by Dakota West
The microwave beeped again, and this time when Seth stuck his finger into the peas, he nearly burned himself and pulled his hand away, sucking air in through his teeth. Then he sat at the table in the kitchen, the uncomfortable, rickety chair digging into his back, and ate his dinner while he worried about a mine coming to Obsidian.
After he washed his plate and fork, something occurred to him, and he walked into the dining room where Zach’s schoolwork was spread out, his head bent over it studiously. Seth felt bad for interrupting, but did it anyway.
“When was the last time you checked the mail?” Seth asked.
Zach blinked a couple of times, then looked sheepish.
“Maybe like... a week ago?” he said.
Seth knew when his little brother was lying. It had obviously been more than a week.
Not that he’d remembered to check the mail lately. They rarely got any, so they were just out of the habit.
“There’s some stuff on the table in the guest bedroom, actually,” said Zach. “I keep meaning to go through it, but I’ve been really busy and just haven’t remembered.”
He at least looked embarrassed.
Shit, thought Seth. He doubted that if Quarcom was really coming to town, they’d send something through the mail, but it was worth a shot. It wasn’t like he had any idea where to get a copy of the Salt Lake Tribune.
Seth walked to the mailbox. It was a good hundred yards away, by the main road, which was part of why they rarely checked it, and as he walked he could see the mesa hulking black against the star-filled sky, silent and dark. Beyond it, if he listened closely, he could just hear the sound of the river rushing past.
The mailbox was stuffed with junk mail, mostly weekly circulars advertising deals for grocery stores in towns an hour away. He tucked all that under one arm and went through the three envelopes left over: two were from credit cards, addressed to the Monson Residence, and one was from the Kane County tax board, addressed to Seth, Garrett, and Zach.
Shit, thought Seth with a sigh. Property taxes again, and here I thought we might get our heads above water at last.
When he got back to the house, he dumped most of the junk mail in the trash, and took the envelopes upstairs to the desk in the guest bedroom. Since it was just Seth and Zach in the big house, the guest room had mostly become junk storage. They solved the problem of messiness by closing the door.
The desk, at least, wasn’t overflowing, but as Seth tossed the credit card offers onto the desk, he noticed something a little weird. There were five of them already on the desk, and on the outside, they just said, Don’t miss out on this great deal!
Seth got suspicious.
They must really want me to apply for this credit card, thought Seth, or something hinky is going on.
He ripped it open and pulled the letter out, frowning as he saw the thick blue stripe across the letterhead. It was addressed to Seth, Garrett, and Zachary Monson, and it wasn’t long at all.
6th notice
To Mr. Monson, Mr. Monson, and Mr. Monson:
Quarcom, Inc., has filed a motion with the state of Utah requesting documentation of your ownership over several hundred acres in Kane County. While we understand that you claim this land as yours, research into state archives suggest that the proper paperwork has never been filed.
If you do not produce the proper written documentation by Friday, May 16, Quarcom will purchase this land from the state of Utah and put it to industrial use.
For a map of the area in question, and instructions on filing documentation, please see attached.
Regards,
Gilbert Norfrey
“FUCK!” shouted Seth. He threw the letter to the floor and stared at the map.
It was exactly as he’d feared. It was a map of their land, stretching for miles and miles of desert, from the road to the Elk River. On it was Copper Mesa itself, along with a smattering of smaller hills and mesas. Everything but the area immediately around the house was colored in, indicating that if he didn’t do something, it would belong to Quarcom soon.
I’m going to kill Zach, he thought. How could he just leave the mail on the desk in here for a month?
Seth walked to the bed and sat on it heavily, putting his head in his hands. His mind was a whirl, but mostly, he couldn’t believe that it was happening.
This has to be some kind of practical joke, Seth thought, but he didn’t know anyone who could pull this off. He didn’t think that any of his buddies had the imagination to think of this, and probably didn’t have the brainpower to make it sound so real.
It could be a scam, Seth thought, and he lit up. Sure, the letter wasn’t asking for his social security number or credit card info, but maybe it was something else. Maybe they just wanted him to confirm that he and his brothers owned the land, and then step two of the scam would be something more nefarious.
None of that squared with what Jules had said earlier in the truck, though. And Quarcom itself was most certainly a real, horrible company.
Seth let the map fall to the ground, rubbed his eyes, and then looked around the messy room. He’d been tossing odds and ends in there for years now. A pile of VHS tapes sat on the bed, next to one shoe, notebooks from high school, and a plastic shelving unit that he’d had in his bedroom as a kid.
At least the house wasn’t in question. There was the issue of money, of course, but between him and Zach, they could scrape enough money together to rent something in town. The big ranch house had been in his family for generations. His mom had grown up there, and her father before her, back to old Hiram who’d moved to Utah from Missouri a hundred and fifty years ago.
