Chapter 20 of 20The Land Under It

Diane Halloran called before church on Sunday and said the settlement math had flipped all the way over. The building on Miller Pike could not be sold, mortgaged or conveyed to anybody on God's green earth without Margaret Ackerman's signature, and the loan against it could not be cleared without her release. Roy's Friday offer was dead on arrival.

"Insulting Friday," Diane said. "Worse now."

"I'll be right down."

"Door's unlocked. I'm the only fool on the square."

Margo hung up, put on the barn coat from Menards, and walked the four blocks from Sixth Street down to the Corley square. It was twenty-eight degrees and the wind came down the side streets off the open fields; the courthouse limestone looked colder than the air did. The whole town was either in the eleven o'clock pews or home under a blanket with the Sunday paper spread across the couch, and St. Boniface's doors stood open with the food-drive barrels still stacked outside the parish hall, waiting for somebody to carry them back in.

Diane's office was cold. She had the radiator going and a mug of coffee at her elbow that had stopped steaming, and the cut-glass dish of butterscotch still sat on the client side of the desk.

The pad was already ruled into headings.

"All right," Diane said. "The LLC first."

Margo sat down and worked the paper fan open and shut once, because the radiator was winning. She did not open the accordion file.

"The transfers are frozen and your complaint asks the court to void them," Diane said. "If the court voids them, that money comes back into the marital column, and it comes back as a finding that he meant to move it."

"Meridian's gone. Their own search turned up your filing and a co-guarantor who won't sign, and nobody buys a business with a lawsuit stapled to the front of it."

"Then the cash."

Diane tapped the pad.

"You took the unreported Saturday work and put it on the record before Thanksgiving. That makes the money marital property and it makes it his problem with the IRS, and he can't argue one of those without arguing the other."

"What's left?"

"The loan."

Diane looked up.

"Two personal guarantees, a mortgage held by Miami Valley Savings, eleven acres of ground, and a bank that has stopped believing the man who signs the paperwork. Nothing on that property moves without your name on a page, and nothing clears that note without your release. You're holding the only door on that property, and it opens from your side."

"What's he holding?"

"A shell with no license and no contracts and no members left in it but him," Diane said. "The note. The tax. And a lawyer he's paying by the hour to tell him it's going to be fine."

"Cauldwell called me Friday afternoon."

Diane uncapped her pen.

"He says no judge takes a man's family business."

Margo waited.

"I told him judges take things every week. They mostly take them from the fellow who moved them first and then came in and asked to keep what was left."

That got the first dry laugh of the day out of Margo, one short note, and it surprised her.

"Miss Brandt says the deposits and the cards ran together into one account, and she wrote it out in her own hand and resigned."

Diane turned a page.

"And Nick will say under oath that he ran those Saturday calls and put the cash in a drawer at the shop."

"From his father's own son."

"Yes."

Margo looked at the radiator for a while.

"I did his books for twenty-four years," she said. "I coded those Saturday deposits as parts sales, every one of them, in my own handwriting, because he told me that was how the business ran. I never wrote myself a check out of any of it."

"I know."

"So what do I want out of it. That's what you're about to ask me."

"It is," Diane said, "and it's the one question I can't answer off this pad."

Margo stood and buttoned the coat.

"Let me go look at something first."

The Bluebird had the after-church crowd at the counter and the Sunday special going, and Carol set a plate in front of Margo before she had picked a stool. Meatloaf with the ketchup glaze, a scoop of potatoes, a roll, and $8.49 on the board behind the register.

"You're eating," Carol said. "I don't care what else you're doing today."

Margo ate about half of it.

"Your husband was in Friday," Carol said, wiping the counter around the salt and pepper. "With a fella in a gray suit who ordered one coffee and watched the bank the whole time."

"Did they tip?"

"The suit did."

Carol put the rag over her shoulder.

"Roy never does."

"Well," Margo said, and ate her potatoes.

She left the rest, which Carol pretended not to see, and drove out Miller Pike.

Nick's truck sat in the gravel yard with the driver's door open. He was loading the bed for Monday morning, a box of igniters and a warranty compressor he had pulled off a job and not yet carried inside.

"Mom."

"You're working on a Sunday?"

"First calls are all over on the east side."

He set the box down.

"Dad's been calling all morning. I let it ring."

She walked the property line with him anyway, from the road back to the county ditch: eleven acres of frozen stubble with the gravel yard and the shop sitting in the middle of it, the ground ridged hard where the plow had gone through and draining downhill toward the fence. The sign at the road said ACKERMAN HEATING & COOLING, and the letters had been repainted, and under them you could still see where other letters used to be.

"The recorder keeps the deed," Margo said. "This ground came off my grandfather's farm. It was never sold to anybody. It was kept."

"Dad says Grandpa Walt bought it."

"Then Dad's wrong, and there's paper that says so."

Nick was quiet a minute, looking back at the shop.

"If you get it," he said, "are you going to sell it?"

"No."

"Good."

He picked the box back up.

"Because I'd still like to run this place."

They went up the loft stairs together for the igniters, and the toolbox was where it had been under the moving blanket, dust on the lid, E. J. S. punched into the metal. Nick put a hand on it and offered to carry it down to her truck.

"Not today," Margo said. "It stays here until an order says it can come home."

The light over the door at Diane's was still on, and the square was empty except for a truck at the curb. Margo knocked once and went in.

"You looked," Diane said.

"I looked."

"And?"

"Ackerman and Sczepanski," Margo said. "That's what the sign said once. My father's name was on the side of that building, and this town has spent my whole life telling me he couldn't make it work."

Diane capped the pen and sat back in her chair.

"So what do you want out of it?"

"I want the building," Margo said. "The land under it. My father's ground."

"You could take the cash and the house on Fairlawn and be done with him."

"I know it."

Margo put the fan in her coat pocket.

"The building," Diane said.

"The building," Margo said.

Diane tore the top page off the pad and squared it on the desk between them, the headings in her own neat print with a line ruled under each one.

"That's the one thing the loan lets you force," she said.