Chapter 6 - THE PAPER TRAIL
While I was learning to walk in St. Louis, Uncle Boyd was busy preparing the kill.
Through my access to the county auditor’s online database—using the bookkeeping credentials Arthur Vance had legally granted me at the Co-op—I tracked every filing Boyd made in the Bellweather County courthouse.
Thinking I had died in a ditch or vanished into the St. Louis slums, Boyd had wasted no time. He had taken the contract I signed under duress—the one with the transposed Social Security number and the altered middle name—and paid off an unscrupulous local notary named Wayne Higgins to forge the official stamp.
He had combined my eighty-acre inheritance with Dad’s original three-hundred-acre cattle ranch and contracted to sell the entire four-hundred-acre parcel to Midwestern Prairie Development LLC, a shadowy shell company planning to turn the historic farmland into a toxic industrial waste processing depot.
The purchase price was 4.2 million dollars.
The closing date was set for May 14th at 10:00 AM in the private boardroom of the Bellweather County Land & Title Office.
Boyd had already bought himself a brand-new eighty-thousand-dollar Ford King Ranch dually, Ruth had ordered imported marble for a condo in Florida, and Travis was telling everyone at the local bars that he was about to become an oil baron.
Two days before the closing, I returned to Bellweather in secret.
Eli met me at a private airstrip twenty miles outside town, where a friend of his had flown me in from St. Louis. When Eli saw me step down from the cabin steps—walking tall, my spine straight, the cane resting lightly against my thigh—his weathered face broke into a rare, genuine smile.
"Look at you," he said softly.
"I have the files, Eli," I said, holding up a black leather briefcase. "I have the original title deeds from 1998, the altered scans from Boyd’s kitchen table, the forensic handwriting analysis from St. Louis, and the bank statements proving Boyd embezzled my father's life insurance payout."
Eli opened the door of a sleek, black GMC Yukon that looked completely out of place next to his old farm truck.
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"Good," Eli said, his voice dropping into a tone of quiet, dangerous authority. "Because tomorrow morning, we aren't just going to stop the sale. We're going to tear down the whole empire."
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