Chapter Nineteen
Mitchell Robinson sat hunched at Presley’s command post. His daughter treated the vast desk and expensive wall of monitors as her kingdom.
The soft glow from the screens casting long, pale shadows across the room.
He asked her to show him all the surveillance cameras.
They had a security office attached to the stables, manned by one of his employees. That was to protect his property.
These cameras faced out, always watching the perimeter. His neighbors. His future empire.
He had enlisted his daughter Presley to help him go over the security feeds because he needed to know what happened today, before he found out that George and Millie Coulter had done something with their original contract.
Mitchell was a smart man—about business, about land, about the desires of others—but he didn’t have the technical skills of his daughter.
While he understood the basics and what could and could not be done, he couldn’t make it all work.
The drones. The security cameras. How to make things go forward and back and enhance them.
So, he relied on Presley. She might have the technical skills, but he was teaching her how to see things the way he did. Every detail mattered.
Quickly, he looked at all the footage in real time. The winding road through his property, the gently sloping fields, the tree lines that marked old boundaries. The dense foliage that bordered Whisper Creek, the slender trickle of water that united the Robinsons’ land to the McKennas’.
The creek that had started the feud more than a hundred years ago. A feud he didn’t think anyone remembered. Except him.
He wouldn’t forget, as it had been pounded into him from every Robinson who came before him.
His father had been a stupid man. He never had vision.
He’d never expanded, never turned a profit.
After Grandfather died, Mitchell’s dad had run the farm into the ground.
He drank too much, whored around, spent money like drinking water.
Mitchell didn’t understand why his father rejected the land, turning it over to the laborers who Mitchell also employed, but without the free rein they’d had under his dad.
Because the land was in his blood. He wouldn’t let just anyone work for him.
He had the best workers in the field, the best equipment, and fetched the best prices.
He had expanded because he had to; his father’s ill-thought-out plans had devastated the once healthy soil.
And then he created Verdacorp ten years ago, got the farm out of debt, and expanded.
Because farming was suffering, shrinking, prone to price fluctuations at the will and whim of the government.
He had to change tactics, and realized he had a head for business—better, he had a head for the business of land and all the land had to offer.
His grandfather and his great-grandfather would have been proud.
Mitchell didn’t care what his worthless father thought, now a drunk living in a house Mitchell had bought him down in Dallas, with a full-time nurse because Theodore Robinson had drank himself into every health problem imaginable, and Mitchell didn’t want to see him.
Clive went down to visit once a week, but Mitchell had no use for the pathetic, stupid old man who had nearly lost their legacy.
He pushed thoughts of his father aside because they always angered him.
He vowed to be a man his daughter could be proud of.
He had wanted more children, he’d wanted a legacy.
He had Presley, a daughter worthy of him, but he needed to find a wife who could give him two or three more children.
He’d thought Nicole had been the one. He had been wrong.
He focused on the camera feeds that Presley expertly managed.
To the north, the cameras offered a sweeping view of the McKennas’ land and parts of the Baldwin acreage.
He couldn’t quite see either of their houses—trees and terrain and distance kept them obscured—but he had a clear view of their cattle herds and the southernmost edges of their crops.
Enough to know when someone came and went.
Enough to make guesses about routines, planting issues, harvest yields.
By this time tomorrow, the Baldwin property would be his. The paperwork was done. The deal would close at precisely five PM, and as soon as the ink dried, Mitchell planned to install a full perimeter of cameras. He already had the posts and gear ready to go in his equipment shed.
Baldwin didn’t even need to survive, because the contract was signed, sealed, delivered … effective Saturday, April 30, 5 PM.
“I need to see all the angles pointing to the Coulters’ property,” he told Presley.
She popped her gum—a habit he despised, but the one time he commented on it she only popped it more—and tapped a few keys.
The screens split, expanded, shifted to show three angles of the Coulters’ property.
Their house was the closest to his own, though still nearly a mile across two hundred acres of pasture and scrub that the McKennas owned—and he wanted.
Needed. He would buy it, trade for it, do anything to have it.
No one understood that those two hundred acres were the lynchpin in this business deal he’d been cultivating for two years. He wasn’t lying to his brother: without it, they’d lose everything.
