Chapter 36 - The Bell in the Woods
"The chapel," Dorothy repeated, looking out the back window toward the north ridge. "The bell didn't ring on its own. Someone had to pull that hemp rope."
"Rochefort’s scouts," Laurent said, closing the iron box. "They’ve already occupied the ruins. They think the secondary vault is hidden beneath the crypt. That's why the bell rang—it was a signal to their Washington attorneys that they had secured the landmark."
"Then they’re looking in the wrong place," Dorothy said, her jaw setting with the cold, immovable stubbornness that had sustained her through thirty-five years of marriage to a man who kept the secrets of two nations buried under his hearth.
She stood up, dusting the soot from her knees. She did not look like a seventy-year-old widow who had spent the previous Thanksgiving being ordered into the den by a dismissive daughter-in-law. She looked like the matriarch of a dynasty that had just declared war.
"Kevin, go down to the cellar. In the third fruit bin behind the canned peaches, there is a green wooden crate marked *U.S. Forest Service - Survey Equipment*. Bring it up."
Kevin nodded, disappearing down the stone steps.
Laurent looked at Dorothy, bewildered. "What did Gerald leave you down there, Dorothy?"
"Gerald didn't trust foreign magistrates, and he sure as hell didn't trust Donald Vance's family," she said, pulling a leather jacket from the coat rack by the door. "When the county tried to condemn the north ridge for a reservoir back in eighty-two, Gerald bought the entire mountain under a timber reclamation trust. He rerouted the county road, and he moved the original boundary markers fifty feet to the west."
May you like
She pointed out the window toward the high orchard where the heirloom apples grew.
"The ruins on the ridge aren't on church land, Laurent. The old chapel bell isn't in Saint-Cyr or Lyon. It sits squarely on Miller ground. And whatever is buried beneath that chapel belongs to the person who holds the original deed—which is signed by the Governor of Virginia, not some corrupt tribunal in France."
