Chapter 5 - Paper Trails and Vanished Millions
The conference room in Rebecca Shaw’s office did not look like the ones on television. There were no leather armchairs, no panoramic views of a glass-and-steel skyline, no mahogany tables with brass inserts.
The table was made of birch plywood covered in scarred green linoleum. Along the walls, metal shelving units groaned under the weight of thirty years of dead men’s accounts—cardboard banker's boxes labeled with black grease pencil: *Estate of H. Clough (1994)*, *Vance Timber vs. State DOT (2002)*, *In re: Miller Guardianship*.
It was ten o’clock on the morning of January third.
Outside, the rain had turned the snow into a yellow, curdled gruel that choked the gutters along Court Street. Inside, the only light came from two fluorescent tubes that hummed with a low, sixty-cycle buzz that made the bridge of my nose ache.
Rebecca had four stacks of bank records laid out in front of her. She was wearing an old grey tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows that had worn down to the warp, and her grey hair was pulled back into a knot so tight it made the skin at the corners of her eyes look translucent.
“It’s worse than the preliminary petition,” she said.
She didn't look up from a three-page wire confirmation slip she was holding between her thumb and forefinger.
“Worse how?” I asked.
I had left Maisie with Mrs. Henderson for two hours. My hands smelled of the lemon soap I had used to scrub the grease off my shift uniform before coming over.
“Your grandfather’s estate wasn't just the land in Corinth,” Rebecca said. She set the wire slip down and tapped it with the blunt end of a pencil. “Thomas had a three-eighths royalty interest in the natural gas leases on the north ridge. The ones the Dutch syndicate took over in 2015.”
I stared at her. “Thomas told me those wells were dry.”
“They were dry for eighteen months,” Rebecca said. “Then they hit the lower shale formation. In November of 2019—fourteen months after Thomas died—the royalty checks jumped from four hundred dollars a month to thirty-eight thousand dollars a month.”
The room seemed to shrink. The fluorescent tubes hummed their small, monotonous tune.
“Thirty-eight thousand?”
“A month,” she repeated. “For forty-one consecutive months. Every dollar went into an account titled *Thomas Vance Timber Management LLC*. The LLC was formed three days after Thomas’s funeral. The registered agent is Arthur Vance. The sole managing member... is Chelsea Vance-Miller.”
I leaned forward, my knuckles pressing into the green linoleum until the skin went white.
“Chelsea doesn't know anything about gas leases,” I said. “She doesn't even know where the north ridge is. She thought Corinth was in the next county until she was twenty.”
“She didn't need to know where the ridge was,” Rebecca said. “She only needed to know how to sign an authorization for an electronic funds transfer. And she did. Sixty-eight times.”
She slid the next stack toward me.
The top document was a mortgage payoff letter from a private bank in Charlotte. The amount was six hundred and twelve thousand dollars. The property address was 1420 Crestview Lane—Chelsea’s house. The one with the indoor pool and the grey waterfall quartz.
The date on the payoff was June 14, 2021.
The same month Maisie had broken her collarbone falling from the swing set in the municipal park, and I had spent four hours in the hospital billing office begging them to let me pay the sixty-dollar plaster fee in three installments because my checking account had twenty-two dollars and fourteen cents in it.
I had called my mother from that billing office.
I remembered the smell of the payphone receiver—disinfectant and stale tobacco. I remembered Eleanor’s voice, coming thin and distant over the wire: *“Leah, things are very tight right now with your father’s heart medication. You really have to learn to manage your own emergencies. We can't always be your safety net.”*
“She knew,” I said. The words came out of me not as a shout, but as a small, dry rattle, like a seed pod bursting in the frost. “She was on the phone with me while Chelsea was signing the wire.”
“Your mother’s name isn't on the LLC,” Rebecca said. “Arthur was careful about that. Eleanor has no legal authority over the estate accounts. But she received three checks marked *Household Allowance* from that same account between July and September of that year. Ten thousand dollars each.”
“That’s thirty thousand dollars,” I said.
“Enough to replace the roof on Sycamore Crest and put that fancy brick pavers on their driveway,” Rebecca said. She took off her glasses and rubbed the red marks they had left on the bridge of her nose. “Now, here’s where it gets complicated. The district attorney’s office called me twenty minutes ago.”
My stomach dropped toward the floor.
“The DA?”
“Robert Vance is Arthur’s third cousin,” Rebecca said. “He recused himself, which was the only honest thing he’s done in twelve years. The case has been referred to the Special Prosecutions Section of the Attorney General’s office in the capital. They’re assigning an investigator named Kowalski.”
“An investigator,” I said. “That means...”
“That means it’s out of our hands, Leah. We filed the civil petition to protect your share of the remaining assets, but once the clerk saw the forged affidavit of non-residence, she had a statutory duty to notify the state. Forgery of a judicial record is a Class C felony. You can't drop it now even if you wanted to. Even if Arthur gave you every cent back tomorrow morning, the state of North Carolina is the plaintiff on the criminal docket.”
She looked at me, her eyes small and steady behind the lenses.
“Arthur had his first deposition scheduled for next Tuesday in the civil matter,” she said. “His lawyer—they hired Frank Vance from the firm by the depot—called me to ask for a sixty-day continuance on medical grounds.”
“Is he sick?”
“He has high blood pressure,” Rebecca said with a thin, bitter smile that didn't reach her cheeks. “Frank says Arthur is too fragile to sit for three hours of questions under oath.”
“He wasn't too fragile to tell a child she wasn't real,” I said.
Rebecca reached into her drawer, pulled out a fresh legal pad, and uncapped her pen.
“I told Frank no,” she said. “We’re taking the deposition on Tuesday at nine. In this room. If Arthur wants to claim he’s too sick to answer questions about eight hundred thousand dollars of stolen gas royalties, he can bring his cardiologist with him. But he will sit in that chair.”
She pointed to the chair across the table—a straight-backed oak office chair with one broken rung that had been repaired with black friction tape.
“And you,” she added, looking at me over the pad, “are going to sit right where you’re sitting now. You’re going to wear that same coat. And every time he looks at you, you’re going to remember that Thomas Vance spent fifty years making sure that land stayed in his name so nobody could do to you what Arthur has done for thirty years.”
“Maisie asked me if she could have her red coat back,” I said, looking down at my hands.
“She’ll have enough coats to fill a warehouse before this is over,” Rebecca said. “Now, sign these three disclosure forms. The state needs your authorization to pull the tax returns for the LLC.”
I took the pen.
May you like
The ink was black, thick, and wet. When I signed my name—*Leah Catherine Vance*—the nib scratched against the rough wood fibers of the paper, making a sound like someone walking through dry leaves in an orchard in October.
***
