Chapter 9 - The Clearing of the Cove
The restoration took three weeks.
I had hired a local carpenter from Denver—a quiet, middle-aged man named Callaway who had four daughters of his own and didn't ask questions about why the siding had crowbar marks on the cedar.
He replaced the broken rim joist behind the pump house, fitted new rough-sawn tongue-and-groove siding along the basement walk-out, and installed three heavy-duty security floodlights that were wired directly into the main breaker panel behind the water heater.
On the third Saturday of November, the lake was quiet.
The summer crowd had long since retreated to Charlotte and Raleigh; the big cabin cruisers were tucked away in their blue shrink-wrap cocoons at the marinas, and the cove water was clear, deep, and still as cold glass under an unclouded Carolina sky.
I stood on the end of my dock, wearing an old wool sweater and my mud boots, holding a mug of black coffee in both hands.
The water was thirty-eight degrees. You could see eight feet down to the red clay bottom, where the yellow perch were hovering in the shadows of the pilings, their fins moving with that slow, prehistoric rhythm that ignores the weather above.
A white truck turned into the gravel drive.
It wasn't Keaton’s GMC. It was an old Ford Ranger, faded blue, with a tool rack in the back and a small magnetic sign that read: KANE LEGAL INVESTIGATIONS.
Marcus Kane climbed out of the cab, carrying a brown accordion folder under his arm.
He walked down the flagstone path I had relaid the week before, his leather shoes crunching softly on the pea gravel, his long coat flapping in the breeze off the cove.
"They settled," Marcus said, stopping beside me on the dock timbers.
I didn't turn around. I took a sip of the coffee, feeling the steam warm my lips. "Tell me."
"Brenda signed the restitution agreement at ten o'clock yesterday morning," Marcus said, leaning his hip against the dock railing. "They took a third mortgage on the Maple Street house through an equity lender in High Point. High interest—nine point five percent—but the title company let it clear because the state tax lien was secondary."
"And the money?"
"Thirty-two thousand dollars in certified funds deposited into the trust account forty minutes ago," Marcus said. "The Department of Revenue accepted nine thousand in complete satisfaction of the commercial lodging penalty, provided they don't engage in short-term hospitality rentals for ten years."
He pulled a single, white cashier's check from the folder and held it toward me.
PAY TO THE ORDER OF: ARDEN MARIE VOSS.
AMOUNT: $23,450.00.
I looked at the blue ink on the paper.
Twenty-three thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars.
It was the exact difference between the forty-one thousand they had stolen and the taxes they had incurred. Not a penny more; not a penny less.
"What are you going to do with it?" Marcus asked.
I looked across the cove.
On the opposite point, a great blue heron was standing on an old pine stump, its neck curved into an S, its yellow eye fixed on the shallow water between the reeds. It had been there since dawn, motionless, unhurried, patient as granite.
"I'm going to pay off the principal on the dock," I said. "And then I'm going to buy a new Honda Civic. A silver one. With heated seats and a radio that doesn't crackle when the wipers are on."
Marcus chuckled, his hound-dog face breaking into that rare, wide grin that showed his tobacco-stained teeth.
"Your brother Keaton called my office yesterday," he remarked.
"What did he want?"
"Wanted to know if he could drop off the four hundred and fifty dollars he owed for Memorial Day," Marcus said. "Said he had cash. Said his fiancée told him she wouldn't set a wedding date until he had a receipt from my office showing he didn't owe his sister for lodging."
May you like
I took the check from Marcus's hand, folded it once down the center, and slipped it into the pocket of my wool sweater.
"Tell him to give it to the food bank in Mooresville," I said. "And tell him to make sure they print his name on the donor board. The Vosses love to see their names on things they didn't pay for."
