Chapter 35 - The Vault beneath the Mill
Marshal Reyes ordered the concrete barricades to remain on the flatbed truck. "We are suspending enforcement pending an emergency evidentiary review at the federal district court at two o'clock this afternoon," he announced sternly. "No one enters this property without an authorized order. Ms. Miller, your counsel is ordered to appear."
Vanessa didn't answer. She slammed the door of the SUV and barked an order at the driver. The black vehicles turned around in a cloud of dust and sped back toward the highway, leaving us standing in the cold morning air.
"We bought six hours," Marcus said, wiping sweat and plaster dust from his forehead. "Six hours, Carmen. That parish registry proves the Vance family didn't own the reversion in 1954. But Magistrate Whitmore is Sterling Vance’s old college classmate. If we want to kill this snake permanently, we need Arthur’s Zurich proof. We need the physical receipt showing Arthur extinguished the Vance Swiss bond in 1982."
"Where would Dad hide something like that?" Daniel asked, looking across the vast expanse of the twelve-acre orchard. "We tore the main house apart when we did the probate audit."
"Arthur never kept his true treasures in the house," I said, a memory flashing through my mind like a spark in dry grass. "He always said that wood burns, plaster rots, but stone remembers the water."
"The old watermill," Daniel whispered.
We walked briskly down the narrow path that led past the lemon groves, heading toward the northern boundary where Blackwood Creek tumbled over slate boulders. The old stone gristmill had been built by Arthur’s great-grandfather in the late nineteenth century. Its waterwheel had long since collapsed into the mossy water, and the heavy oak doors were chained shut.
Daniel pulled a crowbar from Samuel’s truck and snapped the rusted padlock. The heavy door groaned open, releasing a cloud of damp, earthy air and the scent of river mud.
Inside, old grinding stones lay half-buried in dry chaff and fallen roof slate. The floor was made of massive slabs of gray river granite.
"Where do we look, Mom?" Daniel asked, shining a heavy flashlight across the shadowy corners.
"Arthur spent three weeks down here after he came back from Switzerland in the summer of eighty-two," I recalled, walking toward the center of the mill where the central driveshaft met the millstone bed. "He said he was reinforcing the foundation against the spring floods. He brought down five bags of quick-drying hydraulic cement."
Samuel bent down with his flashlight, running his hand over the seams of the granite slabs. "Here. The mortar around this third slab isn't lime mortar like the rest of the 1890s floor. It’s gray Portland cement."
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Daniel jammed the edge of the crowbar into the seam and threw his whole weight onto it. Samuel joined him, their boots slipping on the slick stone. With a sickening scrape of stone on stone, the slab shifted, tilting up to reveal a narrow, dry rectangular chamber lined with zinc sheets.
Inside rested a heavy, watertight ammunition canister from the Second World War.
