by Lucy Finn
“What mess?”
“The Queen Nefertitty thing. I didn’t know she had a gun.”
“A gun? Who the hell is Queen Nefertitty and how does a weapon come into this!”
“You’re yelling. I knew that’s what you’d do. I can’t talk to you. I’m going to have to take care of this on my own, I see that now.” I started to march out of the room.
Gene grabbed my arm and turned me around to face him. “Not so fast. Explain, and explain everything.”
“Let go of me.”
“No. Not until you tell me what you’re planning to do and how a gun comes into it. This is not a game to me, Ravine. You can’t tell me something like that and then walk away. I’m not going to allow it.”
“You’re not going to allow it!” I was so mad I was starting to see red. “I’m not taking orders from you.”
“You expect me to take them from you, don’t you? I’m your genie. I have to obey you. Well, if that’s how you want it, then what I’ll be to you is a genie. And that’s all I’ll be.”
With that Gene let go of my arm. His form grew transparent and turned into a wisp of smoke which floated up into the air and streamed over to the kitchen counter before disappearing into the amber bottle.
“Oh you—you—impossible—man!” I yelled after him. I was furious with his behavior, and with my own. I was messing up everything. I stood there for a minute before I suddenly burst into tears and ran upstairs. I flung myself down on the bed and cried my eyes out. It was totally out of character. True, I was premenstrual, but I don’t think I had ever felt more miserable in my life.
Five minutes later I heard a rapping on the doorframe leading into my room. I lifted my tearstained face and saw Gene standing in the doorway.
“I can’t come in,” he said. “My mistress forbade me to step foot in her bedroom. But maybe she’d come out here. Please?”
I got up and walked into the hall. Gene took me in his arms and kissed the tears off my cheeks. “I’m sorry I made you cry,” he said.
“You didn’t make me cry. I did that all by myself,” I said, burying my face in his broad shoulder.
“Either way, I can’t stand seeing you unhappy. I’m sorry I lost my temper. It’s just that I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt. Listen, okay? I need you to talk to me before you do something that might get your head blown off, that’s all.” He was stroking my hair while he talked and I didn’t want to let go of him. It felt so good to have my arms around his body and not have him a puff of smoke that I couldn’t reach and couldn’t touch.
I lifted my head and looked at him. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. I really didn’t. I didn’t know about the gun until I had already agreed to try to get my client’s ashes back from the woman who took them.”
“Ravine, I hate to say this, but you’re not making a lot of sense.”
“It’s a long story. As I started to explain earlier, I committed myself to doing something I shouldn’t have agreed to do. Now I need you to help me; I can’t do it without you,” I said, being only a little disingenuous and starting to brush my lips against his. Then I kissed him, long and hard.
Gene moaned. “I will never be able to say no to you. Not when you kiss like that. I’ll watch your back, of course I will. I’ll watch your front. I’ll watch every inch of you. But I’m asking you, not ordering you, will you say a few crucial words before you agree to do something that involves both of us?”
“What words?’ I asked, kissing him again and letting my lips trail down his chin to his neck.
His breathing was getting shallower, and he whispered hoarsely in reply: “These: Let me talk with my partner about it. I’ll get back to you. Can you promise me that?” he said, squeezing his eyes shut because I was pressing my body tightly against his in a sensitive place.
“That sounds like a reasonable request. I promise, partner,” I said softly and in all sincerity. And at that moment, I did sincerely mean it. “Now if I could address you as a genie—”
Gene’s eyes sprang open. “Why?”
“I need to lift the ban on my genie’s coming into my bedroom. Is it okay with you, genie, if I allow you to come in?”
“I am pleased to obey you,” he said in a raspy voice and lifted me up into his arms. He carried me over to the bed and put me gently down on the crazy quilt that covered it. “Does this mean you want me to sleep here tonight?”
“Yes, it does. But I had something else in mind besides sleep, at least right now.”
“So do I,” he murmured as he started to remove my clothes. It turned out we were both thinking about exactly the same thing.
