Chapter 6 - The Freight Office
The old brick rail depot smelled of creosote, damp coal dust, and sixty years of stale tobacco smoke trapped behind yellowed beadboard walls.
Outside, the six-car freight train shunted backward with a metallic shriek of iron wheels against dry steel, the vibration rattling the dusty, fly-specked windows of the station master's office. Inside, the potbelly stove in the corner was cold, but the man sitting behind the scarred oak desk looked like he had been frozen in place since the administration of Jimmy Carter.
“You’re late, Artie,” Silas Vance said without looking up from a ledger that looked as thick as a telephone directory. He didn’t have Harold Pike’s oily charm or Vanessa’s frantic ambition; Silas was the kind of man who ate iron nails for breakfast and spat out rust. “The eleven-fifteen down-line already dropped the manifest for the south section, and if you haven’t got the signature for the timber transfer, the state’s going to seize the right-of-way before lunch.”
Dad kicked the warped wooden door shut behind us, the latch catching with a heavy, satisfying thud that drowned out the rattle of the distant freight cars.
“The state’s got other things on its mind this morning, Silas,” Dad said, walking straight up to the desk and dropping the heavy brass key ring right onto the open ledger. “Harold’s down at the chapel sitting on the floor with a Dixie cup of water, and my daughter’s currently trying to peel her faux-mink collar off a red carpet while Deputy Tom Gable tries to figure out how to write an accident report for a funeral that hasn't happened yet.”
Silas finally raised his head. His eyes were small, gray, and sharp as awls under heavy, bushy brows that looked like two frayed brushes. He looked from the brass keys to Dad, then slowly turned his gaze toward me standing by the door.
“Natalie,” Silas grunted, his voice sounding like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. “You look more like your mother every day. She had that same stubborn look around the mouth whenever Artie tried to buy another tract of scrub oak that wouldn't even grow briars.”
“Silas,” I said, crossing my arms against the chill draft blowing in under the door. “Did you know about this?”
“About what?” Silas leaned back in his swivel chair, the springs groaning in protest. “About Harold helping Vanessa forge a quitclaim deed on the timber rights to pay off Grant’s gambling debts in Decatur? Or about you two staging a resurrection in the middle of a Tuesday viewing room?”
I stared at him. “You knew about the debts?”
“Everybody in Miller County knows when a man starts losing his shirt at the poker table behind the feed store,” Silas said, picking up a stub of a yellow pencil and tapping it against the desk. “Grant’s got the financial sense of a blind mule in a hail-storm. What I didn’t know—until Artie here walked through that door—was whether you two were going to let them steal the whole north ridge before the winter frost set in.”
Dad pulled up a metal folding chair, sat down with a heavy sigh that rattled his ribs, and leaned his elbows on the desk.
“They weren't just after the timber, Silas,” Dad said quietly. “They were after the house. The accounts. The old safe behind the brick veneer in the cellar.”
Silas’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “The cellar safe? The one your granddaddy put in back during the depression?”
“The very same,” Dad nodded. “And Vanessa didn’t wait for the lawyers to open it. She had a crowbar and a set of masonry chisels in the trunk of her Buick by midnight last night.”
Silence fell over the small office, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the rhythmic clack-clack of the rail switch outside and the steady drip of a leaky drainpipe somewhere under the floorboards.
“If they got into that safe,” Silas whispered, leaning forward until his face was six inches from Dad’s, “they didn’t just find the old deeds to the bottomland. They found the letter from the county board dated back to nineteen-seventy-two.”
Dad went completely still. The color drained from his face so fast his skin looked like old parchment under the amber light of the single overhead bulb.
“I thought we burned that letter, Silas,” Dad said, his voice dropping into a harsh, dry rasp.
May you like
“You didn’t burn it,” Silas said grimly. “You gave it to me for safekeeping when the county tried to condemn the water rights. And I put it right where nobody would ever think to look... inside the double bottom of the old mahogany filing cabinet in the back room of Harold’s funeral home.”
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