Mara returned with a question that made the adults around her fall quiet.
"Who owned this building before the club?"
Ronan looked at her. "The Brackett family. Why?"
"Because whoever installed that equipment understands parts of the original structure better than our maintenance records do. I want to know who had the plans."
Garrett, passing the doorway, stopped abruptly. His expression changed.
"Harland Brackett," he said.
The name had an effect on the room that Eli noticed immediately. Ronan's mouth tightened. Cutter looked up from the window. Boone, near the hallway, muttered something under his breath and went silent again.
"That's a name I haven't heard in a while," Ronan said.
"His family built the original place," Garrett continued. "His grandfather had a storage business here in the sixties. Harland worked on the underground additions when he was younger. That's what people said, anyway."
Eli looked from one man to the other. "Who is he?"
Ronan answered after a pause. "A contractor who believed the world had stolen what he thought belonged to him."
The explanation needed more history, and the history was not the kind anybody could tell quickly while people were trying to escape a building. But Ronan gave Eli enough to understand. The Brackett family had once owned much of the ridge and used the old structure for commercial storage and construction work. Over the years, debts and disputed contracts had eaten into the business. The Iron Hollow club bought the property legally in 1989, after the last owners could no longer maintain it.
Harland had been a young man then. He had always blamed the club for gaining a property his family had lost, though the purchase itself had been lawful. Later he built a construction business of his own, won municipal contracts, and accumulated a reputation for impossible promises and questionable accounting. An investigation uncovered fraudulent billing and unauthorized work on several sites. He went to prison nineteen years earlier and served eleven years before returning to the county.
"Eight years out," Garrett said. "And he's had eight years to look at that building from the road and think about what he believes we owe him."
"You think he came back?" Eli asked.
"I think somebody with knowledge of this property came back," Ronan replied. "We can let the sheriff determine the rest."
It was not a declaration of guilt. It was the recognition of a serious possibility. The annual gathering was held the same weekend every year, a tradition familiar enough that local businesses stocked extra coffee and breakfast supplies before the bikers arrived. Someone who had lived in Callaway Creek for years would have known when the building was most crowded. Someone who remembered the old plans could have known the underground entrance existed long before Eli found it.
Eli thought of the roster hanging below the building. Sixty-three names. All present. He imagined someone sitting at a desk and carefully writing them down, not as people but as pieces of a grievance assembled over years. His stomach tightened again.
"He's had a lot of time," Eli said.
Ronan looked at him. "Maybe. But time doesn't make a person right."