I put my own signet ring on his thumb and I kicked his body into the hold with the coal.
When the divers found him two weeks later, the crabs had done the work for me.
They buried Arthur Vance in the family plot at Common Burying Ground with full civic honors, and I walked out of the probate court with the entire estate in my waistcoat pocket.”
“And my mother?”
I asked.
“Sarah knew,” the old man said, looking up at me with eyes that were entirely dead.
“She found the dental records in the safe at the boatyard when she was twenty.
She walked into my office in ninety-four with that calfskin book, and she told me she was going to expose the whole rotten swindle.
She was going to tell the state that the man running the Vance-Sterling trust was an imposter who had spent thirty years hiding thirty-three corpses under sixty feet of coal slag.”
“So you gave her Richard,” I said.
“I gave her a husband who would bankrupt her before she could file the petition,” he whispered.
“I brought Richard Whitman into the firm, I gave him the credit lines, I fed him the projects that were guaranteed to fail, and I watched him drain her dry.
I knew that as long as Sarah was fighting her husband for her own allowance, she wouldn’t have the time or the money to hire the detectives to dig up the grave at Common Burying Ground.”
He reached out, his hand hovering over the vellum deed on the desk.
“And now,” he said, his voice rising into a sharp, desperate wheeze, “it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter who I am!
It doesn’t matter whose teeth were in that skull!
If you don’t sign that paper, Clara, the federal marshals will seize this land, they will dig those caverns open, and they will find sixty years of Vance-Sterling waste that will wipe out every dime you will ever make until you are eighty years old!
Sign it!”
“No,” I said.
I picked up the vellum deed.
I didn’t tear it.
I didn’t throw it into the fire.
I folded it neatly in half, then in quarters, then in eighths, until it was a small, stiff rectangle of antique paper no larger than a cigarette packet.
I walked to the open safe in the chimney breast, reached inside, and placed the folded deed into the hidden drainage conduit behind the green velvet lining—the secret conduit my mother had written about in her diary.
Then I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my cell phone.
The screen showed five missed calls from Judge Harrison’s chambers, two from the Boston office of the Environmental Protection Agency, and one incoming call from a number I didn’t recognize with a 617 area code.
I answered it.
“Clara Whitman,” I said.
“Ms.
Whitman,” a man’s voice came through the small speaker, crisp, military, and entirely devoid of the bureaucratic hysteria that had defined the afternoon.
“This is Special Agent Miller, United States Department of Justice, Environmental Crimes Division.
We are currently at the security gates of your property on Ocean Drive with six units and an emergency federal injunction issued by the Chief Judge of the First Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“The gate is unlocked, Agent Miller,” I said, looking directly into the pale, terrified eyes of the old man standing before me.
“You can drive straight up to the courtyard.”
“Ms.
Whitman,” the agent continued, his tone warning and heavy.
“Be advised that we are executing a statutory attachment under Section One-Oh-Seven of the Superfund Act.
Any attempt to convey, encumber, or alter the legal status of the real property known as The Breakwater will be treated as an act of federal obstruction.”
“There will be no obstruction, Agent Miller,” I said.
“In fact, I have two things waiting for you on the library desk.”
“And what are those, ma’am?”
“First,” I said, “the original, hand-annotated survey maps from nineteen thirty-eight showing the exact location of the chemical discharge conduits leading into the Narragansett sub-surface cavern system.”
The old man let out a strangled shriek and lunged toward the desk, his hickory cane swinging wild through the air.
I didn’t flinch.
I stepped back half a pace, letting the heavy wood strike the corner of the teak desk with a splintering crack that knocked the brass transit level to the floor.
“And the second thing, Ms.
Whitman?” the federal agent asked, his voice suddenly sharp with intense operational interest.
“The second thing,” I said, watching the old man collapse against the hearth, his hands clawing at his chest, his breathing coming in thin, wet, rattling gasps, “is a ninety-one-year-old fugitive named Arthur Vance, who has been legally dead since nineteen sixty-two, and who is the sole surviving general partner of the entity that dumped the chemicals.”
I looked down at the old man lying on the marble.
“Bring an ambulance with your cruisers, Agent Miller,” I said.
“My uncle has an appointment with the grand jury that is sixty years overdue.”
Chapter 5: The Fall of the Breakwater
The blue and red lights did not flicker through the mist; they turned the entire limestone facade of *The Breakwater* into an undulating, violent sea of crimson and cobalt.
There were seven federal Suburbans, three state police cruisers, a mobile command post from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and an advanced life support ambulance from the Newport Fire Department, its diesel engine rumbling as the paramedics wheeled their gurney up the front steps with their defibrillator bags banging against their hips.
They took Arthur Vance out through the two-story bronze doors he had paid for with stolen insurance money.
He was strapped into the gurney, an oxygen mask strapped across his face, his eyes rolling back in his head, his hands cuffed to the aluminum rails of the litter by two United States Marshals who stood on either side of him with their thumbs hooked into their tactical vests.
He looked tiny.
Stripped of his hickory cane, his salt-stained overcoat, and his sixty-year masquerade, he was nothing more than a withered, terrified old clerk who had spent his life running from the ghosts of thirty-three men he had burned in a basement in Pettaquamscutt.
Special Agent Miller stood in the center of the library, wearing a navy-blue windbreaker with **DOJ-ECD** stamped in yellow letters across the back.
He was fifty, with graying hair cut close to the scalp, holding my mother’s calfskin ledger in one hand and the 1938 survey maps in the other.
He turned the pages slowly, his eyes widening as he read the names of the state officials, the ship captains, and the corporate entities that had been indexed in my mother’s neat, architectural hand.
“This is the holy grail of the southern New England industrial docket,” Miller said, his voice quiet with awe.
“We’ve been looking for these transport manifests since the Carter administration.
Every time we got close, the files disappeared from the state archives in Providence.”
“They didn’t disappear,” I said, standing beside the window, watching the rain beat against the glass.
“They were bought.
Arthur Vance owned three judges on the superior court and four senators on the finance committee.
He paid for their campaigns with dividend checks drawn on the accounts of dead sailors.”
Miller looked up from the book, his eyes fixing on my face.
“Ms.
Whitman,” he said, setting the ledger down on the desk.
“You understand what this means for your inheritance, don’t you?”
“I am an auditor, Agent Miller,” I replied.
“I understood what it meant before I walked into Judge Harrison’s courtroom this morning.”
Miller pulled a legal brief from his inner pocket—the federal execution order.
“Because the Sterling Irrevocable Trust was capitalized entirely with the proceeds of ongoing criminal enterprise—specifically the illegal concealment of industrial waste and maritime insurance fraud—the entire trust res is subject to statutory civil forfeiture under the RICO statutes.
The hotels.
The ski lodge in Vermont.
The accounts in Providence.
Even the ground beneath this house.”
He paused, looking at the red Cartier boxes resting on the mantelpiece.
“The jewelry too, Ms.
Whitman.
