Chapter Thirty-One · Evelyn
Chapter Thirty-One
EVELYN
The open line was a phone on a dining room table between a coffee cup and eleven scale tickets, and for four hours it had been the most boring thing Evelyn Chase had ever listened to.
She had not been able to sit down since supper.
Grace had told her twice to eat something and she had eaten nothing, and at one in the morning Grace had given up and put a plate of pot roast at her elbow where it went cold, and neither of them mentioned it again.
The thing nobody warns you about, Evelyn thought, standing at a dining room window with a coffee she had not drunk, is that being the one who is safe is a job with no tasks in it.
She had done the arithmetic on it around midnight.
Eleven men in a lot. Sixteen signatures on a sheet of paper in a lawyer’s file.
A call reference number written on the back of a hand.
Every single one of those was a thing she had helped build, and she had built them so that a man could stand still in gravel instead of walking across it, and she believed in all of it.
And she would have traded the entire architecture to be standing in that lot.
“You’re doing the thing,” Grace said, from the table.
“I’m aware.”
“Sit down before you decide something.”
She sat down. It lasted four minutes.
What she kept coming back to, standing at that window with a cold coffee, was his hand at the small of her back going out to the truck.
Not the bed, though there was that. The hand.
A man who had spent forty-two years being careful about what he showed a room had started putting his hand on her in front of his own club and had never once said a word about doing it, and she had spent three days trying to work out when he had decided to, and gotten nowhere, and enjoyed getting nowhere.
She wanted him in that house, with no dignified way to dress the wanting up.
She wanted him upstairs in a narrow bed being unbearable about how long he was taking, and instead he was standing in a gravel lot forty minutes away in thirty-one degrees with his phone up, in the open, where anybody could see him.
Which was, she was aware, the entire point, and had been her idea.
At two oh six it stopped being boring.
“Boss.”
Grace’s hand went flat on the table.
Then Diesel’s voice, close to the phone in his truck, saying the address of his own yard out loud to nobody, which Evelyn understood after a second was for the recording. Then gravel. Then a car door.
Mr. Harrow.
“That’s him,” Evelyn said. “That’s the voice from the highway.”
Grace was already writing.
They listened to nine minutes of it.
Evelyn stood the entire time with both hands on the back of a dining room chair, and Grace sat, and Counselor the beagle lay under the table and did not care, and the two of them heard a man in a grey overcoat laugh in a gravel lot and say that in eleven years nobody had ever filmed.
And then they heard him say the other thing.
There’s a fella in that truck behind me who came down from Hagerstown Friday, and he does not work for the same people I work for, and he has not been told about the telephones.
Grace’s pen stopped.
“That’s not a threat,” she said. “He’s warning him.”
“He’s warning him,” Evelyn said, and heard her own voice come out wrong, “and I want to know why, and I want to know it in the next ninety seconds.”
Because something was wrong with the arithmetic and had been for about four minutes and she had not been able to get her hand on it.
She started saying it out loud, fast, because saying it out loud was the only tool she had ever had.
“Two vehicles. Six men, maybe seven. At two in the morning. To take boxes out of an unlocked office.” Her hands were moving on the table.
“Grace, they did not need six men. They needed one man and a crowbar and forty seconds, at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, when nobody would have been there.”
“They didn’t know the yard would be empty.”
“They knew the yard would be empty. They drove past it three times on Sunday and Renata watched them do it.” Evelyn’s throat had gone dry.
“And they came at two in the morning anyway, with two vehicles and lights on the grade, down a road with one way in and one way out, into a yard where they had every reason to expect at least somebody, and Aldridge got out of the car first with his hands showing, which is the thing he does when he wants to be seen.”
Grace looked up.
“He wanted to be seen.”
“Grace, on Thursday afternoon Alton Renner offered one point four million dollars for that building and was refused.” Evelyn had both hands flat on the scale tickets.
“On Friday morning somebody who does not work for Renner brought a man down from Hagerstown. On Saturday morning a federal prosecutor spent four hours and twenty minutes in Wendell Prine’s kitchen and came out with a notebook. ”
“And on Monday at seven,” Grace said slowly, “Wendell Prine does not show up for work.”
“Nobody is coming for boxes.” Evelyn heard herself say it.
“The boxes are corroboration. Prine is the case. And they have known since Saturday afternoon at the latest, because somebody watched a plate query cross a screen on Monday and there is a second one of those people at that sheriff’s office, and Danielle Ford drove a government car up that man’s driveway in daylight and sat in it for four hours. ”
Grace Walsh was already dialing.
“Ford,” she said. “Ford, Ford, pick up.”
It went to voicemail.
“She turns it off at night,” Grace said. “She told me she turns it off at night because of her mother’s hospice calls, and I told her that was reasonable, and I want to be sick.”
“Teal.”
“Teal doesn’t have an address for Prine that isn’t the one in the file and neither do we.”
“Yes we do,” Evelyn said.
She was moving before she finished the sentence.
The Workers’ Compensation opinion was in the third folder on the sideboard where it had been for two weeks, printed four times, read to pieces, and she got it out and flattened it on the table and put her finger on the caption block.
“There’s no address in an opinion,” Grace said.
“There isn’t. There’s a lawyer.” Evelyn was already reading.
“Prine had counsel. A firm in Roanoke took a third of his award in 2015 and their name is in the style of the case, and a law firm that handled a comp claim has a client file with an address in it and a phone number, and they have had it for a decade because nobody throws those out.”
“It’s two in the morning on a Sunday.”
“It’s a law firm, Grace, which means there’s an after-hours answering service and a managing partner with a cell phone, and you are a member of the Virginia State Bar with a client whose life is in danger.”
Grace Walsh stared at her for about one second.
