Beatrice lunged forward, her fingers clawing at the sleeve of my blazer, but the sudden downward bump of the main tires striking the tarmac threw her back into the leather cushion. Her purse slipped from her lap, spilling silver pens and mint tins across the floor.
"Thomas!" she choked out, her breath ragged. "She took the transmittal."
The Senator didn't reach for me. His training was too disciplined for an open scuffle in front of forty First Class witnesses who were already standing up to retrieve their overcoats from the overhead bins. He simply closed his briefing binder, placed his silver pen back into his inside coat pocket, and looked down at me where I remained crouched in the aisle.
"You have five minutes to give those sheets back to Beatrice, Maya," he said, speaking in a level, conversational hum as the aircraft turned off the active runway toward the terminal. "Before this plane docks, I will make one phone call to Sheriff Vance in Forsyth. If you have that paper when you clear security, Clara won't just be dealing with a civil eviction notice. She will be booked into the county annex on commercial trespassing and criminal mischief charges before sunrise."
I pushed myself up onto the seat, my knees shaking slightly from the hard touchdown. I didn't answer him. I folded the torn transmittal sheet twice, sliding it into the dry inner pocket of my jacket, flat against my ribs.
Through the thin cotton of my shirt, I could feel the cold dampness of the wine that had soaked through my waistband, but my hands had stopped trembling. On the single exposed line at the bottom of the page, visible just before I folded the sheet, the signature granting the county right-of-way over Parcel 408 wasn't Clara's, and it wasn't mine.
It was an electronic facsimile of our father’s notary signature—stamped with an expiration date three weeks after his death, and countersigned by Thomas Caldwell’s chief legislative counsel.
The chime rang overhead as the seatbelt sign extinguished. Around us, passengers flooded the aisle, pulling wheeled bags from the compartments, their voices rising in the mundane chorus of travel plans and phone calls home. Beatrice remained frozen in her seat, her eyes fixed on my chest pocket, her face drained of its mocking composure.
She knew what was on the transmittal page. She had known the moment she tipped that glass of Merlot across my lap to keep me from looking at her row.
I didn't wait for Kevin to clear the forward aisle. I grabbed my canvas tote from the floor, wedged my shoulder between a corporate consultant and an off-duty pilot, and stepped into the humid Atlanta air filling the jet bridge before Senator Caldwell could even unclip his phone from his belt.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Instead, I turned hard left down the corridor toward the rental car transit shuttle on the ground level, pulling my phone from my bag. The screen illuminated with three missed calls from Clara, each timestamped twenty minutes apart while we were descending over Knoxville.
I tapped her contact as I pushed through the double glass doors into the concrete staging bay where the shuttle buses idled.
She picked up on the first ring. The background noise on her end wasn't the usual rustle of cedar shavings or the high, chattering calls of the injured kestrels she kept in the north aviary. It was the low, steady rumble of a heavy diesel engine idling on gravel, punctuated by the metallic clink of a chain-link fence being pulled taut.
"Maya," Clara said, her voice strained to a thin wire. "There are two white pickups sitting at the cattle guard. No county markings, but they’ve got Forsyth County commercial transport permits taped in the rear glass. A man in a high-vis vest just told me they have an expedited abatement order signed at noon. He said if I don't release the raptor enclosures to the state agricultural contractor by four o'clock, they’re bringing in an excavator to level the pens."
"Don't touch the gates, Clara," I said, stepping behind a concrete pillar out of the line of sight of the upper terminal cameras. "And don't sign anything they hand you. Who signed the abatement?"
"The paper he held against the window was stamped by the clerk's office," she whispered. Her breath hitched, the raw fatigue of two weeks of diesel generator hum catching in her throat. "It cites Dad’s original deed waiver. Maya, they’re saying Dad transferred the access easement to Caldwell’s regional development authority back in November. They’re saying he signed away the clinic's road access two weeks before he went into hospice."
"Dad didn't sign it," I said, pulling the torn transmittal sheet from my coat pocket and pressing the paper flat against the rough concrete pillar.