Chapter 1

1

2018—late February

Eric Slade stopped the John Deere mower he was riding when he saw his best friend Rusty Seever come running across the yard in his direction. It was a huge expanse of lawn, and Rusty, a lithely muscled redhead, was sweating profusely, and his chest was heaving from exertion. He was so out of breath he could barely get the words out—so much so, Eric held up a hand for silence.

“Slow down, Rusty,” Eric said. “Give yourself a chance to catch your breath—then you can tell me what’s got you so riled up.”

Rusty bent over, hands on knees, and let his breathing calm down. Then he stood and faced Eric.

“You know my cousin Gladys?”

“The one who works over at the courthouse?”

“Yeah. She just called my cousin Roger, and he called me.”

Rusty paused so long, Eric felt a need to prime the pump. “So the gossip phone tree is working?” he said. “What of it?”

“Gladys told Roger that someone’s gone and bought The Folly.”

Mention of The Folly caused an image of the county’s most famous—or infamous, depending upon who was speaking—building slash landmark to appear in Eric’s head. A wealthy planter named Winfield Raleigh had purchased a thousand acres of prime land along the Savannah River a year or so before 1850 and had proceeded to build a plantation house on a rise about half a mile from the river. The original house contained two stories plus attic, and Raleigh had selected red brick for its construction. Eric didn’t remember the details, but Raleigh, along with his entire family, had come to a bad end around the time of the Civil War, and people in the area had begun to refer to the house as Raleigh’s Folly. Over the years, that name had been shortened simply to The Folly. If Eric remembered correctly, the house hadn’t been occupied since before World War II, and the only reason it hadn’t collapsed under its own weight was because those owners had replaced its shingled roof with a good quality sheet metal roofing.

All of this information had run through his mind in a few seconds, and Eric said, “So?”

“Think about it, buddy,” Rusty said. “If some fool has spent a ton of money to buy The Folly, surely he’s gonna be renovating it.”

“Again, so?”

“Have you seen the place recently? There’s several acres of grounds, and they’re a total wilderness. Surely the guy’s gonna need to hire somebody to restore them, so why not us?”

“Why not, indeed,” Eric said. “But I heard a lot of ifs there.”

“Does that mean you’re interested in us bidding on the job?”

“Sure, but we need a ton of information, first.”

“What kind of information?”

“How about a name.”

“A name?”

“The name of the new owner.”

“Gladys didn’t know. The deed was made out to a corporation. What other information do we need?”

“Size and scope, buddy. Size and scope. Now hurry up so we can finish this job. Why are we even doing this job, anyway? The temperature might be in the high seventies today, but it’s the last weekend of February and we could still have a late frost before spring officially begins.”

“When a customer calls and says ‘the grass is looking bad, come mow it’, that’s what we do,” Rusty said. “We both know that some of them have more money than sense.”

“Yeah, and I’m very glad they do, so let’s get to it. We’ve got just enough time to stop by The Folly and have a look at it before I have to get cleaned up for class.”

“I don’t know why you want to waste your evenings teaching part-time at the local junior college, when you could be teaching full-time over at Georgia,” Rusty said. “The local pay is shit.”

“Yeah, but I have no desire to move to Athens or teach full-time at Georgia or for that matter, anywhere. At the local junior college, if I teach a minimum number of hours each semester, I qualify for state retirement, and that’s not to be sneezed at.”

“Maybe, but it sure doesn’t give you much free time.”

“Look at it this way, Rusty. I get the best of both worlds. I get to work outdoors, which I love, I have three months off in the summer, and when I’ve worked the appropriate number of years at the college, I’ll have a nice little pension from the state to fall back on.”

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“It does, indeed. Now step up on the hitch and let me carry you back to where you started.”

Rusty stepped up onto the hitch at the back of the John Deere and put his arms around Eric’s chest.