Chapter 10 - The Logging Trail of David Vance
The truck groaned against the snow drifts as Jason forced the heavy four-wheel drive through the unplowed logging track.
Branches heavy with ice scraped against the roof like skeletal fingers, screeching against the metal in long, agonizing shrieks. The headlights barely penetrated twenty feet into the dense pines, illuminating a tunnel of falling snow that seemed to have no beginning and no end.
In the back seat, Megan was curled into a ball, the metal lockbox cradled in her lap like an infant. Emma had finally stopped crying, lulled by the low, rhythmic vibration of the engine and the warmth of the heater blowing through the vents.
I sat with my fingers dug into the leather of the dashboard, watching the temperature gauge.
*Minus twelve.*
If the truck bogged down out here, three miles from the highway in a closed logging concession, we wouldn't survive until dawn.
“How much further to the county line?” Jason asked, his hands wrestling with the steering wheel as the tires caught a deep rut beneath the snow.
“Two miles,” I said, checking the GPS on my phone. The cellular signal was dead—no bars, just a red *SOS* symbol blinking in the upper corner—but the satellite mapping was still tracking our offline coordinates. “Dad put a steel cattle gate at the intersection with Route 9. He kept it chained, but he told me the combination once.”
“Did he?” Megan whispered from the back seat, her voice raw.
I turned around to look at her. “What does that mean?”
Megan looked down at the metal lockbox in her lap. Her hands were shaking violently. “Claire… Dad didn't just leave Emma the money because he loved you.”
A cold knot twisted in my stomach. “What are you talking about, Megan?”
Megan reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small, tarnished silver key on a faded blue ribbon.
“Dad knew he was going to die,” Megan whispered. “He didn't just discover Evelyn’s embezzlement two weeks before the crash. He had been planning this for three years. He knew the timber company was going under. He knew Evelyn was sleeping with Paul before they ever got married. He knew everything.”
She slid the key into the small lock on the metal box.
*CLICK.*
The lid popped open with a hollow sound.
Inside lay three thick, leather-bound journals, a series of microcassette tapes, and an official certified document from the Cook County Department of Public Health, bearing a gold seal.
I reached back, my hand trembling, and lifted the certified document into the front seat.
Jason glanced at it under the soft green glow of the dome light. “What is that?”
I unfolded the thick vellum paper.
It was a birth certificate.
*Name of Child: Claire Vance.*
*Date of Birth: June 14, 1996.*
*Father: David Vance.*
*Mother: Eleanor Marie Sterling.*
I stared at the name.
*Eleanor Marie Sterling.*
Not Evelyn.
My breath seized in my lungs, the cold air burning my throat as if I had swallowed crushed glass.
“Evelyn isn't your biological mother,” Megan wept softly from the back seat, burying her face in her hands. “She never was, Claire. Dad had an affair with Arthur Sterling’s younger sister, Eleanor. When Eleanor died in childbirth, Dad brought you home and forced Evelyn to raise you as her own to save the family name. Evelyn hated you from the day you took your first breath.”
The pieces of my entire life—twenty-eight years of cold glances, of subtle cruelties, of being pushed to the edge of family photographs, of being told I didn't look like a Vance, of being treated like an intruder in my own home—slammed together with the force of an oncoming freight train.
The dog bowl.
*“Maybe Emma can eat from something she can’t break.”*
*“I don’t want her ruining the Christmas pictures.”*
*“You treat her like she’s made of glass.”*
It was never about Emma being a premature baby.
It was about Emma being Eleanor Sterling’s granddaughter.
The living, breathing continuation of the only woman David Vance had ever truly loved. The woman Evelyn had spent thirty years trying to erase from the earth.
“She hated me,” I whispered, tears finally breaking free and tracking hot down my cold cheeks. “She hated me because I looked like Eleanor.”
“And she hated Emma,” Megan whispered, “because the moment Emma was born, every single penny of Dad’s empire legally reverted to Eleanor’s bloodline. Evelyn was left with nothing but the debts she accrued trying to buy your father’s love.”
Suddenly, the truck’s tires hit solid asphalt with a violent jolt.
We burst through the tree line.
Ahead of us, the rusted steel cattle gate hung wide open, its chain cut clean in two.
May you like
And idling on the shoulder of Route 9, their yellow emergency strobe lights cutting through the blinding blizzard, were three state police cruisers, their engines purring in the frozen night.
***
