Chapter 7 - THE SECOND SIGNATURE
Under the flashing red strobe lights of the fire engine on Highway 17, Beatrice Hale looked every one of her sixty-nine years. For the first time in the four decades I had known her, the iron-spined probate attorney couldn't meet my eyes.
"Answer me, Beatrice," I said, my voice shaking not from grief now, but from a cold, terrifying clarity as I held up the laminated 2004 medical archive ticket with Thomas Vance’s signature across the bottom. "My mother wrote in this book that she was going to you the next morning to turn Russell in. Why did Arthur Vance’s brother sign for her blood samples at a private storage facility three days after her funeral—and why didn't anyone ever tell me?"
Beside the ambulance, Marcus Gadsden shifted uneasily on the bumper, pulling young Leo closer against his good side. Even the fire marshal, who had been walking over with a clipboard, slowed his pace when he saw the look on my face.
Beatrice took off her wire-rimmed glasses and wiped them slowly with the corner of her coat sleeve. "Because I didn't know that ticket existed until thirty seconds ago, Martha. When your mother died at Roper Hospital in November 2004, I was in Bethesda for six weeks undergoing radiation for breast cancer. Thomas Vance handled all of my active probate files while I was gone."
I stared at the laminated claim stub in my palm. "Thomas Vance died in 2016."
"Yes," Beatrice said, her voice tight with an anger that matched my own. "And two months after your mother’s funeral, in January 2005, Vance Maritime Capital quietly forgave the remaining default penalties on Russell’s first commercial construction loan and entered into a joint venture with Bennett Coastal Development."
The pieces clicked together with a sickening thud.
"Arthur knew," I whispered.
"Or his brother Thomas did," Beatrice said, pulling her car keys from her pocket with a sharp jerk of her hand. "Clara must have called my office from the hospital emergency room before she lost consciousness and told Thomas she suspected Russell had put something in her tea. Instead of calling the coroner, Thomas had a private toxicologist pull her blood vials from the hospital lab—and used them to force Russell into giving the Vance family a fifty-percent silent stake in every piece of land he developed for the next twenty years."
My stomach lurched. No wonder Arthur Vance had been so quick to command the sheriff’s deputies at the Palmetto Club tonight. He wasn't protecting me, and he wasn't outraged over his father’s stolen pocket watch. He was terrified that my mother’s missing safe was about to expose the twenty-two-year blood bargain that had built both of their fortunes.
"Get in the car, Martha," Beatrice said grimly. "Before Arthur realizes what survived that fire."
"Mrs. Martha, take us with you," Marcus said, standing up from the ambulance bumper and refusing the paramedic’s attempt to guide him into the back of the rig. He held his bandaged left arm against his chest, his jaw set hard. "My daddy had a stroke because of those men. If you’re going back to that restaurant, you aren't walking in there with just two women."
Twenty-five minutes later, the four of us—Beatrice, me, a soot-covered demolition foreman with a bandaged arm, and a twelve-year-old boy in a mended blue coat—walked back through the polished mahogany doors of The Palmetto Club.
Most of the fifty-six investors were still clustered around the bar, unwilling to leave until they knew whether their sixty-seven-million-dollar escrow wires were safe. At the far end of the private dining room, the two off-duty sheriff’s deputies were standing outside the closed doors of the small VIP lounge where Russell, Kimberly, and Arthur Vance were waiting for the Charleston police detectives.
Wait—why was Arthur in the room alone with Russell and Kimberly?
I didn't knock. I pushed the brass handle down and shoved the lounge door open.
Inside the wood-paneled study, Arthur Vance wasn't standing across the room from my husband in righteous anger. He was leaning over the leather desk beside Russell, holding a lighter under a rolled sheaf of pink carbon receipts he had pulled from the back of Eli Gadsden’s ledger while we were gone.
"Put that out!" Marcus Gadsden roared, lunging across the carpet with his good arm and knocking the brass ashtray and the burning paper off the desk before slapping the flames out with his work boot.
Arthur Vance stumbled back against the bookshelf, his patrician composure cracking for the first time as he saw the scorched steel firebox cradled under my arm—and my mother’s gold wedding band gleaming on my thumb.
"Martha," Arthur said quickly, smoothing his suit jacket as the two sheriff’s deputies stepped into the doorway behind us, drawn by the commotion. "Thank God you’re back. Russell was just trying to destroy the rest of Eli’s ledger—"
"Save your breath, Arthur," I cut him off, walking up to the leather desk and laying the laminated 2004 medical archive ticket directly on top of the charred ash on the blotter. "How much of Russell’s sixty-seven-million-dollar empire belongs to Vance Maritime under the 2005 agreement your brother Thomas forced him to sign?"
Arthur’s mouth opened, then closed without a sound.
Across the room, slumped in a wingback chair with his tuxedo bow tie hanging loose around his neck, Russell let out a hollow, bitter laugh.
"Tell her, Arthur," Russell rasped, looking up at me with red-rimmed, defeated eyes. "Tell her who gave me the prescription digoxin capsules from his father’s medicine cabinet in November 2004 when your mother threatened to take the counterfeit mortgage receipts to the feds."
The silence in the small room was absolute. Even Kimberly, curled in the corner sofa, stopped crying and stared at the seventy-two-year-old financier in horror.
"You're lying to save your skin!" Arthur shouted, his face turning purple as he pointed at Russell. "My brother Thomas found out what you did after the funeral! I had nothing to do with Clara Miller’s death!"
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"Really?" Beatrice stepped forward, pulling a small digital voice recorder from her pocket—Wait, no, she didn't pull out a recorder; she picked up the silver pocket watch Arthur had placed on the table earlier and popped open the rear dust cover with her thumbnail.
Pressed inside the gold casing of Arthur’s late father’s watch wasn't a photograph of his family. It was a folded pharmacy compounding receipt from November 2004, written in Arthur Vance’s own hand.