The second thing that happened that night that upset me—in fact, shook me to my bones—was this. Gene was sleeping soundly, his arm across his muscular chest, a soft snore escaping his lips, when I slipped out of bed about midnight. I put on a warm robe and quietly left the room. I wanted to peek in on Brady and make sure he was okay.
I went into my baby’s room that smelled of flowery baby lotion and faintly of wet diapers, despite the Diaper Genie. Brady didn’t stir as I leaned down over his crib and kissed him gently on the cheek. He was such a beautiful baby, and so good it brought tears to my eyes just to look at him. Yet as I looked at him, his night-light illuminating brightly enough for me to see his face, I saw, besides Brady’s beloved features, how much he looked like Jake.
My involvement with Gene had made my emotional life complicated very quickly. I didn’t want any loose ends from the past. I had to find Jake and tell him about Brady, then work something out with him if he wanted to see his son. I couldn’t let the situation go. I knew that.
I stopped by the window and looked out at the night. The moon was nearly full and so bright that only the biggest stars were visible. The snow had started to melt during the day, collapsing in spots and losing its fluffiness. After the sun went down and the temperature dropped, the wet snow had gotten hard and icy. The moonlight reflected off the now shiny surface of the wide fields behind the house. I saw no one standing out there tonight and felt comforted by the emptiness.
But when I turned away and headed back to bed, from the road that ran along the front of the house I heard the sharp, quick sound of a motorcycle starting up and then fading out when it drove away. I listened with my heart beating wildly as the silence of the night returned.
Chapter 14
A little after nine a.m. on Tuesday, the wooden floor-boards of the county courthouse creaked under my feet as I made my way through the metal detector and found the first-floor room holding deeds and land transfer information. The affable clerk, her gray hair tightly permed and her bifocals set in pink plastic frames that appeared to date from the 1970s, quickly retrieved the records from the Sikorsky farm and the Katos’ B and B. I showed my driver’s license to her, signed a large ledger to acknowledge receipt of two dark brown accordion files, and took them over to a scuffed-up wooden table. I opened the first of the files, identified by a parcel number, not a name, and began to read.
The purchaser of the Sikorsky land and buildings—the farm where the well had mysteriously become tainted—was no lone bachelor farmer. The purchaser of record was a real estate corporation called Running Brook Development Company. I made a note to look up the principal shareholders and track down its origins. The Sikorskys had owned the land since the 1920s when it had been bought from one of the Sicklers, an old family that had settled in this region in the early 1800s. I couldn’t find the Sicklers’ original deed. Instead, transfer of the property from the Sicklers to the Sikorskys included a notarized affidavit that the land was part of the “Last Purchase” made by the state of Pennsylvania in 1784.
I took the file back up to the counter. “If the original deed isn’t in here, where might it be?” I asked the clerk.
“If it’s not there, it has been lost somewhere, especially if the deed originated before the Civil War. Of course, it might be in Harrisburg, but I doubt it. Let’s see.” She looked at the folde
r. “Oh yes, some of the recipients of Last Purchase land were recorded at the capital. You might find something there. These affidavits were accepted up until 1950.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said and went back to look at the Katos’ land records in the other file. The history of the Katos’ B and B told a different tale and one that ultimately made my hair stand on end.
The Katos had purchased their two hundred acres, farmhouse, and barn, now the Jade Meadow Farm, from a Richard and Charlotte Yeager. The Yeagers had bought the property from the Kawatchski family in the 1980s. And that’s when things got interesting. The Kawatchskis’ deed dated from 1785 and was obtained by a Revolutionary War soldier named John Kawatchski in exchange for a certificate, issued to returning Continental Army veterans, entitling him to land for his military service in lieu of pay. What riveted my attention, however, was the very faded note, easily overlooked, written in sepia ink and lightly penned in at the bottom of the deed:
John Kawatchski, or Kakowatchiky, was a full-blooded Shawnee Indian, son of Chief Kakowatchiky formerly of Shawnee Flats in Plymouth. His certificate contained a notation in Gen. G. Washington’s own hand that any land redeemed by Kakowatchiky was to be considered Shawnee tribal lands in perpetuity in recognition of his acts of courage during the War for Independence. This original certificate, because of Wash.’s note, has been given to the Penn. Historical Commission in Harrisburg.
