Chapter 3 - The Discovery of the Six
The room on the fourth floor of the Rhodes Tower did not have a view of the river; it looked out over the flat, gravel-covered roof of the medical library, where two industrial exhaust fans turned with a slow, hypnotic rotation against the gray Columbus sky. It was Thursday morning, forty-eight hours since the brick had hit the concrete step.
My face was no longer mine. It was a construction of white linen bandages, adhesive strips, and six small titanium pins that had been drilled into the bone above my ear to keep the orbital floor from collapsing into the sinus cavity. My left eye was still swollen shut, but the doctor had told me that morning that the retina was intact—the darkness was just fluid, a lake of blood that would take three weeks to drain into the tissue of my neck.
Wyatt sat in the armchair by the radiator, a thick stack of blue legal folders across his lap. He hadn't changed his trousers; they were still the gray denim ones from Tuesday night, the knees stiff with dry mud from the Davis garden.
A man in a charcoal suit stood by the window. His name was Arthur Vance, and he had been my grandfather’s attorney until the old man went into the home in Lancaster in 2012. He carried an old leather briefcase with a brass lock that had been scratched down to the base metal, and his fingers smelled faintly of cigar tobacco and old court bond paper.
"They're trying to post the bond this afternoon, Sadie," Vance said. He didn't look at my bandages; he looked at his ledger, his gold pen moving down a column of dates that had been typed on an old manual ribbon machine. "Your mother’s brother, the one who owns the gravel pit in Delaware County, brought three thousand dollars in cash to the municipal clerk's office at ten o'clock. They're trying to get Gregory out before the grand jury convenes on Tuesday."
"The electrician," I said, my voice coming out of the right side of my mouth like a broken reed. "Did he give the statement?"
"He did," Vance said, turning a page in his folder. "And he's not the only one. We have six, Sadie. Six distinct depositions registered with the district attorney's office before the sun came up yesterday."
"Six?" Wyatt looked up from his files, his brow furrowing. "The utility truck only had one man in it. The neighbors across the street didn't even come to their windows until the sirens started."
"The utility truck driver was the first," Vance explained, his gold pen stopping on a red ink line. "But there were five others sitting in a black sedan parked sixty feet down the block—men from the state labor compliance board who had been shadowing Gregory since four o'clock that afternoon. They were there to serve an administrative warrant for the cross-collateralization of the farm equipment notes."
A small, cold draft moved across my feet through the bottom of the hospital sheet. "They saw it?"
"They saw the whole thing," Vance said. "They had a video recorder running from the dashboard of the sedan to document who was entering the house. They have Gregory fetching the brick from the gully. They have Brenda standing by the swing with her hands in her pockets. They even have the audio from the porch microphone—the part where Melanie tells Wyatt he chose the wrong daughter."
Wyatt let out a long, slow whistle through his teeth. "That's enough to clear the first-degree assault charge, Arthur. That's ten years in the state facility without a look at parole."
"It's more than that," Vance said, his face turning toward the gray window where the library fans were turning. "The video shows something else. At exactly 10:04—three minutes before Gregory came out with the clay—the curtain in the third window was pulled back. The compliance officers have a high-resolution still of the face behind the glass."
I tried to sit up, but the titanium pins in my skull throbbed with a hot, red intensity that forced my head back into the pillow. "Who was it, Arthur?"
Vance didn't answer with a name. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a large, brown envelope—the heavy, reinforced kind used for moving title deeds between the county recorder's office and the bank vaults. He laid it on the over-bed table, his fingers smoothing the paper before he pulled out a document with a blue silk ribbon bound into the margin.
"This is the last will and testament of your grandfather, Charles Davis," Vance said. "The one he drew in my office on Bell Street in November of ninety-three. The one your mother told the probate judge had been lost in the fire at the railyard office."
"He's dead, Arthur," I said. "He died in the Lancaster facility four years ago. We went to the service at the Methodist chapel."
"No, Sadie," Vance said, his voice dropping into that heavy, unhurried resonance that belongs to men who spend their lives looking at church registries. "You went to a service for a man named Charles Davis, yes. But the death certificate registered in Lancaster was for a cousin—a cousin who had been living on the state pension under your father's power of attorney since 2014."
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Wyatt stood up so fast his chair hit the radiator with a loud, metallic clang. "What are you saying, Vance?"
"Your grandfather didn't die in Lancaster," Vance said, his finger tapping the blue silk ribbon on the deed. "He's been in that house on Glenwood Avenue for twelve years. He's been behind that gray lace curtain in the room they told the county appraiser was nailed shut because of the dry rot. And according to this text right here, he owns every foot of the timberland Wyatt’s company just cleared for the new state highway extension."
