American Lease (A Dylan Cold Novel Book 1) (15 page)

Their conversation and walk had taken them through Monson center and back to Dylan’s apartment. The last fifteen minutes of the walk were silent while Dylan thought about what he had just learned. In the driveway he stopped and looked off to the patch of dirt where Montana was buried.

“Holy shit,” Dylan finally said.

“Indeed. If this document is found, it could change the world. England would have rights to at least the East Coast of the United States. They would likely let us keep it, for a price.” Abbey’s face suddenly went blank.

“But it would have expired like a hundred and fifty years ago.” Dylan couldn’t believe this unknown document could be so significant. “Wouldn’t we get to keep it from squatter’s rights or something? If they didn’t make a claim when it expired, it’s not fair for them to make a claim now.”

Abbey dropped the next bombshell: “Someone, no one knows who, claimed that the term of the lease was two hundred and fifty years from the date of consummation. We’re looking at sometime in the spring for the lease to come due.”

Dylan whistled and rose from the couch. He walked to the kitchen, careful to step over and around the items still strewn about the floor. He opened the fridge and retrieved two cans of raspberry seltzer. When the door closed, Dylan just stood facing the fridge, lost in thought.

Slowly, he walked back to the living room and handed a can to Abbey. He walked to the far wall and looked out the window and then turned back to the room. Sitting wasn’t an option; movement helped him think.

“Does that mean those were British agents that killed the cop and my dog?” Dylan asked with a puzzled look.

“Not necessarily. The king liked to grant land to family and his trusted inner circle. There is speculation that if the lease were truly written and approved by the king, it would have been transferable. Whoever held the lease would be the legal owner of the land.” Abbey’s face was ashen with the implications.

“So Russia or Saudi Arabia could find the lease and own New York and Washington, D. C.?” Dylan didn’t think that sounded right.

“Well, there are a lot of ifs, but basically yes. Actually a country finding the lease would probably be better than an individual or a crime syndicate. Imagine if Al-Qaeda got their hands on the lease? Or a drug cartel? There would be a protracted legal battle; in the end we would probably win, but there would be a cost. Can you imagine paying a royalty of hundreds of millions of dollars a year to a bunch of drug runners?” Abbey shook her head in disgust.

Dylan didn’t like anything that seemed so implausible. “So if we find it, then what? We give it back to the United States government for free? The FBI or someone must be looking for it, if any of this is possible.”

“Ever heard of the Secret Service?” She gave a knowing smile.

“The guys that protect the president? Aren’t they technically a division of the Treasury or something?” Dylan didn’t see an obvious connection.

“They were founded in 1865 with the primary responsibility of fighting counterfeiting. But their roots go back further. During the Civil War, the Confederacy put a great deal of their covert operations resources into finding the Lease. There were several European countries ready to recognize the Confederacy, but they needed them to produce something concrete and lasting. Can you imagine if they had a document that gave them rights to the North? Some people believe that there was at least one attempt to create a counterfeit Lease, which makes the Secret Service even more important.” Abbey’s eyes moved about the room while she talked and thought.

“But to counterfeit it, they would have to see an original, right? That would mean that the federal government already had the original. Why not make it public then?” Dylan was starting to see why the story was both hard to believe
and
plausible at the same time.

“You ever hide something so well you forgot where you put it?” she asked, cockeyed.

“Seriously?” Dylan had been pushed past the point of belief. “A document giving the holder rights to the East Coast of the United States was simply misplaced? This is starting to sound a lot like a campfire story that ends with ‘boo’ or ‘gotcha.’”

“Well, if you understood what traveling and health conditions were like in the 1860s, you might not be so incredulous. The prospect of getting in a car and driving to Washington, D. C. right now is unpleasant. Can you imagine taking a stage coach or going on horseback, exposed to the elements? It would have been miserable and taken days. The traveler could easily have gotten ill and not recovered.” She seemed annoyed by his inability to think of the period.

“But why Monson? I think the sign says it was abandoned in, like, 1770, a hundred years before the Civil War,” Dylan insisted. He was having fun thinking critically about hiding an historic document.

“Even in the 1860s, New Hampshire was the middle of nowhere. Also, ‘abandoned’ may not be the best word. They forfeited their charter and several towns absorbed parts of Monson. It’s not like the homes and people completely disappeared. If you cleared four acres of New Hampshire forest by hand, I doubt you would ever move away from it.” Abbey nodded, confident in her local history knowledge.

Dylan was not going to give in. “Yeah, but a hundred years after it was cleared, the guy working it has no memory of what it took. He just knows there are a ton of rocks and his growing season is like six weeks long. It’s a stupid place to hide the American Lease.”

“I agree. Can you imagine being in the minority of a group that only has a few members? My thesis was that the American Lease was brought to Monson during the Revolutionary War. It was far more likely to be inhabited by the people who had cleared the land, which made them industrious, hard-working Americans.” Abbey frowned.

