Chapter 13 - The Counter-Strike
“I’m not here as an enemy, Miss Reed,” Evelyn said quietly, closing the folder with a soft snap. “If the bankruptcy court tries to litigate this in open court, your settlement goes into public record. Every detail of what happened that night—the abuse, the hospital reports, the desperate panic of the Voss men—becomes front-page news across the state.”
“Let it,” Claire said without hesitation. “I have nothing left to hide. They do.”
“True,” Evelyn acknowledged. “And Warren Voss is currently rotting in a private memory-care facility outside Atlanta, while Daniel is working under an assumed name as a night clerk at an interstate motel, terrified of his own shadow. But the federal trustees don't care about justice. They care about recovery percentages.”
I finally set the leather strap down on my workbench and looked up at the lawyer.
“You didn’t drive all the way out to the south road just to deliver a court summons, Ms. Vance,” I said. “People who carry bad news mail it. People who want a deal show up in person.”
A faint, tired smile touched Evelyn’s lips.
“You never did lose your touch, Samuel,” she murmured, leaning back against the porch rail. “Here is my proposal. The federal trustees want to write off the Voss estate as a total loss due to environmental contamination liabilities at the North Ridge site—soil toxicity, heavy metals, industrial runoff. If the state declares the land an environmental disaster zone, the entire property value drops to zero.”
“And?” I prompted.
“And the cleanup costs would normally fall on the municipal tax base,” Evelyn said. “Unless someone steps forward to purchase the acreage as a designated agricultural conservation trust for a nominal fee—say, one dollar—and takes on the remediation oversight.”
May you like
Claire drew a sharp breath. “You want us to buy Voss Hill?”
“I want you to control it,” Evelyn corrected. “If you hold the title through your agricultural cooperative, you control the entire ridge line, the watershed, and the commercial access roads into town. The bankruptcy court gets to close the file, the federal auditors wash their hands of the mess, and the Voss family is legally, permanently erased from Hartwell County history.”
