Chapter 7 - A Gathering of Wolves
I sat back on my heels. Paige stopped in the kitchen doorway, the cider kettle half-suspended above the stove.
“Your backpack?” I whispered.
Owen nodded, his lip trembling again, terrified that he had confessed to a crime. “He... he said Mom was being crazy about the grandfather’s papers. He said if the police or the lawyers came to the house because of Mom’s work, they would take everything Grandpa gave us. He said I had to be the man of the house and protect it.”
The sheer, sickening calculation of it made the room tilt.
Grant hadn't just used our son as a lookout. He had used him as an unwitting vault.
If the SBI had raided the house with a full search warrant—which Grant clearly knew was a possibility after the Gastonia warehouse notices started arriving—they would search his office, his car, his closet, his safe.
They would never search a ten-year-old boy’s superhero backpack hanging on the mudroom peg behind three rain slickers.
And if Victoria Vance had demanded the physical deed before handing over her share of the timber proceeds, Grant could have simply walked to the mudroom, pulled the blue-ribbon parchment from between Owen’s fifth-grade social studies folders, and handed it over without leaving a single digital trace on his personal laptop.
“Owen,” I said, keeping my voice as gentle as spring rain. “Where is your backpack right now?”
“In the trunk of Aunt Paige’s car,” he said. “Under my soccer cleats.”
Paige didn't wait for me to speak. She set the kettle down with a sharp *clink* and ran out the front door into the mountain mist.
Thirty seconds later, she came back inside.
The nylon backpack was bright royal blue, decorated with a faded patch of the Charlotte FC soccer crest. The zipper was stuck near the bottom, jammed with dried mud from the practice field behind the middle school.
I pulled the zipper back with my pocketknife.
Inside were two half-used composition books, a plastic pencil case containing three chewed Dixon Ticonderoga number-twos, an unopened bag of fruit snacks, and a flat, heavy cardboard document mailer from the Henderson County Register of Deeds.
I opened the mailer.
The blue-ribbon deed fell into my lap.
It was sixteen inches long, printed on heavy legal vellum that had turned the color of old butter around the edges. Along the left margin ran the official blue grosgrain ribbon, threaded through three brass eyelets and secured at the bottom with a red wax wafer stamped with the seal of the Superior Court of Henderson County, dated October 14, 1974.
Fifty years to the day before Owen was born.
On the back page, in the section reserved for subsequent conveyances, there was a signature line.
Grant had already signed his name in black ballpoint ink: *Grant M. Hughes, Co-Owner / Spouse.*
Beneath it, in shaky, hesitant cursive that looked like it had been traced over a light table, was my name: *Meredith Vance Hughes.*
He hadn't even spelled my maiden name correctly. He had written *Vance* instead of *Vane*—a Freudian slip of such staggering arrogance it would have been laughable if it hadn't been an attempt to steal my son’s future.
“Look at the date,” Paige said, pointing a finger over my shoulder.
The forged notary acknowledgment at the bottom was dated for tomorrow: *March 14.*
Grant hadn't intended to sell the timber through Victoria Vance.
He was playing her, too.
He was planning to use Victoria to clear the state environmental lien using my cash, let her take the heat for the counterfeit money, and then take this forged original deed directly to the timber group in Asheville tomorrow afternoon to collect the entire nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars himself.
He wasn't running an affair.
He was running a three-front demolition derby, and he had put our son in the driver’s seat of the lead car.
I stood up, walked back to the pantry, and dialed Thomas Sterling’s direct line.
“Thomas,” I said.
“Did you find it?”
“I have the deed,” I told him. “With my forged signature, dated for tomorrow, and Grant’s signature already affixed.”
Thomas exhaled slowly.
“Meredith,” he said, his voice dropping into that solemn, terrifying quiet that mountain lawyers use when the jury has returned with a capital verdict. “Where is Grant right now?”
“According to the Ring camera, the SBI left our house an hour ago. He’s inside. He thinks Victoria has the deed. He thinks I’m in Chicago.”
“Then we have approximately fourteen hours before he realizes that Victoria Vance isn't coming back with his money,” Thomas said. “Get in the car, Meredith. Leave Owen with Paige. I am calling Judge Abernathy at his home in Biltmore Forest. We are going to have an emergency ex parte hearing at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“No,” I said.
Thomas stopped. “Meredith?”
“I am not hiding behind an ex parte hearing, Thomas. I am going back to Charlotte tonight.”
“That is dangerous and entirely unnecessary,” Thomas said sharply. “The man is facing twenty years in Central Prison. He is desperate. Desperate men do not behave rationally when their options collapse.”
“He isn't desperate yet,” I said, looking out the kitchen window at the dark hemlocks swaying in the mountain wind. “He thinks he’s still the smartest man in the room. He thinks I’m coming home on the early flight from O’Hare tomorrow afternoon to cry about the stolen money.”
“And what do you propose to do?”
May you like
“I’m going to let him make his pitch,” I said. “And then I’m going to give him the blue ribbon.”
***
