The 23rd Deletion Bride novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Yard

Four weeks later I stood in front of my father's freight yard with a chain across the gate.

The sign over it said CARRICK HARBOR FREIGHT in letters that had gone gray.

Six cranes stood idle along the pier, and two of the warehouses had boarded windows.

The police had a report on Delaney's photo of the loft.

Her phone had been off for four weeks, and nobody could find her.

Hattie had moved a cot into the loft, and Cullen had put a second lock on its door.

I was twenty-seven weeks along, with the doctor's permission to be on my feet three hours a day.

I had decided to spend them here.

"Are you sure?" Cullen said beside me.

"My father shut this yard the week he died."

"The workers are still on his payroll. He left money for a year, and the year ends Friday."

"Then it's a good week to open the gate."

Forty men and women in work jackets stood behind the guardhouse.

They had come in answer to a notice on the board by the pier.

The man in front was older than the cranes, and he had run the dock for my father for thirty years.

"Miss Carrick," he said.

He had called me that when I was nine.

"Hello," I said. "I'd like to open my father's gate."

"I don't have the key. The lawyers do."

I took bolt cutters from Cullen's trunk and held them out.

The old dockmaster looked at them, and then at the forty behind him.

"Go on," one of them said. "She asked."

He cut the chain himself, and the whole line of them clapped.

A silver car stopped outside the fence before the chain hit the ground.

A man in a very good suit climbed out with a leather folder, smiling.

"Mrs. Amory. Excellent timing."

"It's Ms. Carrick."

"Of course. I represent the buyer from the Amory deal, as I'm sure you know."

He laid the folder on the hood of Cullen's car and opened it.

"We'd like to take this off your hands. The land, the cranes, the warehouses. Eleven million, cash, today."

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