Interpreter for the Dead Read online

  The only thing more interesting than the fact that Caywood was much slicker than he had suspected, was that everybody in Cottonwood, every single person his father had deeded land to, was even more in debt than he could possibly have imagined - including Oren McConnell.

  As disturbing as the 'Tax Codes' information was, it was 'Real Estate Terminology' that proved to be the Rosetta Stone. The folder contained a map of his father's land, showing all the draws and spurs and lakes and streams that made up the valley. Also depicted were a series of old mining tunnels beneath the valley. Dane knew about the tunnels from stories he had heard his father tell and from old newspaper clippings. Which was more than could be said for his great-grandfather, Eli Dane.

  Jokingly referred to later as the Underground Railroad Baron, apparently Eli Dane didn't see much humor in watching great sections of his railroad line collapse beneath the weight of his brand-new electric locomotive. The engine still lay where it had sank into a collapsed mine nearly a century ago, nothing to mark its final resting place save a few exposed pieces of metal turned to rust. All of that was old news.

  What was new was the fact that the map was only six months old and had been drawn up by a local engineering firm by the name of GeoReclamation, Incorporated. A quick trip to company's website showed that they specialized in a form of land stabilization where, through patented engineering techniques, they could reinforce and refill old mining tunnels. That would give developers access to land once thought impossible to build on.

  Land like Henry Dane's.

  "Sir, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

  Dane looked up, startled. The security guard was talking to the homeless guy sitting in the chair nearby, not him.

  "C'mon, man. I'm just trying to get a little shut-eye."

  "You know the rules. You can't be in here if you don't have a library card."

  "Now how am I supposed to get a library card when I ain't got no ID?" said the man through a mouthful of missing teeth, already getting up.

  His fingers frozen on the keyboard, Dane pictured the valley filled with multi-million dollar tract mansions. From the layout, it appeared they were planning on building one house per quarter of an acre. That equaled a hell of a lot of houses and a hell of a lot of money.

  "You done?"

  "Sure," said Dane. "Just a sec."

  He began to send a copy of the 'Tax Codes' file to the printer, but changed his mind and logged off instead. Something about knowing all that he knew now about the people that lived in Cottonwood left him feeling slimey.

  Despite searching Caywood's computer high and low, he still found no indication the realtor had actually been in Las Vegas when his father died.

  He went back down the stairs, his mind in a fog as he mulled over all the ramifications of what he had learned, not just the night before, but today as well.

  "Can I help you?"

  "What?" said Dane, staring down at a woman behind the library help desk. He didn't remember why he'd gone there until he saw the guard rousting a woman in a dirty parka coming out of the bathroom.

  "Oh yeah," said Dane. "I need to replace my library card."

  "That's a six dollar charge," said the woman clicking her tongue and bringing out the forms. "You've got to be more careful."

  "Trust me," said Dane, handing her a ten and pocketing his change. "I will be."

  "Can I see your driver's license?"

  "I'm sorry, I left it at home. I have an old receipt, will that work?"

  Dane walked out the door a few minutes later and found the homeless man he'd seen upstairs. Dane gave him the library card and told the man to remember his name was Gordon.

  "I can remember that. My son's name was Gordon. He died in the war."

  Chapter 18

  "You've got a problem," the lawyer said, pushing a thick manila envelope across the conference table as Dane sat down.

  "What is it?"

  Harding had called him less than an hour ago, insisting he come into the office right away. He had literally just walked in the door from the library, when the phone rang.

  "A copy of a petition filed with probate today. It came with this." Harding waved a videotape at Dane then slid it into the VHS player. "It's a claim against your father's property."

  "You mean a lien? It can't be much, and McConnell already filed for discovery two months ago."

  "Not a lien. A claim. Against the whole property. It's a will."

  The screen came to life, revealing an empty wooden chair next to an old Franklin stove. Dane recognized the furnishings because they were in his kitchen at home. In the lower right hand corner of the screen, the timestamp indicated the tape had been made seven years before, roughly eight months after Michael left home, eight months after his mother died.

  His father stepped into the frame and sat down.

  The long sleeve shirt he wore buttoned up to his neck was too big, and his shoulders were thin and bony beneath the checkered fabric.

  Michael Dane saw emotions play out beneath a face drawn and tired, lines of creased flesh etched into the unshaven face like dry riverbeds. His eyes, buried in dark circles of loose skin, were little more than pinholes of light.

  His father raised his hands, shaking. The calloused skin and thick fingers were gone, now transparent as bat's wings.

  "My name is Henry William Dane."

  The female interpreter's voice startled Michael.

  "I am making this so there are no tricks from the lawyers or anybody else about what will happen to this land and house, my land and house, when I die."

  The old man sat more upright in his chair as if gathering strength, every muscle tensing as if for a fight.

  "Everything on this land is what I got from my father when he died, but that was not all there was. Some was taken by the government for taxes, or so they said. I have made sure this will not happen again. The money for the taxes is already taken care of. Everything will go to the Boulder Valley School for the Deaf and Blind to use however they want. My name is Henry William Dane and that is what will be done."

