Chapter 37
RYDER
Iplug the first address from Sana’s report into my GPS.
As much as I want to take the information I have and get Evie’s water wheel fixed, I feel like it wouldn’t be right to charge forward without thoroughly investigating every piece of information Sana was able to give me.
She did her detective work from a distance, but now that I’m here, it’s time to take a look at what she could only glance at from satellite imagery.
My GPS tells me I’m seventeen minutes away, so it’s likely on the opposite side of town.
But as I follow the route, entering narrower and narrower roads that aren’t taking me anywhere near the center of town, I start to wonder where the bounds of Sunflower Hill really lie.
Because I can circle it on a map. Tell you the exact highways that split Sunflower Hill from Lavender Springs or Daisy Lake or Poppy Valley, but these roads take me somewhere I’ve never been before.
They get smaller and smaller, the houses older and spaced further apart, the hills steeper.
And I’m starting to wonder if the entrance to Narnia is actually hidden somewhere in the middle of Sunflower Hill.
The middle that, until now, I’ve never known about.
When I was a kid, I used to bike through the woods and pop out in random areas I didn’t recognize, only for those areas to quickly become part of my mental map as I explored.
But those woods were on the other side of town, where I grew up.
And I’m once again humbled. This town I thought I knew so well apparently has a few tricks up its sleeve.
Finding Evie here should have been my first clue.
As the GPS directs me to a gravel driveway that’s mostly grass, at this point, I yearn for Evie’s four-wheel drive. I briefly wonder if Reed found a way to hack into my car’s computer and lead me to my death.
But I shake that thought off quickly. He doesn’t hate me that much.
Yet.
Old orange signs tacked to the trees around me warn me that this area is private property, and judging from the state of the road, I deem that to be very true. So private that my car might be first to have graced this driveway in years.
And when I hit a particularly large pothole, I abandon it altogether. This road—if I can call it that—is rough, and I really don’t need to involve a tow truck in this visit.
I walk along the overgrown driveway toward a building I can just barely make out in the distance.
And it’s surprisingly peaceful. Birds chirping in the distance, squirrels hopping from tree to tree. Every so often, the sun peeks through the canopy of leaves above me and highlights the ground in front of me.
And as I come upon the building, the road veers off to my left, another building just barely visible in the distance that I can only assume is Reed’s second property, if the address is any indication.
I turn to the house in front of me, getting the oddest sense that I’ve been here before.
On the front door is a sign marking the property as condemned, so I don’t bother knocking. I had a feeling it would be abandoned anyway, considering Reed’s apparent non-involvement with it.
But following my spidey senses that tell me this place is familiar, I go ahead and walk around to the back of the building.
And I pause when the trees open and I realize I’m staring down at the sunflower farm.
I blink, wondering if there could possibly be another sunflower farm, but something tells me Eve would have figured out a way to eliminate her competition if there was.
So I drove seventeen minutes through winding backroads into Narnia… and Narnia, apparently, is the cabin that Evie always thought about one day buying.
And Reed owns it.
Around back, I take a seat on a thick tree stump that’s the perfect height for a bench and look out over the fields. The sunflowers are sparse after the storm and our panicked chopping, but there are still a few late-blooming yellows and oranges among the green.
I stare into the trees, wondering how close my own property is. A hundred yards? Maybe two?
This whole time Reed has been pitting Evie and me against each other, but I’m starting to wonder if these cabins had anything to do with his plan.
Hidden behind an LLC and abandoned to rot.
If the money Reed is funneling in through his brother-in-law is any indication, it seems to me that he shouldn’t have trouble paying the liens on these cabins.
Or just selling them at a loss, if he doesn’t want to deal with them anymore.
But with Reed’s scheme now exposed, I have to wonder whether his whole goal was to offload his cabins at a premium.
Reed knows Eve will stop at nothing to protect her sunflower farm. And Eve claims that it’s hard to keep the place running, but I’ve seen more ingenuity from her than anyone. It’s not a matter of whether she can pay for something, but what she needs to do to make it happen.
And I bet Reed knows this.
What if all that road work out front, which does affect Eve’s business—albeit less than it affects Gam’s ability to walk to the park—was an attempt at forcing Evie back and up into the hills?
I can’t be the only person to look at the placement of that second cabin and wonder why there isn’t a driveway there.
The portions of my and Eve’s properties that connect to the main road are steep.
Hers is worn down from years of use but no doubt was almost perilous when it was made, and mine is essentially a ladder to the sky and absolutely not drivable without significant work.
As I stare out over the sunflowers, eyeing the barn where Eve is no doubt running Sana and Rohan through one of her many quickly delivered and information-packed farm spiels, I get the distinct feeling that I wandered into someone else’s fight.
And I have to wonder whether Reed expects Evie’s next move to be a request for funding from the historical society to fix her water wheel, considering the exorbitant cost.
I wonder how he would structure the ensuing negotiation.
Maybe he’d claim her driveway isn’t up to code—it’s probably not—or he’d come up with some other bullshit roadwork that would take up space and cause traffic jams getting into the sunflower farm.
She would abandon the water wheel, but that number would be stuck in her mind—a number that isn’t quite enough to cover demolition of a house and a new driveway, but certainly doesn’t seem as exorbitant when that’s what it’s being spent on.
I shake my head.
I’m just the developer who wandered into the middle of a small town battle and screwed the whole thing up.
The road work was supposed to put pressure on Evie, but instead he managed to draw out somebody with means who’s more than happy to throw money at a problem to make it go away.
