Page 67 of A Mile of Ocean

“Three million,” Savannah replied.

“Three million twenty-three years ago was generous unless this is a huge ranch with ten thousand acres,” Trent noted. “Were our parents’ lives worth three million, I wonder?”

“Well, according to this,” Savannah began, “Deanne de Haviland held onto it, even though a Stillwater, Oklahoma bank sent her a letter stating that the funds were there waiting for the executed documents to arrive. Your grandmother never complied.”

Trent swallowed hard. “No wonder they’re seeking retribution. I can see how this would cause tensions to escalateto this point. Whoever is doing this, he’s not leaving until he gets that agreement signed and executed. That’s why he didn’t kill her. She’s the legal owner of the Triple C. He needs her signature.”

“And she’s willing to risk all our lives to keep what’s hers,” Tate deduced.

“But no one had to die,” Dolly surmised. “All she had to do was sell them the Triple C back twenty-three years ago. If she hadn’t held onto the land, Travis and Linley might still be here.”

“Now you’re onboard with the problem,” Trent returned. “Now you see what’s been wrong with her entire mindset.”

“She’s warped out of her mind,” Dolly added.

“No argument there,” Tate whooshed out. “We need to clean this mess up because I’m not letting this go. I’m getting answers first thing tomorrow morning. Not that I’ll be able to sleep after learning about all this crap.”

With a new resolve, the siblings gathered up the scattered papers and returned them to the safe, putting everything back in its proper place the way they’d found it before locking it back up.

Trent could barely control the disappointment and anger coursing through his veins as they prepared to leave the house, knowing one greedy woman had altered his and Tate’s entire future.

Chapter Twenty

Trent woke at seven to a loud pounding on the door.

“We’ve overslept,” he mumbled to Savannah, nestled beside him.

Groggy, she shoved her hair out of her eyes and tried to sit up, only to roll over on her side to pull the covers tighter. “Considering we didn’t go to bed until four, I’d say we’re entitled to a few more hours of sleep.”

The knocking continued.

“I’ll go see who wants to talk so badly they’re here at this hour,” Trent muttered as he fumbled pulling on his jeans and a shirt.

“I’m coming,” he shouted toward the front door.

He hobbled to the living room and jerked the door open. Eastlyn Parker stood on the stoop. “This couldn’t have waited until noon?”

“I’m glad to see you, too,” she said as she marched past him into the house. “Thanks for stopping by with an update because I’ve also been working on your case since the crack of dawn.”

“Sorry. Come on in. I’ll put on coffee. We were up late last night—or was it early this morning?—going through my grandmother’s safe. She stuffed it with a lot of documents after Granddad died that explains what set this off—an ugly land grab that resulted in a lawsuit—that’s lasted for years.”

“Yeah? Well, Cooper has questions. He’ll be here at nine to go over his list with the Duchess. Feel free to attend the meeting. He discovered the de Havilands were a piece of work. Everything your grandmother told him about her family is a lie.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” he muttered, heading into the kitchen, and she followed. He took a bag of coffee from the cabinet, which was already ground, and grabbed a filter. After measuring two large scoops into an ancient Mr. Coffee, the brewing cycle kicked in with a noisy start.

“At this stage, nothing about the de Havilands would surprise me. But I can tell you this much. The Duchess must be making her family proud. We think she knew who caused our parents’ accident twenty-two years ago. But said nothing about it.”

“What kind of parent would do that?” Eastlyn asked.

“Hey, I’m just getting started. She even demanded that my grandfather stop talking about it. And that’s not all. We have a madman doing this because she inherited a five-hundred-acre ranch in 1970 called the Triple C from an old man in Wyoming. No one knows why he passed over his relatives in Oklahoma and made her his beneficiary. But that’s what happened. However, the big question for us is this. If Granddad was the one who worked the ranch and this guy wanted to disinherit his relatives, then why wasn’t Barrett the beneficiary instead of his wife? Why did Deanne de Haviland get the ranch? See my point? It doesn’t sit well. My grandfather didn’t even want it. He came to California after the guy died and started his own business. It was his dream. On the other hand, Deanne decided to run that ranch from here, something she never told anyone, something she kept hidden from my grandfather for years until recently when he received a letter exposing her little secret.”

“This five-hundred-acre ranch, by any chance was the owner Noble Colter?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because the fingerprints off the notebook matched back to Colter Zedekiah Bohannon, age forty-three, of Stillwater, Oklahoma. His prints were on file because he had been arrested during a college brawl when he was twenty-two. He served six months in jail for assault but doesn’t have so much as a speeding ticket since then.”

“Until he decided to forego the legal battles and go to war with us,” Trent asserted. “Look, the documentation in the safe proves that Josiah Bohannon and his heirs tried every way possible to get their uncle’s land back for the last fifty years. They put their faith in the court system, and it failed them. When the courts ruled against them, they offered three million dollars to get it back. This entire time, their belief was that Deanne de Haviland had fleeced their uncle, Noble Colter, and conned him into leaving her his ranch, the Triple C, back in 1970. The will had already been probated by the time Josiah, an out-of-state relative, found out his uncle had died.”

---