Babies had been born there. People had lived their whole lives there, then expired in one of the rooms. When his own parents had died fourteen years before, the house had become his and his brothers’, and the only reason that they’d been able to stay together instead of being split up in the foster system was because they already had somewhere to live. The judge had even said as much, that he’d never allow the then-seveteen-year-old Seth to become the guardian for his younger brothers if they hadn’t already had a nearly-free place to live.
None of that solved his current problem. Seth took a deep breath, trying to calm his frazzled nerves, and stood, heading downstairs to where his brother still sat, staring at pages full of numbers.
Zach glanced up, then frowned.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You stub your toe or something? I thought I heard you shout.”
Seth just showed him the letter, and watched Zach’s face go pale.
“They can’t do that,” he said. “The 16th is what, in three days? This is bullshit!”
“They’ve been sending us letters for months,” Seth said. Suddenly he felt tired, completely drained of energy. “We never opened them.”
“Shit,” whispered Zach, looking at the map. “At least it’s not the house.”
“I don’t even know where to start,” Seth said. “Has there ever been a deed to all that? Or is there a bill of sale, or even... anything?”
“Did Hiram even buy it?” asked Zach. He put his elbows on the desk, and pushed his hands through his thick, dark hair, making it stick up in every direction. “Or did he just decide to live here?”
“I have no idea,” Seth said.
They stared at each other, blankly.
“I guess I’m firing up the computer,” said Seth.
It was an old computer. The thing still ran Windows 98, and seemed positively ancient, but it was what they had. Seth used it once in a while for the basics, but the only internet service they could get was dialup, and it was deadly slow.
As the thing booted, Seth’s brain worked overtime. He had no idea how to find the deed to the land, if it had ever even existed. He had no idea how he could stop Quarcom if it hadn’t, or if he had no chance. As the oldest brother, he felt like he was responsible for the whole mess, even if all three of them were adults.
I was supposed to keep th
em safe, he thought. How is a mine in the backyard safe?
Finally, the desktop popped up, and Seth started the very slow research process.
Chapter Four
Jules
Jules laid on the lumpy mattress, her book propped over her face. For the thirtieth time in about five minutes, she glanced over at her kitchen counter, about three feet from her face, where her phone sat silently.
Ring, she thought. She narrowed her eyes and focused all her brain power at the thing, willing it to ring as hard as she’d ever willed anything before.
The phone sat there stubbornly, refusing to ring.
She sighed and went back to her book. When she’d gotten a few projects back-to-back in the remoter parts of North America, Jules had optimistically decided that it was time for her to finally read some of the great classics of literature.
At first, she’d torn through Pride and Prejudice, mostly enjoyed Wuthering Heights, and given up on Anna Karenina after about two hundred pages. Right now, she was a quarter of the way into Moby Dick, but she just couldn’t concentrate on it, and it was mostly because of her phone that wouldn’t ring.
Rolling her eyes, she put the book down on her chest, then stretched out until she could just barely grab the phone with her fingertips. Even though Quarcom was a giant international company, they’d put her up in an RV in a campground on the edge of town. It could be worse, but it sure wasn’t the Ritz.
For the thousandth time, she checked that her phone had signal, which it did. Then she tossed it at the foot of the bed and put her hands behind her head.
Why wouldn’t he call? She wondered. He asked for my number. Why would he do that if he weren’t going to call?
A light breeze came in through the window, carrying the smell of the desert along with it.
Chill, she told herself. It’s been, what, ten hours? Give the guy a chance. He’s probably busy. Read your book and quit thinking about it.
But it was too late: she was definitely thinking about it now.
What if he thought he was doing me a favor? She thought. Get a chubby girl’s phone number, make her feel special for a little while?
Her stomach sank.
Or worse, she thought.
Worse had already happened, back in the dark ages of high school. From ages twelve through sixteen, she’d had a huge crush on Taylor Kimball, one of the guys on her high school’s football team, but Jules had been chubby and covered in a combination of freckles and zits, not to mention a huge nerd. For ages, she’d admired him from afar, until one day, he broke up with his girlfriend and asked her out.
She said yes, of course, flabbergasted and over the moon. Soon he asked for her help studying, and Jules was still so infatuated and, frankly, naive, that it had taken about a week before she’d started doing all his homework.
Lying on the bed, Jules’ face still burned in shame, ten years later. Time hadn’t helped that much, and she still felt like the world’s dumbest idiot when she remembered it.
Of course Taylor had still been banging his hot girlfriend, sometimes literally while Jules was doing his work for him, late into the night. Of course he’d shown all his friends the love notes she’d written him, and they used to shout the phrases she’d written back at her while she walked down the hall.
Jules’s stomach flip-flopped and she put the book on her face, trying to block out the thoughts.
In the years since, she’d had boyfriends. She’d had a random hookup or two, and many more men had expressed their sincere interest, but deep down, she thought she’d always be the dumb girl who did the football star’s homework. She didn’t want to think that every guy who approached her just wanted to use her for something and didn’t really like her, but the suspicion was a knee-jerk reaction.
Besides, the past few weeks mostly alone in a trailer were starting to take their toll on her. She needed to get out, to interact with other people, to have a conversation.
