Chapter 62 - The Granite Crypt
By three in the morning, the rain had started again, drummed against the tin patching we had tacked over the kitchen roof. The house smelled of wet timber, soot, and the bitter trace of ozone drifting up through the cellar floorboards.
Dad sat at the kitchen table, the sole surviving piece of furniture from the front room, cleaning the breech of his old twelve-gauge with an oily rag. He wasn't doing it because he planned to shoot anything; the repetitive motion was the only thing keeping his fingers from locking into stiff, trembling claws.
Across from him, I had the surveyor’s maps from the courthouse spread over the cracked linoleum. I had weighted the four corners with spent brass shells from Julian's hired men.
"Look here," I said, running my thumbnail along the boundary line established by the 1922 county charter. "The creek doesn't bend naturally around the north orchard. Limestone dissolves into sinkholes or bluffs, but this line is straight as a plumb bob for eleven hundred yards. Evelyn didn't fight Julian because she wanted to save the apple trees. She fought him because if he dug five feet into the creek bank, he’d breach the roof."
Dad didn't look up from the gun barrel. "What roof?"
"The flume," I said. "The old waterworks didn't run to the mill. The mill was an intake. It sucked water out of the Blackwood to cool whatever is buried beneath the bedrock. Julian’s company wasn't trying to quarry stone, Dad. They were trying to reach the valves before the automatic timer tripped."
"And Evelyn was stopping them?"
"Evelyn wasn't stopping them," I replied, tracing the purple watermark that had reappeared under my ultraviolet pocket torch. "She was the operator. The payments she made weren't paying down debt. Every payment was an authorization code. Look at the ledger entries from sixty-eight to ninety-eight. The account numbers don't follow standard banking routing. They're coordinates. Grid coordinates, depth marks, and cubic-foot pressure readings."
Dad set the barrel down with a dull thump on the pine table. "She was my wife, Tom. For forty-two years. She baked bread every Tuesday. She patched my work coats with thread she kept in an old Prince Albert tin. You're telling me she lived on top of an ordnance vault?"
"Not ordnance," a woman's voice said from the back doorway.
I was on my feet before the sound had cleared the air, my hand dropping to the heavy iron wrench I’d left on the table. Dad didn't jump; he simply picked up the shotgun receiver and laid two shells into the open chambers with the smooth, terrible calm of an old soldier.
The woman stood in the kitchen doorway, her silhouette framed by the wet darkness of the yard. She wore an oiled canvas coat, blackened at the cuffs, and an old felt cap pulled low over graying hair. Water dripped from her hem onto the porch floor. She wasn't carrying a weapon. She held a battered leather field case under one arm, its brass buckles green with age.
"Put the gun away, Arthur," she said. Her voice was raspy, dry as cracked shale, but there was an authority in it that froze Dad’s thumb on the safety. "If Evelyn had wanted you to shoot me, she wouldn't have left my name on the southern boundary marker."
Dad stared at her, his lips parting. The color drained completely from his face. "Martha?"
"Martha died twenty years ago, Arthur," the woman said, stepping into the room and letting the screen door slap shut behind her. "I'm Sarah. Her younger sister. The one Evelyn said went out West after the flood."
"You were twelve years old," Dad murmured, his voice cracking.
May you like
"And now I'm seventy," she said, dropping the field case onto the table between the maps. "And we have seventy hours before the hydro-static locks on Chamber Four blow the bottom out of this entire valley."
***
