Pulling back a rug, Vasily found the cellar door. The moment he lifted it, the moans became clearer. At the bottom, on a pile of old burlap sacks, lay an elderly man with a face as pale as paper. The two of us managed to get him upstairs and onto a bed.
I went right to work. There was a serious blow to his head, and the situation looked bad. Vasily called the police and an ambulance.
I figured it would take at least a couple of hours for help to get there from town, so I cleaned the wound as best I could and made a tight bandage from clean sheets I found in a closet. At one point the farmer came to briefly and forced his eyes open. His dazed gaze landed on me. “I’m dying, and I’m not afraid anymore,” he rasped, each word costing him effort.
“They came for this.” His trembling fingers moved toward the pocket of his worn vest. With difficulty, he pulled out a scrap of paper folded several times over, yellowed with age and marked with dark old stains.
The old farmer held it out to me. I unfolded it. The handwriting was uneven, the letters slanting as if the writer had grown weaker with every word.
It was a note written by Lisa in the last moments of her life. “Dad, I know I won’t live until morning. A kind man named Gerasim found me and helped me deliver the baby.
You have a granddaughter. I named her Daria. I’m begging you, don’t look for her openly. Claudia caused the crash. The rotor failed.
Keep my little girl safe from her. Keep my daughter safe from her, Dad.” Cold ran through me. Vasily stood behind me in silence.
He had read the note over my shoulder, and his face had gone hard as stone. He put a hand on my shoulder without a word. In that gesture there was support, and a quiet promise that we would see this through. We no longer had suspicions. We had an accusation written in my mother’s weakening hand.
When the police arrived and the ambulance took the farmer away, we agreed to split up. Understanding how serious this was, Vasily went straight to the sheriff’s office to hand over the information about the attack and the new evidence. I waited for a taxi and headed back to the estate to tell my grandfather what we had found….
