I Left Him at the Altar, So the Best Man Took Me Off the Island novel · Chapter 5 of 40
Chapter 5: Bolt Cutters
The padlock was the size of my fist and brass-bright against the old gray door.
Below it, stapled to the frame, was a laminated sign.
PROPERTY OF PETTENGILL MARINE. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
I stood on my father's doorstep with the toolbox in one hand and read it twice.
"They can't do that," I said.
"They did it," Fern said.
"The deed is in my name."
"Then they did it to scare you."
Ansel crouched to look at the lock without touching it.
"It's a good one," he said. "I can have a deputy out here in an hour. That's trespass and forcible entry."
"No," I said.
He glanced up.
"I don't want a Marine Patrol officer standing on my porch with a clipboard," I said. "I don't want Constance to be able to say the Point needed a Pettengill to protect it."
"All right."
"Fern," I said. "Is there a bolt cutter in this toolbox?"
Fern's mustache lifted.
He knelt, flipped the latches, and came up with a pair of long red-handled cutters that had been my father's.
He didn't hand them to me.
He held them out to Ansel.
"No," I said, and took them myself.
The jaws bit into the shackle with a crack, and the lock dropped into the weeds.
I kicked the sign off the frame.
Nobody said a word, and I pushed the door open.
It was one room under a sloping roof, with a stove, a plank table, and a ladder to the loft.
There was dust on everything and a mouse nest in the stovepipe, and it was exactly as I remembered.
The air had my father in it, tar and cedar and cold coffee.
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