Then she said, “Get me the number,” and stood up so fast the chair went over.
It took nine minutes.
The answering service took four of them and would not give out a cell number and finally agreed to page the on-call attorney, who called back at two nineteen and was a woman named Priscilla Hodge who had been asleep and who listened to six seconds of Grace Walsh before saying, “Hold on, I’m getting a pen. ”
“I cannot give you a client address,” Priscilla Hodge said. “You know I can’t.”
“I’m not asking you for an address,” Grace said. “I’m asking you to call him.”
There was a pause about two seconds long.
“That’s clever,” Priscilla Hodge said. “I’ll call him from the car.”
“Ms. Hodge.”
“Yes.”
“If he answers,” Grace said, “tell him to turn on every light in that house and go out the front door to the road and stand in the middle of it where anybody driving past can see him, and to stay there until a deputy comes. Not the back. Not the shop. The road.”
“Ms. Walsh, that is either very good advice or the worst thing anybody has ever told a client.”
“It’s what worked in a gravel lot in Blackthorn Gap two hours ago,” Grace said, “and it is the only thing I have.”
Priscilla Hodge called back at two thirty-one.
Evelyn was still on hold with the sheriff’s office and she watched Grace Walsh’s face while it happened and she would carry the picture of it a long time, because Grace’s face did nothing at all for four seconds and then came completely apart.
“He answered,” Grace said.
Evelyn had to sit down on the arm of a chair.
“He answered, and he was already awake, and she says he told her there had been a vehicle at the bottom of his drive for about twenty minutes.” Grace had the phone against her chest. “And he said, tell the lady I already got the porch light on.”
“There’s one more piece and I want it said before I make this call,” Evelyn said, “because if it’s wrong I need you to stop me.”
“Say it.”
“Aldridge is not part of it.” She was surprised to hear herself. “Grace, he told Diesel about the man from Hagerstown out loud on a recording, unprompted, after saying he was fully aware of what he was doing. He said he had spent two days trying to find out who asked for him.”
“He’s covering himself.”
“He is absolutely covering himself, and he is also, right now, standing in the light forty feet from eleven cameras with his hands in his pockets, which is the only place in that yard where he cannot be usefully somewhere else.” Evelyn’s mind was going faster than her mouth.
“He came out of that car first and he has not moved. He is the reason nothing has happened yet.”
Grace stared at her.
“You think he’s stalling.”
“I think a man who has worked for that organization for eleven years found out on Friday that somebody outside it brought a shooter down from Maryland, and I think he has been in a car for two days working out what that means for him.” Evelyn picked the phone up.
“And I think he drove into that yard at two in the morning knowing how it was going to look on eleven telephones.”
Evelyn was on the other phone with the Botetourt County Sheriff’s Office at two twenty-two.
She had thought about what to say for a hundred and eighty seconds and she said it in the flattest, most boring voice she had ever produced in her life, because she had learned at nineteen that dispatchers do not respond to fear, they respond to information.
“My name is Evelyn Chase and I’m calling from 411 Sycamore in Fincastle at the home of attorney Grace Walsh.
This is a non-emergency callback related to reference number 4-1-7-2-2, which was filed at nine forty-four last night by Diesel Harrow of Harrow Salvage on Blackthorn Gap Road.
” She read it off the back of Grace’s hand where Grace had copied it.
“There are currently multiple unknown vehicles and persons on that property and I have an open telephone line to it. That is the first thing.”
“Ma’am, are you telling me there’s something in progress at that address?”
“Yes. And the second thing is a separate address and I need to say it now in case this line drops.” Her hand was steady on the pen.
“There is a federal witness named Wendell Prine on a rural route in Buchanan who met with an assistant United States attorney yesterday morning, and I believe he is in immediate danger tonight, and the assistant United States attorney’s phone is off.
I do not have his street address. His employer is Cardinal Cold Chain. ”
There was a small sound on the line that Evelyn recognized because she had made it herself about four minutes ago.
“Ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “Say that name again.”
“Wendell Prine. P-R-I-N-E.”
“Hold, please.”
Evelyn held.
She stood in a dining room in Fincastle, Virginia, at twenty-three minutes past two in the morning, with the scale tickets on the table and a beagle asleep on her foot and an open line to a gravel lot forty minutes away, and held.
And on the open line, thin and far off and very clear, she heard Diesel Harrow say:
“You in the F-250. There are eleven cameras on you.”
“Ma’am.” The dispatcher came back on and her voice had changed entirely.
“I have a Botetourt unit two minutes from the Harrow property and I have Rockbridge advising a Botetourt deputy is en route to a rural route address in Buchanan for a welfare check on that name, and I am going to need you to stay on this line and not hang up for any reason. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Are you at a safe location?”
Evelyn Chase stood in a dining room in Fincastle with a beagle on her foot and eleven scale tickets on the table and every person she had in the world standing in a gravel lot forty minutes away.
“Yes ma’am,” she said. “I’m the safest one there is.”
And then, ten seconds later, on the open line, she heard the first shot.
She did not scream and she did not drop anything.
Later, she could never explain why she had gone so still.
With a telephone against each ear, one with a dispatcher on it and one lying flat on a dining room table in Fincastle, Virginia, carrying every man she had in a gravel lot, she heard the second shot, and she heard something metal, and she heard Cutter Reeves say a word she had never heard him say.
And then, thin and far off and perfectly clear, she heard Diesel Harrow say one word.
“Hold.”
Not go. Not a name. Not her name.
Hold.
And they held, and Evelyn Chase, standing in a dining room with her whole life going on out of a speaker, understood exactly what it had cost him to build a club that would do that, and what it was costing him to spend it, and she put her hand over her mouth and did not make one sound into either telephone.