Walter looked at the document.
"Can you prove that?"
"I can try."
Tommy nodded.
"There's something else."
He pulled out another page.
"This company has received payments from several local businesses."
Gabriel studied the names.
Then his face changed.
One of the businesses belonged to a former club associate.
A man named Victor Hale.
Gabriel slowly sat down.
"That's impossible."
Walter looked at him.
"Who is Victor?"
"Someone I trusted."
Mara looked between them.
"What does he have to do with this?"
Gabriel didn't answer immediately.
Then he said:
"Victor used to be our treasurer."
The kitchen fell silent.
Walter looked at the printed documents.
The bank.
The development company.
The holding company.
And now a former member of the Iron Vultures.
The situation had become far more complicated than anyone had expected.
But the most troubling discovery was still waiting.
Tommy turned the final page around.
At the bottom was a list of names.
One belonged to a man who had been dead for nearly four years.
James Miller.
Ruth's husband.
Walter stared at the page.
"How can a dead man sign a property transfer?"
Nobody answered.
And outside, somewhere beyond the orchard, a vehicle slowly approached the farmhouse.
Walter Briggs stared at the signature at the bottom of the document.
James Miller.
The name belonged to a man who had been buried four years earlier beneath a stone marker in Cedar Hollow Memorial Cemetery. Walter remembered attending the funeral. He remembered Ruth standing beside the grave, holding a small bouquet of white flowers while the minister spoke about a life built around family, hard work, and honesty.
Now someone had used that dead man's name to transfer property.
For several seconds, nobody in the farmhouse spoke.
Tommy was the first to break the silence.
"There's no way this can be legitimate."
Gabriel picked up the document.
"Could somebody have forged his signature?"
"Obviously," Tommy answered. "But that's only part of the problem. Look at the date."
Mara leaned closer.
The transfer had supposedly been authorized six months after James Miller's death.
Walter removed his reading glasses, cleaned them with the corner of his shirt, and put them back on.
"That means somebody didn't just steal money from Ruth."
He looked at Gabriel.
"They stole her husband's identity, too."
Mara covered her mouth.
"Ruth doesn't know."
"Not yet," Walter replied.
Gabriel placed the document on the table.
"We need to show this to Sheriff Carter."
"Yes," Walter agreed. "But before we do, I want to know how many other people are on that list."
Tommy opened his laptop.
"That's what I've been trying to establish."
The young man had spent most of the night examining corporate registrations, property transfers, and financial documents that Mara had saved before leaving Blackridge Development. He had created a spreadsheet containing every suspicious transaction he could identify.
There were twenty-three.
Twenty-three properties.
Twenty-three families.
Some of the names belonged to people who had died. Others belonged to elderly residents, single parents, or families who had fallen behind on payments after medical emergencies.
The transactions were different, but the pattern was remarkably similar.
A property owner received a notice concerning an irregularity in their mortgage account.
The bank claimed that payments were missing.
A legal dispute followed.
A second company appeared, offering to purchase the property.
When the owner refused, foreclosure proceedings accelerated.
By the time the family understood what was happening, the property had already become difficult to recover.
Walter studied the spreadsheet.
"How much land?"
Tommy entered the addresses into another program.
"Approximately six hundred acres."
Walter whistled softly.
"That's a lot of property."
"More than that," Mara said.
She pointed to the names of several companies.
"Some of these parcels connect to the old railway corridor."
Gabriel looked up.
"What railway corridor?"
"The abandoned freight route east of town. Blackridge has been trying to purchase the surrounding land for a logistics development."
Walter shook his head.
"That railway hasn't carried anything in twenty years."
"Exactly," Tommy said. "But the land around it is valuable if somebody builds a distribution center."
Gabriel looked at the map.
A red line ran through the eastern edge of Cedar Hollow.
It crossed several farms, a former industrial site, and the property where Walter's farmhouse stood.
Walter leaned forward.
"Wait."
He pointed at the map.
"That line goes through my north field."
Mara nodded.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because the development plan requires access to the railway corridor."
Walter sat back.
Suddenly, the foreclosure notice made more sense.
His property was not merely an old farm that a developer wanted to purchase cheaply.
It was a strategically important piece of land.
Without it, the proposed road connection would be much more expensive.
Without the road, the entire development might become financially unviable.