Chapter 3
Cedar Hollow was never quite sure what to make of me. Over the years I had heard the theories, usually delivered in the friendly, speculative tone people use when they are trying to place a neighbor without actually asking him.
Some people thought I was a mechanic. That was close enough to be understandable and wrong enough to be useless. Some thought I was a contractor, which made them picture me building decks and additions, neither of which I had ever done for money. A few, the ones who liked a good story, thought I was running some kind of illegal commercial business out of the metal building behind my house, which was flattering in a strange way, as if my life were more exciting than it was.
None of those were right. What I actually did was service heating systems and propane appliances: regulators, furnaces, water heaters, emergency systems, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a house warm and its water hot and its occupants from thinking about any of it. Most of that work took place outside Cedar Hollow. I drove to farmhouses and small businesses and houses on county roads where the owner would meet me at the door and say, "It's making a noise again," as if the noise were a personal betrayal. I fixed the noise. I checked the pressure. I replaced the part that had given up. Then I drove home.
The workshop existed for a simple reason: to keep fumes and noise out of the house. Propane work smells like work. Tools clang. Compressors complain. A house is for sleeping and eating and sitting still for five minutes with a cup of coffee. A workshop is for everything else. Keeping them separate was not a business strategy. It was common sense, and it kept my kitchen from smelling like a garage.
My land, though, was older than any of that. It predated Cedar Hollow by decades. Before there were three curving streets and sixty houses and identical mailbox posts, there was a farm here, and the family that worked it kept goats. The Halvorsens. Their hay barn had stood roughly where my workshop stood now. Their dirt access road had run toward the county road along much the same line my gravel drive followed. When the subdivision arrived, it arrived around my parcel, not over it, like water going around a rock.
That history mattered in a way I did not yet fully appreciate. There was an old propane distribution agreement in the county archives, recorded as Book 412, Page 117, made in 1988 between the Halvorsen farm estate and the original Cedar Hollow developer. I knew it was there. I had not needed it in years. It was the kind of paper you file away and forget about until someone tells you to remove a tank you have owned for nine years, at which point you start remembering where you filed things with a great deal more interest.
For most of my life on that land, none of it had been a story. It had just been the ground I lived on, the barn that became a workshop, and the work I did. Cedar Hollow could think whatever it liked about the man in the metal building. I had heat, hot water, and a truck that started most mornings. That had seemed like enough.
The work itself was steadier than people assumed. A furnace does not care about the season in the way a garden does; it fails when it fails, usually on the coldest night of the month, and it expects you to answer the phone. I answered it. I drove out with a flashlight between my teeth and a gauge in my hand, and I stood in basements and utility rooms listening to machines the way a doctor listens to a chest. Most of the time the problem was small: a valve that had stuck, a pilot that had given up, a regulator that had drifted out of calibration the way old things drift. Small problems, fixed promptly, are what keep big problems from happening, and most of my working life was spent preventing the second kind.