Chapter Thirty-Two · Wrench
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
WRENCH
They arrested Dwight Prater on the first of December and they had the vendor by the twenty-second of February and I am going to put down how, because it was not police work and it was not lawyer work.
It was Blackthorn County keeping records.
Teal came out of retirement for it. Sixty-two years old, out of the federal government five years, and he drove down on the second of December and sat in the fire hall with a legal pad because Grace called him, and he worked it for eleven weeks without a badge and without pay and without any authority whatsoever, and what he actually did was tell four state investigators which drawer in Blackthorn County to open.
He said one thing at the start that turned out to be the entire method.
“There is no informant here,” he said. “Nobody is going to roll. Prater doesn’t know anything, the bondsman won’t talk, and the man in Charlotte will never say a word.
” He put his pen down. “So we are not going to find a person who tells us. We are going to find the four places where somebody in a hurry left a mark in a county that writes everything down, and we are going to find them by asking people what they wrote in October.”
It took nine weeks and there were four.
Prater could not name anybody. He had been paid in cash twice in a parking lot behind a truck stop in Bristol by a man in his fifties who never gave a name, and he had no telephone number, and every meeting had been arranged through a third man who is a bail bondsman in Kingsport and who lawyered up inside four hours.
That is where it stopped for ten weeks.
Here is what broke it.
One. The purchase order. Ruben Kell saw a line item upside down on a desk on the fourteenth of October and would not give me the entity name because he was sixty percent sure.
In January, under oath, on the record, with a lawyer beside him, he gave it, because sixty percent is not enough to say in a repair shop and is exactly enough to say in a deposition where the other side gets to correct you.
Two. Renata Sowder’s scale tickets.
The new scale house has a fireproof cabinet in the block wall because Grace Whitmore said build it two feet longer on the fourteenth of July.
In that cabinet is every weight ticket since the eighteenth of July.
And on the seventh of November, at 2:41 in the afternoon, a white extended-cab pickup with Tennessee plates came through Harrow Salvage with nine hundred and six pounds of scrap aluminum and took two hundred and twelve dollars in cash, and Renata wrote the plate in the corner of the ticket, because Renata has written the plate in the corner of every cash ticket since 2026 and every soul here knows why.
That plate comes back to a man named Ordell Vance, fifty-four, of Kingsport, Tennessee, who has a state contractor’s license for demolition and site clearing, and who was engaged as a subcontractor on this project on the ninth of October under the line item site conditions and access, phase two.
He came through that yard three weeks before, in daylight, and sold aluminum, and looked at the county, and did not know a woman writes plates in the corner.
Three. Wyatt Stallard’s legal pad from the twenty-third of October.
He counted four hundred and a dozen people going up the courthouse steps. He also, because he is nine and counts everything, wrote down the vehicles on Court Street that were there the whole day and did not move, and there were four, and one of them was a white extended-cab pickup.
He wrote it down on the twenty-third of October because he was bored, and he gave it to Teal in December, and it puts Ordell Vance here thirty-eight days before the fire and it corroborates the scale ticket.
Four. Mrs. Absher’s log.
A man came into that courthouse on the twenty-seventh of October and pulled the plat book for the fire hall parcel. He did not give a name because he did not have to. Mrs. Absher wrote in her hand ledger, as she has since 1989: gentleman, plats, F.H. parcel, 27 Oct, did not sign.
And under it, because she is who she is: Tenn. plate, white truck.
She is seventy-one years old. She has kept that ledger by hand since 1989 alongside the electronic index, which the state has told her four separate times is redundant, and she has been overruled on it in writing twice by two different county administrators, and she has kept it anyway, and in 2019 a supervisor asked her in open session to stop because of the cost of the books.
The books cost eleven dollars a year.
That ledger is the reason a state investigator had a plate on the twenty-second of January, and Mrs. Absher has never once said I told you so about it, and when the Recorder asked her for a comment in March she said, and Lily printed it exactly:
“It ain’t about being right. Somebody comes in that office, they get wrote down. That’s all it is and it always has been.”
They took Ordell Vance on the twenty-second of February and he did what Prater could not, and that’s that he had a telephone, and the telephone had a number in it that belonged to a director of asset management for a company with eleven employees and a suite in Charlotte.
That man was indicted in June on nine counts and he has pled to four and he is going to prison and he has never given anybody a thing.
Meade Cardwell has not been charged with anything.
I mean to say that plainly and then I will say the rest.
There is no evidence that Meade Cardwell knew.
There is a great deal of evidence that a man who worked for him engaged a subcontractor, that the subcontractor hired a man from Wise County, and that nine thousand dollars in cash moved through four hands.
There is testimony that the director asked Ruben Kell a hypothetical question in a tone like he was reading it, and it has never been established what he was reading or whether anybody wrote it.
Grace has said to me about forty times that a chain of proof is not a chain of guilt, and she is correct, and she taught this county that in August and has to live with it now the same as the rest of us.
In April, Meade Cardwell gave nine hours of deposition testimony under oath and answered every question and asserted no privilege of any kind.
He was asked whether he had ever authorized, requested, or been informed of any act against the property or persons of Blackthorn County.
He said no.
I have read that transcript a dozen times and I believe him, and that in this book in my own name, because it would be easier for me if I did not.
I will put down what I think and label it as what it is, meaning a thing I think.
