Close to the Broken Hearted

by Michael Hiebert

  After four or five attempts, Dewey got his bike out of the ditch. By then, mine was already in the trunk. “Bye, Abe,” Dewey said with a wave. “Bye, Miss Leah.” And with that, he kicked off and headed down the hill toward the Blackberry Springs Bridge and his home.

  “Get in the car!” my mother snapped.

  I got in the car. She got in her side and slammed her door. Turning the key to start the ignition, she told me, “If I ever catch you doin’ somethin’ like this again . . . so help me. Didn’t we go through all this once before?”

  I knew what she was talkin’ ’bout. She was talkin’ ’bout Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow, just like Dewey had been on the phone this morning. But just like I’d told him, this was all different on account of Preacher Eli actually having shot a kid and gone to prison for it. I was about to tell her just that when she turned her face to me and I saw that look in her eyes that meant it was best to just keep my thoughts to myself. I’d learned that over the years you didn’t mess around when she gave you that look.

  So instead, I asked, “Where’re we goin’? This isn’t the way home.” We’d just driven by the turnoff to Cottonwood Lane.

  “I’m still workin’. Now you’re stuck comin’ with me.”

  “Comin’ with you where?”

  “Just mind your business.”

  She kept driving down Hunter Road, heading toward Main Street. Soon, the silence seemed to become too much for her because she broke it. “So. I decided to call that Addison woman back and tell her we’d drive into Georgia next time I had a day off. Meet these grandparents of yours. How do you feel about that?”

  It was like dozens of lightning bugs suddenly swarmed up into my chest. “That’s great!” I said.

  We turned left onto Main Street and drove right past the library where me and Dewey had sat with my aunt Addison that morning it was so hot. The marble steps still looked bright white this afternoon, but a scattering of green leaves covered some. They’d blown from the maple trees planted beside them. “I’m hopin’ your sister thinks it’s great, too,” my mother said with a slight worry in her voice.

  I frowned. “You don’t think Carry’ll wanna meet her grandparents?” I found this a very odd thing to be figuring on. Surely, everyone wanted to meet their kin.

  “It’s tough to call how Carry will react to things sometimes. Your sister can be”—she searched for the word—“complicated.”

  “How do you mean—complicated?”

  “She’s just . . . never mind. She’s a girl. You can’t expect to understand ’em. Especially at your age.”

  I didn’t say nothing, just watched the businesses sail by on either side of the road, while trying to guess what our destination was. Finally, I asked again. “Where are we goin’, anyway? Seems like we’re headin’ all the way to the other end of Main Street.”

  “I told you,” my mother said. “Mind your business.”

  I figured since I now seemed to be working with her it was my business to know where we were going, but I found out soon enough. It actually did turn out to be pretty near all the way down at the end of Main Street. She pulled her car to a stop right in front of the Alvin Courthouse. At first, I figured that was our destination, but it turned out we were headed to the public records office right beside the courthouse. I think the records office actually was part of the courthouse, but we entered through the front from the outside, so it seemed like a separate building. Compared to the courthouse it was small and squat.

  Inside, it wasn’t even as big as it looked from the outside. The room was filled with a musty smell, like the pages of old books. Sunlight shined through the three main windows along the front wall. The rest of the room was lit with fluorescent lights.

  Bookshelves separated the room into sections, making it almost like a maze. Most were floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with spines of all sorts of books. There were also catalogs and files like we have in our school library explaining which books had what information in ’em so you could find what you were looking for. Maps and old photographs hung on the walls.

  “I’m Detective Leah Teal from the Alvin Police Department,” my mother told the clerk working behind the small pine desk tucked away in the back corner. “I’d like to check out your property records, if I may.” The clerk’s desk was stacked with papers, making it appear even smaller than it was, so it suited the room. The stacks were so high, some of them rose taller than the woman, who was a brunette with short, curly hair and large round glasses. The stacks made her appear even smaller than she turned out to be once she stood up.

