Chapter 2 #2
I didn’t think Luke Williams was a bad person, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. Dangerous to my equilibrium and dangerous to my peace of mind.
I had too many people counting on me to be okay with that.
“’Scuse me, are you Webb Sunday?” a wheezy male voice said.
I turned and saw a short, heavyset man smiling expectantly up at Knox.
“I’m Webb.” My voice came out grumpier than I meant it to, since I was still thinking about Aiden’s teacher, and I deliberately tried to soften it as I added, “What can I do for you?”
The little man smoothed down his wispy hair. “Stephen Fox, Esquire,” he said, offering me a hand to shake, like I was supposed to recognize the name.
Knox and I exchanged a look. I wouldn’t put it past Amanda to get a new attorney to represent her in our custody dispute and sic him on me in public.
“Nice to meet you.” I shook his hand. “Mr. Fox, if this has something to do with my custody agreement, my attorney has already filed our custody petition…”
“Your—? Oh, heavens no! No, nothing to do with that, I assure you. I’m representing Luke Williams, of course. Your neighbor.”
What was that expression about saying the devil’s name and he’d appear? I gave Knox a hard look because he’d caused this.
I folded my arms over my chest. “What’s he want?”
Gage groaned, no doubt at my lack of manners.
“Er, well… Mr. Williams is trying to untangle a bit of a Gordian knot regarding the title to his land, as I’m sure you know—”
Nope. I made it my business to know as little about Luke as possible.
“—so I figured I’d come introduce myself since I was already here for the meeting. No reason we can’t keep things friendly, is there?”
Yeah, there sure was. Luke and I were not friends. Just the idea made me all… twitchy.
“What’s up with his title?” I asked. “Does he not own the land after all?”
I tried not to sound too excited, but Gage gave me another exasperated look, so apparently, I failed.
Mr. Fox shook his head. “Oh, no, he definitely owns the land right enough. The issue is that I’m not sure exactly how much he owns. He won it all in a contest, you know. Poor man.”
Yeah, right. Tragic. My heart bled for him.
“Anyway,” the lawyer said, fumbling for the battered messenger bag slung over one shoulder, “no need to waste your time chatting when you have things to do and I could be billing for my hours.” He chuckled heartily.
“But I wanted to give you some preliminary information on our claim… where is it… ah, here.”
He pulled out a sheaf of papers and shoved them into my hand. I stared at him while nerves began slithering in my stomach.
“What is this?”
“A copy of my preliminary research into the portion of land in dispute. For our claim,” he repeated.
“What land? What dispute?” I blinked at him. “What claim?”
“The Pond land that’s currently in use as a Sunday orchard, of course.” He sounded exasperated, as if he’d explained whatever the hell this was in exacting detail and I was still obtuse.
“There is no Pond land used by the orchard. There’s the land that my mother inherited—”
“Oh, no, that acreage is not in dispute.”
“And there’s the Sunday land that runs along the border with Lu—your client’s—land, which was transferred to my family a very long time ago as a wedding portion,” I said, biting back my frustration at this unexpected—and entirely freaking unacceptable—interruption of my perfectly mediocre night. “That land’s not in dispute either.”
“Yes, well, you’ll see from my notes that it remains to be seen whether that transfer was legal.
” Before I could argue with him, he rustled in his bag again and produced a business card, slapping it on top of the stack of papers in my hand.
“The meeting’s about to start, so I’d best be on my way.
Give me a call, and we can talk about it.
Enjoy your evening!” He gave an absentminded smile and tottered away.
My siblings and I stared after him in shock.
“Who was that guy?” Hawk asked. “He’s not from the Hollow.”
“What the fuck just happened?” Knox growled.
Emma frowned. “Is he talking about the Pond orchard where your heirloom varietals are?”
My stomach plummeted to the floor. “He’d better not be,” I said in a low, angry voice.
I’d been single-handedly cultivating that orchard since I was Emma’s age.
Over the years, I’d researched and acquired scion wood from a wide variety of apple trees that had nearly gone extinct, patiently grafted them onto rootstock, and nurtured them to health.
And while I loved every square inch of Sunday Orchard, from the U-pick fields to the commercial operation to the pumpkin patch, the Pond orchard was my pride and joy. My labor of love. My life’s work.
I was going to kill Luke Williams, plain and simple.
Gage took the papers out of my hand. “Everyone stay calm. Jeez, it’s like Sunday brothers live to get all alpha-angry over nonsense. Let me take a look… oh.”
Hawk shoved his head over Gage’s shoulder. “Oh, what?”
