Chapter 48 - The Divided Grave
Harrison Keaton let out a wet, rattling wheeze that might have been a laugh. His claw-like hand reached out from beneath the wool blanket, tapping weakly against the metal rail of the gurney.
"Both of them..." he whispered into the wind. "Look at them, Vance... both of them standing on the stone."
Vance wasn't there—he was sitting in a holding cell in Davidson County—but in Harrison's dying mind, the stage was already set for the final board meeting.
Corinne didn't look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the leather portfolio tucked under Caroline's arm.
"The Tullahoma box," Corinne said. "You found the key in the barn."
"Grant found it," Caroline replied, stopping ten feet from the gurney. "Because Grant wanted the truth about his father. He wanted to know why Thomas Miller died with twenty-two dollars in his checking account while Keaton Development built three subdivisions on the limestone he surveyed."
Corinne flinched. It was the first time in seven years I had seen her armor crack in public. She turned her head toward Luke, her jaw working silently.
"You didn't tell him," Caroline said, a cruel, beautiful smile touching her lips. "You let him believe Thomas Miller was a drunk who lost his transit instruments in a poker game. You let him think his father was weak, because if Grant knew Thomas Miller died trying to protect Clara Vance's daughters, Grant might have looked at you like a human being instead of an executioner."
"Shut up," Corinne whispered.
"No," I said, stepping between them, my boots sinking into the wet limestone gravel. "She’s not going to shut up. And neither are you."
I looked at Corinne. The woman who had slept beside me for seven years, who had made my coffee, who had signed the joint tax returns, who had held a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar promissory note over my throat while I broke my back trying to salvage my father’s name.
"Why is he here, Corinne?" I pointed at Harrison on the gurney. "Why risk a federal fugitive warrant to drag a dying man out of Vanderbilt into the mud at midnight?"
"Because the sanctuary isn't what you think it is," Corinne said. Her voice was shaking now, stripped of the legal precision she had used like a scalpel in Miller’s courtroom. "You think I did this for thirty million dollars? You think I did this to build a nature preserve?"
She pointed down into the dark throat of Cavern Four.
"Look down there, Grant! Look at the timber supports your father drove into the third chamber in nineteen-eighty-one! Harrison didn't want the limestone for gravel! He didn't want the timber for lumber!"
She walked to the edge of the pit, her boots slipping on the slick clay. Luke reached out to grab her arm, but she shook him off with a vicious snarl.
"There are seventeen barrels of industrial trichloroethylene and dioxin tailings buried behind the false limestone wall in Cavern Four," Corinne shouted into the rain. "Keaton Chemical dumped them there in the fall of nineteen-eighty-two, right after Clara died. If this land goes to probate, if Caroline files that partition deed, the state will open a full environmental survey before title can transfer."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
"And when they find the barrels?" Caroline asked, her voice dropping, the confidence suddenly faltering.
"The federal government takes the land under CERCLA," Corinne said, turning on her sister with eyes blazing with pure, incandescent fury. "The entire forty-two hundred acres becomes an EPA Superfund site! The trust dissolves! The Vance name is permanently tied to the toxic destruction of the Cumberland aquifer! And every dime Harrison ever stole from our mother gets swallowed by federal cleanup liens!"
She pointed her finger at Harrison’s gasping, ruined face.
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"I didn't bring him here to save him," Corinne wept, the tears finally cutting through the rain on her cheeks. "I brought him here because the only way the sanctuary statute holds is if the last surviving officer of Keaton Development signs the emergency conservation deed on the physical property before he takes his last breath!"
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