."
David dropped his head into his hands, sobbing openly in the driveway. "I was in graduate school in Chicago. I never rode a motorcycle in my life."
The woman looked past David, her gaze landing on me, and then shifting to the backseat of our car, where Chloe had just sat up, rubbing her sleepy eyes with the back of her fist, her yellow duckling pajamas glowing through the tinted glass.
"Who is the little girl?" Julianna asked, her voice cracking.
"Her name is Chloe," I said, stepping up beside David, reaching out to wrap my arm around his heaving shoulders. "She’s your niece. And seventy-two hours ago, Eleanor Vance filed paperwork to lock her in an institution to protect the family fortune."
Julianna stared at the car for a long, quiet minute. The wind blew through the apple trees, sending a shower of yellow and red leaves tumbling across the damp grass.
Then, she bent down, picked up her iron shears, and turned toward the open front door.
May you like
"Get inside," Julianna commanded, her voice hardening with an iron resolve that could only have come from Vance blood. "Bring the baby. Get off the road before Arthur’s investigators spot the county plates."
***
