Then he slowly turned his head toward my house, completely stunned.
And that was when he realized I hadn’t stayed quiet because I was afraid of him.
PART 2: THE ANATOMY OF A SURVEYOR’S PLUMB
CHAPTER 1: THE BRONZE MONUMENT AT SUNRISE
The morning mist off the Cape Fear river basin was still hanging thick and cold across the sweetgum trees when twenty-two-year-old Bradley Vance pushed open his parents’ leaded-glass front door.
He was wearing an unzipped gray fleece hoodie, track pants, and flip-flops, holding a stainless-steel travel mug of cold brew in his left hand. His car keys and the key fob to his matte-black Ducati Scrambler were dangling from his right forefinger, clicking in an arrogant, rhythmic cadence:
*tink… tink… tink.*
He hadn’t bothered to comb his hair. He had the slouching, insolent posture of an athletic boy whose father’s commercial real-estate holdings and local car dealerships had insulated him from every consequence since he was old enough to break a neighbor’s window with a baseball.
He walked down their brick walkway, stepping over his own discarded gym bag, heading toward the turnout beside their three-car garage where the Ducati sat on its kickstand.
Then his flip-flops stopped dead against the dew-slicked brick.
The travel mug in his left hand tilted. A thick stream of black coffee poured over his bare toes, soaking into the grass, but Bradley didn’t flinch. His jaw went slack, dropping half an inch as his pupils dilated into rigid, unblinking black beads.
Resting twelve inches from the front tire of his motorcycle—planted dead-center into the manicured Bermuda grass that his father paid a commercial landscaping crew two thousand dollars a month to maintain—was a solid granite obelisk.
It stood three feet high, four hundred pounds of dressed, un-polished Virginia greenstone, its square base set into an industrial-grade poured concrete footer that had been cured under thermal blankets during the night.
Bolted flush to the top face of the granite was an eight-inch circular naval ordnance bronze geodetic benchmark medallion, depicting a fouled anchor crossed with an artillery surveyor’s transit, its deeply milled lettering catching the pale October sun:
`UNITED STATES NAVY & CORPS OF ENGINEERS`
`MASTER GEODETIC BENCHMARK // 1944`
`SECTOR: CAPE FEAR BASIN // REDOUBT TEN`
`SURVEYOR OF RECORD: CWO ARTHUR MERCER SENIOR`
`CUSTODIAN OF RECORD: ELEANOR MERCER-VANCE (FEE SIMPLE ABSOLUTE)`
`WARNING: 18 U.S.C. § 1858 // PENALTY FOR INTERFERENCE:`
`MANDATORY TEN YEARS IMPRISONMENT & IMMEDIATE ARMED ATTACHMENT`
