Chapter Eleven · Grace
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GRACE
Ruben Kell came to my office on the eighteenth of June, which was a Friday, at four in the afternoon, and he came up the thirteen stairs and knocked on a door that was standing open.
I want the knock in the record. The door was open. He knocked anyway.
“Ms. Whitmore. Ruben Kell, I’m with the buyer. I’ve got no business with you and I’d like ten minutes.”
“Then you have business with me.”
“No, ma’am, I don’t, and I’ll show you.” He stayed in the doorway. “I’m not going to ask you a question, I’m not going to make you an offer, and I’m not going to mention any parcel you have an interest in. If I do any of those three things you throw me out and you’d be right to.”
I have thought since about why I let him in, and the honest answer is curiosity, and the honest answer after that is that I wanted to see him where I could look at him.
I had built a file on Ruben Kell by then, because I build files.
Forty-six years old. Twenty years in site acquisition, the last nine of them freelance.
Nine states. No litigation history in any of them, which for a man in that trade is close to impossible; I ran him in four jurisdictions and found two easement suits in which he was a witness and nothing else.
A wife, a house outside Knoxville, a daughter graduating in the spring.
No arrests. No liens. No complaints to any real estate board in any state that licenses the work.
Ada looked at the file when I finished it and said, “That’s the cleanest man we have ever run.”
“Yes.”
“Grace, that ought to be good news.”
“It ought to be,” I said. “Ada, in three years this county has run four men, and every one of them left a mark somewhere, because doing wrong is expensive and the expense shows. This one has a spotless twenty-year record in a trade that generates complaints the way a mill generates dust.” I closed the folder.
“So either he has never once done anything wrong, or he has spent twenty years being paid by people who make certain the man in the yard never has to.”
He sat in the client chair. He put his hat on his knee. He did not look at anything on my desk, which took discipline, because my desk had the Ambrose chain on it.
“I’m going to tell you a thing that is going to sound like a threat and is not one,” he said, “and then I’m going to leave, and you’re going to spend the weekend deciding whether to believe me.”
“Go ahead.”
“There is a title cloud on Lorna Farrow’s farm.”
I did not move.
“Nineteen sixty-one,” Kell said. “Her husband’s father’s estate.
There were five children, and the deed out of that estate was signed by four of them.
The fifth was a daughter who had married and moved to Ohio, and she is not on the deed, and there is no order of publication, and there is nothing in the file showing she was ever served or ever conveyed her interest.” He turned his hat a quarter turn.
“That daughter died in 1998. She had two children. Those two children own an undivided one-fifth interest in Lorna Farrow’s farm and, as far as I can tell, have no idea, and neither does Mrs. Farrow. ”
The office was very quiet. Downstairs somebody ran an impact wrench for four seconds and stopped.
“Did you file anything,” I said.
“No.”
“Did your client file anything.”
“No.”
“Will you.”
“I’m not going to answer that, because I don’t know, and if I told you no I’d be making a promise I can’t keep.
” He said it without any apology in it at all.
“Here’s what I’ll tell you. I did not go looking for that.
It was in the file when the file came to me.
It has been in the file since before I was hired. ”
“How long has your client known?”
Kell looked at me for a second.
“Ms. Whitmore,” he said, “I have been on this project fourteen months and I have never once been told a thing I didn’t need.
The file I got in April of last year had ninety pages in it.
Nine of them are about this county specifically.
I have read those nine pages about two hundred times and I still cannot tell you who wrote them, and I have been doing this for twenty years, and I have never been handed anything like them. ”
“What’s in them?”
“I’m not going to tell you that either.” He stood up. “But I’ll tell you what’s not in them, since you’ll work it out anyway. There’s no criminal history in there. There’s nothing about the freight case or the fentanyl or the man that’s at Red Onion. Not one line.”
I sat with that.
“Then what is in them?”
“Families,” Kell said.
He put his hat on.
“Ms. Whitmore, I’m not asking you to do anything.
I’m telling you a fact about a farm because in my experience the worst outcome in this business is somebody finding out too late, in public, from a stranger.
Mrs. Farrow is eighty-two. If that gets filed by anybody, on any day, she is going to be told that she does not own her own home place by a process server in her own driveway.
” He went to the door. “I’d rather she heard it from her lawyer.
And you are not her lawyer, and I know that, and I have turned that over a good deal. ”
“Then why me?”
He stopped in the doorway.
“Because there isn’t anybody else,” he said.
I said, “That is not a reason, that is a location.”
And Ruben Kell stopped with his hand on my doorframe and thought about it, and then he did the thing that made him dangerous. He conceded.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll give you the reason and then I’m done.
I have done forty-one of these and I have never worked one where the people had already been through something together.
Not a flood, not a mine, not a plant closing.
Something they went through and won.” He looked at the room, at the four filing cabinets, at the stove pipe going down through the floor.
“A county like that does not behave the way the file says a county behaves. And when the file is wrong about people, somebody eventually gets hurt, and it is never the man who wrote the file.”
“And you’d rather that wasn’t an eighty-two-year-old woman.”
“I’d rather it wasn’t anybody.” He put his hat on. “And I’ve got a daughter.”
I said one more thing to his back, on the stairs, and I have gone back and forth about whether it was a mistake.
“Mr. Kell. Ninety pages, and nine of them are this county, and no author.”
He stopped four steps down.