  “Oh, absolutely,” she said, seemingly impressed with the fact that my mother was a detective. Her eyes fell to the sword at my side. Then they went back to my mother.

  “This is my son, Abe,” my mother said, explaining. “I reckon he believes he’s Peter Pan.”

  The clerk laughed. I didn’t find it very funny. My mother had just made a joke at my expense.

  The clerk escorted us through the maze of shelves right across the room to the other side, where the thickest of the white-covered books packed a series of shelves on the back wall. I had never seen books so tall. Each one had to be nearly two feet in height. “You’ll find all of the properties in Alvin and the outlying areas listed here. Each volume is categorized by location. You can refer to this map.” She pointed out a map on the back wall that was broken out into squares.

  My mother thanked her and set about tracing her finger up the map, northward. At first, I thought she was heading toward Eli Brown’s new place, but she wasn’t. She was following Fairview Drive, but instead of veering left like Fairview did, she let her finger curve off right and continue around the bend where it turned into Bogpine Way.

  “Goin’ frog huntin’?” I asked, with a laugh.

  “Mind your business,” my mother told me again, not taking her eyes off the map.

  I thought I was being funny. Bogpine Way wraps around a dense forest that opens onto Beemer’s Bog, a place known to get overrun with toads in late spring. Nobody goes near it on account of the smell and all the noise.

  She stopped her finger about a third of the way up the Bogpine bend and tapped. “What street number do you reckon this is?”

  I looked behind me to see if the lady clerk was still standing with us, but she wasn’t, so I figured my mother must be talking to me. I didn’t have a clue what she meant. “I don’t know. How would you ever tell?”

  “I guess you just estimate. This says one hundred down here and three hundred up here. That’s about two inches between them. Would you say this is around another inch and a little bit? I’m looking for four-oh-five.”

  “I guess.” I didn’t rightly know an inch from an inchworm, to be quite honest. But I didn’t want to sound dumb.

  “Okay, that puts us in square zero-seven-C,” she said, reading the numbers from the side and top of the map. “See if you can find that volume.”

  I started looking at the white books on the shelves. It took me a moment to realize they had numbers and letters on their spines. Unfortunately, it appeared the only ones low enough for me to see were from the letters E to T. “I reckon it’s in one of the top rows,” I said.

  “I reckon you’re right.” My mother scanned the top three shelves. It took her a minute before she pulled one of the books from where it sat. It turned out to be even larger than I expected, at least half as wide as it was tall. These books were massive and thick with pages full of information.

  My mother laid the book on a table under the map and carefully opened it to the back where an index listed the addresses by street number and page. She quickly flopped the pages back to the page she wanted. I found myself looking at a detailed map of a bit of road with some forest on the right of it. She flipped ahead the next five pages; every one showed a bit more of the road and the trees as it went farther up and curved right into the forest. I realized I was looking at one big parcel of land.

  In the bottom right corner of each page was a sq
uare with writing inside it:

  405 Bogpine Way, Alvin, AL 36573

  $120,000.00

  320 Acre Property (Cattle Ranch)

  Owner: Unlisted.

  Mon. 2 Mar. 1981 08:00:00

  My mother stared at that square a long while.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” she said. “It don’t make no sense to me.”

  “What don’t?”

  “The land’s sat there this whole time untouched. Nobody’s developed it. The old farmhouse and barn are just rotting away. I don’t understand why there ain’t no owner listed. I thought the state would be listed as owner, or at least the county.”

  “Owner of what?”

  “The land Miss Sylvie’s pa owned ’fore he died.”

  “Wouldn’t Miss Sylvie own it? I thought kids got whatever their folks had when their folks died.” That was my understanding of the whole thing.

  “Miss Sylvie couldn’t afford it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ranches cost money to upkeep, and Sylvie was only fourteen when her folks died. She was in no shape to look after the ranch alone, let alone worry about making the costs. She went into foster care.”

  “What’s foster care?”

