I read the 1934 foreclosure notice aloud. Sixty days on a Depression loan, and when the Braddocks could not pay, my grandfather took the warehouse, the land, and everything sealed inside it, and that was the first block of the fortune that built the hospital wing everyone in that ballroom had been applauding. Then I read my own deed, my title opinion, and the auction contract, all in my name alone. The room did not gasp. It just went very quiet, the way a room does when people are recalculating something they thought was settled.
My father did not speak. Rhett did, from the floor, and that was his mistake, because he said Granddad got it fair and square in front of a reporter from the county paper, and it ran in Sunday’s edition under his own name. What came out afterward was worse than the 1934 file. Curtis Vance had flagged the property to my father eleven months before I ever saw the listing.
