'People will talk about them now as victims or witnesses,' Ruth said. 'I want you to remember they were people first. They laughed. They borrowed money. They forgot appointments. They got into arguments. Lydia was once so angry at your father for buying a boat motor without a boat that she hid the motor in the pantry until he agreed to return it.'
Peter grinned. 'I remember that motor.'
'You can't,' I said. 'You were six.'
'I remember the smell. It made the cereal taste terrible.'
We laughed until Ruth wiped her eyes. The warmth of the room did not solve anything, but it corrected an imbalance. We had been spending our days among threats, photographs and old maps. For an hour we were allowed to remember that the people on those documents had once enjoyed ordinary evenings.
On Friday I met with an attorney named Simone Patel, recommended by Cho because she handled property disputes and understood the boundaries between private lawsuits and public investigations. Simone worked in a modest office above a bakery and made me wait while she finished a call to a tenant whose landlord had changed the locks. She listened to my story, then asked for three things: the current deed, Kline's proposed easement and the written correspondence from the development company.
'I need you to hear something,' she said when I finished. 'We can challenge an invalid easement. We can demand records. We can preserve testimony. We cannot solve a missing-person case through a real-estate lawsuit, and we cannot use a civil filing to force a confession. Those are different processes.'
'I know.'
'Some clients tell me they know and then spend ten thousand dollars trying to make a courtroom answer a question it wasn't designed to answer. You're an engineer. You know the difference between a tool and a wish.'
I smiled despite myself. 'My father used to say that about a wrench.'
She took copies and agreed to send Kline a letter instructing the company to communicate through counsel. She also arranged for an independent title search that reached back to the original utility easement. The fee would consume a painful portion of my savings, but I had spent too much of the week feeling that my choices were being made by invisible people. Signing the engagement letter gave me one small decision I could recognize as mine.
On the way out, I passed a display case of wedding cakes in the bakery below. The owner was discussing frosting colors with a couple who had brought photographs of a garden. I paused and watched them argue cheerfully over lavender versus cream. Their future existed in manageable decisions, and I envied them. Then I bought a lemon tart for Peter and walked into the rain.
He was on the garage floor when I returned, studying a patch of concrete near the back wall. He had found an old stain shaped like the outline of a jack stand, and beneath it a small brass washer engraved with an unfamiliar sequence of letters. I told him not to touch anything until Cho approved. He rolled his eyes but called Santos. The deputy arrived and photographed the washer. It belonged to a vehicle part, he thought, probably harmless. Peter asked whether investigators had checked the garage floor beneath the benches. Santos admitted the search had been limited because they lacked reason to excavate private property. He promised to pass the information along.
That afternoon the house phone rang. It was a landline Dad had kept even after everybody else switched to mobile. A man asked for Harold. When I said he had passed away, the caller remained silent so long I thought the line had dropped. Then he said, 'Tell Eleanor the south culvert isn't the only thing they changed,' and hung up.
We filed a report. Cho asked whether the caller sounded old or young. I said I couldn't tell. He had spoken slowly, perhaps to disguise his voice. The next day a tracing request identified the call as routed through an internet service, the account registered under a name that did not exist. I realized I had begun to imagine every anonymous caller as an enemy, but this one might have been trying to help. The uncertainty was exhausting.
Simone's title search produced its first surprise on Monday. The original north utility easement had been released in 1987, a fact omitted from the county's digital index. The development company's correspondence therefore referred to a right that had not existed in nearly four decades. Kline's draft document sought to restore access for vaguely described 'maintenance activities,' language broad enough to support construction vehicles and underground work. Simone advised me not to sign and sent a formal demand for the source of the company's claimed right.
That evening Peter opened Dad's shed again with Santos present and examined the shelves under a work light. A faded blue paint tin held a stack of receipts for concrete delivered to the creek. The quantities were small and the dates old, but two were paid in cash by a company called Mariner Services. I remembered the name from a list in Ruth's ledger. Santos photographed them and asked whether Dad had ever worked for Mariner. Peter said he hadn't, as far as he knew. The more we learned, the less our father's role seemed like that of a bystander. He had bought parts, hauled materials and paid people to keep a car hidden. He might have been gathering evidence. He might also have done things he had been ashamed to explain.
The possibility brought on our worst argument. I said he should have told the authorities years earlier. Peter replied that the authorities might have been among the people who threatened him. I said fear didn't justify every decision. Peter said I had no idea how it felt to live with someone who listened for cars at night. We both raised our voices. Finally he said, 'You got to hate him from a distance. I had to love him here, while he was frightened and getting older. Those are different jobs.'
I left the kitchen and sat in the dark on the back porch. He was right about the distance, though not necessarily about what it excused. An hour later he came out with two cups of tea and sat beside me. We agreed we could argue about Dad without arguing about whether we belonged to each other. It sounded obvious when spoken aloud. Neither of us had acted as though it were obvious for years.