He probably took one look at me and thought a payday was coming his way.
But I don’t make stupid moves.
Of course, he probably thinks I do after the rooster. But even as the thought crosses my mind, I brush it off. That wasn’t an expensive rooster—that was the start of a kid’s college fund.
So joke’s on you, Reed.
I let out a long breath, trying to determine the best way to proceed. If I’m reading the situation correctly, Reed wants somebody to buy out these cabins. Whether it’s Evie or me, he doesn’t care, but he’ll likely try to extract more money from me, if he has the chance.
But something tells me that every proposal I submit for this property is going to be denied.
I don’t think he actually wants apartments there—I think he just wants me to think he does so that I’ll make him an offer for his cabins.
But the question is… what does Evie want?
I’ve figured out Reed’s game. Now I just have to figure out how to beat him at it.
I spend an hour at the cabin as the sun sets, circling the outside and peering down at the sunflower farm. I watch as Evie leaves the barn and heads back to the bungalow, nothing but a dot in the distance that I’d know was her from miles away with my eyes closed.
When I think I have a good plan, I march back down the driveway and pile into the BMW.
And I head straight for Reed’s.
When I get there, he opens the door with a look of disdain on his face. He raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to speak.
“Considering you work so closely with your ex-brother-in-law, I’m surprised no one has met him yet.”
His face remains impassive except for the tiniest of eye twitches. The smallest hint of confirmation that we’re on the same page.
“I’m in the middle of dinner.”
When I peer behind him, I see nothing but a TV dinner on a tray in front of the couch.
“So should I just go straight to the police then?”
He’s quiet for a moment, mulling this over, and then he steps aside, gesturing for me to come in. “I don’t know what you’re carrying on about. Rich does good work. He’s the only person around here I know who can do historic jobs justice.”
“That’s not true and you know it,” I say, stepping into the foyer and shutting the door behind me.
“Anyone could look at that quote your guy gave Evie and see that it’s price gouging.
I see now why you only ever approve one company for restoration.
It’s the company run by the laziest asshole I’ve ever met who doesn’t think twice about materials that cost half the price of a house before trying to pass it off to the customer. ”
Reed holds his hands up. “That wood needs to be treated in a very specific way to ensure longevity. And it’s a specific kind of wood that’s dying off in this town. It needs to be stained and preserved according to practices at the time the water wheel was crafted. None of these things are cheap.”
“None of those things cost half a house. It’s a couple planks of wood that were likely harvested from my land. The only treatment they got was nearly a century of water damage.”
Reed shakes his head. “You have no appreciation for history.”
“You have no appreciation for the amount of shit you could be in.”
That finally shuts him up.
“What do you want?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest. “If you wanted to file a report, you would have done that already. So, what do you want from me?”
The question I’ve been dying to answer.
“I want the water wheel fixed by the guy we found with materials he deems appropriate for the job.”
Reed rolls his eyes, turning to the door as if to let me out. “Fine.”
“I’m not done,” I say.
He knows what I'm going to ask before I have the opportunity to. “The road work can’t just be cleared overnight. That’ll take time.”
I stare him down. “I don’t think it’ll take longer than a week.”
His words are sharp when he speaks. “Fine. But don’t come crying to me when you blow out a tire in that fancy car of yours driving down that road. That won’t be my fault.”
“It will, because you never actually intended to do work there, did you? It was all an effort to pressure Evie into buying one of those cabins off of you.”
A look of surprise flashes across his face only for a moment before he fixes his expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. You were hoping to piss Eve off long enough that she bought one or both of them off you to put a driveway in there. And then I stumbled along, and your pupils turned into dollar signs.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t need to admit it. You just need to approve the next proposal I give you.”
“Look, Ryder. You can only ask for so much. This town has certain housing requirements. I’m not going to approve just anything you put in front of me. I mean, think of Eve.”
“Eve, who you tried to screw over? Multiple times? I’m thinking of Eve. I’m the only one who has been, this whole time, and I can promise you she’s going to be right there with me when I submit my next proposal.”
His brow furrows—he must not know that Eve and I are something now.
When he doesn’t say anything else, I continue, “And you’re going to sell me the cabins.”
His eyebrows rise.
“For cheap.”
His brow falls, his jaw ticking. “Anything else?”
I think through it for a moment, recognizing that this is likely my one and only opportunity to make demands. “No. That’s all.”
“Can I get back to my dinner now, then?”
I nod. “Sorry to have interrupted.”
The door hits my ass on the way out, but I start my car with a grin on my face.
When I get back to the sunflower farm, I head straight for the barn.
Sana appears in the doorway a moment later, one eyebrow raised when she sees me. “Why do you look like you’re in trouble?”
“Because I did something and now I need your help even though my girlfriend strong-armed you into going on vacation.”
“Ryder,” she groans.
“It’s a good thing! We’ll finally be able to put this mess behind us,” I say.
She rolls her eyes, gesturing for me to follow her into the barn. Rohan is at the stove, gathering ingredients to make dinner, and nods over his shoulder when he sees me.
I follow Sana to the armchairs by the water wheel outlet, and we sit down across from each other.
When she raises her eyebrows—my cue to get on with it—I tell her about my negotiation with Reed.
She nods along, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes at different parts of my story.
“So, you want me to deal with the real estate lawyers?”
I give her my best grin. “I’ll deal with the architect and get something drawn up.”
She sighs, leaning back in her chair as she eyes me. “You seem inordinately excited about this.”
I nod. “I think it’s going to be better than we ever expected.”