Hobie Lansdale climbed down and walked the length of his train to the head end, looked at what was piled in front of his locomotive, then up at the houses, then bent over with his hands on his knees before he straightened and got on the radio.
Karen Brantley came off the lawn with one shoe and dust down her whole front, already talking to Deputy Coye, fast and organized, because she had been organizing things her entire adult life. The railroad did this. They came through here with no notice. That is association property, that is common area, and they destroyed one point four million dollars of it with two hundred guests arriving in three hours.
Ike Trowbridge walked up and held out three pieces of paper until she took them, because she couldn’t not take them, not with a deputy standing there. October twentieth, removal notice, certified refused, that’s the green card stapled to it. He tapped the second. April fourth, certified to the association, the management company and you personally, signed for at your house. He tapped the third. April twentieth, hand delivered to you in front of a tent crew. You tore that one up on the grass. I imagine some of it’s still out there.
“That corridor was vacated,” Karen said. “The county vacated it.” Clem Fetters took a folded copy of resolution 22-14 out of his jacket. “Ma’am, I wrote the staff report for that resolution. The board vacated a public road interest in the entrance apron. It says so on line four.” He handed it to her open. “It doesn’t mention the rail corridor because a county board can’t vacate a rail corridor. Nobody at that meeting thought it did. You’re the only person who ever read it that way.”
And then she went to the letter. Of course she did. It was the only thing she’d ever really had. She walked back to her car and returned with the leather folder, dust all down the front of it, and pulled out the state rail division letter and held it up in front of a deputy, a road superintendent, and a roadmaster, and read it out loud in the voice she used at meetings. The Fern Hollow Branch was abandoned in 1996 and no longer constitutes an active rail line. 1996. That is the state in writing and every person standing here has had a copy of it for eight months.
That was when I nodded at Ware and Ware opened his briefcase on the hood of my truck. Twenty-two pages. It had come in from the state rail division four days earlier and I’d read it so many times I could have recited it and I had not slept properly since. “Ma’am,” Ware said, “that’s the state’s answer. This is the question.” He handed her the first page. Her own letterhead, September twelfth, signed K. Brantley, Chair, Streetscape Committee, requesting the status of the Fern Hollow Branch for a community entrance improvement project. “I’m aware of what I wrote.”
It doesn’t change. Second page. Page two was a photograph she had attached to that inquiry. A close-up of this crossing taken from the shoulder in bright September light, framed on the rail head, the polished top of the steel, filling a third of the frame, bright as a mirror. Exactly what Griff Alderfer described four days later when he asked her to verify the line, and she wrote back that verification was not required. She had photographed the evidence herself and mailed it to the state.
Third page. Page three was a hand-drawn location map in her handwriting. North arrow, a box labeled project site, and the box was drawn on the branch north of a notation reading MP 3.2. Ware let her look at it. “The state answered exactly what you asked. It told you about the segment north of milepost 3.2 because that’s where you drew your project.” He turned the page under her hand. “This is the Fern Hollow and Southern milepost schedule. Pennington Siding connects at milepost 4.1.” Karen didn’t move. “4.1 is south,” Ware said. “You’re standing at 4.1. The state has never in any document said one word about this crossing.”