“Richard didn’t know,” I whispered.
“Richard was a tailor’s son from Bridgeport,” John Sterling mocked.
“He thought the vents on the cliff path were drainage pipes for the lawn sprinklers!
When he blasted the foundations for this glass barn in nineteen ninety-nine, he cracked the main capstone.
The seals started weeping into the lower aquifer twenty-five years ago.
The state knew.
The federal marshals knew.
But as long as the title was tied up in an unresolved probate dispute between a dead wife and an insolvent holding company, nobody could enter the property without a federal warrant that would trigger an automatic public evacuation order for the whole southern half of Aquidneck Island.”
He leaned in toward me, his breath hot and sour with the smell of cheap cigars and rotting teeth.
“Nobody could touch it,” he hissed, “until an idiot heir came forward and proved she was the sole, unencumbered owner of the fee simple title.
You signed the writ of replevin, girl.
You stood in that court and told Harrison that you owned every brick, every stone, every grain of dirt from the low-water mark to the sky.”
“And if the fee simple is consolidated,” I said, my mind racing through the provisions of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, “the statutory liability is strict, joint, and several.
It doesn’t matter who dumped the drums in forty-two.
The owner of record at the time of discovery is personally liable for the entirety of the remediation.”
“Fifty-four million for the first phase,” the old man cackled, his hand slamming down onto the surveyor’s case with a violent, hollow thud.
“And when the bay water breaks through those lower bulkheads—which will happen before the next spring tide—the damages to the Newport fishing fleet and the Navy berths will be two billion.
They’ll strip you down to your eyelashes, Clara.
Every dollar you ever earned in Boston.
Every dividend check.
Every shoe on your feet.”
He reached out his calloused, dirty thumb and ran it across the edge of the Cartier box, touching the cold blue fire of the sapphires.
“Unless,” he added, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial purr, “you sign the transfer.”
I looked at him.
“The transfer.”
From the interior of the surveyor’s case, beneath the yellowed coastal plates, he drew out a single sheet of vellum.
It was not a modern legal form.
It was an antique deed of assignment, typed on an old manual Remington typewriter, the ribbon faint and violet, bearing the title:
**CONVEYANCE OF REVERSIONARY MINERAL AND SUB-SURFACE RIGHTS**
**THE STERLING SHORE TRUST TO THE ATLANTIC SALVAGE AND DISPOSAL CORPORATION**
“Atlantic Salvage,” I read aloud.
“A corporation chartered in Monrovia, Liberia, in nineteen sixty-three.”
“Dissolved on paper,” John Sterling smiled, his eyes gleaming like wet flint.
“Held in dormant escrow by a bank in Tangier that doesn’t answer letters from the United States Treasury.
You sign the sub-surface rights over to the salvage company.
You keep the house.
You keep your mother’s pretty blue rocks.
You keep the hotels.
And when the federal marshals arrive at the gate with their EPA execution order…”
He tapped the vellum with his dirty fingernail.
“…they find that the person who owns the toxic dirt beneath the house is a dead corporation on the coast of Africa.
The enforcement action fails for lack of personal jurisdiction.
The state has to buy you out under eminent domain to get onto the property to fix the leaks.
They’ll pay you eight million dollars just to walk away from the front door.”
He pulled an old Waterman fountain pen from his pocket, unscrewed the black celluloid cap, and laid it on the desk beside the vellum.
“Sign it, Clara,” he whispered.
“Be a real Sterling for once in your miserable, pinched little life.
Save the skin.
Let the taxpayers pay for the drums.”
Chapter 3: The Ghost at the Desk
I looked at the pen.
It was an antique, chased with black hard rubber, its fourteen-karat gold nib worn down at an angle—the exact pen my mother had used to write the entries in the calfskin ledger.
She hadn’t brought the ledger to the keeper’s cottage to show him her cleverness.
She had brought it there because he had taken it from her.
I reached out, my fingers closing around the cold, vulcanized barrel of the pen.
It felt heavy, balanced, real.
“My father didn’t put the tape in the safe, did he?”
I asked, looking down at the violet ink on the vellum.
John Sterling’s grin twitched at the left corner.
“Richard was crying like a baby when they brought him back from the hospital the last time.
He knew his liver was turning to mush.
He wanted to call you.
He sat in that very chair with the telephone in his lap for six hours, dialing the first five digits of your number in Boston and hanging up.
He thought if he apologized… if he told you he was sorry about the bedroom, sorry about the clothes, sorry about letting Elaine treat you like a scullery maid… you’d come home and hold his hand while he died.”
The old man spat another speck of tobacco onto the floor.
“I took the phone out of his hand,” John said without a trace of remorse.
“I told him: *’Richard, you call that girl, she’ll bring three lawyers and a sheriff and she’ll take the clothes off your back before you’re cold.
You want to save Lucas?
You want to leave Elaine something besides the debt?
You make that tape.
You tell them what I tell you to tell them.’*”
“You told him to say Lucas wasn’t his son,” I said.
“Lucas was a dog,” the old man barked.
“A soft, lazy, degenerate little parasite who would have signed the house over to the first loan shark who offered him five grand for a ski trip.
I had to get him off the board.
If Lucas held even one-tenth of a percent of an equity claim, the probate judge would have appointed an independent guardian, and an independent guardian would have looked at the tax titles from nineteen forty-two.”
“And Elaine?”
