My mother insisted she'd never missed a mortgage payment, but when I handed Dad one county document, his hands started trembling… / Chapter 12 / 90

Chapter 12 - The Surveyor’s Red Ribbons

The mud did not seem to touch Julian Vance’s wingtip shoes, or perhaps he simply moved with the careful, calculated gait of a man who believed the earth beneath him was already bought and paid for.

"Arthur," Vance called out as he reached the bottom of our porch stairs. His hair was iron-gray, slicked back behind ears that lay flat against his skull, and his teeth were unnervingly white against the weathered winter gray of his skin. "I was sorry to hear about Evelyn’s sudden departure from the community. She was a woman of singular vision. Uncompromising, you might say."

Mark took two steps down the porch, his hand instinctively resting on the heavy iron pry-bar he’d grabbed from the woodpile. "Take your ribbon off our fence, Vance."

Vance didn't flinch. He didn't even look at Mark. He kept his slate-colored eyes locked on my father. "It isn't your fence, Arthur. The perimeter post you’re standing near lies four yards inside the designated access corridor. Evelyn received four hundred and twenty thousand dollars in staggered annuities between 1994 and 2012 for the exploitation rights to the shale vein running beneath your northern pasture. She collected the final disbursement three months ago."

Arthur took a long, trembling breath. "I never saw a nickel of that money. Not one goddamned penny."

"What you saw or didn't see is an domestic matter between you and your late... well, your estranged wife," Vance replied, pulling a pair of kidskin gloves from his pocket and drawing them over his fingers with sickening precision. "The Vance Trust holds the deed to the subsurface and the right of surface transit. Tomorrow morning at seven, the clearing crew begins work on the access road. We’re taking out thirty-four trees in the first cut. Including that sugar maple by the creek."

"That tree was planted by my brother before he shipped out to Da Nang," Arthur said, his voice dropping into a register that made the hair on my arms stand up. "He died in the Ia Drang valley in sixty-five. He never came home to see it bear sap."

"Then you should take a picture of it this afternoon, Arthur," Vance said quietly. "Because tomorrow it’s firewood."

Vance turned on his heel and walked back toward his Lincoln. The surveyor with the plastic ribbon reached out to knot another strip around our cedar gatepost.

Before the man could tighten the knot, Mark lunged forward. The iron pry-bar came down with a terrifying, metallic *crack*, striking the cedar post three inches above the surveyor’s fingers. The wood splintered, sending shards of dry bark flying into the cold air.

"Touch that wire again," Mark hissed, his face inches from the surveyor’s face, "and the next thing this bar hits won't be cedar."

The surveyor blanched, dropping the spool of pink ribbon into the slush, and backed toward the idling trucks with his hands raised.

Vance paused by the door of his vehicle, looking back over his shoulder with a cold, bemused smirk. "Interference with commercial easement operations carries a mandatory federal injunction, boys. I'll have the state troopers escorting the dozers by dawn. Sleep warm tonight, Miller. It’s the last quiet night you're going to have on this hill."

The Lincoln’s door slammed with a heavy, pressurized thud. The convoy turned slowly, diesel fumes billowing blue and toxic into the hemlocks, and rumbled away down the county road.

We stood there in the freezing quiet. Arthur slowly walked down the steps, knelt in the slush, and picked up the roll of pink ribbon. He gripped it until his knuckles turned as white as the snow, then tore it apart with his bare, shaking hands.

"She knew," Arthur whispered, looking at the broken pieces of plastic in his palms. "All those years she made me buy retread tires for the pickup... all those years Kate couldn't have new shoes for Easter... Evelyn was sitting on nearly half a million dollars. Where did it go, boys? Where did she put it?"

"We're going to find out," I told him, looking down the empty highway where the exhaust still lingered. "Because she didn't spend it on herself. She lived like a pauper out of spite."

"Then who has it?" Mark asked, wiping the cold sweat from his brow.

I looked at the vellum documents in my hand, noticing for the first time the notary stamp on the bottom of the ninety-nine-year lease. The notary was not a clerk from our courthouse.