Chapter 7 - The Daughter Who Remembered.
Ruth shut the computer before Lucas could replay the footage.
“Vanessa was a child,” she said.
“She still remembers,” Amelia replied.
That explained the hatred in the dining room.
Vanessa had not attacked a stranger wearing a valuable necklace.
She had attacked the baby she once helped erase.
Ruth admitted that Margaret changed Vanessa's birth records after the fire so her daughter would appear younger than Lucas.
The Vale trust passed to the youngest surviving female descendant if Gideon died without a competent heir.
By altering one date and eliminating Amelia, Margaret could make Vanessa the sole beneficiary.
Lucas opened the medical folder and found monthly payments to a private clinic named Grayhaven.
The final payment had been authorized that afternoon.
“That is where she took Gideon,” he said.
The investigator warned them that Grayhaven was forty miles away and guarded by a private security company owned through Margaret's shell corporations.
Amelia found a map among the files.
A maintenance tunnel connected the clinic to an abandoned hydroelectric station downstream.
“Grandfather planned for us to find this,” Lucas said.
Ruth looked troubled.
“Gideon planned for many possibilities, including his own death.”
They left the depot in two vehicles just before midnight.
Rain turned the mountain road into a ribbon of black glass.
Amelia rode with Lucas and studied the footage frame by frame on the disconnected computer.
At the moment Eleanor fell, a reflection appeared in the nursery window.
The reflected man wore Gideon's signet ring.
Lucas wanted to believe it was another edited image.
Amelia enlarged the reflection and saw the man's face.
It was Daniel Price, the family attorney, decades younger.
The ring had been a disguise.
“He wanted witnesses to blame Gideon,” Amelia said.
A dark SUV struck them from behind.
Lucas fought the wheel while another SUV boxed them against the guardrail.
Vanessa leaned from its passenger window, her black dress covered by a raincoat.
She aimed a gun at Amelia.
The first shot shattered the rear glass.
Lucas braked hard, allowing the SUV to overshoot them, then turned onto a logging track.
The road ended at a flooded bridge.
They abandoned the car and ran into the forest while security men followed with flashlights.
Amelia's ribs screamed with every step.
Lucas pulled her beneath the concrete spillway of the old hydroelectric station.
They found the maintenance hatch from Gideon's map, but its keypad demanded a six-digit code.
Amelia examined the jade pendant.
Tiny marks inside the shell formed the date of the nursery fire.
She entered it.
The hatch opened.
Lucas climbed down first, then caught Amelia as she dropped into waist-deep water.
They moved through the tunnel while gunfire sparked against the concrete behind them.
At the far end, they emerged beneath Grayhaven's laundry room.
The clinic seemed deserted.
Every bed was empty except one inside a locked glass chamber.
Gideon lay connected to machines, his skin gray and motionless.
Vanessa stood beside him with the gun lowered.
She had used another entrance.
Amelia expected her to fire.
Instead, Vanessa pressed the weapon into Lucas's hand.
Tears streaked the makeup from her face.
“Mother ordered me to kill him.”
She looked at Amelia.
“But Grandfather woke up and told me who my real father is.”
The heart monitor began to race.
Gideon's eyes opened.
His first word was not a name.
It was a warning.
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“Run.”
THE JADE SNAIL | A VALE FAMILY THRILLER
