to get a tempting offer and Sutterly doesn’t have a monopoly on bulldozers. Ever since I-40 opened, we’ve all had bids for bits and pieces of our land, and we’ve all said no thank you.
“Why are we even wasting our time here?” I asked, checking the deed book by the number on Adam’s deed. “It’s not like you’re going to sell.”
Adam lifted up the big heavy leather-bound book I’d pointed to, carried it over to a counter that had one end clear, and began turning the pages. “Page one-oh-eight, was it?”
I looked at Seth, who shrugged.
“Are you?” I asked in a sharper voice.
Adam gave an impatient twist of his shoulder. “I just want to see what’s happening, okay?”
The three of us put our heads together over page 108 and got ourselves oriented.
“Possum Creek,” said Seth, pointing to a wavy line that ran from northeast to southwest and is a major boundary between Knott land to the north and the Stancil farm to the south.
A hundred and thirty years ago, everything south of Possum Creek to a dirt road running roughly east to west had belonged to the Pleasant family. Leo Pleasant still owns a big chunk along the road to the west, but when the original holding was broken up, Jap Stancil’s grandfather got the eastern part bounded by the creek, Old Forty-Eight and the dirt road. G. Hooks Talbert’s great-grandmother got a piece back off the road, along the creek. Another Pleasant son, Merrilee Yadkin Grimes’s great-grandfather, also got land along the creek, and I believe it was Merrilee’s grandmother who sold it to Daddy sometime in the late forties.
So now, moving west from Old Forty-Eight along the south bank of Possum Creek, the land divisions on this plat were labeled J. Stancil, G. H. Talbert and K. Knott, with L. Pleasant lying south of Daddy. Adam’s little piece formed a triangular wedge between Knott and Talbert land on the north, Stancil to the east and Pleasant to the west.
The Talbert piece has no road frontage and Gray Talbert’s nursery would be landlocked were it not for a narrow lane that runs along the western edge of the Stancil farm, right on the line beside Adam. Indeed, when their house trailer was there, Adam and Karen had used the lane as a driveway, too, rather than go to the trouble of putting in their own drive where the southern tip of their triangle touched the road. Jap Stancil still owned the lane back then and didn’t mind two more people using it.
By now, the easement has existed for well over fifty years, so even if Mr. Jap or Dallas had wanted to close it, that was no longer their option. As long as Talberts want to use it, the lane has to stay open.
Land squabbles show up in district court so frequently that I know all about easement encroachments and suddenly it began to make sense that Adam was being offered that ridiculous amount.
“G. Hooks Talbert must want to develop this parcel,” I said. “I saw surveyor’s ribbons all along the creek. But to build houses back there, county regulations require a fifty-foot-wide road and there’s only this ‘cart’ lane, which by definition is thirty feet wide. Your little stretch of road front, Adam, would give him all he needs to meet the requirements.”
“That’s crazy,” Adam objected. “Why wouldn’t he just get ol’ Jap Stancil—he’s still living, isn’t he?—to sell him a wider strip?”
“Because Mr. Jap deeded all his land to Dallas years ago,” I said. “Didn’t Zach tell you about Dallas?”
“Oh, yeah. Shot by his wife, was it?”
“She bought the gun. Her son-in-law’s the one that pulled the trigger.”
“Poor old Dallas. Lived in a nest of rattlesnakes, didn’t he?”
“The trials could drag out for a year or more,” I said. “If Cherry Lou is found guilty, Dallas’s estate will pass to Mr. Jap, but nothing can be done about establishing ownership till after the trial.”
“Dick Sutterly’s the one who tried to buy from Dallas,” Seth mused. “Wonder if he approached Leo Pleasant, too?”
It didn’t take much digging to find the book that recorded Leo Pleasant’s deed, but we had to wait till someone from Ed Whitbread’s office finished using it When we opened it to the right page, we found that it was marked by a slip of paper that held a column of three scribbled numbers that added up to the total acreage of Pleasant, Talbert and Stancil land. Almost as an afterthought, whoever had used that scrap of paper had added a fourth figure to the total: 2.9—the precise size of Adam’s triangle.
There were no subsequent conveyances in the index to indicate that it’d recently changed hands.
“Means nothing,” I said. “You don’t have to record a deed until you’re ready for it to be public record.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Adam said, as he studied the plat carefully. “The Pleasant farm must have a mile of road frontage, but what use is that to Sutterly if he’s really bent on developing the Talbert piece? With Stancil land tied up in a murder trial, the only other way to get to it is through mine or Dad’s and we all know how
Something in Adam’s voice made me begin to wonder: Just how badly did my successful brother need forty-five thousand dollars?
I couldn’t ask him then and there because Nadine and Herman were expecting him for lunch and Seth wanted to get on back to the farm. He keeps a few hogs for the family freezers and one of them was due to farrow that evening.
But when I saw Dick Sutterly heading down the hall toward the Register of Deeds, I called to him.
No reason
“Adam promised me he wouldn’t talk about this to anybody,” Sutterly said, glancing around as if we were about to exchange plans to blow up the Kremlin.
Late thirties, early forties, Dick Sutterly has light strawberry blond hair, a round face that gets pink when he’s excited and a waistline that isn’t porky yet, but will be if he keeps riding around in his truck all day. I used to see him out in denims and work boots, with sawdust in his hair. Now he wears a shirt and tie under his windbreaker and split-leather brogans on his feet. No sawdust either.
We were in my chambers, a bare room with a single desk and three chairs. I was lunching on a Pepsi and a
