Dale tossed an aluminum clipboard onto a steel work table. Beside it sat the heavy canvas volume from my registry vault, its brass hasp sheared through by bolt cutters.
"That ledger was county property anyway," Dale said. "The state transport board approved the six-lane connector in September. They’re paying twelve thousand an acre for timber through the creek gap. Your family sat on two hundred acres of prime pine, claiming an old thirty-foot ditch restriction."
"That restriction was deeded by the circuit court," I said.
"Not anymore," Dale smiled coldly. "Claire signed the emergency transfer two hours ago with Sheriff Boyd. Travis filed a ninety-four-thousand-dollar environmental cleanup lien for motor oil leaking from your wreck into the creek. Claire couldn't pay, so she signed the property variance to satisfy the debt."
"You forged the boundary map," I said.
"Didn't have to," Dale replied, tapping a yellow folder on the bench. "The original plat map had a binding failure. Pages twenty-two through twenty-eight slipped out. Travis has the new survey ready for tomorrow morning’s eight o'clock board meeting. Once the commissioners vote the variance through, Blackwood Timber starts cutting."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a heavy steel utility wrench.
"You’re legally dead, Nora. Peake signed the paper, and Claire took your mother’s locket. If a dead woman turns up in our retention pond, it's just hypothermia and shock."
Beneath the open ledger on his bench lay the yellow folder containing the original 1974 vellum plat map, signed by my grandfather. Dale hadn't destroyed it yet because he needed the surveyor’s embossed seal to certify the replacement pages.
If I ran out the door to find a state trooper, Boyd and Miller would push the transfer through at eight o'clock, and Claire’s signature would make the theft irreversible.
"Dale," I said, "did Travis tell you what I showed him in the diner?"
Dale paused. "He said you had a stolen tow slip."
"Look closer," I said, pulling the blue corner of the death certificate from my vest.
As Dale’s eyes flicked toward the state seal, I lunged with every ounce of strength left in my body.
I swung Cal’s brass flashlight straight into the overhead trouble lamp. The bulb exploded with a sharp crack, throwing the bay into pitch blackness.
Dale cursed, swinging the wrench blindly through the space where I had stood. The steel struck the sedan's bumper with a ringing clang, throwing sparks across the concrete.
I dropped flat, ignoring the agony in my ribs, and slid beneath the work table. My fingers swept across the metal shelf until they caught the rough linen edge of the 1974 vellum map.
I yanked the document free, shoved it deep into my canvas coat, and scrambled toward the dark opening of the bay door.
CHAPTER 3: The Hearing Behind Locked Doors
I kicked the rusted exit bar of Bay 4, threw my weight against the galvanized steel slab, and tumbled into the blinding sleet before Dale Miller could clear the grease-slicked stairs. The heavy door slammed shut behind me, shearing off his shouting voice and leaving me alone in the depot's frozen perimeter with seventy minutes left before the commissioners voted. My boots hit the crushed gravel between two black-tarped salt mounds, my left arm pinned over the stiff linen roll inside my coat, where the 1974 vellum survey crackled against my cracked ribs with every ragged breath.
Behind the garage wall, Dale's utility wrench clattered against a steel workbench, followed by the dry, metallic rattle of an interior security gate being unbolted.
I didn't head for the front security gate where Travis's idling pickup sat under the halogen pole. Instead, I dropped into the ditch line flanking the depot’s diesel fuel farm, dragging my knees through frozen blackberry brambles that tore through my denim. The ditch fed directly into the abandoned Norfolk Southern rail spur, an overgrown corridor of rotten ties and cinder ballast that ran straight through the valley floor toward town, cutting two miles off the highway loop.
The wind off the ridge had turned the sleet into razor-sharp pellets that iced the front of my canvas collar. Every three ties, my left foot slipped into the half-frozen slush between the timber stringers, sending a white shock of nausea straight into my throat. But the pain kept my head clear. Inside the zippered lining over my heart lay Travis Miller’s badge number on a fraudulent county death certificate, the yellow carbon tow slip timed ninety minutes ahead of my plunge into the creek, and the stiff, dry parchment Dale had tried to bury under a ninety-four-thousand-dollar cleanup lie.