Page 3 of Deacon

“Who’s using the ice house?”

He put his pen down.

“Why were you there?”

“I wanted to measure it. I had an idea I wanted to put to you.” I stayed standing. “There are trucks out there, Dad. A new gate. Men. They’ve blacked out the windows. Something weird is going on there.”

“New tenants.”

“You said it was empty.”

“It was. Now it’s leased.”

“To who?”

“To people who pay on time and never call me about the plumbing.” He picked the pen back up. “Which puts them ahead of most.”

“They don’t look like people who care about plumbing, or anything else.”

“You only drove past, Chelsea. You couldn’t see much of anything from the road.”

The only way he knew that was if somebody had called him. Cold spread across my shoulders.

“One of them walked up to the fence,” I said. “He was looking at my plates.”

That got a reaction. A small one, a pause in his hand, his jaw working once. Then he was my father again, unimpressed and patient, as if I was still twelve and asking why I couldn’t have a horse.

“Did you stop?”

“No.”

“Good. Stay away from there.”

“Dad.”

“It’s a lease. It’s business. It’s got nothing to do with you.” His voice stayed level. “Go home. Get some sleep. You’ve got your shop to open in the morning.”

Your shop. Like it was a lemonade stand I’d set up on the corner.

Angry I could’ve handled. This was the voice he used on tenants who wanted a rent reduction, the one that shut a door quietly and locked it after. I’d heard it my whole life, and it still made me feel about three feet tall.

That was what did it in the end. Feeling small made me furious.

“Who are they?”

“No more discussions. Goodnight, Chelsea.”

I looked at him, both of us stubborn. I was my father’s daughter for sure. I left his office without another word.

I sat in my car on Main Street for twenty minutes with the engine off.

Dad’s building. Dad’s business. Salvation had spent two years learning to look the other way when trucks came through after dark. Everyone knew what was going on in this town.

Except I’d looked. And somebody had picked up the phone to my father before I’d even reached town.

I could call Sheriff White. He was the only law in Salvation and a good man, but he’d been shot not all that long ago and still walked with a cane on bad days. And if I told the sheriff, he’d have to act on it. I couldn’t do that to my father, who I had no doubt was involved somehow.

In any case, the county would take weeks. The state would take longer. We’d spent the last couple of years watching outside help fail to arrive.