Chapter 22 #2
Settled at last, her blazer hung over the back of the chair, she reached for the phone to call Nick. He wouldn’t answer. She’d leave him enough information to know where her morning stood.
“It’s me.” Hadley reached over and woke her monitor while she talked.
“Nora Oliver just told me Roland went to his parents’ place Monday night.
Said he thought somebody was watching him.
If he was that uneasy, he might not have wanted that USB drive on him.
He might not have wanted it in his own house at all.
I think you should send somebody out to Holloway and ask the Mercers for permission to search their place.
Roland could have left it there. Give me a call when you get this. ”
She set the receiver in its cradle before the machine cut her off. She’d have run him through the rest of the morning, but she’d rambled enough, and cramming every last thing into a voice message wasn’t how she operated. She’d wait until she had something worth the call.
Hadley signed into her computer before taking a sip of coffee.
It didn’t take long to find the number for the circuit clerk’s office, since they were the ones who handled land records for the county.
Every deed, every plat, every parcel that had changed hands in Cane County since the first survey was recorded and kept in their books at the courthouse in Emberwood.
The woman who answered had clearly gotten into the coffee early, or else she was just a morning person. Cheerful in a way that had no business existing before eight, and helpful in a way Hadley hadn’t expected before the call.
“Land history? Honey, that’s the fun part of this job.
Everybody wants deeds and liens. Nobody ever wants the old stuff.
” She’d introduced herself as Colleen, thirty-one years at the recorder’s office.
“But listen to me going on. You said you’re the police chief over in Whistlerun?
I was so sorry to hear about Chief Langley.
I only ever spoke to the man a handful of times over the years, but he was as kind as they come. What is it you’re after, hon?”
“The original Vinton tract. The east end, specifically. I’d like to know what ground the Vintons broke first, before anything else went in. And the whole chain of title, if I can get it, down to whoever owns the lots now.”
There was a pause, and the woman’s brightness settled into something more like work.
“Oh, now that’s going to take me a while, hon.
The Vintons go clear back to the first survey, and none of that stuff is in the computer.
Anything that old, we’re talking bound plat books and deed ledgers, and I’d have to walk the grantor index by hand to trace it all the way down. That’s a basement job.”
Colleen didn’t sound put out by the request, only honest about the workload. Hadley needed the records, so she let the silence sit and carry the weight of her appeal.
“I can pull it for you, but not this morning.” A reply was muffled when Colleen spoke to someone in the office, then she came back.
“I’ve got the counter to cover till I switch with Deb at ten.
Give me until this afternoon, and I’ll call you back with the whole chain.
It’s odd, though. You’re the second person to come asking after those old records. ”
Hadley had lifted her mug halfway to her lips, but she set it back down beside the keyboard.
“Recently?”
“Lordy, no. Last year. Summertime, to be exact. I’d just come off physical therapy for my knee, and I sailed through that, thank you kindly.
My memory’s a steel trap, though.” Colleen’s voice dropped, folding Hadley into the confidence.
“Not like Deb. We’ve been here the longest, the two of us, but that woman can’t recall what she had for lunch last Tuesday, never mind a year back. ”
“Well, since your memory’s the one that shines…” Hadley kept it light. “Do you remember who it was? Anything that stood out about what they were after?”
“Oh, I recall him just fine.” Colleen’s tone turned soft and filled with pity. “Knew his family for years. It was that professor who taught over at the community college. It’s just awful, what happened to him. Awful.”
Hadley straightened in the chair, her pulse picking up.
“Between you and me, I always thought that man was a touch obsessed with the Threshing Man. My mama recited the old stories every harvest, but I never took to them the way my sister did.” Colleen’s tone suggested she was sharing a confidence.
“My sister makes a fresh talisman every single year. I told the professor as much, and he said to me there was nothing to fear, that folks had the story wrong, all of them. I couldn’t have talked my sister around to that in a hundred years. ”
A long pause came over the line, but something held Hadley back from breaking it.
“But thinking back on it, he had a hard time believing our records were right.”
“What do you mean?” Hadley’s gaze was drawn to Sarah’s talisman leaning in the window.
“He got the strangest look on his face and kept telling me I had to be mistaken.” A note of mild affront came into Colleen’s voice.
“Let me tell you something, hon, these records are seamless. There’s no mistake in them, not that I ever found.
That original tract, the oldest ground in the whole county, sold out of the Vinton family back in the late eighteen hundreds.
Went to the Chesters, and it stayed with them the better part of a hundred and thirty years.
It’s not corn anymore, of course. The Chesters worked it as a small farm, put up a house, a barn, some outbuildings.
Then it changed hands again a couple of years back.
Fella by the name of Donovan Huber picked it up for a fair price. ”
“Donovan Huber?”
“He’s the one who took over his daddy’s garage on Main Street,” Colleen tacked on, believing that Hadley was questioning the identity of the man. “There are other plats near there that changed hands, of course, but not even my memory is that sharp. That’s why I’ll need to head down to the…”
The wind off the storm gusted hard enough to rattle the pane, and the talisman lost its balance against the glass. It dropped to the floor with a quiet thud. Hadley kept the phone to her ear, but Colleen’s side of the conversation faded away as Hadley thought about the sequence of events.
Donovan Huber had bought Larry Chester’s old place two years back and had been fixing it up ever since.
He lived a mile past Garber’s property, out on the same stretch of road where Reed’s truck had burned down to the frame with Reed inside it, and Donovan had been the one to come around the turn to find it all engulfed in flames.
“Chief? You still there?”
“I’m here.” Hadley cleared her throat and pulled herself back. “Colleen, that copy of the chain. Vinton to Chester to Huber. Can you send me everything you’ve got?”
“As I said, that’s all off the top of my memory. It’ll take me a while to run the papers down again, but I’ll scan them and get something in your inbox by the end of the day. That work?”
“Yes.” Then something else surfaced. “Colleen, do you recall anyone else showing an interest in that land?”
“No, but Deb and I take turns at the counter. Let me check with her.” Colleen called out for her coworker, and Hadley waited, turning over how a change in the deed had just reshaped her entire investigation.
“Chief Dawkins? Deb can’t right recall. No surprise there, but she’d remember shuffling through plats from the eighteen hundreds, trust me. It’s a chore and a half.”
“I appreciate the help, Colleen.” Hadley stood, her chair rolling back a few inches. “Truly. I’ll watch for that email.”
“Might be two or three, depending on the file sizes.” Colleen launched into the trials of the office scanner, and Hadley didn’t cut her off. The spiel ran another minute before it wound down on its own. “You have a good day now, hon. Anything else you need, you call me.”
Hadley set the receiver in its cradle, retrieved her mug, and came out from behind the desk. She crossed the room, picked the talisman up off the floor, and rested it on the back of one of the chairs. She’d hang it right once she had the suction hook. In the meantime, there was a decision to make.
She leaned close enough to the window to make out the garage two blocks down. The bay door stood open, though she couldn’t find Donovan in the shadows of the opening. Had there been a specific reason he’d purchased the Chester place?
Coincidence lived in small towns. Everybody’s land touched everybody else’s out here, and every road ran past somebody’s front door. She’d have told a rookie the same in her sleep.
Something still wasn’t adding up.
If Roland Mercer had known since last summer that Donovan’s ground might be the resting place of a long-dead girl and a settlement’s worth of gold and gems, then why had he been caught trespassing on the east parcel of Vinton’s land?
The section that still grew corn. The rows where the Rutledge girl swore she’d spotted a dark figure standing among the stalks.
Hadley was sure of one thing. Whatever was moving through Cane County, whoever had put Reed on that road, none of it was coincidence.