CHAPTER 5: THE STRIPPERS BITE
“Step back, surveyor,” I said.
My voice didn’t rise above the clatter of the excavator’s idling diesel, but the edge in it stopped the man mid-tread. The surveyor’s boot hovered an inch above the top brick riser. His eyes dropped from my face down to the heavy iron chisel in my right hand, still angled like a wedge beneath the mortise cavity.
He looked back toward the street. Evelyn Cross stood paralyzed at the foot of the flagstone path. Her knuckles were pressed against her mouth, her eyes fixed on the blue-backed legal bond David Vance had flattened against the bronze mesh of the screen.
“That’s a stay of execution,” David called out from the dark foyer, his voice smooth, devoid of the morning’s brittle panic. “File your red tag, surveyor. The moment that adhesive touches the trim, my attorney files an ex parte injunction against the township and the association for tortious interference. The damages start at seven figures.”
The surveyor let out a slow, sour breath through his teeth. He looked at Evelyn. He looked at the idling lowboy with its waiting crawler crane. He didn’t say a word. He simply folded the red vinyl placard into his back pocket, turned on his heel, and walked back down the lawn without glancing at the woman who had summoned him.
“You’re making a mistake, David,” Evelyn yelled, her voice breaking against the rumble of the hydraulics. “You don’t know what you’ve signed!”
David didn’t answer. The inside deadbolt threw home with a heavy, oiled click.
The lowboy gave a hiss of released air brakes and rolled backward, retreating down the winding curb. Evelyn stood alone on the manicured grass for three seconds longer, her face pale as lard under the noon sun, before she hurried back to her sedan and sped away.
The cul-de-sac went deathly quiet again. Only the ticking of my van’s cooling manifold and the smell of half-cured alkyd enamel remained on the porch.
I looked down at the bronze mortise plate resting in my palm. Vance Trust Holdings — 1968.
I left the job site without applying another brush stroke. I loaded my caddy, tied down the ladders, and backed the van out of the driveway while the dried white streak on my navy shirt pulled and flaked against my chest like cracked eggshell. I was hired to paint a door, not referee an inheritance bloodline or shield a slumlord’s private syndicate.
Except contractors don’t sleep when a casing isn’t sealed.
At 11:45 PM, the night air had dropped forty degrees. The suburban street was black, the neighborhood streetlamps spaced too far apart to cut through the heavy shadow of the mature red oaks. I parked my van three blocks away on the public avenue, killed the headlights, and walked up the rear utility easement on foot, carrying only a canvas tool roll and an inspection flashlight wrapped in electrical tape to narrow the beam.
A chemical stench hit me before I reached the flagstones.
It wasn’t alkyd enamel. It wasn’t paint thinner or lacquer wash. It was the sharp, throat-searing reek of industrial methylene chloride—aircraft stripper, caustic enough to dissolve flesh in ninety seconds.
I cut across the turf, stepping silently onto the drop cloth I had left taped to the porch floor.
Someone had been here within the hour.
The entire front entryway was weeping. The fresh Colonial Bone enamel, along with eighty years of historical undercoats, had bubbled into a thick, sloughing blister of gray and green slime that ran down the casing like melted wax. A plastic five-gallon jug sat half-empty beside my bucket, its nozzle still wet, fumes rising in pale ribbons against the dark night air.
Whoever did it hadn’t tried to clean the wood. They had drowned it.
I clicked the narrowed beam of my flashlight on, keeping the circle of white light tight against the jamb.
The caustic solvent had eaten through the top three-sixteenths of the chestnut casing, stripping it down past the grain, down past the charred groove where the torch marks had been.
And there, exposed beneath the dissolved fibers of the core framing, was the reason for the panic.
It wasn’t an antiquities stamp. It wasn’t a land trust covenant.
Bored straight into the center of the structural heartwood were four deep, horizontal core-drill holes, spaced six inches apart, plugged not with wooden dowels, but with translucent plastic caps sealed with red tamper wax. Inside the clear plastic, suspended in thick amber gel, were miniature glass ampoules filled with pale yellow fluid.
A thermal accelerant grid. Pre-installed inside the very bones of the house.
Behind me, the front doorknob turned.
The heavy door creaked open an inch. Through the narrow gap, I didn’t see David Vance’s cardigan or his spectacles. I saw the dark barrel of a revolver resting on the chain latch, leveled directly at the white stain on my chest.
“You should have taken the woman’s money, Miller,” David said from the pitch black.
