Before the estate lawyer even opened the leather folder in the Hollow Creek town hall, my twenty-seven-year-old sister Brenda leaned over and grabbed my wrist so hard her fingernails dug into my skin.
The next afternoon, I found Arthur Douglas hunched over a microfilm reader in the back corner of the Hollow Creek public library. He looked even more nervous than usual, his sparse hair mussed, his reading glasses perched precariously on his nose. The faint hum of the machine was the only sound in our secluded alcove, surrounded by dusty local history stacks. I had to stay hidden, careful not to violate the hundred-foot restraining order Brenda had slapped on me.
“Mr. Douglas,” I said quietly, stepping from behind a towering shelf of county records. He jumped, nearly knocking over his glasses.
“Toby! Good heavens, you startled me.” He looked around anxiously, as if expecting Brenda to materialize from between the biographies. “You shouldn’t be here. Brenda… she’s very serious about that order.”
“I know,” I replied, my voice steady despite the tremor in my hands. I pulled the Huck Foley loan agreement from my jacket, along with the probate documents that showed the October 14th notary date. “But I think you need to see this.”
I spread the papers on the small table next to the microfilm reader, pointing to the date discrepancy on the power-of-attorney transfer and then to the loan document. “Grandma Evelyn was moved out of Hollow Creek on October 10th. This document says it was notarized on the 14th. Four days later. And this loan agreement, it uses the Albright homestead as collateral, pledged by Brenda.”
Douglas’s eyes, magnified by his glasses, darted between the documents. He grew visibly paler, the color draining from his face as if someone had pulled a plug. He adjusted his tie, his fingers fumbling with the knot.
“My slip of the tongue,” he mumbled, his gaze fixed on the loan agreement, not me. His voice was barely a whisper. “The date. You were right.”
He looked up, meeting my eyes for the first time, a raw fear in his own. “Brenda… she was very insistent. Very threatening. She said if I didn’t process the papers as she presented them, she would ruin my practice. Accuse me of incompetence, negligence.”
He swallowed hard. “I’m just a small-town paralegal, Toby. I don’t have the resources to fight someone like her, not when she was throwing legal threats around so aggressively.”
A cold knot formed in my stomach. So, Brenda had leveraged his fear, just as she had leveraged the town’s assumptions. Douglas, the supposed neutral party, had been a pawn in her scheme. But then, he warned me of something far worse.
“But that’s not the worst of it, son,” Douglas said, his voice dropping to a low, panicked whisper. He glanced around the empty library, as if listening for unseen ears. “This Huck Foley… he’s not like the bank. He doesn’t wait for probate court rulings or appeals.”
Douglas wrung his hands. “If Brenda defaults on that eighty-five thousand dollar loan next week—and with her spending habits, she surely will—Foley’s men will come calling. They don’t care about legal ownership or your grandmother’s true wishes.”
His voice trembled. “They will seize that property. They will take the land, the house. And if anyone tries to stop them, or if the debt isn’t satisfied in full… they burn it down, Toby. That’s how they operate. That’s the Hollow Creek way for Marcus Foley.”
My blood ran cold. The image of the familiar Albright homestead, the place of all my childhood memories, going up in flames, consumed by the shadow economy Brenda had unknowingly tapped into, was horrifying. Douglas had admitted his part in Brenda’s scheme, but he’d also revealed a new, far more immediate threat. It wasn’t just about inheritance anymore. It was about the survival of my home itself.
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