  “Nothing you don’t ever need to worry ’bout.”

  “Why would anyone want to live so close to Beemer’s Bog?” I asked her, but she completely ignored me. She picked up the book and, leaving it open at one of the pages of the ranch Miss Sylvie’s pa used to own, lugged it back to the desk where the clerk sat. “Mind if I bother you with somethin’?” my mother asked her.

  The clerk smiled. “Of course not. That’s why I’m here.”

  My mother came around to her side of the desk and bent down, showing her the page and the square with the writing in it. “Right here,” she said, “where it lists ‘Owner.’ Can you tell me what ‘Unlisted’ means?”

  The clerk looked confused. “I ain’t never seen that ’fore.”

  “Could it mean it’s owned by the county? Because that’s how I figure it should be. And the date of the record would be pretty near right.”

  The clerk continued to look at it in confusion. “No . . . if it’s owned by the county, it always says ‘Vacant,’ not ‘Unlisted.’ Don’t ask me why. ‘County’ would make more sense. But I don’t know what ‘Unlisted’ means. It’s almost as though the owner wasn’t put in the records, but I don’t see how that’s possible. It’s public information.”

  “That’s what I thought,” my mother said. “Would there be somewhere else I might be able to find out who this property belongs to?”

  “We can run a title search on it. That will involve sending off a form to the Mobile County public records office, but it usually doesn’t take long to get a response.”

  “And that will definitely have the owner listed?”

  “It should. If that doesn’t, something funny’s goin’ on. The next step would be to request a copy of the deed. That would list ownership for sure.”

  “What’s this dollar amount?” my mother asked.

  “That’s the amount the land was appraised at when this survey map was made. We keep the actual assessment records separate, so if you wanted a recent assessment record, I could get you that. But it shows here that, on March 2, 1981, this property was worth one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

  My mother thought this over. “Is there any way we can tell if there is a lien on the property?”

  “We can request that information as part of the title search. I’m sorry, Officer—”

  “Detective,” my mother corrected her. “Detective Teal.”

  “I’m sorry, Detective Teal, Alvin’s just too small to have a records office that keeps much more than just basic records. Would you like me to help you fill out the request for the title search? We can do it right now and save you a lot of time.”

  “Sure.”

  And so my mother did that while I went back and looked at the big map of Alvin hanging on the wall. As I did, my eyes were constantly being drawn upward and westward to that little spot of land in Blackberry Springs where I knew, right at this very moment, Preacher Eli was planning his next move.

  And I was willing to bet dollars to dingbats it had something to do with that teenager who drove that strange silver car me and Dewey had seen parked beside the house.

  CHAPTER 16

  The next day, me and Dewey rode our bikes down to Main Street just for something to do. We often did this—went for bike rides while we talked about this and that. It was nice having the wind on our faces and the sun on the tops of our heads, especially in the summer when it got so hot. We were in the middle of an especially hot spell, and sweat clung to my hair and occasionally ran down the sides of my face while we went along. Of course, both of us had our swords dangling from our hips. They’d become pretty much part of our standard wardrobe.

  Today, Dewey had been doing most of the talking, going on about one of the inventions from his book. It was for an outboard motor he had developed (so far on paper only) that should work with the rubber dinghy he had in his dad’s shed. “We can take the dinghy up to Willet Lake and I’ll show you how it will work. That is, once we build it.”

  I wondered why he chose Willet Lake. It was a nice enough lake and all, but the only way to get there was by walking through a narrow path in the woods that opened on Hunter Road pretty near a half block up from Preacher Eli’s place. Alvin had two other lakes to choose from, Cornflower Lake and Painted Lake, but Dewey had to pick the one that sat on the doorstep of a convicted murderer. Somehow it just figured.

  “I don’t really like boats,” I said. What I really meant was that I didn’t really like being shot to death in the middle of a lake by a crazy old preacher man.

  “You’ll like ’em when they have motors attached. Especially my motor. It’ll go really fast. Did I tell you it uses a car battery and an electric egg beater?”

