Chapter 4 - Under the Floorboards
Amanda pulled her heavy canvas coveralls tight, fastened her dust respirator, and clicked on her industrial headlamp. The crawlspace entrance was tucked beneath the butler’s pantry, a narrow hatch that opened into the cold, earthen belly of the estate.
Dropping down into the darkness, the damp smell of earth and creosote filled her lungs. Cobwebs brushed across her goggles as she crawled on elbows and knees along the central beam. Her flashlight swept across the masonry piers.
Holloway had warned her about the south chimney. If the subflooring there had failed, it meant moisture had wicked upward through the hearth, potentially rotting the primary sill log.
When she reached the south chimney base, she found the wood discolored, but when she struck it with her sounding hammer, the sound was sharp, dense, and ringing. No dull thud. No soft, spongy decay. The surface had taken water stains from a leaky flashing forty feet above on the roof, but the wood itself was virgin longleaf yellow pine—dense as iron and naturally saturated with resin.
"They didn't even inspect it," Amanda said into her mask. Apex had written a catastrophic failure report sitting in an air-conditioned office in Atlanta.
She swung her hammer slightly lower to test the perimeter masonry pier. The head struck something hollow beneath the dry mud.
Frowning, Amanda set her tools down and began clearing the silt and river clay away with her trowel. Two feet down, beneath an intentionally buried slab of slate, lay an oilskin-wrapped bundle tied with copper wire.
She cut the wire with her side-cutters and peeled back the stiff, greasy cloth. Inside was a leather journal and an original surveyor’s plat from nineteen-forty-one. Tucked into the front pages was an original, unrecorded land grant deed bearing the name of Amanda’s grandfather, Arthur Sterling.
Magnolia Crest had always claimed its border ended at the salt marsh canal, leaving this mansion and its two hundred acres of prime waterfront out of reach. But this plat showed the opposite: this parcel had never been sold outside the bloodline. It had been placed into an irrevocable trust intended for Arthur’s grandchildren—a trust that Eleanor had spent three years desperately trying to dissolve behind closed doors.
Amanda sat in the cold dirt, her heart hammering against her ribs. Three years ago, Eleanor had thrown her out into the rain over an allegedly stolen diamond necklace, humiliating her before the city’s elite.
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It was never about jewelry. It was about title, control, and the one granddaughter who understood structural law well enough to read the fine print.
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