Chapter 15 - The Tape Inside the Stuffed Bear
Clara ducked behind the heavy mahogany desk, pulling her knees up against her belly. Her heart was beating so loud she feared the person on the other side of the door could hear it through the wood.
The lock clicked. The door creaked open, admitting a gust of freezing Atlantic air and the heavy stench of damp wool and stale tobacco.
Heavy, dragging footsteps crossed the threshold.
"I know you're in here, Mrs. Vance," a woman’s rasping voice echoed through the room. "And if you value the life of that baby inside you, you won't scream."
Clara peered around the edge of the desk.
Standing in the doorway was a woman in her late fifties, wearing an oilskin yellow raincoat, her hair wild and graying under a wool cap. She had a severe scar cutting across her left eyebrow down to her jawline. In her gloved hand, she held an old, soot-stained cassette recorder and an antique plush teddy bear—the same bear that had sat in Ethan’s old bedroom at Blackwood Manor.
"Who are you?" Clara whispered, standing up slowly, holding the butter knife like a shiv.
"Put the butter knife down, girl. If I wanted you dead, Julian wouldn't have had to pay me twenty grand to forge Morrison’s medical license."
Clara’s breath hitched. "You’re with Morrison?"
"I was a surgical nurse for the Vance family for twenty years before Eleanor threw me out on the street for stealing morphine," the woman said, spitting onto the floorboards. "Name is Martha. Morrison is a quack whose license was revoked in Maine ten years ago. Those pills he gave you? They aren't for preeclampsia. They're high-dose ergotamine. They induce violent uterine contractions and systemic vasoconstriction. You take four of those, you go into sudden, precipitous labor, bleed out internally, and the child is delivered via emergency C-section by Morrison on this kitchen table."
"Why?" Clara choked out, tears finally spilling down her cheeks. "Why would Julian do this to me? He loves this baby!"
"He loves the *trust*," Martha snarled, stepping forward and tossing the soot-stained teddy bear onto the desk. "Under old Arthur Vance’s will, the estate cannot be inherited by a surviving son if there is an unborn child of Ethan’s line. Ethan was the golden child. Ethan married a girl in secret three years ago, had a baby that died at birth, and Arthur rewrote the trust. If Julian has a biological heir born on American soil, he gets eighty million dollars outright on the child's birth certificate. But if you survive, Clara... under New York marital law, you get half in a divorce. And Julian knows you were starting to ask questions about Ethan’s car crash."
Martha reached into the teddy bear’s back, ripping the seams open. She pulled out a small micro-cassette tape.
"Ethan knew Julian cut his brake lines," Martha said, her voice dropping to a gravelly hiss. "He recorded Julian admitting it the night before the crash. Ethan hid this tape inside this bear. Julian burned the nursery trying to find it. He thought his mother had it."
Clara stared at the tape. The world seemed to tilt on its axis.
"Why are you giving this to me?" Clara asked.
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"Because Julian shorted me ten thousand dollars on my retainer this morning," Martha said with a savage grin. "And because I watched that boy drown a stray dog in the Blackwood fountain when he was nine years old. He’s a monster, Clara. And tonight, he’s coming back with Morrison to harvest that baby."
***
