Back in the study, Brock ran a hand through his damp hair, breathing hard. The storm hadn’t let up. The windows rattled in their frames now. A tree branch scraped along the siding like fingernails inside a coffin.
He pulled out his phone again and redialed.
Mitchell answered on the first ring. “Tell me you found it.”
“There’s no safe,” Brock said, voice low. “No sign of the original. I don’t think they kept it here.”
Silence. Just the crackle of static.
Then Mitchell spoke, his voice harder now. “A contract doesn’tdisappear, Brock. If it’s not there, then someone took it. And if someone took it, we’re exposed.”
Lightning lit up the room in stark, electric white.
“Maybe they gave it to someone. Like their lawyer or one of their kids.”
“Maybe,” Mitchell said, voice cold. “Maybe they did just that. I’ll find out who. Be ready when I call.”
Brock felt something cold crawl up his spine as the line went dead.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mitchell Robinson sat hunched at Presley’s command post. His daughter treated the vast desk and expensive wall of monitors as her kingdom. The soft glow from the screens casting long, pale shadows across the room. He asked her to show him all the surveillance cameras. They had a security office attached to the stables, manned by one of his employees. That was to protecthisproperty.
Thesecameras faced out, always watching the perimeter. His neighbors. His future empire.
He had enlisted his daughter Presley to help him go over the security feeds because he needed to know what happened today, before he found out that George and Millie Coulter had done something with their original contract. Mitchell was a smart man—about business, about land, about the desires of others—but he didn’t have the technical skills of his daughter. While he understood the basics and what could and could not be done, he couldn’t make it all work. The drones. The security cameras. How to make things go forward and back and enhance them. So, he relied on Presley. She might have the technical skills, but he was teaching her how toseethings the way he did. Every detail mattered.
Quickly, he looked at all the footage in real time. The windingroad through his property, the gently sloping fields, the tree lines that marked old boundaries. The dense foliage that bordered Whisper Creek, the slender trickle of water that united the Robinsons’ land to the McKennas’.
The creek that had started the feud more than a hundred years ago. A feud he didn’t think anyone remembered. Except him.
He wouldn’t forget, as it had been pounded into him from every Robinson who came before him.
His father had been a stupid man. He never had vision. He’d never expanded, never turned a profit. After Grandfather died, Mitchell’s dad had run the farm into the ground. He drank too much, whored around, spent money like drinking water. Mitchell didn’t understand why his father rejected the land, turning it over to the laborers who Mitchell also employed, but without the free rein they’d had under his dad.
Because the land was in his blood. He wouldn’t let just anyone work for him. He had the best workers in the field, the best equipment, and fetched the best prices. He had expanded because he had to; his father’s ill-thought-out plans had devastated the once healthy soil. And then he created Verdacorp ten years ago, got the farm out of debt, and expanded.
Because farming was suffering, shrinking, prone to price fluctuations at the will and whim of the government.
He had to change tactics, and realized he had a head for business—better, he had a head for the business of land and all the land had to offer.
His grandfather and his great-grandfather would have been proud.
Mitchell didn’t care what his worthless father thought, now a drunk living in a house Mitchell had bought him down in Dallas, with a full-time nurse because Theodore Robinson had drank himself into every health problem imaginable, and Mitchell didn’t want to see him. Clive went down to visit once a week, butMitchell had no use for the pathetic, stupid old man who had nearly lost their legacy.
He pushed thoughts of his father aside because they always angered him. He vowed to be a man his daughter could be proud of. He had wanted more children, he’d wanted a legacy. He had Presley, a daughter worthy of him, but he needed to find a wife who could give him two or three more children. He’d thought Nicole had been the one. He had been wrong.
He focused on the camera feeds that Presley expertly managed.
To the north, the cameras offered a sweeping view of the McKennas’ land and parts of the Baldwin acreage. He couldn’t quite see either of their houses—trees and terrain and distance kept them obscured—but he had a clear view of their cattle herds and the southernmost edges of their crops. Enough to know when someone came and went. Enough to make guesses about routines, planting issues, harvest yields.
By this time tomorrow, the Baldwin property would be his. The paperwork was done. The deal would close at precisely fivePM, and as soon as the ink dried, Mitchell planned to install a full perimeter of cameras. He already had the posts and gear ready to go in his equipment shed.
Baldwin didn’t even need to survive, because the contract was signed, sealed, delivered… effective Saturday, April 30, 5PM.
“I need to see all the angles pointing to the Coulters’ property,” he told Presley.
She popped her gum—a habit he despised, but the one time he commented on it she only popped it more—and tapped a few keys. The screens split, expanded, shifted to show three angles of the Coulters’ property. Their house was the closest to his own, though still nearly a mile across two hundred acres of pasture and scrub that the McKennas owned—and he wanted. Needed. He would buy it, trade for it, do anything to have it.
