With Kim kibitzing over my shoulder, I navigated to the Maryland tax assessment database, selected Tilghman County and let the database know I intended to search by street. On the following screen, I filled in Our Song’s house number and street name, then clicked Next.
‘Wow!’ I flopped back in the chair, totally awed. Everything you ever wanted to know about our little home away from home – with the possible exception of where I hid the dark chocolate-covered caramels – was suddenly laid out on the monitor before me.
‘Magic, huh?’ Kim said.
‘Darn right. I’m used to government websites that are slow, make you enter the same information half a dozen times, freeze and then kick you offline with a “Sorry, try again.” Kudos to whomever designed this one. Not the lowest bidder, obviously.’
Kim tapped the screen. ‘Here are the deed reference numbers I was telling you about. You should jot them down.’
I made a note of the liber and folio numbers for our property on a scrap of paper, then navigated over to MDLandRec.net. From there it was a simple matter to type the numbers into the blanks set aside for ‘book’ and ‘page’ – et voila! – a digital image of the actual deed for Our Song filled the screen.
‘Excellent!’ I said.
‘The information you want is down here,’ Kim told me, leaning closer, ‘after all the “witnesseths” and “in consideration ofs,” the paragraph near the bottom where it says, “being the same property conveyed by deed dated May 31, 1968 and recorded among the Land Records of Tilghman County Maryland in Liber 3088 Folio 201 which was granted and conveyed from Charles T. Quinn and Juliana C. Quinn, husband and wife unto the Grantors herein,” which would be you.
‘Now you navigate back to the home screen,’ she instructed, ‘but this time you plug in the numbers 3088 and 201. When that deed comes up, it will list the previous owners, too. Keep going back and back and back until you’ve gathered the whole ownership chain, or the documents run out – whichever comes first.’
‘That might take a while,’ I said with a grin. ‘Dwight Heberling thinks our property dates to the mid-1700s. Was King George II or George III on the throne back then?’
Kim grinned back. ‘Google it. Might even have been James II.’ She checked her watch. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then. You’ve got half an hour before Fran shows up.’ She winked. ‘And if you’re very nice, I won’t tell her you’re already here.’
‘What’s the report from the courthouse today?’ Paul asked when he returned to the eastern shore from Annapolis later that evening.
I eyed the battered briefcase he carried, bursting at the seams with paperwork.
‘Why don’t you put your briefcase down and I’ll fix you a drink. Gee and Tee?’
‘Wine, I think.’
‘White or red?’
‘Whatever’s already open, sweetheart.’
‘I’ll meet you on the porch,’ I said as I headed for the kitchen. ‘We can toast the Canada geese. They’ve been super noisy today.’
A few minutes later I joined him on the porch, carrying two glasses of chilled Sauvignon blanc. ‘The house goes back to the middle of the eighteenth century,’ I said, handing him a glass. ‘Just as everyone suspected.’ I settled into the lounge chair next to Paul and adjusted a pillow behind my back. ‘It was built by a guy named Josiah Hazlett and seems to have remained in the Hazlett family until early 1952 when it and twenty acres of surrounding land was sold to Liberty Land Development Corporation for a pittance, at least by today’s standards.’
‘Land development?’ Paul looked puzzled. ‘Why aren’t we sitting in the middle of a cluster of waterfront condos, then?’
I shrugged. ‘Sewer? Water? Who knows? Whatever plans they had must have gone bust because LLDC held the property for about ten years, then sold it off to an outfit called Heartland Enterprises, Inc. Charles and Julianna Quinn bought the property from Heartland in 1975 for twenty-thousand dollars.’
‘Ah,’ Paul sighed and took a sip of his wine. ‘Those were the good old days.’
‘Tomorrow I plan to spend some time at the courthouse, but in the library, not the basement. Kim promised me access to Lexis-Nexis where I hope to find out more about those two companies.’
The following day, Kim was as good as her word. When a search through Lexis-Nexis turned up nothing particularly useful, she directed me to an Internet database called Forbes People Tracker which provided several links, but none that led anywhere. It wasn’t until I logged onto the Dialog database and started trolling through Dun and Bradstreet’s Who Owns Whom that I struck pay dirt.
Heartland was a real estate development corporation based in Hohokus, New Jersey, but Liberty Land Development – now defunct – had once been an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Clifton Farms, a chicken processing plant.
In CrocTail, which contained information about corporations and their subsidiaries going back year by year, I found Clifton Farms easily enough, categorized under ‘poultry slaughtering and processes’ as well as ‘food and kindred products.’ Its owner was a man named Clifton J Ames. Clifton J Ames had been dead since 1992, but the processing plant he had established was very much alive. I’d bought a package of Clifton Farms boneless thighs at Acme the previous week. They were still in my freezer.
TEN
‘The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome.’
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae, 1889
Our Song seemed to be in a state of perpetual makeover; we were living through a real-life episode of HGTV. One day it was Love It, Or List It. The next, House Crashers or Flip or Flop. I expected Jonathan and Drew, the Property Brothers, to pop out of the woodwork at any moment with another problem that required our urgent attention, and that of our checkbook.
Using sledge hammers, the wall between the kitchen and the living room had come down in a loud and spectacularly pleasing way, opening up the downstairs to space and light. Dwight Heberling assigned his son to clean up the debris in preparation for the new framing while he took a pair of workers up on the roof and got them going on a more careful demolition of the chimney.
Just when I thought we had everything under control, the water pump stopped working. Dwight pulled the pump out of the well, swore, pointed out a jumper wire some idiot had installed across one set of contacts at the pressure switch, and pronounced the pump D.O.A. A new pump was ordered, but while we waited for it to be delivered via Fedex overnight, we had no water to drink, do the dishes with or flush the toilets. Dwight and his workers improvised, drawing fresh water out of the creek to mix the mortar and clean their tools. Meanwhile, Paul fetched a bucket of water, set it next to the downstairs toilet and we followed island rules: If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.
That’s why I found myself at the Acme supermarket early that morning pushing a grocery cart full of bottled water through the checkout line. I’d heaved the last plastic jug onto the conveyor belt when somebody called my name. Caitlyn Dymond was pushing a similar cart loaded with boxes of juice, granola bars and fruit rollups. She steered the cart into line behind me. ‘Kids in day camp,’ she explained, plopping a super-sized box of goldfish crackers on the conveyor belt just behind the plastic bar that separated her groceries from my water jugs.
‘Been there, done that, Caitlyn, and I remember it well.’ I eyed the piles of snack foods in her basket and asked, ‘Just how many kids do you have?’