Chapter 22 - The Wolf's Bargain
We didn't go to my cottage. I wouldn't let him step foot across the threshold I had scrubbed clean with lye and pine oil. Instead, we sat on the overturned cedar skiff beside the abandoned fish shack at the edge of the creek, where the tide was beginning to lap at the rotting pilings.
Thomas took a silver cigarette case from his pocket, opened it with a precise flick of his thumb, and lit one of the dark French cigarettes with a gold lighter. The blue smoke curled into the cold salt fog, bitter and intoxicating.
"Eleanor is drowning," he said, blowing a thin plume toward the water. "Even without me pressing the lever, your departure pulled the plug on their bathtub. Arthur’s firm put him on administrative leave three days ago. Did you know that?"
"No," I lied. I had seen the automated alerts on my old work email before I shut the account down forever.
"Hannah went to the country club last Friday night," Thomas continued, amused by the misery he was recounting. "Ran up an eight-hundred-dollar bar tab on a credit card that was declined at midnight. She threw a glass at the bartender, called the manager a peasant, and was escorted off the grounds by two county deputies. By Saturday morning, the local gossip mill had ground Arthur’s reputation into fine flour. And by Monday, the mortgage broker came calling."
"Good," I said coldly. "They can sell the Lexus. They can sell Hannah’s designer luggage."
"They can't sell what they don't own," Thomas said softly. He laid the envelope across his knee and broke the wax seal with his thumb. From inside, he drew out several sheets of yellowed vellum, their edges brittle with age, along with a stack of crisp, modern legal forms bearing the seal of the state appellate court.
"My mother was not a fool, Clara," he murmured, his eyes scanning the archaic legal text. "She knew Eleanor was a parasite from the day she was born. Grandmother Vance wrote a testamentary trust: Oakton could remain in Eleanor’s possession only so long as the estate remained solvent and free of secondary liens. If Eleanor ever defaulted on a municipal tax assessment or mortgaged the primary residence without the consent of both living heirs... the entire deed revokes. It reverts immediately to me. Or to my designated successor."
He slid the documents across the overturned hull toward me.
I looked down. At the bottom of the vellum deed, beneath my grandmother’s ornate cursive signature, was a clause written in fading iron gall ink: *In the event of default, waste, or fraudulent encumbrance, the title shall pass whole and unencumbered to Thomas Vance, or should he predecease the waste, to his designated lineal kin.*
And beneath that, attached to the modern court petition, was an affidavit of title with a blank line for an assignee.
"I have no interest in returning to Virginia to manage a crumbling colonial monstrosity filled with bad memories and worse plumbing," Thomas said, watching my face carefully. "I live in Tangier. The climate suits my lungs, and the tax laws suit my income. But Eleanor stole seven years of my life with that fraudulent death certificate. I want Oakton leveled, Clara. Or sold to developers who will carve that front lawn into thirty quarter-acre subdivisions and turn Eleanor’s rose garden into an asphalt cul-de-sac."
"And what does that have to do with me?" I demanded.
"You paid the property taxes on that house for five consecutive years from your own personal checking account," he said, leaning forward, his cold eyes boring into mine. "Under state equity law, you are Eleanor’s largest unsecured creditor. If you sign this petition of joinder, we file it in Richmond on Friday. By next Tuesday, the sheriff serves Eleanor and Hannah with an eviction notice. Not a foreclosure—an immediate writ of possession. They will be out on the curb with whatever they can carry in their arms."
May you like
He offered me a heavy gold fountain pen.
"Sign it," he whispered. "And watch them burn."
