Page 1 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

one

Juneau

"The clause lapsed in April," Hettie Prewitt says, and slides the folder across her desk with two fingers. "Which means as of this spring you can do whatever you like with it. Sell it, sit on it, plant potatoes."

"I'm selling it."

"So I gathered."

Her office smells like paper and cold coffee. There's a radiator under the window doing nothing at all, and outside, Main Street is wearing its market bunting, orange and gold triangles snapping in a wind that has an opinion about October. I've been in Silver Ridge for two hours. My rental car still has the airport parking stub on the dash.

I open the folder. Survey plan, nine acres, irregular wedge. The east boundary runs along a gravel road. The west boundary follows a creek. In the middle, a rectangle marked concrete structure (derelict).

"Talk me through the timeline again," I say.

Hettie folds her hands. She's seventy if she's a day, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the unhurried manner of a woman who has notarized four decades of this valley's divorces. "Your grandmother left the parcel in trust when she passed in 2015. No sale, no subdivision, no development for ten years. Your mother inherited the beneficial interest and couldn't touch it either. When Corinne died, it came to you, still tied. April tenth, the clause expired. You're the only grandchild, there's no one else in line, and the title is clean."

"And the buyer's ready?"

"The buyer has been ready since May. Northgate Storage Partners. Two hundred units, climate-controlled, phase one by spring."

"They want to close Friday."

"They want to close yesterday."

"Friday works." I take out my pen and cross out a clerical error on page four, because someone typed the lot number wrong and I have never in my life been able to leave that alone. "My flight's Friday evening. Four days. That's enough for the searches and the discharge and the signing, and then I go home and this is done."

"Four days is a tight week for a property nobody's touched in forty years."

"Four days is generous. I've closed a nineteen-parcel assembly in nine."

Hettie watches me correct the page. "You planning to look at it?"

"I've looked at it. Satellite, GIS layers, the regional land use plan, the last three assessment rolls." I cap the pen. "I'm an urban planner. I've read this parcel more carefully than most people read their own leases."

"That's not the same as looking at it."

"It's better."

That's not entirely true and I know it while I'm saying it, which is a habit I picked up somewhere around the third year of paying off my mother's funeral one automatic transfer at a time. There's a version of grief that looks exactly like competence.

She makes a sound that isn't agreement and isn't argument. Then her eyes go past my shoulder to the outer office, where a bell has rung over the door and someone's boots are coming across the floorboards without any particular hurry.

"Hettie," a man says. "Your assistant let me in. She's under the impression I have an appointment."

"You don't."

"I know."

I turn around.

He's filling the doorway in a canvas jacket with the cuffs turned back, forearms brown from a summer he clearly spent outdoors, and there's a dark red beard on him with more copper in it than his hair. Stocky. Built like he lifts things all day and doesn't think of that as exercise. The lines at the corners of his eyes are the kind you only get from laughing at people you like, over and over, for years.

He looks at me. And I have the immediate, undignified experience of my whole body arriving somewhere ahead of me.

"You're Harker," he says.

"Juneau."