Chapter 246

Elias spends the following afternoon at the county records office, the same cramped, fluorescent lit room he sat in months ago tracking down dead men’s identities, working through a stack of paperwork with the same clerk contact who owes Alvin enough favors to keep asking no questions.

He’s here for something simpler this time. Or what should be simpler.

The house he grew up in. The one his mother’s still living in, the one he’s spent his entire life believing his father left them free and clear as the one small stubborn piece of security in an otherwise unstable childhood.

As it turns out, it isn’t free and clear.

The records show two separate loans taken out against the property in the two years before Adrian’s death, both substantial, both structured in a way that any reasonable lender would have called in well before now. By every normal calculation, the bank should have seized that house within eighteen months of Adrian disappearing from the world.