“The family had offers for the land. We refused them. We’ve been refusing them for years. I’m guessing Letitia did the same. So, yeah, something like that after John inherited the property. He didn’t know the history and had no reason not to sell. And I’m betting that if you look into the owners of the development company, you’ll find Mayor Blockhead associated in some way. He always is when it comes to land around Afterthought.”
“Observation or deduction?” he asked.
“About the mayor? Observation. He owns a realty company, remember? The only one in town.” Evie felt cramped in the little car, almost rubbing shoulders with Jax. She liked men well enough, and Jax had what it took to turn her on. But her relationships never worked out. She was simply too weird, and men couldn’t handle it, especially straight shooters like Jax.
What she really wanted was to convince Jax and his law firm that she made a good detective. If she could work with them for a few years, she’d have a basis to apply for a license. So, she could dream. Of course, if Jax blew off his job... The Universe never dropped plums in her lap.
“That’s a conflict of interest. The mayor shouldn’t be able to vote on anything to do with land.” Jax hit the gas as soon as they ramped onto I-95.
“It’s a small town. Every vote is a conflict of interest in some way. The whole point of being on the council is to influence how the town grows. I’m not pointing fingers, much. I’m just saying the development company is not operating in outer space. It has connections to the council.” Living in a fish bowl all her life, she’d had time to observe how human interaction worked, upfront and personal. College couldn’t teach the lessons she’d learned.
He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Lakeland is a consortium of contractors our firm has worked with for decades. Stockton and Stockton is an old, reliable firm, small but well known in business circles. So I’m not ready to buy they’d do anything illegal. But the fact remains, the deed books, the deeds, and the tax notices don’t line up.”
“And the town, the developers, and presumably, your law firm, stand to benefit. And Loretta, since I’m guessing there’s a nice amount of money being paid for her land. The only ones suffering are my family, which might be a motive for skullduggery right there. The town would rather have a barbershop on Main Street than Mom’s shop, and my mother and her sisters have been a thorn in the town’s side for years.” Evie slumped in the seat and tried to pull all her revolving thoughts in line.
“One assumes the conflict between your family and the town goes back longer than that,” he said in what sounded like amusement.
“Well, yeah.” She huffed a laugh recalling a few memorable town meetings. “The school teaches all the creative arts, plus horticulture, forestry, and carpentry because, over the years, my family browbeat every family in town for educational support. It’s a small school with a curriculum wider than that of most cities. Few people here can afford college, so vocational courses make sense.”
“Let me guess—to pay for all that, the town had to raise taxes because the tax base is too small to fund all those classes. So the council members—who probably don’t have kids in school—want to reduce their own taxes by expanding the tax base with a massive residential anthill on your property—just to get even.”
“Yeah, probably,” she said gloomily, glaring out the windshield. “They don’t consider that Main Street businesses are thriving because the school offers opportunities and educational value. Families don’t leave Afterthought the way they do in every other small town in the country. We’re a prosperous community with a lot of creative, educated, skilled people who bring money in from outside.”
“But those people need a place to live,” he argued.
Evie rolled her eyes and gestured at the cotton fields they passed. “You think there’s a shortage of land? The pondfloods. It’s a natural basin. Build on that soil and the whole town floods. Our ancestors were not idiots. My family would probably donate the property for a public park if anyone asked, but no, parks cost money instead of making it. Short-sighted.”
“And they think you’re flakes and can be cheated,” he added.
“They’re wrong. And even if we can’t turn them into toads, we can run them out of town in the next election. So where in heck does this leave us?” Feeling disgruntled but relieved that Jax understood and maybe accepted the problem, Evie watched with interest as they left the 95 for the 16 into downtown Savannah.
“Considering the lower property taxes in your county, the ease of access to Afterthought, and the demand for bedroom communities outside of Charleston and Savannah—that leaves us with a raft of suspects two states wide,” he admitted.
“Well, how many are in a position to doctor the registrar’s records?” Evie watched as he expertly dodged in and out of traffic, catching turn lanes and driving a zigzag path into a commercial district that wasn’t historic downtown. Dang. She’d hoped to see a ghost or two.
“The blue-haired lady at the desk? Anyone else who works there?”
“Emma Blue?” Evie laughed. “She’s a lovely, flag-waving fascist, but I’m pretty sure it would never occur to her to change anything, anywhere. Admittedly, she’s not fond of my family, but she’s unlikely.”
“So are my father and John Post. I’ll look deeper into Lakeland, see what connections I can find.”
“The name on the surveyor papers was Titan, not Lakeland. What does that signify?”
“Titan is just a surveying firm. I’ll have to see if they’re invested in Lakeland.”
He spun down a side street into a warehouse district. “Our archives aren’t housed at the office. I think I can get into the storage unit without too much trouble, but there are cameras all over. If anyone is monitoring them, I’ll need to explain why I’m digging in old records when I’m supposed to be returning Loretta to school.”
Well, double dang. She’d hoped to see where he worked. The big aluminum-sided structure he pulled up to was beyond uninteresting into deadly dull.
She followed Jax out of the car. He inserted a card in a reader, just like a hotel room, and pushed open a security door. Snapping on a switch in the interior revealed metal shelving stacked high with ancient boxes. Evie sighed. “Even Cousin Orbis couldn’t find a ghost in here.”
“It’s a paper graveyard.” Jax flipped through a computerized index on the desk at the entrance. “The records of clients dead for decades reside here. I need a roster of my father’s clients to know what he was working on when he died. This is a dead end.”
“Negativity gets you nowhere. Are there dates on those boxes? Can you find dates around the time of your father’s death?” Evie roamed down the first aisle, examining labels, looking for the order of storage.
“There are dates for when they were archived. The section for the year of his death is over on the far right, aisle H, block 3. That doesn’t guarantee it contains anything he was working on though.”
“Got it.” Evie ran her hand over the dusty boxes, reading faded labels. “They’re organized alphabetically by client name. So we have about three dozen file boxes in this section starting with Abercrombie and ending with Thomas. Apparently no Vanderbilts or Zacharies died that year.”