Dylan replayed her words carefully. She was the Ph.D. candidate that had started her thesis on the American Lease and never finished it. That meant, in addition to her stunning good looks, she was smart, really smart.
Why hadn’t she finished the thesis, if she was that smart?

“But your timeline doesn’t work. And there has to be a logic jump that is just implausible.” Dylan finished his seltzer and crushed the can.

“No. My timeline is perfect and the logic is sound. Evidence and facts just aren’t available. At least, not to me.” She looked at the floor, defeated.

“Then lay out your timing and logic for me,” Dylan insisted. “If I’m going to look for this thing, I want to know whatever you have.” He hadn’t realized he was going to actually search for the document until just now.

Abbey looked at him as if gauging his trustworthiness.

“Sounds an awful lot like someone who wants to get the Lease for themselves. What did you do before you came here?” she asked.

“Bounced around, mostly.” Dylan pursed his lips. “I had some drug issues a while ago, but I’ve been clean for almost seven years. I just try and keep my head down and make it through one day at a time,” he said.

“So a drifter druggie wants me to trust him with my ideas on where to find one of the most important and valuable documents in history?” She looked at him skeptically. “How do I know you’re not with
them?”
she asked.

“Unbelievable. In case you forgot, you came to me. In fact, I’m still not sure I should be looking for the Lease. I’ll probably just call the cops and tell them about the threat and what that guy did to Montana. Then I’ll move and be done with this whole mess.” Dylan shook his head in disgust.

Abbey stood and wrinkled her face. “That’s what you would like me to think. It just so happens that the first time you ever came into my dad’s farm stand was right after a cop was killed in relation to someone searching for the Lease? That’s practically like waving a giant flag telling me to talk to you. How could I have been so stupid?!”

“Then maybe we should agree that I don’t give a crap about the Lease. All I care about is finding the asshole that killed my dog,” Dylan said, trying to extend an olive branch to resolve a conflict he didn’t understand.

“If we find the Lease, I get to say what happens with it. And we do it, even if you disagree,” she insisted.

“Absolutely. And when I deal with the scumbag, you can’t be anywhere close to me.” Dylan was glad that she was not going to let this suspicion continue.

“Seeing how you don’t have a computer, let’s go to my place and look through these documents.” She smiled at him and opened the door to her truck.

Being with Abbey felt good. Dylan hadn’t felt this way with a girl, or anyone for that matter, in a long time. He watched as she drove through town and admired her calm exterior; he knew she was excited.

Once, at a stop sign, he caught her staring at him. Plenty of girls had pursued him when he was the big man on campus, but this was the first time he had been checked out in a while. It felt good, but did not erase the pain of losing Montana.

The driveway to Abbey’s house was one of the nondescript dirt paths that randomly appeared along the paved roads. From the street, there was no way to tell if it led to an orchard, a pumpkin patch, or just an empty cleared lot. As they came out of the trees, Dylan saw a smallish farmhouse sitting up on a grassy knoll.

From the outside it looked like the house probably hadn’t changed in over a hundred years.  When they were closer, he could see an air-conditioning compressor and a generator tucked neatly into a back corner. Certainly some updating had occurred. The grass was well-kept and the shrubs were trimmed but not sculpted. Pay attention to details, but get the job done—a hallmark of the New England farmer, and the woman who lived here.

“How long has your family owned this?” Dylan asked as Abbey put the truck in park.

“It’s been a while. One-hundred-and-seven years in March actually. The house itself is two-hundred-and-thirty years old; the footprint was expand a little about two hundred years ago, but hasn’t changed since,” Abbey explained and probably could have given significantly more detail.

“It’s beautiful. This space is perfect. Feels like they could film a movie here.” Dylan smiled.

“I’ve lived here my whole life, except when I was away at school.” Abbey paused.  “Sometimes it’s hard to remember how much history this building has seen. As a kid, it was just another boring old house. Now I can practically hear it breathe.”

She walked up the steps on the side of the house and turned the knob to open the door. Dylan noticed that she hadn’t unlocked anything; as he entered he saw that there was no deadbolt, just a simple knob.

Abbey passed quickly through the kitchen and went into what looked like an office, though there was no door. She flipped open a laptop, which immediately came to life. She removed the USB drive from her pocket and inserted it easily into the computer. These actions were just as natural as her movements navigating around the tractor.

She clicked on the USB drive to expand the folders. Hundreds of file names appeared, most of them numbers, but Abbey scrolled down the list, taking in what she could. The last file on the drive was the only one with a name: “Map.” Abbey clicked on it.

The map that Dylan had seen on the top of the pile in his kidnapper’s car filled the screen. It was a map of Monson, but instead of an open field with pointers to cellar holes, it showed a populated town with homes and street names.

“I think we’re going to need some coffee,” Abbey said as she stood and walked back to the kitchen.

