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 totaclass="underline" 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 he feels abut selling.”
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 he couldn’t tell me what was going on.
“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 pack of Nabs from the vending machines over in the old part of the courthouse. With court due to resume in fifteen minutes, it was all the lunch I had time for.
“If word gets out, it could send land prices right through the roof,” Sutterly told me.
Some big secret. As if he’s the only one who’s noticed the escalation of land prices in Colleton County these past few years.
Dick Sutterly’s just an opportunist who happens to be in the right place at the right time. His father was an itinerant carpenter who built a Skilsaw, three nail aprons, and two jackleg helpers into a small construction company that Dick took over when the older man had a heatstroke one summer. From building modest individual houses to order, he began building two or three at a time on speculation.
Those were leveraged into ten- and fifteen-house strip plats, and these became sixty- and eighty-house subdivisions with streets and cul-de-sacs.
“Now I’ve got the chance for something really big,” he said, his cheeks turning pink. “All I need is Adam’s little scrap of land and I’m in business.”
More than that he wouldn’t say.
“Leo Pleasant in on this?” I asked. “G. Hooks Talbert?”
Sutterly’s cheeks got pinker and pinker but my lunch break ended before I could break him.
7
« ^ » Tradesmen, mechanics, and labourers of all sorts, have here an ample range before them: hither then they may repair, and no longer remain in a starving and grovelling condition at home…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
I was headed home after a mental commitment hearing in Makely late the next morning. Despite fog and rain and dreary gray skies overhead, I was cheered by the seasonal sight of holly berries ripening into bright red amidst shiny wet green leaves. Deciduous trees had finally changed color, too, but even though crepe myrtles and pecans showed skeletal limbs through rapidly thinning orange and yellow leaves, oaks and sweet gums and a lot of the other trees had barely begun to shed good. That, of course, could change overnight if we got a real cold snap.
Growth has been erratic yet steady along New Forty-Eight between Makely and Raleigh. Tucked back behind tall rolling berms that are penetrated here and there by stately brick-and-brass gateposts are the roofs of high-end subdivisions with names like Horse Run Meadows or Dogwood Ridge. More numerous though are the nameless developments, the random results of different people deciding to sell off bits of their land to builders with no overall plan in mind: no berms, no stately entrances, just cheap-to-moderate tract houses, each with its own drive giving directly onto the four-lane highway.
I swear I don’t know where all these new people are coming from. Sometimes I wonder how places like Iowa or Ohio or upstate New York still have enough people to make it worthwhile keeping the lights on up there.
Doomed fields, as yet untouched by berm or bulldozer, bristled with real estate signs and surveyors’ ribbons. Soybeans had been picked, tobacco and corn stalks had been cut, a few fields were even planted already in their winter crop of oats. Intermixed were stands of unharvested cotton. The plants had been sprayed with a defoliant and the coarse dark leafless stems stood in stiff contrast to the soft white fibers bursting from their bolls. A couple of days of sunshine and the cotton would be dry enough to pick.