With it, they would be kings.
“I need the middle camera,” he said. “The one that shows the barn and most of the house.”
Click, click, click. Now that was the only feed showing, taking up the bulk of the screen, the high-definition camera catching the corner of the old farmhouse and barn.
Though the recording was in color, everything looked gray because of the rain and storm clouds above.
Like seeing the world in black-and-white, the occasional burst of color almost unreal.
He’d paid extra for the zoom on that one. State-of-the-art optics that could pull in a license plate from a quarter mile. He had tested it.
Mitchell enjoyed watching the land, but what he truly relished was watching people.
The way they moved, the subtle patterns in their behavior.
That was where the real power lay. Several months ago, he’d noticed the Perez boy, the son of the sheriff, sneaking onto the McKenna property late at night.
So, he watched, curious. And his theory held: it didn’t take long before he witnessed the teenager, Avery, meeting him under the oak tree, for a midnight picnic and a kiss.
Did Ellen know what her daughter was doing in the middle of the night? Innocence was all Mitchell saw, but he could make it far more titillating … if he needed to cause a rift between the McKennas and the sheriff.
Which might be sooner rather than later.
Mitchell didn’t need to see everything. Just enough to know when to press, when to pull back.
The land was just an important piece in a bigger game.
What mattered most was control. Long ago, he’d learned that the best way to control something was to watch it without being seen, and act when necessary.
“Rewind in high speed,” he told Presley. “I need to see everyone who visited the Coulters from now back to when they signed the contract last week.”
She rolled her eyes; he ignored it. Fortunately, she did exactly what he asked. Yes, she was spoiled, but she was also smart because Presley was his daughter, through and through.
It took him a few minutes to adjust to watching the world in reverse.
Backwards a man exits the house and gets into a dark truck, which then drives away in reverse. Brock. He was inside for nearly an hour. A job that should have taken minutes, but the Coulters had done something with the original contract.
And he hadn’t found it.
Another man walks around the house in the rain, then backs into his car, which drives away in reverse as well. Tom, making sure the Coulters were gone and no one was inside.
A truck drives up in reverse and comes to a stop.
George and Millie appear outside; Millie moves from the chicken coop, un-securing it—watching this backwards was a bit unnerving, and Mitchell reflected how human minds were designed to only look forward.
Because of course he knew she was shutting the chickens into the hutch before they left for the weekend.
They were protected from the rain because of the awning, but tonight they wouldn’t be protected from predators who might dig under the fence, so they had locked them into this chicken house.
This confirmed to Mitchell that they did intend to be gone overnight.
While Millie was at the chicken pen, George walks backwards from the barn, likely ensuring their two bulls were secure and fed. They both make two trips from the truck into the house, carrying items back inside.
Time passed, light barely changing because of the dark skies, but it was enough to remind Mitchell he was turning back the clock.
Sometimes, he wished he could turn back the clock and make different decisions, different choices.
But time didn’t work like that, and the video camera gave a tainted illusion of what might have been. What could have been.
A woman on horseback gallops back in reverse, arriving at the house. She dismounts and walks backwards into the house. Moments later, she walks backwards out of the house and gets back on her horse, which trots away in reverse.
“Presley,” Mitchell said. “Slow it down and show me that woman on horseback again going forward.”
“Whatever you say, Daddy,” Presley said.
Why did his daughter always sound so damn condescending?
But the video showed forward motion now and he saw the woman ride up to the Coulter house from the field. From the McKenna property.
Without being asked, Presley paused the video on the best view of the woman. She was blurry but Mitchell knew who that was.
Presley typed rapidly on the keyboard and the image became a bit clearer.
Ellen McKenna.
Could she have the original contract? Why would the Coulters have given it to her?
Sure, they were friends, the McKennas and Coulters had been close since the dawn of time, Penny’s sister married a Coulter and moved out to Amarillo back before Mitchell’s dad had been born.
The Robinsons knew everything about the McKennas and every family who had married into it.
Why would they have given Ellen the original contract? By accident? Because she asked? Why did she want it?
This was the worst thing in the world to have happened.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?” Presley asked.
He didn’t answer her. Because everything was wrong.
He had to get it back. At any cost.