"Seven hundred and fifty thousand," I whispered.
"David was gone, Clara," Frank pleaded, his voice breaking into a desperate whine. "Nothing was going to bring him back. If I let the easement lapse, the city took it for nothing, and Ross built his container yard anyway. This way, the business debt disappeared, and I got something out of ten years of busting my knuckles on these tracks. I was going to help you. I swear to God, once the escrow cleared tomorrow, I had fifty grand earmarked for your medical liens."
He reached into his back pocket, pulled out a thick legal envelope bound with a rubber band, and slammed it onto the desk between us. The paper tore slightly, revealing the green edges of hundred-dollar bills.
"Take it," Frank said, stepping closer, his eyes wild and bloodshot. "Take the envelope. It’s forty thousand cash. Go home, pack your things, and pay off the hospital. If you take that notary book to the state commission tomorrow, Ross’s legal team will bury you in twelve jurisdictions before noon. They will tie you up for corporate fraud, they will claim you stole trade secrets from his dinner table, and they will challenge David’s life insurance policy on grounds of intentional wreck."
I looked down at the money on the desk, then at the heavy brass seal that bore my husband’s company name.
"David didn't wreck that truck on purpose," I said, looking Frank straight in the eye. "And you know it."
"It doesn't matter what I know!" Frank yelled, grabbing the edge of the desk. "It matters what Ross’s lawyers can prove in front of an insurance magistrate! You take that book out that door, Clara, and you walk into that hearing alone. You won't have a lawyer, you won't have a job, and by Friday afternoon, the sheriff will have your furniture on the sidewalk. Take the money and let the damn train go."
The choice sat on the desk between us, heavy and poisonous. Forty thousand dollars would clear my back rent, buy off the debt collectors hounding my telephone, and let me breathe for the first time in eight months. All it required was turning around, closing the door, and letting Julian Ross stand before the cameras tomorrow morning to claim the work David had bled for.
I picked up the manila folder containing the original master deed. Then I picked up Janice Keller’s notary register.
I shoved both deep into the inside breast of my coat, right beside the crumpled draft from the restaurant floor.
"Clara, don't do this," Frank said, lunging around the desk to grab my arm.
I snatched David’s heavy steel desk stapler from the blotter and brought it down hard across Frank’s forearm. The metal struck bone with a sharp, heavy thud.
Frank bellowed in pain, stumbling back against the open safe and clutching his wrist. "You're crazy! He’ll destroy you!"
"He can try," I said.
I backed out the door into the cold October rain, pulled the heavy steel deadbolt shut from the outside, and jammed David’s padlock through the hasp, snapping it closed. Frank began hammering against the inside of the door, his screams muffled by the cinderblock walls, but the rain and the hum of the transformer drowned him out.
I ran through the wet gravel to the station wagon, threw the ledger onto the passenger seat, and locked the doors. It was midnight now. Eight hours left.
I pulled out my phone and dialed the only number David had told me never to call unless the yard was burning to the ground: Arthur Pendelton, the retired chief counsel for the Philadelphia Port Authority, who had drafted the original easement twelve years ago.
The line clicked on the sixth ring, an old man’s raspy voice answering into the dark. "Who is this?"
"Mr. Pendelton," I said, pressing the gas pedal to the floor as the car fish-tailed into the street. "My name is Clara Vance. Julian Ross is filing a forged deed on the Schuylkill spur at eight o'clock tomorrow morning, and I have the notary book that proves it."
CHAPTER 3: The Hearing That Froze His Billions
Arthur Pendelton did not turn on his hallway sconces. At quarter past one in the morning, the seventy-two-year-old retired chief counsel for the Philadelphia Port Authority opened his heavy oak door just wide enough to verify my face through the brass security chain. He was wearing an unbuttoned cardigan over faded blue pajamas, his white hair standing in unruly tufts above wire-rimmed reading spectacles. When his eyes dropped to the heavy manila folder and Janice Keller’s black vinyl notary register pressed against my ribs, he unhitched the chain and stepped aside without asking a single question.
His kitchen smelled of pipe tobacco, peppermint tea, and fifty years of accumulated municipal law books. Pendelton cleared a stack of typed briefs off the green Formica table, pulled down a brass-necked banker’s lamp, and snapped it on. The sharp circle of white light fell across the scattered papers I pulled from my coat.