Chapter 12 - Eleven Days
The development deposit deadline was now just five days away.
Harbor Crest moved to intervene in the property case, claiming it had relied on assurances from my father.
Its attorneys filed hundreds of pages and demanded an expedited decision.
Rebecca told me pressure was part of the strategy.
They wanted us too exhausted to verify every contradiction.
The title dispute, however, was becoming clearer.
Grandpa's transfer and recorded trust instruments gave my parents no right to sign away the property.
Their apparent misrepresentations were being documented for the court.
Daniel Price stopped pretending to be invisible.
He sent me an email describing a proposed settlement and included a photograph of Knox in my backyard.
There was no explicit threat.
There did not need to be.
I immediately brought Knox inside and notified Harris.
A patrol car passed my street that night, and I arranged to stay elsewhere until the situation was assessed.
Rebecca filed the email in support of a protective request.
Meanwhile June reported someone had removed a box from the farmhouse attic before our first inspection.
We reviewed her inventory against old photographs of the rooms.
The missing box had once held Grandpa's personal letters.
I called June to ask if she remembered who carried it out.
"Your mother," she said.
"The morning after the funeral."
That evening an investigative journalist named Caleb Ward contacted Rebecca.
He had worked on the Pier Nine story as a young reporter and had kept unpublished interview notes.
His editor had killed the follow-up after a lawyer threatened litigation.
Caleb wanted to know why the farmhouse had suddenly become so important.
Rebecca agreed to speak off the record only about public filings.
Caleb produced one piece of information we hadn't seen.
A separate state transportation proposal had evaluated an access corridor through the farmland.
If Harbor Crest controlled the property, it could benefit from a lucrative logistics project.
The land was worth much more than the three million Vale had offered me.
But Caleb's most troubling discovery had nothing to do with money.
A confidential source claimed someone at Carter Tidewater Holdings had booked temporary lodging for Lena Ruiz on the night before the fire.
The lodging was in a different city.
If true, it suggested Lena had been removed from danger deliberately.
Then Caleb played an old audio interview.
A frightened female voice said, "Mr. Thomas Carter helped me leave."
The recording ended with one other sentence.
"He told me his son was trying to stop what the other man had planned."
I looked at Rebecca.
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What if my father was guilty of terrible things, but not the one crime we'd begun to assume?
