Chapter 5 - The Rot Beneath the Floorboards
That evening, Priya Raman called an emergency secure conference call.
I sat at my father’s oak desk on Wilmington Island, the sound of the ocean wind rattling the window glass, with Barnaby on speakerphone beside me.
“We just finished cracking the secondary accounts Grantham opened at Coastal Heritage Bank,” Priya said, her voice crackling with excitement. “Rosalind, the sixty thousand dollars sent to Willamina was just the tip of the iceberg.”
I gripped the edge of the desk. “What else did he do?”
“Three years ago, Grantham quietly applied for a home equity line of credit against your Gaston Street property,” Priya revealed. “He secured a credit facility of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
My breath hitched. “How could he do that without my permission? The deed was solely in my name at that time!”
“He utilized a forged limited durable power of attorney,” Barnaby chimed in, his legal fury barely contained. “Drafted on fraudulent letterhead, witnessed by—you guessed it—Brenda Higgins. Grantham drew down the entire one hundred and fifty thousand dollars within eighteen months.”
“Where did that money go?” I demanded. “Grantham’s salary at the commercial insurance brokerage is nearly six figures! What was he spending two hundred thousand dollars of stolen money on?”
Priya sighed. “Willamina wasn't just facing foreclosure, Rosalind. Willamina has been running an illegal high-stakes offshore gaming habit through a shell syndicate out of Florida. She ran up nearly two hundred and ten thousand dollars in debt over a thirty-six-month bender. Grantham was paying off her bookies to keep the Morrison family name out of the regional press.”
I leaned back in the leather chair, staring up at the white ceiling beams.
The pristine, high-society Morrison family. The pillars of Savannah tradition who treated me like dirt beneath their shoes, who sneered at my self-made design firm, who lectured me about proper etiquette and lineage—they were completely rotten. They were drowning in degenerate gambling debts and criminal fraud, and Grantham had been gutting my children's financial security like a butcher to preserve their pathetic, gilded facade.
“Does Grantham know we’ve found the HELOC?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Priya said. “The bank records were released under an emergency judicial subpoena Barnaby secured yesterday afternoon. Grantham’s attorney hasn't even received the electronic discovery packet. They have no idea we have the transaction ledger, the wire confirmations, or the IP addresses linking the transfers directly to Willamina’s boutique laptop.”
“And what about the forged deed to Finanella?” I asked.
Barnaby cleared his throat. “I met with Assistant District Attorney Marcus Vance—Judge Vance’s second cousin—two hours ago. I presented the notarized deed, the Charleston city livestream showing you two hundred miles away, your timestamped contractor waivers, and Brenda Higgins’s employment connection to Willamina.”
“And what did Marcus Vance say?”
“He said,” Barnaby replied, a razor-sharp edge in his voice, “that he hasn’t seen a cleaner case of felony real estate fraud in fifteen years. He already has a grand jury indictment package ready to present.”
“Do we arrest them now?”
“No,” Barnaby commanded. “Tomorrow morning is the family court hearing for temporary support and property distribution. Grantham’s lawyer, Preston Tyler, is an old school-tie hack. He is going to walk into that courtroom tomorrow morning waving that forged ten percent deed in front of Judge Vance, claiming Finanella is an indispensable party to the marital estate and demanding you be evicted from your own home.”
“He’s going to hang himself with his own rope,” I realized.
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“Exactly,” Barnaby said. “We let them introduce the forged document into a court of record under sworn affirmation. Once Grantham swears under penalty of perjury that the signature is yours... the trap snaps shut.”
***
