My bedroom window opened without a squeak; my dad had planed the pine sash himself the summer before his diagnosis. Outside, the night air was damp and smelling of turned loam and distant asphalt.
The roof of the screened porch was pitched at a twenty-degree angle, covered in rough asphalt shingles that tore at the rubber edges of my soles. I lowered myself onto my stomach, inching backward toward the gutter line. The limestone driveway below looked pale and hard in the moonlight, nine feet down. But to the left, running along the cedar siding of the kitchen, hung the heavy galvanized conduit for the electrical main.
I swung my legs over the tin gutter, caught the cold iron pipe between my thighs and forearms, and slid.
The metal tore at the palm of my left hand, the friction burning through the skin before my feet hit the soft mulch of Evelyn’s hydrangea bed with a muffled thud. I dropped into a crouch, freezing against the foundation stone. Above me, Evelyn’s bedroom window remained black and undisturbed.
I sprinted low across the thirty yards of open lawn toward the cedar fence line.
The Higgins property sat behind a row of overgrown privet hedges that had gone wild after Clara’s husband died five years back. The rusted padlock on the iron gate hung loose, exactly as Clara had warned, but the wooden slats of the greenhouse were rotten at the base. I shoved my shoulder against the lower rail; the dry pine gave way with a splintering snap that sounded like a gunshot in the midnight quiet.
I scrambled through the gap, dragging my knees through broken clay pots and dried peat moss, before shoving the greenhouse door open into Clara’s back kitchen.
The kitchen smelled of menthol ointment and boiling vinegar. Clara Higgins sat at the small formica table, wrapped in a quilted housecoat, an aluminum walker braced between her knees. On the table sat a glass of tap water, a brass mortise key with a stamped rectangular tag, and a worn leather coin purse.
"You're bleeding on the linoleum, child," Clara whispered, her rheumy eyes darting toward the curtained window facing Evelyn's yard.
"It’s just scrape from the pipe," I said, catching my breath against the sink counter. I unzipped the canvas jacket, pulled the black ledger from my waist, and laid it flat under the low yellow light of the range hood. "Look at the date, Clara. May tenth. You signed line three."
Clara reached into her housecoat pocket, pulled out a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses, and leaned over the lined ledger paper. Her dry, mottled finger traced the ink where Thomas Reid’s heavy hand had pressed into the grain.
"Thomas brought this over on his motorized cart," she said softly, her lips trembling with an old, simmering anger. "He told me Evelyn had been meeting with Arthur Pence in the bank parking lot after closing hours. He knew she was going to claim he had vascular dementia to void his final codicil. He had me witness his revocation right here at this very table."
She looked up at me, her gaze steadying into something fierce.
"Arthur Pence isn't just her lawyer, Tessa. His brother is Judge Harold Pence down at the district probate bench. That’s why Deputy Miller brings those envelopes personally. The whole courthouse runs on favors between those two families."
She slid the brass mortise key across the table toward me.
"The abstract office is three miles down the old railway grade," Clara said, pushing the coin purse after it. "Thomas kept the backup file in the fireproof lockbox bolted beneath the counter in the basement vault. The code is your mother’s birthday. If you walk the county road, Deputy Miller will pick you up before you reach the creek bridge. He patrols the blacktop every forty minutes looking for gravel haulers."
"What about the transport van?" I asked.
"If they get here at five-thirty and you're gone, Evelyn will tell Miller you broke into my house or ran toward the river. She’ll have the county search and rescue dogs out before sunrise to make it look like a tragic breakdown." Clara reached out, her cool, brittle fingers closing over my wrist with surprising strength. "Don't you run into the woods, Tessa. That’s what they want. You run straight to where the papers are registered. You get inside that storefront before Arthur Pence can file the conservatorship docket at eight o’clock."