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The factory was a lot larger than I remembered from passing through it six weeks ago. There were a lot of windows I hadn’t noticed before, possibly because the big shutters that framed them had now been opened so there was light streaming in.
“I think this could be a meeting hall,” Cash said.
I shook my head. “Too large and too long. And the acoustics are lousy. It might make a bowling alley.”
“Try to take this seriously,” he said, losing his smile. “I want to give back to Burney.”
If he expected me to take that seriously, he was delusional. Cash Porter was first, last, and always for himself. The only thing he’d give somebody was a boomerang.
“Maybe we put the museum in here,” Cash said.
“Museum?”
“The Burney museum. The town has a fascinating history.”
“Burney has a fascinating history?”
“Sophronia Burney, the abolitionist, established not only this town, but made this area a part of the Underground Railroad,” Cash said. “JB’s Bar and Grill was the first female-owned bar in this part of southern Ohio. And the Burney Seminary was one of the first places to educate girls.”
I shook my head. “All props to Sophronia, but I’m pretty sure JB’s Bar and Grill used to be a tea shop run by Jill Barclay’s great-grandmother, and if it was the first female-owned teashop in this part of Ohio, I’ll eat your hat. And as for the Burney Seminary, from what I’ve heard, it was right up there with Lowood School in the way it treated the kids sent there.”
“Lowood School?’ Cash said.
“Jane Eyre,” I said.
“Who is she?”
“The book?”
“Never read it,” Cash said. “You know, there are a bunch of books in Cleve’s office. You should go through them, help me pick out the ones to put in the museum. In fact, you should work with me on the museum. You’ve read so much—”
“No, thank you,” I said, but I let him show me around the rest of the place. The center had burned, but the ends of the building hadn’t, and there was plenty of room for a museum, meeting places, classrooms, whatever he could think of. The brick walls were solid, and the rafters were scorched but still intact, which meant it might be easy to put a new roof there. And now Cash was going to rehab it after it had stood empty ever since Cleve Blue had died six years ago. Maybe Mickey Pitts had done the factory a favor, setting it on fire. It didn’t matter, he still shouldn’t have shot Vince.
“Upstairs, we’re thinking upscale condos,” he said as he led me up the stairs at the far south end. “We’ll finish the second floor wherever we don’t need the high ceiling. Like for the museum.” He spread his hands wide indicating some kind of expansive vision for the Burney museum.
I thought of Anemone and shook my head.
“What?” he asked.
“Not upscale,” I said. “Low-income housing. Cleve Blue put most of the people who worked here into poverty when he moved the manufacturing to Mexico twenty years ago. It would be good PR to help some of those people now with inexpensive apartments on the second floor you’re going to build. Give the families that worked here priority. Get them out of Over-the-Hill and into some place with heat and electricity. Anemone knows all about low-income housing. You should get her in on this.”
“Wonder if there’s a tax break in that,” Cash said, frowning as he thought. “Because you’re right, the PR would be solid. Amy would like that.”
I assumed Amy was Senator Wilcox, Cash’s boss, mentor, and (I had strong suspicions) lover. Back when we were dating in high school, Cash had tended to sleep with everything that moved and said yes, and nothing he had said or done since told me he’d changed.
Cash took me upstairs and led me deeper into the south side where the roof was intact. The place was a warren, multiple rooms off the hall, but with tall windows, lots of light. It could be beautiful.
“You’re going to love this next part,” Cash said, stopping to unlock double doors in the middle of the hall.
He opened them up, and straight ahead were the windows that had creeped me out the last time I’d been here, standing outside looking up before I went in to meet Mickey Pitts: big circles with squared off panes at the bottom that had looked like eyes with rectangular bags under them, staring down at me. I’d assumed then that Mickey was behind them with a gun, but from the inside they were just big, fancy windows letting in a lot of light over a large roll top desk in a room with a coffered ceiling and paneled walls that had once been painted a beautiful blue. The side walls were lined with bookshelves holding hundreds of books, from leather bound notebooks to hardcovers to paperbacks.
“This was Cleve’s office.” Cash pointed to a spiral staircase to the right of the door. “Come on up, you have to see this.”
I followed him up the ornate metal spiral staircase to a trap door that opened into one of the two cupolas on the top of the building. It was a small room with a pitched roof, about six-foot square, with big windows on all four sides.
“You can see all of Burney from up here,” Cash said, and I didn’t say, “No, you can’t,” because I was too busy looking out the windows.
You couldn’t see the Shady Rest Motor Court, where Mickey Pitts had killed Thomas Thacker. You couldn’t see up the hill to the Blue House which Anemone had repainted after Mickey torched it so that it was now the Pink House. You couldn’t see the part of Burney called Over-the-Hill, the pocket of poverty Cleve Blue had created when he’d moved this factory’s business to Mexico, or Vince’s Big Chef by the river, or the hairpin turn up on the hill where Navy Blue had died. But you could see the high school where Cash had dumped me three times, and the back of Porter’s Garage where Cash had grown up, and the Red Box where Cash and I had spent a lot of our teenage years, and in the far distance to the south, you could see the edges of the expensive development Cash was fronting now for Vermillion Inc. You could see all of Cash’s Burney from here, and as far as he was concerned, that was all of Burney.