The handwritten note was signed “Andrew Mon-tour, Wyoming County Register of Deeds, 1876.”
I had an aha! moment. I knew that the state of Pennsylvania had granted a license to the Seneca to run the local racetrack, but the Seneca had competed for the license with other vendors. It wasn’t so in other states. Many Indian-run casinos could be found in New York State and Connecticut because the casinos were built on tribal lands. Under federal law, a recognized tribe has the right to run gaming facilities on its land, and the state cannot stop the tribe from creating the facility or operating it. Pennsylvania had none of these casinos because no federally recognized tribes owned land in Pennsylvania, or at least no one knew they did—until now.
I believed the Kakowatchiky deed meant that the Shawnee, a recognized tribe, could develop the Katos’ land as a gaming operation. All they had to do was retrieve the land from the Katos. In fact, I bet that neither the Yeagers nor the Katos had had any right to buy the land in the first place since it had been granted “in perpetuity” to the Shawnee.
If the Shawnee contested the sale, the whole thing could turn into a nasty court battle, but the easiest way to obtain the land for gaming would be for the Shawnee to quietly reimburse the Katos for their purchase price. To the best of my knowledge no tribe member had approached the Katos, which told me that the Shawnee didn’t know about the Kakowatchiky tribal lands. But I had a strong hunch that someone else did and was looking to make a quick profit by buying the property cheaply from the frightened Katos and reselling the land back to the Shawnee for big money.
I returned to the counter and asked the clerk if anyone else had looked at the Katos’ deed recently. She said someone had.
“Wait a minute.” She nodded and ducked down below the counter. “We can find it right here in the ledger.” She pulled out the large book that I had just signed and put it down in front of me. “We still don’t have these records on computer, although everything in this office is supposed to be transferred over the next few years,” she explained. “Then people can do their research online. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Especially when it comes to liens against property. It makes it too easy for people to stick their noses into other people’s business. I don’t agree with it at all.” Meanwhile she opened the ledger, ran her finger down a page, and then turned the book around so I could see the entry where her index finger pointed.
“Two months ago. Right there. It was a Joann Kawatchski. She said she was kin to the original owners and was researching her family tree.”
“Thank you. That makes perfect sense,” I said and wondered if Joann Kawatchski could possibly be Jo/Joann from the London Junkyard. I glanced at my watch. It was still early. I had plenty of time to stop by there and find out before I had to go back home.
Low gray clouds had made the daylight murky by the time I pulled into London’s Salvage and Junkyard. So many state police cars had parked around the building that I wondered if there had been a robbery or something, although what a thief might want to steal here, I couldn’t imagine.
I grabbed my briefcase out of the backseat and started walking toward the office door. My snow boots didn’t look chic, but as I picked my way through slush and mud to get to the squat cement block building, I was glad that I had taken off my Moschino pumps when I left the courthouse. They were last year’s style, but I hadn’t worn them after my feet swelled up during my pregnancy. With my tight budget, they were the last Moschino shoes I’d be able to buy for a long, long time.
I knocked on the metal door, and a woman’s voice called out, “Come on in.”
Cigarette smoke mixing with the noxious fumes of a kerosene heater assailed my lungs the moment I stepped into the office, a sparsely furnished room filled by Joann, a plus-sized woman, and her desk. A flashy purple Siamese fighting fish swam around the roots of a plant in a clear vase; it seemed to be the sole personal touch in the bland room.