“In my experience,” I said, “a document with no author is not anonymous. It is a document whose author expected to be read.”
Ruben Kell stood on my stairs with his hand on the rail for about three seconds.
“That’s the only thing anybody has said to me about this job in fourteen months that I had not already thought of,” he said, and went down.
I sat there for a long while after he went down the stairs, and then I got up and went to the window and watched him get in the rental car and go, and then I did four things and I am going to list them because the order matters.
First, I wrote a memorandum of the conversation, verbatim as I could get it, dated and timed, and I signed it and made two copies and put one in the safe and drove one to Ada that night.
Second, I called an attorney in Salem named Priya Venkataraman who has done quiet title work for thirty years and who does not know one soul in Blackthorn County, and I engaged her, out of my own pocket, to represent Lorna Farrow on a matter I described only as a potential heirs’ interest, and I asked her to make no contact until I called again.
Third, I went and told Lorna.
I drove out there at eight o’clock at night and sat in her kitchen and told her that a man had come to my office and said her farm might have a defect in the title from 1961, and that I could not advise her but had found her somebody who could, at my expense, and that she should not sign anything or answer any letter until she had talked to Ms. Venkataraman.
Scout Carlisle was at that table when I got there, because it was a Friday and because Scout has eaten at that table on Fridays and Sundays since he was sixteen years old, and Maya was at the sink and Wyatt was on the floor with a notebook.
I said I needed Lorna alone and Lorna said no.
“Whatever it is, they can hear it,” she said. “I have got to the age where I don’t care to be told a thing twice.”
So I told it in front of all four of them.
Lorna listened to all of it with her hands in her lap.
Then she said, “Which one of Ray’s sisters?”
“Ohio.”
“Marie.” Lorna nodded slowly. “Marie was thirteen years older than Ray and she left in 1949 and she come back one time, for Ray’s daddy’s funeral, and she set in that room right there.
” She pointed at her own front room. “And there was a paper and there was a fight about it and Ray never told me what it was, and Marie died in Ohio and I sent a card.” She looked at me. “So it’s true, then.”
“I don’t know. It might be. That’s not the same thing.”
“Grace.” Lorna Farrow put both hands flat on her own kitchen table.
“I have set at this table for fifty-eight years. My husband died in that bed. I raised four boys of my own in this house and about nine more that wasn’t mine, and Scout Carlisle’s chair is right there, and I have never in my life wondered whose house it was. ”
She looked around her own kitchen.
“And a man come up them stairs this afternoon and give it to you to hand me,” she said, “and I need you to tell me true. Was he cruel about it?”
And I had to say it.
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t.”
Scout got up from that table and went out on the porch, and Maya went after him, and through the window I watched a thirty-seven-year-old man stand with both hands on a porch rail in the dark for about a minute while his wife stood beside him and did not touch him until he was ready.
When he came back in he sat down and said one thing.
“Lorna. Is my chair on that deed?”
“What?”
“The chair.” He put his hand flat on the table in front of the place he has sat since 2007. “They can’t take a chair off of a table, can they. That ain’t in a deed.”
Lorna Farrow reached over and put her hand on his wrist.
“Honey,” she said, “ain’t nothing in a deed that matters and I have been finding that out all evening.”
Fourth: I went back to the office at ten at night, and Wrench was in the bay with the light on, and I stood in the doorway and could not make a sentence.
He came out from under the truck and looked at me.
“Lorna,” he said.
“How do you know that.”
“Because that’s the only face I ain’t seen on you.”
I sat down in one of the three chairs by the stove in June with no fire in it and told him the whole thing, and he listened all the way through without one word, and at the end I said the part I had not said to Lorna.
“He’s not going to file it,” I said. “He doesn’t have to.
He came and told me it exists, and now I know, and now Lorna knows, and now every night that woman is going to lie in bed and know that a stranger in Charlotte can end her at any moment for the price of a filing fee.
” I put my head back against the wall. “That is the entire operation. He does not have to do anything. He just has to make sure we all know what he could do. And there is no cause of action for telling somebody the truth about a deed.”
Wrench sat down in the third chair, Amos’s chair, which he does not sit in.
“That’s the fourth one,” he said.
“The fourth what?”
“Fourth time he’s done a decent thing that costs us.
” He was counting on his fingers, which I had never seen him do.
“Corrected four prices. Told Renata about her mineral severance. Kept the offers open past May fifteenth when he didn’t have to.
Now this.” He put his hand down. “Grace, a man can’t do four decent things by accident. ”
“No.”
“So they ain’t decent.”
“They are, and that’s the horrible part. Every one was a genuinely decent act, and every one made us weaker, and both of those are true at the same time, and I have practiced law for fourteen years and I do not have a category for it.”
Wrench looked at the cold stove for a while.
“I do,” he said. “It’s a man softening a thing before he puts a load on it.”
I sat with that.
“Say more.”
“You can’t bend cold steel without you crack it,” he said.
“So you heat it. Slow, even, all over, and the whole time you ain’t doing nothing to it.
You ain’t bent it a degree. A fella watching would say you was being awful careful with that piece.
” He put another stick of nothing on a fire that was not lit, meaning a thing he does with his hands in June.
“Then when it’s ready, it goes where you want it and it don’t fight you and it don’t crack, and everybody says how easy that went. ”
“And you can tell?”
“I can tell.” He looked over. “Grace, that man ain’t been buying this county since February. He’s been heating it.”