  Henry Dane flapped his hands as if shooing away an annoying fly. The tape ended.

  The conference room door clattered open and John Caywood burst in, face red. He gave Michael Dane a withering look.

  As hard as it was for Dane to stomach Harding knowing what he'd found out, it was practically unbearable to be in the same room with Caywood. All he could do was stare at the man and wonder if he had a hand in his father's death. It made his blood boil.

  Now is not the time. Wait until you're sure.

  Dane clenched his fists under the table and tried to control his temper. He didn't want to give anything away until he knew for sure if Caywood was responsible.

  "Well, how do you explain this?" Caywood screeched, pointing at the television screen.

  "How do I explain what? A videotape I've never seen? I had no idea my father made a will," Dane responded.

  Harding interjected.

  "I suggest you start digging through everything you can find. Try to find anything that would contradict what your father said in that tape. I don't need to tell you how important this property is to us."

  The lawyer paused.

  "Your father wasn't on any kind of medication was he?"

  The question caught Dane off guard. "What would that matter?"

  "I had a client whose husband left everything to his secretary when he died. Seemed open and shut, until I found out his doctor had given him a prescription for Prozac a couple months before. His wife, my client, walked away with everything. Never mind the prescription had never actually been filled."

  Chapter 19

  The swivel chair creaked like old bones, as Dane leaned back and rubbed his face, his eyes aching.

  He sat at the roll top desk in the corner of the kitchen, pouring through piles of old bills and hand-written receipts. Hanging above it was a corkboard filled with post-it notes, business cards, and various memos.r />
  The desk had been the most likely place to find a will, and he had come up with nothing. The box he'd set aside for anything promising still sat empty five hours later.

  Before searching the desk, he'd gathered all the boxes of old papers and files from the storage closet into a stack in the living room, but he hadn't turned up anything in those either.

  Deep down he suspected he wouldn't find anything anyway. He had no doubt McConnell had already gone through the files top to bottom soon after Henry had died.

  In the desk file drawer, each year's file began on April 16th, with the amount paid out on property taxes added to the total paid out in bills and used as a starting point from which incoming money was deducted daily thereafter. Miraculously, the money his father and mother brought in from horseshoeing and printing usually brought the total pretty close to zero by the end of the year.

  Every so often, though, the gap between income and outgo became too large to fill with just horseshoes and print jobs. It was during these times that his parents would rent a few acres of land to one of their friends, always a deaf family that was having a rough time of it on the outside.

  Paying much less for a place to live than they would anywhere else in Boulder County, the renters helped his parents make ends meet and sometimes even provided Dane with kids his own age to play with.

  His father would not allow anyone to bring in a trailer, instead rolling the old Pullman car down the tracks near the family's allocated spot and letting it serve as temporary shelter until a house could be built. The houses were made using scrap lumber and building materials collected over the years and kept in the outbuilding. Using what was on hand, the resulting structures were surprisingly appealing if not easily categorized.

  With a roof over their heads and a promise to never raise their rents, it was an offer that most accepted gratefully in the beginning. Over the years, though, a certain resentment seemed to come into play. Many wanted to own the land on which they spent so much of their time. His father declined all offers, telling his friends that he would understand if they felt the need to move somewhere else. Few ever did, feeling that Henry Dane would eventually, in his old age, see that he couldn't take the land with him. Any chances of getting to Henry through Anna Dane disappeared when she passed away, or so their son would have thought.

  However, Henry had clearly decided to sell the various families the parcels of land not long after Michael had left home. A file with the paperwork for each family was in the desk, the sales prices on each plot ridiculously far below market value.

  Tucked in there as well was a handwritten loan agreement between Henry and Oren McConnell dated two years earlier, for the sum of $35,000. The payment schedule indicated Oren had not made a payment for the last eight months.

  Why had his father changed his mind about the land? And what had Oren McConnell borrowed such a large sum of money for?

  When Henry had been sole owner of the land, the realtors had only one target they could go after. Now they had dozens. Perhaps the old man had seen the inevitability of it all, leaving it to younger and stronger hands to defend. In the end though, Henry Dane still had more than fifteen hundred acres. More than enough to keep the realtors hounding him.

  He sighed and tried to pull the bottom drawer of the desk all the way out. Something was catching. The drawer finally gave. Inside he found stacks of yellowed letters, bound together by a cracked rubber band.

  Nearly twenty years old, the letters documented a yearlong conversation between his mother and grandmother. Valerie Porter tried in vain to convince her daughter and mule-stubborn, selfish husband of the wisdom of letting them move up to Colorado to help out. Henry's response was always a clear and resounding negative, no matter how often the question was asked.

  Henry's sign for his mother-in-law had been a combination of peacock and turkey. It was a fitting description of the brightly colored woman Michael remembered strutting around their house, stinking the place up with smoke and dropping ashes from her cigarette.

