The Silent Hour

Two hours later, wearing fresh pants and shoes, I stood in the recorder’s office and stared at a warranty deed confirming that, yes, Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell owned the home. There was no mortgage. They’d paid five hundred thousand for the property alone seventeen years earlier. It was a forty-eight-acre parcel.

So Harrison’s information was accurate and up-to-date and the Cantrells still owned the home. Now came the second step, the auditor’s office, where I’d find a new address for the couple.

Well, it was supposed to go that way. When I took the parcel number over to the auditor’s office and requested the records, though, I learned that the taxes had been paid each year—in full and on time—by one Anthony Child, attorney at law, Hinckley, Ohio. Okay, maybe I was going to need a third step to finish this one off.

_________

Child’s office was on the second floor of a brick building on the square in Hinckley, which is a town known nationally for Buzzard Day, a bizarre ritual in which people gather each April to welcome a returning flock of turkey vultures. In some places, this return would be cause for alarm, or at least mild revulsion. In Ohio, it’s a celebration. Hey, we have long, tedious winters, all right? You take your excitement where you can get it.

Attorney Child was in, and willing to see me. The entire firm seemed to consist of an angry-looking secretary in an outer room and Child alone in the office behind that. The door to the tiny attached bathroom stood open, showing a toilet with the seat up. First class. For a good thirty seconds after I’d been shown into his office he kept his back to me, staring at the TV. Weather report. Can’t miss that.

“Hot,” he said when he finally clicked the television off and turned to me. “Unusually hot for the first week of May.”

“I know it.”

“Going to be a rough summer. You can always tell.”

Everyone else was rejoicing that winter had finally broken, and this guy was bitching about the summer to come. Cheerful. He sat and stared at me without much interest. Maybe fifty years old, small face with slack jowls and sleepy eyes. His tie was loosened, and his jacket was off.

“I was just explaining to your secretary that I found you through a tax record,” I said. “I’m curious about some property, and when I pulled the records I found your office handled the payments.”

That was all it took to wake the sleepy eyes up. They narrowed and focused, and he pushed away from the desk and ran both thumbs down the straps of his suspenders.

“What exactly is your line of work, Mr. Perry?”

I took out a business card and passed it across the desk to him. He looked at it long enough to read every word three times and then read them backward. Finally he set the card carefully on the desk and kept one hand on it while he looked back up at me.

“This is about the Cantrell house.”

I nodded.

“Who are you working for?”

Here I hesitated, for the obvious reason. Parker Harrison’s name hadn’t meant anything to me until he’d taken to writing letters, but Child was a good deal older and more likely to remember a murderer from that era than I was.

“Someone who’s interested in the property,” I said after a beat of silence. “It’s a damn expensive home to leave in that condition.”

“I take it you’ve trespassed out there and seen the place? Don’t worry, I’m not going to report you. Plenty of people have trespassed there before. It’s a damn headache, that house is, and for as little money as I’ve made off the arrangements, I wish I’d never agreed to it.”

He was warming up to me now, waving his hand around while he talked, looking more relaxed.

“You put up the gate,” I said.

He nodded.

“At the Cantrells’ request?”

A hesitation, as if I’d asked something odd, and then, “No, not exactly. I’d been out to the house a few times and saw that there’d been some vandalism. The sheriff called me to complain, because they’d had to go out there on several occasions and break up groups of drunk kids wandering the grounds. Word got out that the place was empty, and the kids immediately found their way to it. You know how that goes. Then there was a hitchhiker who found it and moved right in, had some insane idea about claiming squatter’s rights. Sheriff was irritated, so I went ahead and put up the gate and the fence. It’s helped.”

“You paid for this?”

“I draw from an account she left. The money was there.” He pulled himself back to the desk again, frowning, and said, “Mr. Perry, you clearly don’t want to tell me who you’re working for and why they want to find her, but I need to tell you this: Any number of people do want to find her, from the police to reporters to people like you, and I can’t help. All I ask of you is to make that clear to your client. I don’t know how to get in touch with her; I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing.”

“Mr. Child, I don’t understand exactly why she’d be so sought after. Who is the woman, anyhow?”

He looked at me as if I’d asked him how to spell my own name. Then his eyes turned reflective and he nodded. “Your client’s interested in the property.”

“That’s right.” It wasn’t true, really, but I had the sense that was what he wanted to hear as some kind of reassurance.

“So you have no idea . . . shit, you guys really are clueless. Okay. That puts me at peace. It truly does.”

“What don’t I understand, Mr. Child?”

“Anything,” he said. “You don’t understand anything. What do you know about Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell?”

I shook my head. “Only that their names are on the deed.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then you absolutely don’t understand a damn thing. Now I’m going to tell you two little details, and then I’m going to ask one more time who you’re working for, and if you won’t answer, I’ll tell you to get the hell out of my office.”

He braced his elbows on the desk and folded his hands together. “You’ve done amazingly poor research, Mr. Perry. Here are the two details you need to know: First, Joshua Cantrell is dead. Nobody had heard from him in twelve years, but last winter his bones were found near Pymatuning Reservoir. Buried in the woods. Case still under investigation.”

He paused, and I was aware of how quiet it was in his office, so quiet that I could hear the dripping of a faucet in the little bathroom on the other side of the wall, a drop falling into the sink every few seconds. Plip, plip, plip.

“Detail number two,” he said. “Do you know the lovely Mrs. Cantrell’s maiden name?”

“I do not.”

“Sanabria,” he said. “Alexandra Sanabria.”

“Shit,” I said. “You’re kidding.”

He shook his head.

“Maiden name,” I said. “Surely she’s too old to be the daughter of—”

“Dominic? Yes, too old to be his daughter. Just the right age to be his sister. Sister of Dominic, daughter of Christopher, right there in the trunk of a very infamous family tree. Pride and joy of Crime Town, USA.”

It was an old nickname, went back almost fifty years, but people still attached it to Youngstown, a gritty factory town an hour from Cleveland. While the Italian mob’s heyday in Cleveland was during the sixties and seventies, Youngstown remained an epicenter for decades longer, featuring constant FBI attention as well as the occasional car bombing or sniper takedown of a major player. During one attempt to pay off the town’s mayor, a priest was involved as a money handler. Ties run deep in Youngstown, and a lot of them run through the Sanabria family. Christopher was the patriarch, the focus of a major federal investigation when he was killed in the late seventies. Twenty years later, his son, Dominic, appeared in headlines for a few months during the Lenny Strollo and James Traficant trials. Something like seventy convictions were handed down in the fallout of those investigations—Traficant was a U.S. representative at the time, which only added to the circus—but