Chapter 43 - The Mud at Tullahoma
The rain started somewhere south of Brentwood, sweeping in from the west in sheets that turned the wipers of my truck into useless, rhythmic squeaks against the windshield. It was almost nine o’clock when I turned off State Route 130 onto the washboard dirt lane that led to the Vance homeplace outside Tullahoma.
The Keaton company had owned the surface rights to this land for thirty years, but they had never touched the old barn. It sat at the rear of an overgrown twenty-acre pasture, its hemlock siding turned black with rot, the roof sagging inward like the spine of a starved mule.
Clara Vance had lived here until Harrison married her in the summer of 1981. A year later, she was dead of postpartum complications—or so the official Franklin County records claimed.
I killed the headlights before reaching the gate, coasting into the weeds near the rusted hay rake. The silence was absolute, save for the drum of heavy water against the truck’s tin roof. I pulled a heavy steel flashlight and a flat-head prybar from the toolbox in the truck bed, zipped my canvas work jacket to my chin, and stepped into the mud.
Every instinct told me to call Luke. He was the attorney. He was the one who understood how to present chain of custody in a court of law. But Luke’s primary loyalty was to Corinne. He had loved her quietly, uselessly, from a distance for a decade, enduring her coldness and my recklessness while holding her legal defense together. If I told Luke that Caroline was Corinne’s twin sister, he would move to suppress it to protect Corinne’s claim to the sanctuary.
And Corinne? If Corinne learned that the woman who had shared my bed for two years was the flesh and blood she had spent her entire life mourning in secret, the wreckage wouldn't be legal. It would destroy whatever remained of her humanity.
The barn doors hung off their iron tracks, swaying an inch or two in the rising wind. Inside, the air smelled of moldering straw, dry pigeon droppings, and ancient creosote. My flashlight beam cut a clean white tunnel through the floating dust motes.
*In the foundation.*
Harrison had spent fifty years buying, stealing, and surveying land, but he was a creature of habit. In every property he owned, he marked corners with three-quarter-inch rebar driven flush into the northeast cornerstone of the main outbuilding.
I made my way through the collapsed stalls, stepping over rotting leather harness straps and rusted tractor parts, until I reached the northeast corner of the barn. The stone foundation here was dry-stacked fieldstone, laid long before the Civil War.
I dropped to my knees in the dirt. The flashlight beam crawled across the moss-covered stones. Near the floor line, three stones sat slightly recessed, the lime mortar between them crumbly and gray.
I jammed the flat edge of the prybar into the gap above the center stone. It moved half an inch. A shower of dry, sandy grit fell onto my knuckles. I worked the bar back and forth, levering the weight, until the forty-pound stone slipped forward and crashed into the dirt floor.
Behind it, recessed into a hollowed-out timber beam, was a cylindrical brass container—the kind engineers used in the seventies to store survey schematics.
I pulled it free. It was sealed with heavy black electrical tape around the threaded cap. With my pocketknife, I slit the rubberized tape and unscrewed the brass head.
Inside was a single steel key stamped with the number *114* and the insignia of First National Bank of Tullahoma. Wrapped around the key was a yellowed piece of notebook paper covered in Clara Vance’s precise, looping cursive.
I flattened the paper against my knee, shining the flashlight beam directly onto the blue lines:
*To whoever breaks this stone:*
*If you are Harrison, you have already killed me. If you are Vance, you have already sold me. If you are my daughters, forgive me.*
*Corinne was taken by the court. Caroline was taken by the river road. I have divided the blood because they would have divided the grave.*
*Box 114 contains the irrevocable power of attorney granted to the second child upon her twenty-fifth birthday. If she is alive, Tract Forty-Two does not belong to the state, and it does not belong to Keaton Development.*
*It belongs to the sister who stayed.*
My phone buzzed sharply in my pocket, shattering the silence of the barn.
I pulled it out, expecting Luke or the hospital.
It was a local text from an unregistered number, but this one didn't come with a scan. It came with an address.
May you like
*The bank closed thirty years ago, Grant. The safe deposit boxes were transferred to the county annex on Lincoln Street. Caroline is already in the parking lot. You have twenty minutes.*
***