Dylan looked at the map and was able to locate the Gould house for a reference point. It looked like there were more houses labeled than there were cellar holes identified in present-day Monson.

Dylan wondered if they were making discoveries or just approaching Abbey’s baseline. “Have you seen this map before?”

“Oh yeah, that’s not new.”

“But it’s not the key to finding the lease?” Dylan was guessing.

“Most of the clues point to the lease being hidden in a wall. I doubt that it was hidden in the walls of a house.” Abbey came back into the little office space.

“Didn’t they used to burn houses if they were going to move? It was easier to salvage the nails that way, nails being the most expensive component of building back then.” Dylan wanted to support her logic.

“Very good. Do you want to guess what type of wall is relatively permanent in these parts?”

“Rock walls. They are everywhere, including in the middle of the woods miles from anything.”

“Yup. Imagine rolling the Lease up, putting it in a small wooden box, wrap it in oilskin and burying it in the base of a rock wall. Fireproof, waterproof, and it’ll never move.” Abbey pushed past him and sat in front of the computer.

Dylan didn’t completely agree. “But why preserve it if it’s impossible to find? Why not just destroy it?”

“Who says it’s impossible to find? They left clues and passed them on from generation to generation,” she answered, while navigating back to the top of the list of files.

“Then who has the clues?” Dylan wondered aloud.

“They died with someone before that person had the chance to pass them on,” Abbey said, matter-of-fact.

“Do you know that for sure or are you speculating?”

“I can’t document it for you, but I know for sure.” She opened the document titled “1.jpg” and scanned the screen.

Her face wrinkled. Dylan wondered:
could we have possibly struck gold with the first document?

“Did you find something?” he asked hopefully.

“What?” She looked like she had forgotten he was even there. “No, we just need a plan to sort all of this out. Clicking and trying to remember isn’t going to work for a hundred-and-fifty-plus files,” she replied.

Her fingers flew around the keyboard and a printer behind Dylan whizzed to life. Abbey pushed herself back from the desk, spun, and pulled two sheets of paper off the tray almost at the instant they appeared.

“We’re going down the list,” she looked at him intently. “I’m going to tell you what to write, you write it on one line across the from the file name. Ready?”

“Wait. I need a pen, and can you call out the file name before you tell me what to write? I want to make sure we stay in sync.”

She got him a pen and turned back to the laptop.

“1,” she called out begrudgingly, before delivering her one-line summary.

They worked at a furious pace, Dylan and his sloppy handwriting fighting to keep up with Abbey’s fluid and well-practiced computer navigation.

It was like a crash course in history. The documents that had recently been digitized covered everything from a list of checked-out library books to an attendance list from a town meeting in 1793. Genealogy records, property purchase and sales agreements, inventory from the grange and the muster of the Always Ready Engine house were recorded with no obvious links other than being from the same town.

“Coffee?” Abbey asked as she rose from the seat and headed for the kitchen.

“Yeah.” Dylan was still scribbling but hoped the chore was complete.

He was done by the time she returned.

“Let’s see.” She traded him a steaming mug for the paper. Reading the document took her only seconds and ended with pursed lips and a shaking head.

Dylan stood and stretched backwards, letting out a deep breath. He blew on the hot coffee, but did not take a sip.

“Any surprises?”

“Nothing. I devoured nearly all of these documents years ago and the ones I haven’t are irrelevant. They have nothing,” she said.

“Is it possible that you’re too close? A forest for the trees kind of thing?” he asked while he looked around the walls of the kitchen.

Abbey didn’t answer; she went back to reading the list and making faces. The silence grew to the point that it was awkward.

She finally spoke: “We’re missing a key, still.
The key.
”

“What about the medallion?” Dylan asked.

“Nothing it says on the medallion points me to one of these documents. There are links, but they point to a few different documents. We need a single clue that points to one document.” She let the paper fall to the desk.

SMASH!
The sound of breaking glass startled her. Dylan was staring up at the top of one of the kitchen walls, the coffee pooling at his feet amidst shards of the mug.

“What if there were two clues pointing to one document?” he asked.

“What two clues? Don’t make me guess.”

“The leaf.”

Abbey walked to join Dylan in the kitchen. She looked up to the wall where he was staring.

The kitchen was encircled with framed leaves. They were flattened and labeled in neat cursive writing. Some of the pencil marks were fading, but Dylan was sure they would be able to read the faint writing if the frames were pulled off the wall.

Abbey pulled the medallion from her pocket and studied the image of the leaf.

“What are these?” Dylan asked.

“My great-grandfather liked to document different species of plants. Flowers and shrubs are stored in picture albums, we have dozens of them, but trees were hung on the wall because they were his favorite. He has leaves from hundreds of different species of tree.

“Does he have one that matches the medallion?” Dylan said, asking the obvious question.

“I bet he does,” she answered excitedly.