Chapter Twenty-Five · Evelyn
Chapter Twenty-Five
EVELYN
Grace’s spare room had a twin bed, a sewing machine, and six boxes of a dead woman’s Christmas decorations, and Evelyn Chase slept in it badly for five nights.
She did not lie awake missing him, exactly. She lay awake auditing.
That was the only word for it. She went back over six weeks the way she went over a quarter, entry by entry, looking for the places where she had been wrong about what she was looking at, and the maddening thing, the thing that got her up at two in the morning to sit at Grace’s kitchen table, was that there were almost none.
The man had crouched down to be eye level with her in a shop bay. He had asked before every single time. He had told her it cost him something to let her drive to Buchanan, and had let her drive to Buchanan. He had stood up in front of sixteen men and handed her the choice.
And for eleven days of it there had been a memory card in a drawer.
Both of those were true. She had said as much to him about Pike and the trailers and now she had to do it about herself, and it turned out that carrying two true things at once was substantially harder from the inside.
“You’re doing it again,” Grace said on the fourth morning, pouring coffee.
“Doing what.”
“Sitting at my table at six in the morning with your hands around a cup thinking about a man.” Grace put the pot down. “I’m not going to give you advice. I want that noted, because it is costing me a great deal.”
“Noted.”
“I will say one thing and it is professional.” Grace sat. “Whatever you decide, decide it in about a week, because there is a difference between a woman taking the time she needs and a woman living in my spare room, and the second one is a decision she is making without saying so.”
She saw him twice in those five days.
Once at the deposition, where they had said good morning and nothing else for four hours, and once on the Sunday, at the yard, where she went to pull the last two boxes and found him in the shop bay with the roll-up open, up to his elbows in a transmission that did not need to come out of anything.
He straightened up when he heard her.
“I can go,” he said.
“It’s your shop.”
“That ain’t what I said.”
Evelyn stood in the middle of a concrete floor with a banker’s box on her hip and looked at a man who had lost eight pounds in a week and was pulling a good transmission apart at two in the afternoon on a Sunday.
“How’s the club,” she said.
“Holding.” He wiped his hands. “Dutch has been at the clubhouse every day. He don’t do nothing when he’s there. He just sets.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“No,” Diesel said. “It ain’t.”
Neither of them moved.
“I’m not going to ask you anything,” he said. “I want you to know that going in, so you can be in a room with me without bracing.”
“That’s considerate and I hate it.”
“Yeah, well.” Something almost went across his face. “I ain’t got a lot of moves left that ain’t considerate.”
She carried the box out to Grace’s car and put it in the back and stood in the yard for a second with her hand on the roof, and then she got in and drove away, and made it four miles before she had to pull over at the church.
The plate turned out to be the hardest easy thing Evelyn had ever run into.
“Seven characters,” she said on Thursday, standing in Grace’s office with the certified photograph of the back of the drawing on the table. “It’s a Virginia plate from 2019 and it is written down in a man’s own hand with a date beside it, and I cannot find out who it belongs to.”
“You cannot.”
“The DMV database is not public. It is protected by federal statute. There are fourteen permissible uses and none of them is a forensic accountant is curious.” She had spent two days confirming that.
“I can get a title history through a commercial service, which gives me a VIN and a chain of ownership and no name. I can get an accident report if it was ever in one, which it wasn’t. I have hit the wall.”
Grace laced her fingers.
“You know the answer,” she said.
“I know the answer and I don’t like it.”
“Say it out loud anyway.”
“We give it to Teal.”
They met him on Friday in the same room with the same window, and Marcus Teal read Cecil Ammen’s deposition transcript in twenty minutes without saying one word, and then looked at the photograph of the back of the drawing for a great deal longer than that.
“Twenty-four,” he said.
“Twenty-four.”
“There are nineteen in my file.”
“Yes,” Grace said.
Teal set the photograph down and put both hands over his mouth and sat like that.
“Six years,” he said. “There has been a mechanic’s lien in the Botetourt County clerk’s office for six years.”
“Recorded in November of 2019.”