I think a man built a machine over ninety-one years that was designed to make one problem go away, and I think he inherited it, and I think he ran it correctly and honestly by his own lights and never once in his life had to know what the bottom of it did.
And I think that on the twenty-fourth of November he stood in a fire hall in front of six hundred and forty people and said out loud that not knowing is not the same as not being responsible, and I think he meant it, and I think he had no idea that six days later his own machine was going to prove him right in a way he will carry to his grave.
Grace says I am being generous. Diesel says I am being a fool. Charity Teague says it is not my business to decide and that the only person entitled to an opinion about Meade Cardwell is Odessa Ambrose Pratt.
Odessa Pratt has never given one, publicly or privately, and has been asked about forty times.
She says, every time: “I ain’t studied him.”
Cody Sifers went back to work at the yard on the second of March.
Denny Puckett did his work and his own for eleven weeks and would not take a dollar for it and Diesel paid him anyway by putting it in an envelope in his toolbox, and Denny found it and put it in the fireproof cabinet in the block wall with a note on it that says Cody’s.
That envelope is still in there. Cody knows about it. Neither one of them will touch it and neither one will say why.
Evelyn Barnes was nineteen on the thirtieth of November and she gave dispatch an address, a patient count, a mechanism, and a vehicle description with a dent on it, in that order, in ninety seconds, at night, in the rain, four minutes after watching a man light two people on fire.
She started nursing school in Blacksburg in August. Sienna Reeves drove her up and helped her carry boxes and came home and did not talk about it for a week.
On the eighteenth of February, Odessa Ambrose Pratt sat for a deposition in Bluefield at eighty-eight years old, in her own dining room, with an oxygen line she had started using in January and did not want in the picture.
It ran two hours and eleven minutes.
Their lawyer was decent about it. He had a job and he did it, and the job was to establish that she had no personal knowledge of anything, and that’s true, and that her claim came to her from strangers in October, meaning also true.
And at the end of it he asked her one question too many.
He asked her, and I have the transcript in front of me: Mrs. Pratt, prior to October of last year, had you ever asserted any claim to any property in Blackthorn County, Virginia?
And Odessa Ambrose Pratt said:
“No, sir. I did not know it was there to assert. My daddy would not say the name of that county in my hearing for thirty-one years, and I have found out at eighty-eight years old why, and the reason is that in 1937 the clerk of that court wrote down that he give notice in a newspaper that had been shut for a year, and then eight months after, a man named Cardwell bought the press it was printed on so there weren’t nothing left to check it against.”
Their lawyer said, “Mrs. Pratt, I’m going to object to the narrative.”
“You go ahead,” she said. “It’s on the record now.”
It is on the record now.
That transcript is public. It was read into a hearing in Roanoke in May, in open court, by a judge, aloud, and it ran in nine newspapers, and there is a copy of it in a steel cabinet in the rebuilt north end of the Blackthorn County fire hall, four items down from a framed page of nine lines that has no card on it.
Cardinal Ridge Holdings withdrew every outstanding offer in Blackthorn County on the ninth of June and has not filed anything in Blackthorn County since.
You cannot sell an assemblage that has a dead newspaper in it.
Meridian Abstract Services was dissolved in August. Its files went to a firm in Richmond under a court order and Alma Ambrose has been through eleven boxes of them and expects to be through the rest by next spring, and what is in them is not my business to report and will be in a newspaper before this book is.
Not because of the law. Grace says the legal question is still genuinely open and might have gone either way and might have taken four years.
Because of the sentence. Because an eighty-eight-year-old woman with an oxygen line said forty-one words on a Tuesday in her own dining room and they are in a transcript and a transcript cannot be bought, and no buyer on this earth is putting a battery plant on ground that comes with those forty-one words attached to it forever.
That is what ended it.
Not a hammer. Not a bridge. Not sixteen men.
A woman writing it down, in a room, where it could be heard, where it would keep.
There is one more entry and it is mine and it is out of order and I am putting it at the end of this chapter because it is where it belongs.
On the fourteenth of November, three weeks before, Ada Grier found out who held the paper behind Farmers and Merchants on my father’s shop note in 2003.
It was sold in a portfolio of eleven small commercial notes in October of 2002 to a Roanoke lending company that has been out of business since 2011.
That company was capitalized by, among four others, a partnership whose general partner was Bertram Sowder, who was the Commonwealth’s Attorney of Blackthorn County from 1997 to 2009, and who died in 2017.
That is all there is. There is no more.
Grace has told me the truth about it nine times and the truth is this: a prosecutor holding a piece of a company that held a note on a building that burned is a conflict of interest so obvious that in 2003 nobody would have thought to look for it, and it is not evidence of anything, and it will never be evidence of anything, and every person who could be asked about it is dead.
I have got a chain of paper with a hole in the middle of it and a brother in a churchyard.
Ada found it on the fourteenth of November. Grace held it sixteen days, which she has apologized for and which I have told her was correct, because there was a vote coming and a county coming apart and a man who would have driven to Roanoke that night with a folder.
She gave it to me on the second of December in a waiting room, because I asked her whether she had anything she was holding, and because she does not lie to me about timing.
I read it in the hall.
Then I went back in the room and did not say one word about it to my brother, and he had eleven hours left, and I have decided that’s the best thing I have ever done.