The Kelso County Ledger called me Wednesday. A kid named Bert Coughlin wanting comment on a dispute about the entrance at Foxglove Crossing. I said very little. I didn’t have to. He’d already called Karen and for the first time since this started she’d had to answer a question instead of issuing an instruction, and you could hear it in the two lines he got out of her. The corridor is common area. And then, I’m not going to litigate a landscaping project with a newspaper.
Two days later, three people stood up at the annual budget meeting and asked where one point four million dollars had gone and why the association was paying a security contractor. She was losing altitude, and I let myself feel it for about a day and a half.
Then the newsletter came out. She wrote it herself. Full page glossy in every mailbox. It did not mention directive number four or the RFI or the deed or the plat. It said the association was being targeted by the owner of an industrial quarry who wanted to run freight traffic through a residential community, that his legal threats had already cost them thousands, and that any assessment increase would be the direct result of one man refusing to accept a state determination. There was a paragraph about the safety of children.
Wanda Curtland called that night apologizing before she finished saying hello and told me half the street believed it because half the street would rather believe one man is greedy than believe their own board buried a railroad in the dark. I hung up and sat with the two documents on the kitchen table because there was a question in them I hadn’t asked yet.
Verification not required. Line is abandoned per state rail division correspondence in committee file. She wasn’t bluffing. A woman who is guessing does not write the word required. She had that letter and she’d believed it enough to override a professional contractor and pour concrete on a working railroad. So what was actually in it?
I told Ware I wanted the whole thing. Not her photocopy. The complete state rail division file, everything in the folder. He put in the records request on a Friday and the analyst who called back was helpful in the way state employees are helpful when they have no idea what they’re standing in the middle of. She said inquiry files take a few weeks because they include the incoming correspondence and all attachments. Then she said the part that made Ware pick his pen back up. The inquiry that generated that letter was opened on September twelfth by a Ms. Karen Brantley.
We asked the county for an emergency order in January. Remove the obstruction, restore the crossing, stop the work. Ware said it was the fastest road and the cheapest one. And he was right about both, and it was still the worst day of my life to that point.
Judge Frederick Amboy took the bench at 9:15 in a courtroom with the heat running too high. Karen Brantley sat at the far table in a gray suit with a leather folder squared in front of her, and she looked at me exactly once on the way in, the way you check a chair before you sit in it. Ware laid out the deed, the operating agreement, the plat, Ike’s inspection, the railroad’s removal notice, and directive number four with cover the rails circled in red. For about twenty minutes, I thought we were walking out of there with our line back.