Gage let out a humming sound. “It says here… Hezekiah Pond drew up papers upon his sister’s marriage to Benjamin Sunday. He divided his land ‘from the mighty oak to the hedgerow.’ But the lawyer’s note says the oak got cut down a hundred years ago…”
Emma snorted. “Hedgerow. I thought that was a made-up word in those Pride and Prejudice fanfics Hawk reads.”
“They’re not all fanfic,” Hawk muttered. “Some are retellings. There’s a difference.”
Knox was over Gage’s other shoulder, reading under his breath.
“Part of that land passed back to the Pond family on Esther Whistlebaum Pond Sunday’s death, as a legacy to her nephew, but only so far as ‘the line running due east from the bend in Pond Creek to the fence before the cider house.’ And the creek dried up during the world-famous beaver overrun of 1872. ”
Now Hawk was the one snorting. “Beaver Overrun. Sounds like the name of a girl band.”
Emma elbowed him out of the way before plucking one of the papers out of Gage’s stack. “Wait. It says here the hedgerow was decimated in the Great Spongy Moth Plague of 1867. What does that even mean? I’m still not sure I understand what a hedgerow is, much less a spongy moth plague.”
I shook my head and tried not to grind my teeth. “None of this matters. It’s not his fucking land. The stone wall between our properties was erected before the Civil War, for God’s sake!”
Gage muttered under his breath. “And people think Floridians are weird. What kind of language is this written in? Ye olde farmhande? Can anything this old still be legal? Can we get someone to translate this?”
Knox met my eyes over Gage’s head. “Webb, the wall doesn’t mean anything. You can build a wall… anywhere. Are you sure the property transfer is legit?”
My fingernails bit into my palms. “Of course it is! We’ve planted on that land for centuries.
If Luke fucking Williams thinks he’s going to dispute a land transfer that happened in the Revolutionary War era, he’s got another think—ah, Mrs. Graber!
So nice to see you. Yes, he’s fine. Just sleeping over at a friend’s house.
” I tried to smile at the librarian’s kind inquiry, even though I knew it was just a nosy excuse for coming over here to see what had the Sunday siblings in a dither.
Once she was gone, I turned back to my family and noticed Hawk and Emma snickering. “What is it now?”
Emma was laughing too hard to speak, so Hawk said it.
“Jebediah Sunday signed a ‘friendship agreement’ saying he could continue growing his crops on Abraham Pond’s land for ‘one hundred fruitful harvests,’ with a certain percentage of the Sundays’ ‘yield from our friendship’ to be paid to Abraham’s heirs.
That lawyer guy has a note here asking how many fruitful harvests there’ve been since 1836 and whether or not the Sundays have been delivering apples to the Ponds. ”
“I’m not giving Luke Williams my apples,” I snapped, drawing way too much attention.
I felt fury boiling up inside me, coiling and kicking like a living thing, as if all the restless anger I felt about all the shit I couldn’t control in my life had coalesced into something too enormous to ignore.
As it happened, Hawk had been right. It was possible to feel very, very angry over a tiny parcel of land.
Incensed, really.
Infuriated beyond the telling.
My face heated, and I realized I couldn’t stay here for one of Little Pippin Hollow’s interminable town meetings.
I needed to leave.
“He’d probably like our apples,” Emma said, tapping a fingertip to her chin. “At least… he might like Gage and Knox’s apples, if you catch my meaning.”
“I don’t,” I spat, not wanting to hear about Luke Williams and anyone’s apples.
Knox got a knowing look on his face. “I have the pickup line already ready.”
I shot Knox a look. “Don’t say it. Do. Not. Say. It.”
“How do you like them apples?” Knox said dutifully before all four of them lost their collective shit and I stormed out into the night.
There’d never been a clearer sign that tonight was the night for getting utterly and completely wasted.
And I knew just the place for it.
When I hit the cool night air, I stopped long enough to take a deep breath and try to calm the hell down so I didn’t flash an angry scowl at all of the townspeople still filtering into the building. It was just long enough for Knox to catch up to me.
“I’m sorry. I was just trying to introduce a little levity to the situation. We don’t know how serious this is yet, Webb, so take a breath.”
“It’s fine. I just need a drink. And I need to not sit through a bunch of bullshit about some ridiculous clause in some other dude’s idiot ancestor’s will, and how a developer wants to pave paradise and put up a…
a vacation resort. I could give two shits about Fogg Peak when I’m busy worrying about Sunday Orchard, and I’m really fucking tired of random-ass documents from almost three hundred years ago determining the course of people’s lives today. ”
“Fine, then let me go with you,” Knox offered. “I’ll tell Gage—”