Joann stared at me. Since I was carrying a briefcase and dressed in a suit, I think she was trying to figure out if I was “somebody.” She must have figured I wasn’t. A box of Winston cigarettes lay next to an ashtray already containing a dozen butts smoked down to their filters. Joann reached for the Winston box, tapped out a cigarette, and lit.
“What can I do for you?” she asked and blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.
“Are you Joann Kawatchski?” I asked.
“Yeah, who wants to know?” Her piggy eyes squinted at me without warmth.
“I’m a real estate attorney. My name is Ravine Patton. I was wondering what your interest is in Jade Meadow Farm out in Beaumont.”
Behind her heavy makeup her face paled. “What’s it to you?”
“Quite a lot. I represent the owners, and it seems somebody has been pressuring them into selling their property.” My voice was hard. I straightened my shoulders and slapped my briefcase down on a chair with a bang. “What was your business with Alvin Hoyt?”
Her face turned even paler and sweat beaded on her upper lip above the cigarette.
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” she said.
“Would you rather talk to the police?” I asked, staring her down.
At that she began to laugh. I didn’t get the joke.
“I think you better talk to my boss. Hold on a moment,” she said. She punched numbers into her cell phone and a few seconds later, she spoke into it. She told her boss that I was out in her office asking about Jade Meadow Farm. Then Joann heaved herself up from her desk chair, and her body was racked by a phlegmy smoker’s cough. When the coughing stopped, she took a last puff on her Winston before crushing it out in the ashtray.
“Follow me,” she said. I picked up my briefcase and walked behind her as she lumbered toward a door in the back of the room, her terry cloth bedroom slippers shuffling across the linoleum floor. When she opened the door, her girth filled the entrance. I figured she’d have to turn sideways to get through it, but instead she stepped aside. “Go right in there.” She gestured with her head.
As I walked by, I could smell the pungent combination of stale tobacco, Jean Naté cologne, and fear.
Against one wall of the room I entered stood a long narrow table, groaning under its load of food: a huge platter of fresh fruits, another laden with rolls, and a long warming station with stainless chafing dishes over Sterno heaters. In the center of the room, at a table covered with a white linen tablecloth, sat a dozen state police officers in uniform. They were eating and talking, their plates piled high with pancakes, scrambled eggs, and sausages. A waiter with a carafe of coffee was sil
ently filling their cups.
As I took in this unexpected scene, a patrician-looking man with a shock of silver hair and a finely tailored pin-striped suit walked over to me, his hand outstretched. “I’m George London. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
His handshake was dry and firm, with a politician’s polished style.
“Ravine Patton. I apologize for intruding. I had some questions about a local property, and I thought I would be speaking to Ms. Kawatchski.”
He asked if he could get me anything to eat. I politely refused, but agreed to a cup of coffee.
“Sal!” Mr. London called out to the white-coated waiter and told him to bring two cups into his office.
“Let’s have a word in private, and I’ll see if I can answer your questions,” George London said with a friendly smile that appeared completely genuine. Light twinkled off a diamond pinky ring as he gestured toward another door off the dining room. Handsome and energetic, he reminded me of Bill Clinton, a man whose charisma hid any character flaws and whose power didn’t need a display of authority. He had it, he could use it, and everybody knew it.
London’s office, even in the middle of a junkyard, was well-appointed, with a modern chrome and glass desk atop a deep red oriental carpet, and Mies van der Rohe chairs in fawn-colored leather. He asked me to sit, and I did.
The waiter entered with a tray holding two cups, a carafe of coffee, and a silver creamer and sugar bowl. He put the tray down on the coffee table between the chairs.
“Thank you, Sal,” London said and closed the door when the waiter left.
I put my briefcase down on the floor next to me as George London sat and passed me a cup of black coffee. “Cream or sugar?”
I shook my head no. London took his black as well. He sat back and asked, “How can I help you?”
I began my hastily rehearsed story. “I represent the owners of Jade Meadow Farm, a small B and B in Wyoming County. I have reason to believe that someone wants to frighten them into selling their property. I was wondering if you might know anything about it.”