Chapter 5 - The Strategy of the Boundary Line
By noon, the rain had stopped, leaving the valley under an icy, translucent glaze that turned the hemlock needles into tiny glass daggers.
My attorney, Andrea Vance—Frank’s youngest daughter, who had taken her law degree at Penn and returned to Blackwood Creek with three filing cabinets of corporate tax law and an absolute refusal to attend social luncheons—arrived in an old Subaru wagon that had two bags of road salt and an iron spade rattling in the back.
She didn't take off her boots in the mudroom. She walked straight to the pine table, set her leather briefcase down between the salt cellar and the butter dish, and opened a laptop that had a cracked corner case held together with black electrical tape.
"Mark filed an emergency petition for relief from the exclusion order at ten-fifteen," Andrea said, not looking up as her fingers typed a rapid, mechanical sequence into her terminal. "His lawyer is Toby Henderson—the cousin from the title agency who does all of Ashley’s closing work."
"What’s the claim?" I asked, setting a mug of hot coffee beside her elbow.
"Duress," Andrea said, her lips curling into that thin, terrifying line that Vance women get when someone tries to short-weight them on hay bales. "He claims you withheld his thyroid medication until he signed the partition agreement. He claims you threatened to report his sister’s husband to the state licensing board for unlicensed general contracting if he didn't surrender the north wing. And he filed a verified motion to impound the farm accounts pending an equitable distribution audit."
I took a slow sip of my coffee. "Does he have the bank numbers?"
"He has the account numbers for the checking line at the Citizens Bank," Andrea said. "The one you used to pay the electric bills and buy the salt licks. He doesn't have the trust accounts at Wilmington. He doesn't even know the trust exists."
"How much was in the checking line this morning?"
"Three hundred and twelve dollars and forty cents," Andrea said, looking up from her screen. "After I debited my initial retainer and transferred the operational reserve into the Blackwood Lineal Heritage Trust at eight-thirty."
"And the mortgage on Ashley’s townhouse?"
"That’s where it gets delicious," Andrea said, pulling a legal-sized document from her briefcase. "Ashley’s purchase-money loan on the King Street property wasn't an ordinary commercial mortgage. It was a private note carried by the developer—a secondary lien underwritten by a mezzanine syndicate out of Allentown. Do you know who owns seventy percent of the paper on that syndicate, Claire?"
I looked out the window toward the stone springhouse. "Grandma’s sister in Doylestown."
"Aunt Margaret," Andrea nodded. "She died three years ago, and her estate was consolidated into the Blackwood Land Trust under your sole fiduciary administration. Ashley has been making her thirty-two-hundred-dollar monthly payment to your corporate post office box for eighteen months. Every single dime she paid went into the maintenance escrow for your grandfather’s timber tractors."
I closed my eyes for two seconds. The breath came out of me in a long, quiet sigh that smelled of coffee and woodsmoke.
"She hasn't paid the November installment," I said.
"She’s fourteen days delinquent," Andrea replied, tapping the screen with the tip of an unsharpened pencil. "And under the terms of the private deed of trust her husband signed when they took the second out to buy the pontoon boat, there is a ten-day cure period following formal notice of default before the acceleration clause kicks in. I had the notice hand-delivered to her door on King Street by a process server forty minutes ago. Right while she was carrying her grocery bags into the foyer."
"What does the acceleration demand?"
"Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars," Andrea said, her voice dropping into that quiet, deadly church-pew whisper. "Cashier’s check. Within forty-eight hours. Or the sheriff posts the sale bill on the front door of the townhouse on Friday morning."
"She’ll go to Mark," I said.
"Mark has eleven hundred dollars in his personal checking account and twenty-two thousand dollars in credit card debt from his trip to the Borgata," Andrea said. "And his firm—the logistics group down in Bethlehem—just received a formal subpoena for his corporate expense records. I sent a copy of his room service receipt to their chief compliance officer at nine this morning, along with an inquiry as to whether the forty-five-dollar breakfast steaks were an authorized expenditure for regional account acquisition."
A floorboard creaked in the hall behind us.
I turned around.
Frank was standing in the doorway, holding a five-foot wooden surveyor’s rod with red-and-white foot marks painted down the face.
"Wind’s picking up from the north, Andrea," Frank said. "If we’re going to walk that boundary line and check them pins before the snow covers the shale, we better get moving. Deputy Miller said he’d meet us down by the walnut stump at two o’clock to make sure Mark’s cousin doesn't try to pull up the stakes while we’re in the brush."
"I'm coming," I said.
I pulled my oilskin coat back on, zipped the heavy brass zipper up to my chin, and took my father’s twenty-ounce framing hammer from the nail behind the kitchen door.
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"What do you need the hammer for, Claire?" Andrea asked, closing her laptop with a sharp click.
"The frost is getting into the ground," I told her. "If Richard Caldwell’s pin is still sticking up six inches in the briars, I’m going to drive it down until the iron meets the bedrock. So nobody ever has to look at his name on this line again."
