Chapter 5
The fallout from the town hall meeting was catastrophic for Vanguard Horizon,
sending their stock prices plummeting,
and triggering a massive internal audit of their regional executives.
Richard Vance was forced to resign in disgrace,
facing multiple federal indictments for environmental fraud,
and perjury regarding the municipal water rights.
But the victory was not without its desperate,
ugly retaliation from the people who had lost their power.
A week after the vote,
my mother called me from the cooperative,
her voice trembling slightly,
a rare occurrence that immediately put me on high alert.
Someone had been distributing malicious flyers around the town of Linden,
slipping them under the windshield wipers of parked cars,
and pinning them to the community bulletin boards.
The flyers contained vicious,
fabricated rumors about my mother,
claiming the cooperative was a front for money laundering,
and that our food products were contaminated with dangerous chemicals.
It was a pathetic,
cowardly smear campaign,
designed to destroy the reputation of Marisol’s Table,
and drive away our loyal customer base.
I knew immediately who was responsible,
because I recognized the exact syntax,
the specific brand of venomous phrasing,
and the desperate need to humiliate a woman who had refused to be broken.
Virginia Halden.
Despite her probationary restrictions,
despite her ruined social standing,
she was still obsessed with tearing down the woman she had once forced to the floor.
She had likely used the last of her hidden cash reserves to hire a third-party distributor,
hoping to operate in the shadows,
safely removed from any direct legal consequences.
I told my mother not to touch the flyers,
to leave them exactly where they were,
and I dispatched Maren Cole to Linden on the next available flight.
We did not need to fight rumors with counter-rumors,
we simply needed to follow the paper trail,
extract the security camera footage from the local parking lots,
and trace the payment back to Virginia’s accounts.
She had severely underestimated the loyalty of the Linden community,
and she had completely forgotten that I possessed the resources to track her every move.
I was not going to let her poison the well,
I was going to expose her final,
May you like
desperate act of malice,
and ensure she faced the absolute maximum penalty for violating her protective order.
