Chapter 4 - The Outcast Aunt
The drive to Mount Gilead took an hour and fifteen minutes through a steady, gray November drizzle that turned the corn stubble along Route 42 into black slush.
Frank drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the console, his eyes scanning the rear-view mirror every three miles to make sure Davis’s private investigators hadn't picked up our track from Cambridge Boulevard. We had left my cell phone on the kitchen counter, plugged into the charger, so its GPS transponder would tell Cashin I was still lying in bed, compliant and still.
Aunt Vesper’s house was a two-story Victorian that had lost its paint during the Bush administration. The wraparound porch had settled four inches into the clay on the eastern side, giving the entire facade the crooked, defiant lean of an old barn that refused to fall simply because the wind hadn't asked politely.
Vesper Caldwell opened the door before we had reached the top of the porch steps.
She was seventy-one, with hair the color of galvanized wire cut into an irregular bob that looked as though she had trimmed it herself with kitchen shears. She wore a stained wool cardigan over a denim work shirt, men’s chore trousers, and a pair of mud-caked muck boots. In her right hand, held casually against her thigh, was an old Remington 1100 twelve-gauge shotgun, its walnut stock worn smooth by forty years of rabbit hunting.
She looked at my sling. She looked at the blue sutures in my temple. Then she looked past me at Frank’s six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame.
"You look like a Conrail brakeman," she said to Frank.
"Norfolk Southern, ma'am," Frank said, touching the brim of his ballcap. "Track supervisor."
"Same difference," Vesper said, lowering the barrel two inches. "They both smell like creosote and bad coffee. Come inside before the cold gets into the floorboards. I don't heat the hall."
The interior of the house was a library of grievance. Every horizontal surface—the sideboard, the grand piano that hadn't been tuned since 1982, the walnut dining table—was covered in three-ring binders, banker’s boxes, and legal pads bound with thick rubber bands.
A cast-iron woodstove was roaring in the corner of the parlor, filling the room with the dry, fragrant heat of burning hickory and seasoned ash.
"Coraline finally did it, didn't she?" Vesper said, walking to a dented enamel pot sitting on the stove and pouring three cups of dark, bitter chicory into mismatched ceramic mugs. She didn't offer milk. She didn't offer sugar. "She finally used the physical option."
"Blythe did the pushing," I said, sitting on the edge of a horsehair sofa that groaned under my weight. "Coraline gave the nod."
"Of course she did," Vesper said, sitting in an oak rocker that had two iron brackets bracing the back spindles. "Coraline never uses her own fingernails if she can find a child to do the scratching. That’s how she took my husband’s shares in seventy-nine. She told Arthur that my Donald was drinking his lunch at the Athletic Club. She had a forged ledger from the warehouse manager showing five hundred cases of industrial hydraulic oil missing from the docks. Donald was too proud to fight her; he signed the surrender agreement just to stop her from calling his mother."
She took a long sip of the chicory, her eyes narrow and gray as creek stones.
"What did they try to make you sign?"
"Medical power of attorney," I said. "And an emergency conservatorship."
"And the land?"
I paused, the mug halfway to my mouth. "How do you know about the land?"
Vesper laughed—a dry, rattling sound that ended in a sharp bark. She reached behind her chair, pulled a heavy, cloth-bound surveyor’s register from a milk crate, and dropped it onto the floorboards with a dull thump.
"Because your father didn't buy that parcel from Conrail, Maren," she said. "My husband Donald gave it to him in 1974."
I stared at her. "My father told me he bought it at county auction."
"Your father was a proud man who didn't want his daughter knowing he had taken a favor from a Caldwell," Vesper said, leaning forward until I could see the tiny silver whiskers on her chin. "Donald was the operations vice president before Coraline’s branch of the family staged their little corporate coup. Donald knew that the city was going to build the outer belt through Hilliard. He knew that the western rail approach would eventually become the only deep-water freight terminal for the entire inland port."
She tapped the surveyor's register with her knuckle.
"The deed contains a reversionary covenant, Maren. Donald wrote it himself on the back of the original plat map. If Caldwell Logistics ever attempts to acquire that siding through eminent domain, corporate acquisition, or marriage, the title doesn't transfer. It reverts to a private trust dedicated to the maintenance of the retired rail workers' pension fund in Franklin County."
She smiled, showing teeth that were slightly crooked and yellowed from decades of strong tea.
"Coraline doesn't know the covenant exists because Richard Davis’s father was too lazy to pull the underlying 1974 county deed records. They thought it was a simple fee-simple grant to your father. If they take that property through an involuntary conservatorship, they trigger the covenant automatically. The land doesn't go to Cashin. It goes to the union trust. And Caldwell Logistics loses its last operational rail connection by the end of the month."
I looked at Frank. He was leaning against the doorframe, his mug held in both hands, his mouth open slightly.
"That means..." Frank started.
May you like
"It means," I said, "they're trying to steal a box that has an explosive charge wired to the latch."
"Exactly," Vesper said. "And I've been waiting forty-seven years for someone to hand Coraline the matches."