“I have four people. I have two of them full time.” His voice had gone flat. “I have never once thought to run a lien index. It would not have occurred to me in ten more years. Why would it? He’s a freight company.”
“Companies do not weld,” Evelyn said.
Teal looked at her.
“Say that again.”
“Companies do not weld.” She kept her hands flat on the table.
“Everything you have been looking at is a document that a company generates about itself, and Renner is extremely good at those. What he could not control is that a man with a torch in Buchanan wanted forty-one thousand six hundred dollars and went to a counter and wrote down what he built.”
Marcus Teal took out a notebook and wrote for about forty seconds.
“All right,” he said. “What do you want.”
“We want a name for that plate,” Grace said.
“And I want to be honest with you about the trade, because I don’t intend to start this by being clever.
If you run it, you’re going to have to put it in a file, and the moment it is in a file it is in a building with somebody in it who told an underwriter in Richmond about a case that isn’t public. We know that and we’re asking anyway.”
“Why.”
“Because a man is dead,” Grace said, “and because at some point you have to hand something to somebody.”
Teal was quiet.
“There’s a second reason and it’s the real one,” Evelyn said.
“You have been carrying an April memo by yourself for eleven months. You are the only person in your building who thinks this is a Renner case. And you are doing exactly what everybody in this thing has done, which is decide that the safest place for a dangerous piece of information is inside one person.”
Teal’s jaw moved.
“That’s a hell of a thing to say to me.”
“I’ve watched what it costs,” Evelyn said. “Twice now. I’m the only person in this room qualified to say it and I would like it said.”
“You’re right,” Teal said.
Nobody had expected that, including, from the look of him, Teal.
“I have had that memo on a thumb drive in my sock drawer since April,” he said.
“Not on the network. My wife thinks I’m having an affair, which I am going to have to deal with at some point.
” He put his notebook away. “I’ll run it Monday.
And I’m going to do something else, which is that I’m going to put it through the Roanoke County Sheriff’s Office on a mutual assistance request instead of through my own building, and I want somebody in this room to tell me whether that’s clever or cowardly, because I have been alone with these decisions for eleven months and I’ve lost the ability to tell. ”
“It’s clever,” Grace said.
“It’s both,” Evelyn said, “and both is usually right.”
He ran the plate on Monday.
He called Grace’s office at four ten in the afternoon and asked for the speaker to be on and for Evelyn to be in the room, which Evelyn noted.
“Virginia registration, 2019, on a 2013 Ford F-250, black, no camper shell,” Teal said. “Registered owner is not a company. It’s an individual. Wendell K. Prine, rural route address in Buchanan, Botetourt County.”
Grace wrote it down.
“Prine,” she said.
“P-R-I-N-E. Fifty-eight years old. And I’m going to save you the next four hours, because I already know who he is and I have a photograph of him.
” Papers moved. “Wendell Prine is the shop manager at Cardinal Cold Chain. He’s been there since it opened.
I have him coming out of that bay in nineteen surveillance photographs going back two and a half years, and in nine of them he is carrying a clipboard, and I have never once thought about him for one second, because he is a shop manager at a refrigerated freight yard. ”
Evelyn was already typing.
“Say the year of the truck again,” she said.
“Twenty thirteen.”
“And he’s fifty-eight.”
“Ms. Chase, whatever you’re doing, do it out loud, because I would like to learn how.”
“The Virginia Workers’ Compensation Commission publishes its awards and its opinions,” Evelyn said.
“It has for decades. It’s a searchable public database because they are quasi-judicial decisions and a decision has to be public.
Nobody thinks of it as a record about a person.
Everybody thinks of it as a record about a claim. ”
She typed a name into a state website that had not been redesigned since 2011.
It took four seconds.
“Prine, Wendell K., versus Cardinal Cold Chain LLC,” she read.
“Opinion of the Commission, 2015. Claimant sustained a crush injury on the fourteenth of August, 2014, when a pallet load shifted during unloading.” Her mouth had gone dry.
“Comminuted fracture of the right tibia and fibula. Surgical fixation. Award of permanent partial disability, twenty percent to the right leg.”
