Chapter 13 - The Site Under the Mountain
Federal agents found Chris before Bell.
At Blackwater Ridge.
He was caught at a locked service road with survey equipment, cash and a forged environmental permit.
He wanted immunity badly enough to talk.
Bell told him Blackwater contained rare-earth mineral deposits.
Potentially worth hundreds of millions.
That was the supposed prize.
But federal records contradicted him.
A Department of Energy team had surveyed the land decades earlier.
The mineral estimates were modest.
So Bell lied to Chris.
Why send him there?
Maybe as a distraction.
Then investigators found an old concrete structure deep inside the property.
Cold War era.
Unregistered on county maps.
My grandfather acquired Blackwater shortly after the facility was decommissioned.
Coincidence?
Nobody believed in those anymore.
The federal government temporarily sealed the site.
I was technically owner.
Still couldn't enter.
The irony was exhausting.
Nicole sat beside me outside the courthouse when Chris was arraigned.
She had removed her wedding ring.
“Do you hate me?”
“Yes.”
She nodded.
I appreciated that she did not ask for softening.
“I hated you too.”
“I know.”
“No. I hated what your life made mine look like.”
I looked at her.
She continued.
“When you bought Hollow Pine, Mom showed everyone pictures like she'd done it.”
That surprised me.
“She bragged about me?”
“All the time.”
Not to me.
Never to me.
“She told people you were brilliant. She just never told you.”
My chest hurt.
Why?
Because praise privately would reduce control.
Criticism kept me striving.
Praise publicly made the family look successful.
Another role.
Nicole whispered:
“I thought if I had your house, maybe I’d have something she respected.”
That was pathetic.
Painful.
Human.
Still not justification.
“You could have built something.”
“I know.”
Good.
Then she gave me Chris’s old tablet.
One encrypted folder remained.
Maya cracked it.
Photographs from Blackwater.
Bell.
Chris.
And my grandfather.
Impossible.
Grandpa had been dead sixteen years.
The photograph metadata said four years ago.
Fake?
Forensic review said no obvious manipulation.
The man looked exactly like Richard Manning Sr.
Older than I remembered.
Alive.
My father stared at it.
“No.”
Mom sat down.
She did not look shocked.
I noticed.
“You knew.”
Her eyes filled.
“Not for sure.”
“What does that mean?”
She had received birthday cards every year.
Unsigned.
Same handwriting.
Grandpa’s.
She told herself someone imitated him.
“Why hide that?”
“Because the last card said if Tracy ever learns I survived, Arthur will come for Blackwater.”
May you like
The dead grandfather had entered the story.
And apparently Bell wasn't the only person afraid of what I might inherit.
