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Sloan remembered the image of Tilly and Reid Margolis, lying dead in the tasting room, and had a different thought about that. She couldn’t leave Nora, and knew in an instant that she would either die defending her, or kill to protect her. She grabbed Nora under the arms and dragged her to the edge of the large machine that stood in the middle of the field. It was the yellow tractor-looking machine she had seen Lester using earlier in the morning to drive fence posts into the ground. It wasn’t much, but it was more protection than lying in the grass.
She dragged Nora around to the front of the machine and peeked around the edge. As soon as she did, another shot rang out. Sloan dropped back to the ground. Ellis was close, and even if Sloan were willing to leave Nora, running for the house would mean getting shot. To lie there and wait would mean the same.
CHAPTER 72
Bend, Oregon Friday, August 2, 2024
ELLIS MARGOLIS RAN FROM THE EDGE OF THE VINEYARD AND SAW Sloan Hastings carrying Nora over her shoulder. He fired off another round that caused the women to tumble into the prairie grass. He continued his pursuit and saw Sloan stand from beneath the cattails. He fired again. Running as frantically as he was, there was little chance of hitting his target. The shots were intended to pin them down and prevent them from getting to the house. He’d kill them when he reached them.
He was desperate for this day to be over. He wanted to put an end to it all, call the police, and tell them what he’d discovered—that Lester Strange, the family’s loyal employee, had brought bloodshed to the very family that had supported him over the years. The only explanation, Ellis knew, would be that with the emergence of Sloan Hastings, Lester went on a killing spree to cover his tracks from decades earlier. Ellis would emerge as the lone survivor and fill in any holes the authorities had trouble understanding.
The truth, if he could pull it all off, would remain hidden as it had for the past three decades. Ellis had been embezzling funds from Margolis & Margolis for years to cover his opioid addiction. In recent years, his drug abuse had bled into a gambling problem. He had believed, nearly thirty years before on that fateful Fourth of July evening, that the deaths of Preston and Annabelle would forever keep his secret safe. But now Sloan Hastings promised to uncover it all, to dig up the secrets Ellis had buried a lifetime ago. The bloodshed at Margolis Manor was the only way to keep it all hidden. He would find a way in the coming years to compartmentalize even this terrible day.
As he approached the large EVO1 fence post driver, he slowed. The women were here somewhere, and he wasn’t going to allow himself to get close enough for either to attack him. He’d seen the Hastings woman’s muscled physique and would leave nothing to chance. He circled around the big yellow machine, approaching from the front. He heard a moan and recognized Nora’s voice. After another step he found the women lying in the cattails huddled against the machine. A white fabric of some kind was wrapped around Nora’s leg.
“Please, Ellis,” Nora said. “Stop this madness.”
He looked at her with pity. Killing his parents had been difficult. Killing his wife would be the hardest thing he did.
“Did you shoot them, Ellis? Did you shoot your parents. Please, tell me it wasn’t you.”
“Where did the pictures come from, Nora? In the darkroom. Where did those photos come from?”
“Annabelle’s camera. The one I gave her that summer.”
“But who took them, Nora?”
Nora never had the chance to answer. Sloan sprang from the ground and charged at Ellis, putting her shoulder into his midsection. The collision knocked the wind from his lungs and the gun from his hand.
CHAPTER 73
Bend, Oregon Friday, August 2, 2024
SLOAN DROVE HER SHOULDER FORWARD, LIFTING ELLIS OFF THE ground and driving her legs like she was pushing the heavy sled at the gym. In a final effort she lunged upward and threw Ellis to the ground, landing on top of him. With Ellis on his back and Sloan straddling his chest, she dug the thumb of her right hand deep into his left eye socket. Ellis released a guttural moan as a sickening popping noise came from his eye. Sloan rolled to the side and looked for the gun in the tall cattails.
She ran back to the spot where she had originally tackled him and searched while Ellis moaned. She spotted the black handle first, then the silver metal of the barrel. She reached for it just as she felt a hand grab her ankle. She screamed as she fell forward, Ellis pulling her leg backwards. She reached for the gun but as her fingers brushed the handle, Ellis dragged her backwards through the tall grass. Sloan kicked her legs and tried to crawl forward. The gun was just out of reach, but her body moved in the wrong direction as Ellis rose first to his knees and then to his feet, gaining traction with each movement.
Sloan flipped onto her back, breaking her ankle free from Ellis’s grip. She pulled her knee to her chest and then exploded forward in a powerful kick to his groin that connected with full force and brought the man to the ground. Sloan scrambled back to the gun as she heard sirens in the distance. She found the gun again, this time taking it in her hands and turning to Ellis. But he was no longer doubled over from her kick. He was standing over her, his left eye swollen shut and sunken, with blood flowing down his cheek.
Sloan’s back was against the giant yellow machine and she pointed the gun at Ellis. She knew instantly from the deranged look in the man’s only remaining eye that she would have to shoot him if she hoped to stop him from killing her. Her right index finger began to depress the trigger, but before she did, she heard a rumble like a car backfiring. For a moment Sloan believed that she had fired the gun, but she felt no recoil. Her back, however, began to vibrate as the fence post driver roared to life. She saw Ellis look up at the big machine just as the driver shot a fence post down onto his head. The weight of the post, and the power of the driving machine, sent the post into his skull and through his chest. The machine echoed in the redundant clinking that had woken her that morning, and then went silent. It took Sloan a moment to understand the physics of what had happened, but as she looked at Ellis Margolis standing stiff and upright, she realized that the ten-foot fence post had been driven through his body and into the ground, killing him instantly and riveting him into place.
Sloan lowered the gun and slowly turned. When she looked up into the big machine she saw Lester Strange sitting in the operator’s seat, his hands on the controls.
CHAPTER 74
Bend, Oregon Thursday, August 15, 2024
NEARLY TWO WEEKS AFTER HER HARROWING ORDEAL AT MARGOLIS Manor, Sloan was back in Oregon. The FBI had summoned her. For the past ten days, since Agent John Michaels and his task force had reviewed the photos Sloan and Nora discovered on Annabelle Margolis’s camera that told the story of the night she and Preston disappeared, the FBI had used ground penetrating radar to explore the property around the winery. The day before, they zeroed in on three specific locations where the ultrasound showed foreign objects deep underground. Experts were brought in to confirm that the soil had been disturbed and relaid years before. Knowing Ellis Margolis had access to earth-moving equipment stored on the property suggested that the bodies had been buried deep in the ground. Cadaver dogs were brought to each of the three sites and offered a positive response to one of them. Excavation was underway.
Agent Michaels met Sloan at the front gates and escorted her in a golf cart to the digging site far out among the cabernet vines. The area was cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape. Backhoes and front loaders roared as their hydraulic arms clawed into the earth and lifted massive amounts of soil to deposit into waiting dump trucks that beeped when they reversed out of the area.
Agent Michaels pulled up to the site and Sloan exited the cart. Crews of agents stood by while others watched a large monitor powered by a gas generator that told the operators of the earth-moving machines how deep to dig.
“That’s it,” one of the agents yelled as the front loader lifted its final bucketful of soil from the deep hole in the ground.
The agent came over to Michaels.
“We’re at about three feet away. We’ve gotta go by hand now.”
