The man at the gas station was the thread I pulled. When I asked him where he’d heard it, he told me Marlene had spent weeks telling anyone who would listen that her grandparents once owned my two acres and that a city outsider had bought it out from under her family through a crooked deal. It was a good story. It was also entirely invented.
I went back to the county, and this time I did not ask about my line. I asked about hers. Marlene’s family had never owned a single foot of that land. The parcel she claimed her grandparents lost had belonged, for sixty years, to the Ellery family, the same Mr. Ellery who sold me the house and walked me to every stake.