She needed her phone to ring. She sat up slightly on the uncomfortable bed, looking at it, daring it to ring.
Nothing.
Jules gritted her teeth and refocused on Moby Dick, forcing herself to read the same paragraph over and over until she was paying attention to it.
“Are you there?” crackled the voice on the Jules’s computer screen.
Barely, she thought. She sat up straighter, her laptop in front of her on the kitchen table. The curtains behind her were drawn, but there was no getting around the morning light leaking in around the edges, and nowhere else to sit with a computer in her RV.
“Yes, I’m here,” she said. “Am I coming through?”
“It’ll do, I guess,” said Gilbert Norfrey, Quarcom’s North American Vice President of operations. “How are things coming along?”
Jules’s heart skipped a beat. They were going badly, and telling Gilbert something that he didn’t want to hear didn’t always go well.
“All the preliminaries are pretty discouraging,” she said, practically shouting at her computer. “There’s a whole lot of problems with the site, for starters—”
“Speak up, Jules, I can’t hear you,” Gilbert said, leaning toward the screen. From what was behind him, he looked like he might be on the Quarcom jet. That would make sense, she figured; he was due in Obsidian the next day to oversee the final steps.
“The site is bad,” she said at top volume. “The underlying rhyolite layer is too weak, and the sandstone is very porous, and honestly, I’m not sure how the site got approved at all. Besides, it’s much too close to the river. If there’s any kind of accident, all the runoff will go right in, and it would be a disaster.”
“But is it legal?” he asked.
Jules opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.
“This is so new that regulations don’t really cover what we’ll be doing,” she shouted.
Part of her screamed at her to lie, but she knew that was stupid. Quarcom had an army of legal staff, and they’d figure it out in an hour. Then, they’d go ahead with their plans, plus she’d be reprimanded.
“So it’s not illegal,” said Gilbert.
“It’s a bad choice of site for a mine like this,” she tried to say. Stripes of static cut across Gilbert’s face, and his image froze, got blocky, and then straightened out. “The environmental repercussions will be massive.”
“Are you using a tin can telephone for this call?” Gilbert said, half-joking and half annoyed.
“I have to use the cellular hotspot because Obsidian only has dialup,” she said. “But the cell signal’s not very strong.”
Actually, I’m amazed this is working at all, she thought.
“Well, I’ll be there first thing tomorrow,” Gilbert said. “As soon as I can drive in from Blanding.”
Jules couldn’t help but note that he wouldn’t be staying in an RV.
“I don’t think this mine should go forward,” Jules said, shouting at the computer now.
Gilbert’s face blinked out, and the screen went blank.
He’s not going to listen to me, she thought, dejectedly shutting her screen. He’d destroy the Grand Canyon or Yosemite if he thought he could make money from it.
Jules pushed open the curtains and looked out at the expanse of desert outside her window, stretching red and dusty to the horizon.
I should start looking for another job, she thought. I don’t think I’m making much of a difference in this one.
When the phone finally rang at five-thirty, Jules jumped. She was practically neck-deep in surveys and printouts, one pencil stuck through her thick red hair, holding it in a bun, and one pencil behind her ear. She held a third pencil in her hand.
The number wasn’t familiar, and she snatched it off the table, holding the screen up in front of her. Then she took a moment to clear her throat, collecting herself, before answering.
It was either going to be Gilbert or Seth, and she knew who she was hoping for.
“Juliana Morgan,” she said as prof
essionally as she could.
“Hey there,” said a deep, almost scratchy voice. “It’s Seth.”
Jules’s heart did a somersault. No: ten somersaults.
“Hi,” she said.
“I know this is pretty short notice, but I thought maybe I could return the favor and pay you back by showing you around town tonight,” he said. “You busy?”
“Not at all,” she said eagerly.
Don’t be too eager, she thought. At least play a little hard-to-get.
“There’s a catch,” he said.
Jules frowned at the interior of the RV.
“What is it?” she said, cautiously.
It had better not be, ‘don’t tell my girlfriend,’ she thought.
“I don’t have a car right now,” Seth said.
Jules smacked herself on the forehead.
“Of course,” she said. “Do you need a ride? I can pick you up.”
“That would be perfect,” he said, and she thought that she could hear a little relief in his voice. “My truck hasn’t moved since the last time you gave me ride.”
She smiled at the interior of the RV.
“I feel like I’m doing the heavy lifting so far,” she teased. “First I rescue you, then I pick you up for our—” she fumbled on the word date— “night out on the town.”
“I promise I’ll make it up to you,” Seth said. “What do you say to burgers, shakes, and bowling?”
“I say you’ll have to give me directions,” Jules answered.
“Pick me up in thirty?” Seth said. “I know it’s soon, but if we really want to get the most from Obsidian, we gotta go before everything closes.”
Jules stood from the table and yanked the pencil out of her bun, knocking the one from behind her ear in the process, and they both clattered to the floor. She rolled her eyes, then grabbed another pencil from the table, pulling a blank sticky note from a pad.