Nobody said anything on either end of the line.
“Right leg,” Teal said.
“Old break.” Evelyn’s hands were shaking on the keys.
“Right side. Just like Cecil Ammen said, and just like Pike Danner, and there are probably four thousand men in this state who walk like that and it never once occurred to anybody at that table that the walk could belong to anybody but a Copperhead, because the man on that camera was wearing a cut.”
And then, sitting in a room over a hardware store in Fincastle, Virginia, Evelyn Chase heard herself make a sound.
“Grace.”
“What.”
“The clubhouse alarm.” She turned around. “Diesel told me in his kitchen. Blue Ridge Security did the clubhouse in the spring of 2019 and I asked him why they got an alarm, and he said they’d had a break-in over the winter. Somebody came through the back and took the till and a case of liquor.”
Grace Walsh went completely white.
“They took a cut,” she said.
“They took a cut.” Evelyn stood up so fast the chair went over.
“In the winter of 2018. Before the keypad, before Cardinal, before the first load. It is the first thing that ever happened. It has been in the middle of this the entire time and every single one of us walked past it, because a break-in where somebody takes the till and the liquor is the least interesting sentence in the English language.”
“That’s why nobody remembers what else was missing.”
“That is exactly why they took the till and the liquor,” Evelyn said.
Grace sat down slowly in her own chair.
“Winter of 2018,” she said. “The keypad went in March of 2019. The lien was recorded that November. The first route seven load was August of the year after.”
“They took the cut first.” Evelyn had both hands on the back of a chair.
“Grace, that is not a man improvising. That is somebody who, before there was a single truck or a single plate or a single load, walked into a clubhouse in a hollow and took a jacket, because he had already worked out that one day he would want a picture of a Copperhead doing something.”
“He kept it six years.”
“He kept it six years and used it once.” Evelyn’s voice had gone strange in her own ears. “One time. On one camera he did not know existed. And it worked the way it was supposed to, and it was pointed at Diesel Harrow specifically, and it did not fail.”
Nothing moved in that office.
“I need to ask you something as a lawyer,” Evelyn said finally, “and I need you to answer it as one.”
“Go ahead.”
“Does any of this reduce what he did.”
Grace Walsh took a long moment with that, and Evelyn was grateful for every second of it.
“No,” she said. “He had a camera and no name on it and eleven days, and he chose to hold it, and a man was isolated and died. That is true regardless of who the man on the tape turns out to be, and it will still be true in ten years, and if you go up that mountain expecting this to undo it, you are going to make a mess of both of you.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I’m not finished.” Grace took her glasses off.
“It doesn’t reduce it. It changes what it was.
For five days that man has been carrying it as a failure of judgment about a person he loved, which is a thing you can never fully come back from because it says something about you.
What you’re about to hand him is that it was a trap, built for him by a professional, using the one thing about him that everybody who has ever loved him has known for thirty years.
” She set the glasses down. “He is still responsible for walking into it. But there is a difference between a man who was wrong about his friend and a man who was hunted, and he deserves to know which one he is.”
She was on the road by five.
She had thought about calling. She had gotten as far as the phone in her hand twice at the bottom of Grace’s stairs, and both times she had put it down, because there was not one version of this that could be said into a telephone.
There was a man who had spent eleven days believing that Pike Danner had opened his gate.
There was a club that had spent five days believing it too, because Diesel had told them all of it on a Monday, in a room, at the same minute, in the correct way, and the correct way had spread the wound out over sixteen men.
And it had never been anybody in that room. Not once. Not one night in two years.
It had been a fifty-eight-year-old shop manager from Buchanan with a limp and a stolen jacket, and the only reason a man like that had ever put on a Copperhead cut at two in the morning under a light pole was that somebody had understood, correctly and completely, what a closed club in a closed town would do to itself with the idea.
Evelyn Chase came up out of the Gap and onto the ridge road with the sun going down behind her and drove the last mile and a half of gravel too fast, and the porch light was on, and she had not decided one single thing about the rest of it.
She was going to have to tell him standing up.