The Inspector Sealed My Shed In Front Of The County Bidders

Curtis Maddox called me an arsonist while I had a piece of pine under my nose.

That was how I checked old lumber. Heart pine had a deep, warm smell when you shaved it. New pine smelled sharp. Wet oak smelled like an old bucket. Forty-eight years as a salvage carpenter had taught me more through my nose than any lumber stamp ever had.

I was a thin white man of seventy-one, with a bent nose, pale blue eyes, and white hair that stuck out above my ears.

That morning, eight people stood outside my tool shed near Waycross, Georgia. Three were county bidders. The others had come to buy boards or ask about work.

Maddox made sure they could all hear him.

“You burned that mill to get yourself a demolition contract, Everett.”

My block plane stayed in my hand.

“You planning to put that on paper?” I asked.

He held up his tablet.

“Already did.”

Curtis Maddox was a white American man of forty-four, broad through the chest, with pink cheeks and a neat brown mustache.

He usually spoke in a soft drawl, calling men older than himself “young fellow.” That day he called me Mr. Hensley.

“The shed is sealed pending a safety review. Suspected fire materials. Possible evidence.”

“My materials are boards.”

“And some boards burn real convenient.”

Two men looked away. A woman who had ordered porch posts stepped back toward her car.

The burned place was Bell Creek Sawmill, an empty county building off a sandy service road west of town. The county had bought the land for drainage work. I had bid $42,600 to take down the unsafe parts and sort the lumber.

The contract had not been awarded.

I had been allowed to remove a small list of loose contents before bidding closed. A bench. Two hand carts. A mechanical watch clock with its paper patrol strips.

For the approved salvage visits, Maddox was my site boss. Nobody went through the gate without his name on an access slip.

The clock sat in a steel box beneath my kitchen table. Its latch made three dry clicks when it opened.

Maddox had signed the contents release himself.

“What fire materials?” I asked.

“Don't make this harder.”

He pasted red paper across my shed doors. A county code aide pressed the ends flat. There was no deputy, no search warrant, and no list of anything they thought they might find.

“I need my tools for a stair job tomorrow.”

“Then you should have thought about tomorrow.”

His voice lost its soft edges on that sentence.

He handed me an emergency order. The box marked Immediate Hazard said only: Associated with mill incident.

“That isn't a hazard,” I said.

“Appeal instructions are on the website.”

He looked at my old flip phone, then back at me.

“Might want a younger person to help.”

After he left, a bidder named Darrell Voss stood beside the red seal. Voss owned North Ditch Clearance. His trucks had appeared at the mill before the county had finished taking bids.

“Bad luck, Everett,” he said. “I could buy your stacked stock. Cash. Six thousand.”

There was $19,400 worth of dry lumber inside that shed, before you counted a single saw.

“I'll keep it.”

“Hard to sell what the county won't let you touch.”

He rubbed a thumb along the seal as if he had helped choose the paper.

By noon, my stair customer had canceled. That cost me a $780 balance. By two, the porch woman wanted her $240 deposit back.

I wrote both amounts in my daybook.

Then I wrote every word I could remember Maddox saying, with the names of the people who had heard him.

My wife had been gone nine years. There was nobody at home to tell me to sit down before my knees gave out. So I sat when they gave out, beside the kitchen table, and pulled the steel box toward me.

Three dry clicks.

The watch clock looked like a round lunch pail with a shoulder strap. A watchman had carried it through the mill and used keys fixed at numbered stations. Each key made its own mark beside the time on a moving paper strip.

The paper did not know a man's title.

Along the blank tail of strip 4119, somebody had written a county vehicle number.

C-14. In bay. CM. 11:46.

I had seen C-14 on Maddox's truck that morning.

I did not decide what the writing proved. First I needed the man who had made it.

Otis Barlow had watched that mill for nineteen years. He had retired after the fire, complaining that retirement paid less than a broken vending machine.

I found his number in my daybook.

Before I could dial, a county courier knocked. He left a sealed envelope on my porch and hurried back through the gnats.

Inside was a notice barring my bid from consideration.

The reason was a digital inspection report stating that all mill patrol records had been destroyed in the fire.