  Michael had adored his Grandpa Glenn. His eyes lit up as he told Michael all about Arizona, the sky filled with flying cockroaches so big they blocked the sun, the air so hot piss turned to dust before it hit the ground. Now that was hot.

  Grandpa Glenn had bought him his first fishing pole and shown him how to use it down at the creek behind the house, the baseball game coming over an old transistor radio he always kept in his pocket. His father never took him fishing, or anything else for that matter. Grandpa had shown him how to make his own radio using a crystal from one of his mother's old hearing aids, a penny and some wire wrapped around a pencil. Magic.

  On Michael's ninth birthday, his grandfather had driven him into Boulder and bought him a model rocket. Afterwards they went to a greasy burger joint, the old man teaching him how to shoot nine-ball over a couple glasses of Roy Rogers. Grandpa Glenn's didn't have a cherry and smelled funny.

  His grandparents had never been very involved in his mother's life. As with many hearing parents of deaf children, the disconnect was just too great. The sudden interest in his mother surfaced after they lost their business and found themselves in dire straits financially.

  As Grandma Val saw it, they had only one choice. Move to Colorado and stay in their daughter's house until their son-in-law could build them a house on some nice, out of the way part of the property.

  Dane tucked the last of the letters back into the drawer. No help there. If anything, it only made the case for the school stronger.

  What made him think his father would leave him the whole property, when Henry had been unwilling to give even a small part to his own wife's parents?

  He shut off the lamp and looked around, the house quiet except for the ticking of the clock above the fireplace.

  He needed more time, but time cost money and he wasn't about to take any more from John Caywood.

  Time to go make his own.

  Chapter 20

  If the looming reality of impending imprisonment hadn't been enough to convince Dane to cut bait and run, the drunken ramblings of the suit sitting on the barstool next to him did.

  Staring into the bar mirror as if staring into the abyss, Bob had shared with Dane the story of a dot-com venture gone bad. Bob, and Bob alone, the only one still alive to tell the tale.

  "So there we are, sitting in Brent's office, trying to figure out how we're going to tell everybody that they won't have jobs anymore come Monday morning, right?"

  "Right."

  Dane had gone over all his options while rearranging pieces of beer labels on top of the bar, deciding that all sensible roads led away from Boulder. Staying here would be like hanging around a cattle yard while as the trucks for the slaughterhouse pull up.

  "Shit Creek. I'm telling you, man, that's where we were," he gestured, slopping beer across the polished mahogany.

  "And I'll bet you didn't even have a paddle," encouraged Dane, only half listening, using the white noise of the guy's voice to think.

  "Paddle? Hell, the only thing we had was a hole in the bottom of the boat. And we were headed for the rapids."

  The guy finished off his beer and signaled the bartender for another round. Dane gave a half-hearted protest, and then tilted his Monkey's Head Ale in thanks.

  The idiotic name and the funky label were a grim reminder of the plague of microbreweries that had seemed to follow Dane across the country, sprouting up wherever there was enough disposable income. Dane took a swig of his beer, figuring it was a small price to pay for convenience. The leaded-glass windows and copper kettles made finding guys like this one as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

  "I mean, the money just wasn't there. The investors weren't going to pony up any more cash until we sold something, but the sales guys had nothing to sell, and the programmers weren't going to hand over shit until they got paid. And we weren't paying them shit to begin with, just a bunch of college kids. Better them than me though."

  Dane took a drink
and wondered what would have happened if Ansel Harding had gotten the tape while he was still in Boulder County Jail, feeling the cold of the bottle in his hand. He'd still be there wearing orange and facing possession charges, that's what.

  "We got a notice saying they're about to shut the power off, it's so bad. So when the secretary walks in and tells us we've got a call from DataCorp, I'm like - ecstatic. When they say they want to meet us for lunch and make another offer all I can think is yes, there is a God..."

  Fucking McConnell. The videotape had been up his sleeve all along; ready to be played whenever it looked like the co-op wasn't going to get what it wanted.

  "...so I'm sitting there with the chopsticks shaking in my hand, I'm so nervous, already thinking about how I'm going to spend the money..."

  It always came down to money, thought Dane. Without the property, he had no money. Without the money he had no lawyer. Without a damn good lawyer he was going to prison.

  He was already in free-fall with the ground coming up fast.

  The ground that held the poisoned remains of his father.

  Dane thought about the payment schedule he'd found in the desk and wondered again if this was really about the co-op at all.

  Thirty-five grand was a lot of money to some people. Where had it gone, what had it been used for? Dane had no doubt that given the choice between his family and his neighbors, Oren McConnell would protect his family. But would he kill for it? His first instinct was to say no, but the fact remained that he had concealed the tape - lied about it. Dane could be sure of nothing anymore.

  "When the guy takes out his pen and scribbles on the back of his business card and slides it over to Brent, just like in the movies, right? I mean, do people really do that? I don't know. But anyway...I can tell from the look on Brent's face that something's wrong. Then the guy from DataCorp says 'I know it's less than our original offer, but I think under the circumstances you'll find it fair'."