Yeah, right. Tragic. My heart bled for him.
“Anyway,” the lawyer said, fumbling for the battered messenger bag slung over one shoulder, “no need to waste your time chatting when you have things to do and I could be billing for my hours.” He chuckled heartily. “But I wanted to give you some preliminary information on our claim… where is it… ah, here.”
He pulled out a sheaf of papers and shoved them into my hand. I stared at him while nerves began slithering in my stomach.
“What is this?”
“A copy of my preliminary research into the portion of land in dispute. For our claim,” he repeated.
“What land? What dispute?” I blinked at him. “Whatclaim?”
“The Pond land that’s currently in use as a Sunday orchard, of course.” He sounded exasperated, as if he’d explained whatever the hell this was in exacting detail and I was still obtuse.
“There is noPondland used by the orchard. There’s the land that my mother inherited?—”
“Oh, no, that acreage is not in dispute.”
“And there’s the Sunday land that runs along the border with Lu—your client’s—land, which was transferred to my family a very long time ago as a wedding portion,” I said, biting back my frustration at this unexpected—and entirely freaking unacceptable—interruption of my perfectly mediocre night. “That land’s not in dispute either.”
“Yes, well, you’ll see from my notes that it remains to be seen whether that transfer was legal.” Before I could argue with him, he rustled in his bag again and produced a business card, slapping it on top of the stack of papers in my hand. “The meeting’s about to start, so I’d best be on my way. Give me a call, and we can talk about it. Enjoy your evening!” He gave an absentminded smile and tottered away.
My siblings and I stared after him in shock.
“Who was that guy?” Hawk asked. “He’s not from the Hollow.”
“What the fuck just happened?” Knox growled.
Emma frowned. “Is he talking about the Pond orchard where your heirloom varietals are?”
My stomach plummeted to the floor. “He’d better not be,” I said in a low, angry voice.
I’d been single-handedly cultivating that orchard since I was Emma’s age. Over the years, I’d researched and acquired scion wood from a wide variety of apple trees that had nearly gone extinct, patiently grafted them onto rootstock, and nurtured them to health. And while I loved every square inch of Sunday Orchard, from the U-pick fields to the commercial operation to the pumpkin patch, the Pond orchard was my pride and joy. My labor of love. My life’s work.
I was going to kill Luke Williams, plain and simple.
Gage took the papers out of my hand. “Everyone stay calm. Jeez, it’s like Sunday brothers live to get all alpha-angry over nonsense. Let me take a look… oh.”
Hawk shoved his head over Gage’s shoulder. “Oh, what?”
Gage let out a humming sound. “It says here… Hezekiah Pond drew up papers upon his sister’s marriage to Benjamin Sunday. He divided his land ‘from the mighty oak to the hedgerow.’ But the lawyer’s note says the oak got cut down a hundred years ago…”
Emma snorted. “Hedgerow. I thought that was a made-up word in thosePride and Prejudicefanfics Hawk reads.”
“They’re not all fanfic,” Hawk muttered. “Some are retellings. There’s a difference.”
Knox was over Gage’s other shoulder, reading under his breath. “Part of that land passed back to the Pond family on Esther Whistlebaum Pond Sunday’s death, as a legacy to her nephew, but only so far as ‘the line running due east from the bend in Pond Creek to the fence before the cider house.’ And the creek dried up during the world-famous beaver overrun of 1872.”
Now Hawk was the one snorting. “Beaver Overrun. Sounds like the name of a girl band.”
Emma elbowed him out of the way before plucking one of the papers out of Gage’s stack. “Wait. It says here the hedgerow was decimated in the Great Spongy Moth Plague of 1867. What does that even mean? I’m still not sure I understand what a hedgerow is, much less a spongy moth plague.”
I shook my head and tried not to grind my teeth. “None of this matters. It’s not his fucking land. The stone wall between our properties was erected before the Civil War, for God’s sake!”
Gage muttered under his breath. “And people think Floridians are weird. What kind of language is this written in? Yeolde farmhande? Can anything this old still be legal? Can we get someone to translate this?”
Knox met my eyes over Gage’s head. “Webb, the wall doesn’t mean anything. You can build a wall… anywhere. Are you sure the property transfer is legit?”
My fingernails bit into my palms. “Of course it is! We’ve planted on that land for centuries. If LukefuckingWilliams thinks he’s going to dispute a land transfer that happened in the Revolutionary War era, he’s got another think—ah, Mrs. Graber! So nice to see you. Yes, he’s fine. Just sleeping over at a friend’s house.” I tried to smile at the librarian’s kind inquiry, even though I knew it was just a nosy excuse for coming over here to see what had the Sunday siblings in a dither.
