“I’ve been indisposed,” I said, my voice steady despite the rage building inside me. “Vincent, I need your help, and I need discretion.”
“You have both. My office. One hour.”
“I’ll be there.”
I bought a cheap prepaid phone with cash I kept hidden in a compartment of my purse—emergency money Nicholas had insisted we both carry after getting stranded with a flat tire years ago. I also purchased a bottle of water and a sandwich I had no appetite for. Ray refused to take my money.
“On the house, Naomi. You need anything else, you just ask.”
His kindness nearly broke me. Nearly. But I hadn’t cried when they lowered Nicholas into the ground, and I wouldn’t cry now.
Vincent’s law office occupies the second floor of a Victorian on Main Street, above a stationery store and across from the town hall where we’d attended more than one zoning meeting about agricultural land use. When his secretary saw me, her eyes widened.
“Mrs. Canton, Mr. Hargrove is expecting you.” She hurried from behind her desk. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?”
“I’m fine, Helen. Thank you.”
Vincent met me at his office door, his tall frame a bit stooped with age but his eyes sharp as ever. He’d been a year behind Nicholas in school, had handled our business incorporation, our wills—everything legal in our lives.
“Naomi.” He guided me to a leather chair, then sat not behind his desk, but in the chair beside me. “Tell me what’s happening.”
So I did. The conversation after the funeral. The suspicious will. The drive and abandonment. With each detail, Vincent’s expression darkened.
“The will they showed you,” he said when I finished, “was not the will Nicholas and I prepared last year. Their document is a forgery. I suspected as much.”
I opened my purse and removed the fireproof box. From it, I withdrew the deed to the original twenty acres.
“They don’t know about this.”
Vincent examined the deed, nodding slowly. “Smart. Very smart. You two were always thinking ahead.”
“Nicholas suggested putting this portion in my maiden name when we first expanded,” I said. “Insurance, he called it, in case the business ever failed.”
“And now it’s insurance of another kind.”
Vincent placed the deed carefully on his desk.
“What do you want to do, Naomi?”
I met his eyes.
“I want my home back. I want the business my husband built. And I want my children to understand exactly what they’ve done.”
Vincent didn’t flinch at the coldness in my voice. Instead, he nodded.
“Let’s start with a place for you to stay tonight. My sister’s B&B has a vacancy. Tomorrow we’ll begin the legal work.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I need to move faster than that. The developer is closing next week.”
Understanding dawned in Vincent’s eyes.
“You’re not planning to just go through the courts.”
“Courts are for people with time,” I said. “Vincent, I have a better idea.”
That night, in the floral-papered comfort of Rose Hill Bed and Breakfast, I made my first call. Not to my children. They could wonder where I was, whether I’d reached town or collapsed on the roadside. My call was to Harold Winters, the regional manager of Pennsylvania Trust Bank, where Canton Family Orchards had done business for decades.
“Mrs. Canton, I’m so sorry about your husband,” he said.
“Thank you, Harold. I’m calling because I’ve discovered some concerning transactions, and I need your help to protect what’s left of our business.”
My second call was to Martin Adams, the agricultural extension agent who’d worked with us for fifteen years.
“Naomi, I was at the funeral but didn’t get to speak with you,” he said.
“I know, Martin. It’s been chaotic. Listen, I need information about a potential development on farmland in the county.”
My third call was to Sophia Delaney, editor of the Milfield Gazette and Nicholas’s second cousin.
“Ellie, how are you holding up? I’ve been worried,” she said—using the old nickname only people from town remembered.
“I’m managing, Sophia, but I think there’s a story you might be interested in—about developers, protected agricultural land, and inheritance fraud.”
By midnight, I had made seven calls, each one a strand in the web I was weaving. Outside my window, the quiet streets of Milfield slept peacefully, unaware that Naomi Canton—always the peacemaker, always the nurturer—was planning war.
In the morning, I met Vincent at his office with a legal pad full of notes.
“I need you to freeze the business accounts,” I told him. “And I need you to file an emergency injunction on any sale of the property based on the fraudulent will.”
Vincent reviewed my notes, his eyebrows rising.
“This is comprehensive.”
“I had forty years with Nicholas,” I said. “I know every contract, every client, every detail of that business.” I leaned forward. “And I’m going to use all of it.”
“Your children won’t take this quietly,” he warned.
“I’m counting on it.”
By noon, the pieces were in motion. Vincent had filed the emergency injunction. Harold had frozen the business accounts pending investigation of suspicious activity. Martin had contacted the environmental board about protected wetlands on the proposed development site—wetlands that happened to be on my twenty acres.
I sat in Vincent’s office watching the clock tick toward 1:00 p.m., when my children would discover that their carefully constructed plan had hit its first obstacle.
My phone rang—the new prepaid one, whose number they shouldn’t have known. But Vincent had made sure they’d gotten it. I let it ring four times before answering, my voice calm.
“This is Naomi.”
“Mom.” Brandon’s voice crackled with barely contained fury. “What have you done?”
I smiled, though he couldn’t see it.
“I’ve only just begun.”
“Mom, be reasonable,” Brandon’s voice hardened through the phone. “You can’t just freeze accounts and file injunctions. Do you have any idea what you’re doing to our deal?”
