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“He’s coming in, Nora!”
“Follow me,” Nora said, running to the far side of the darkroom.
Sloan hadn’t noticed the other door. She’d only been in the room for a moment originally before Nora had cast the space into darkness. Then, the room had been lit by the glow of the red safelight. But now, with the overhead lights ablaze, she saw it. A heavy wooden door, rounded on top and with thick wooden planks creating an ornate X across the front.
Nora twisted the lock and pushed the door open. The hinges protested in a high-pitched screech until the door came to a halt. Based on the franticness of his hammering, Ellis had heard the door open.
“Nora! Stay in the darkroom. Something’s happened. It’s not safe for you to leave.”
Sloan saw Nora hesitate, and sensed her doubt. Sloan knew she wanted to believe her husband. She grabbed Nora’s hand and pulled her through the doorway and into the darkness beyond.
“Where are we?” Sloan asked.
“The caves of the winery.”
“Caves?”
“Where they keep the wine while it ferments and ages.”
Their voices echoed in the dark, damp tunnel. They turned and hurried through the corridor until the light from the darkroom lost its reach. After another few steps they were in complete darkness.
“I left my phone in the guest cottage,” Sloan said. “Do you have yours?”
“No,” Nora said. “It’s in the kitchen.”
They half jogged through the cavernous space, placing their hands on the wine barrels that lined the tunnel for guidance. Finally, they emerged into a large atrium of the tasting room. Nora felt for a light switch and clicked it on. Strings of bulbs lined the ceiling in long lines and blinked to life.
The circular atrium had three tunnels leading from it, each lined with oak barrels of fermenting wine. In the middle of the vestibule was a mahogany bar used for tastings. Massive double doors were closed but Sloan could imagine them open with sunlight pouring through and wine enthusiasts filling the space.
Sloan ran for the double doors that would take her from the caves and lead her out into the vineyards, but Nora’s scream stopped her cold. When she turned, she saw Nora standing by the bar. On the ground, creeping from behind the bar, appeared to be a puddle of red wine, as if cabernet bottles had shattered. Sloan took a hesitant step toward the tasting bar, and then another and another until she stood next to Nora and looked behind the mahogany. On the floor lay Tilly and Reid Margolis. In each of their foreheads was a gaping hole. A still-expanding pool of blood was spilling across the floor.
The images Sloan and Nora had developed in the darkroom flashed through her mind—Tilly holding the serrated knife, Ellis gripping the baseball bat. The tabloid covers of Annabelle and Preston cradling their newborn daughter also clouded her mind. The crime scene photos she’d reviewed with Eric. The flashes and thoughts came too quickly to comprehend. As her eyes refocused on the carnage in front of her, something else stole her attention.
“Help.”
Sloan looked at Nora.
“Help.”
The voice was feeble, and Sloan could not decipher its source. She felt Nora grip her hand, fearing, Sloan knew, that perhaps Reid was still alive. But another glance at the wound to the man’s forehead confirmed he was dead. Sloan had seen enough gunshot wounds during her rotation through emergency medicine to know that a hole through the forehead was not sur vivable.
“Please, help me.”
They both looked toward the tunnel to their right. The pleas were coming from the darkness within.
CHAPTER 68
Bend, Oregon Friday, August 2, 2024
ELLIS MARGOLIS HADN’T FELT THIS OUT OF CONTROL SINCE THAT fateful summer in 1995 when things had begun to fall apart. Back then it was Baker Jauncey who had set off the cascading dominos. With some luck, and some difficult decisions back then, Ellis had navigated his way through that situation. His mother had become his unwilling accomplice after she killed Annabelle during a rage-fueled altercation. Their relationship had never been the same since that night. His mother hated Ellis for killing Preston, even though he’d done it to save her life. At least, that’s how the story played out.
The truth was, that after Annabelle had revealed to Ellis that Preston knew about the fraud at the law firm, Ellis had no choice but to kill them both. But when he returned to Preston’s house on the Fourth of July, his mother had already taken care of Annabelle. And when Ellis saw Preston choking his mother, he knew there would never be a better opportunity to solve all his problems.
That night at Preston’s house had drawn Ellis and his mother together in a way they had never before known. They’d never been closer. To hold another’s secrets brought people together more powerfully than even unconditional love. Their livelihood depended on the other staying quiet about that night, and for twenty-nine years they both had. Then Sloan Hastings showed up.
Ellis had been running through his options since the day Nora told him that baby Charlotte had turned up in North Carolina. It was a scenario Ellis had never considered. His biggest loose end over the decades had been Margot Gray. But he had kept her content over the years. Only recently had she gone off the rails with guilt, when the Sloan Hastings story broke, and Margot put things together. Ellis managed to quiet her just in time, but Margot Gray was just one of several problems. The world was closing in around him, but he’d found a solution that would solve all his problems.
Back on that fateful July night, he had loaded Preston and Annabelle’s bodies into his truck and cleaned up Annabelle’s blood from the kitchen floor using pool chlorine diluted in water. Still, it wasn’t enough to stop the investigators from finding traces of her blood on the floor. But the detectives had never come close to figuring out what happened in that house, or where Annabelle and Preston’s bodies had been hidden. Late at night on July 4, 1995, Ellis had driven up to the winery to bury the bodies far out in one of the vineyards. So many years had passed that Ellis couldn’t remember the exact location.