  “No,” I said. At that point, I started tuning him out as he went on about the intricacies of motor building using household appliances and common garden supplies.

  Finally, I couldn’t listen to him go on about ridiculous ideas for motors anymore so I casually changed the subject.

  “Guess what my mom told me yesterday.”

  “Now how could I possibly guess something like that?” he asked.

  “I didn’t mean for you to really guess.”

  “Then why did you say it?”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s just somethin’ people say. Like ‘Betcha don’t know what I’ve been up to lately.’ ”

  “I wouldn’t know that either.”

  “I suspect you would have a better idea than anyone else would, though.” We were getting off topic.

  “Well, if I had to guess what you’d been up to,” Dewey said, “I’d guess it would have somethin’ to do with your ma bein’ upset with you for catchin’ you spyin’ on Preacher Eli yesterday. She sure seemed mad.”

  “Aw, she wasn’t so bad,” I said. “I’ve had her much madder at me than that. Heck, all she did was force me to go to the records office with her.”

  “The records office? What the heck for?”

  I pedaled backward slightly and slowed down my pace. We were coming up on Vera’s Old West Grill on our left and the air was full of the smell of burgers sizzling on the grill. My mouth watered and my stomach gave a little rumble.

  Dewey saw that I was braking and matched my speed. He knew what I was about to say was important. “Now you can’t tell nobody,” I said, trying to keep my voice to a whisper, even though it’s impossible to hear somebody whispering when you’re riding a bike. So I ended up just talking as quietly as possible.

  A group of three men came out of Vera’s, laughing. They were all wearing golf shirts and dress pants. I figured they probably worked together—maybe at one of the office spaces that would soon be coming up on our right. Likely, they were on their lunch break.

  Dew
ey knew I was serious. He waited until we were well past hearing distance of the men before he spoke. “I won’t. You know you can trust me.” Boy, did I have his interest now.

  “My mom was checking out the land owned by Sylvie Carson’s folks ’fore they died. I didn’t know exactly what she was lookin’ for, but from what I could catch, she seemed to think somethin’ sneaky’s goin’ on. And all I could think of was that if there is anythin’ weird, the obvious person behind it is Preacher Eli.”

  “Of course,” Dewey said. “Did your ma agree?”

  “I didn’t ask her. But she did find out somethin’ strange. Apparently, whoever owns the land isn’t listed at the records office and the woman workin’ there said that was quite unusual. She appeared rather concerned ’bout it, actually.”

  We came to a stop at the intersection where Sweetwater Drive runs through Main Street. On the corner across the street, Fast Gas looked deserted. There were no cars at the pumps and I didn’t even see an attendant working there. Looking at the gas station made me think of my pa and how he used to work at a gas station farther down Main Street during nights and how, if he’d worked days, he’d probably still be alive. I was glad that gas station he worked at wasn’t around no more and that they’d built the Brookside Mall where it used to be. Judging by Fast Gas, it certainly seemed like working the day shift was a much easier job than nights. You didn’t even have to be out front. You could just hide somewhere inside if you wanted.

  “So what did your ma do?” Dewey asked as we started riding again.

  “She sent off for more records from the Mobile office that’s a lot bigger and has more information. The woman said they’d know for sure who owns the land. My mom was really suspicious ’bout the whole thing and didn’t seem to like it one bit that there wasn’t no one listed. I really got the feelin’ Preacher Eli’s gonna turn out to be somehow involved.”

  “Wow,” Dewey said. “That’s somethin’. I can’t wait to hear ’bout those records when they come.”

  The row of business centers came up on our right. There were three of them; each was a three-story cement building named after a hawk. There was Hawk Ridge, Hawk Point, and Hawk Landing. I didn’t rightly know what hawks had to do with business. Each business center squatted back from the road surrounded by poplars and gardens full of rhododendrons and wild roses. The light wind picked up the sweet smell of the roses as we passed.