Chapter 7: The Network Expands
By Thursday afternoon, the news of Arthur Sterling's visit had traveled through the local diner and the feed store faster than a grassfire in August. By three o'clock, three more motorcycles had turned up our drive—heavy Harley-Low Riders with high handlebars and chrome pipes that rattled the loose gravel. They parked in a neat semicircle behind Jesse's bike, and four more men in weathered leather vests climbed off, carrying canvas duffel bags and cardboard boxes filled with groceries, canned goods, and a fresh crate of canned peaches from the orchard down in Odell.
I was sitting at the oak kitchen table, spreading butter on a loaf of soda bread, when the screen door swung open and a tall, bearded man with a jagged scar across his left cheek—whom the boys called "Hammer"—dropped a heavy leather ledger onto the table beside my sugar bowl.
"Vern Vance came through," Hammer said, pulling out a chair and sitting down without waiting for an invitation. He pulled off his riding gloves and tossed them onto the counter. "Took us about twenty minutes to convince him that his old man's name wouldn't be dragged through the mud if he handed over the duplicate records he'd been keeping in his garage down by the rail spur."
I looked down at the ledger. The cover was cracked, dark blue buckram with the official gold seal of the Wasco County Assessor's Office stamped into the cloth, dated August 14, 1994. My late husband, Thomas, had signed his name on page twelve in his sloping, careful cursive, confirming the complete unencumbered discharge of the mortgage note following the cooperative timber grant.
"This is the missing book," I whispered, running my thumb over the embossed seal. "The one Henderson told the county commissioners was destroyed in the basement pipe burst back in two thousand and twelve."
"It's not just the book," Jesse said, walking in from the porch with a thick manila envelope tucked under his arm. He dropped it next to the ledger. "Vern kept the carbon slips from the notary log. Every time Arthur Sterling’s daddy or one of his shell companies tried to file a fraudulent lien on a homestead between here and Maupin, old man Henderson signed off on it in exchange for a cut of the development fees."
"That's a federal penitentiary offense," Ray said from the doorway, where he was leaning against the frame, cleaning his fingernails with the tip of his pocketknife. "Tampering with public land records and mail fraud across state lines. Sterling didn't just buy a few local politicians; he built his whole real estate empire on a foundation of forged signatures and stolen deeds."
"How many others?" I asked, looking up from the ledger, my eyes stinging with a hot, sudden pressure that I hadn't felt since Thomas passed away in the front bedroom six years ago.
"At least a dozen families between here and the gorge," Jesse said, pulling out the chair opposite me and sitting down so our knees almost touched under the table. "People who gave up and walked away because they thought the county had the final word. But they didn't have you, Mom. And they didn't have us."
"What do we do with this?" I asked, laying my hand flat against the worn leather cover of the assessor's ledger.
"We don't go to the local sheriff," Jesse said, his voice dropping into that quiet, absolute tone that brook no argument. "We take it straight to the state attorney general's office in Salem on Monday morning. And we walk into that county courthouse with four lawyers and a dozen witnesses who are going to watch Arthur Sterling try to explain how a dead man's signature got renewed on a property release three years after he was buried in the churchyard."
I looked around the small, cluttered kitchen—at the yellowed lace curtains my mother had crocheted, at the heavy iron skillet hanging by the stove, and at the five large, tattooed men who had somehow made this house feel less like a fortress and more like a home again.
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"Well," I said, reaching for the teapot on the back burner. "If we're going to Salem on Monday, we'd better make sure we have enough pie for the trip. Ray, go out to the pantry and bring me that sack of dried apples from the top shelf."
Ray grinned, a wide, genuine flash of white teeth through his thick beard, and headed for the pantry without a word. The kettle began to whistle softly, a warm, steady sound that chased the last of the mountain chill right out of the room.
