Traci Tyne Hilton - Mitzi Neuhaus 02 - Eminent Domain Page 8

  “Hear me out, even if you hate the idea at first, okay?” Mitzy said.

  “Sure,” Alonzo said.

  “You’re the big boss building the HuddingtonCenter. Is there any way that could be used for, say, leverage in the situation with the inn?” Mitzy asked.

  “Do you mean would my guys strike so that the city won’t follow through with the redevelopment?” Alonzo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No. They wouldn’t. They would rather finish the Hud and then get over and work on the redevelopment. It’s a huge project, it will employ a lot of guys,” Alonzo said.

  “Here’s another one then. Wouldn’t you like the tram to run past the Hud?”

  Alonzo chewed on that in silence for a moment. Mitzy tapped her toe on the floor while she waited, biting her tongue.

  “Yes. I would like that. The location could use it. It’s already a major street. It’s North by a few miles of where they want it though. But what about the community college? We wanted to propose they put the tram on that road,” Alonzo said.

  “You haven’t started the surveys yet, have you? Because I think this idea is better,” Mitzy said.

  “It might be. Hud is big news right now,” Alonzo said.

  “The connection to the current light rail is much better too. Could the Hud facility host a park and ride?” Mitzy asked.

  “Yes. We have a huge parking area. If they want to use the redevelopment dollars they could build a parking garage on our property.” Alonzo said, plotting out the idea in more detail. “But if the purpose of the center is to clean up the neighborhood then the city doesn’t want a parking garage. All that enclosed, dark space makes too much opportunity for crime under cover.”

  Alonzo searched his pocket for a pencil. Mitzy grabbed a pen and an old envelope from her purse and passed them to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. He began to sketch the property he was in charge of. “There is a mini mall right here,” he said tapping the paper. “It’s almost vacant. It has a gas station and a small grocery store still. But we could tear down the mall, pave it and rebuild it with a better building for the grocery store and a nicer gas station. That would be much less intrusive than the Baltimore plan. And it would improve a bigger section of the new Huddington Neighborhood. The Huddington Neighborhood Association would probably leap at the chance. Let me talk to some people about it,” Alonzo said.

  “That sounds great to me. Wouldn’t that be a nice and easy way to take care of the tram problem?” Mitzy said smiling.

  “Yes. It sounds nice and easy,” Alonzo said. “But I’ve already thought of ten ways it could be unpleasant and impossible.”

  “Then stop thinking,” Mitzy said, resting her hand on his knee and leaning in to kiss him.

  Alone at last in her condo, Mitzy was sitting on the soft shaggy rug in her living room. Porch lights from the various condos that enclosed the courtyard below her twinkled in the night. She pulled the myrtle wood box from her purple alligator Birken bag and set it in front of her. She was concealing this item from the Feds, and her conscience bit at her. She quieted the voice of disagreement with the thought that it wasn’t too late to turn it over to the authorities. The box was lovely, unadorned myrtle wood sanded smooth with a satin finish. It was a local product, and certainly not one hundred years old. Mitzy slid the lid off of the long, slender box. She knew there was a collection of papers inside. She lifted them out and spread them before her.

  One piece was heavy folded parchment. She gently unfolded it and smoothed its creases. It was a marriage certificate written in a florid, Victorian calligraphy. The daughter of the original owners of the inn, it would seem. She was Mary Lydia Simonite and her new husband was Frederick Lentz. Lentz was an old, Eastside Portland name. Perhaps he was a younger son. She lay the marriage certificate down. It needed to be framed and hung in the Historical Society Room.

  The next paper was newer. It didn’t seem to Mitzy like something worth hiding away. It was a sheet of watermarked paper, printed at the top with Office of the Mayor Portland, Oregon. It was undated. Locations around town, mostly on one side or another of the WillametteRiver, which bisected the City of Portland into distinct East and West sides, were typed on it. At the bottom the name D. M. Lee was typed. It was probably the signature of the typist. Mitzy laid the paper down.

  The next item that had been hidden in the myrtle wood box and tucked into the arm of the sofa was a passport. It was from 1910 and thoroughly marked. The picture was of a young man with a rather grand mustache that was carefully waxed and drooped over his mouth artistically. His hair was combed carefully and parted in the middle. The young man had been to France, England, Spain, Italy, and India. And then back home. His name was Bartholomew Lentz. Could he have been the son of Frederick and Mary Lydia?

  The next piece of paper was lined notebook paper with a short paragraph in careful script. It read:

  “Mrs. Baker would love to write up the story if I can collect enough documents for her to quote from. Would love to find a journal. But can make a start with this, and possibly the newspapers mother has.”

  The person who wrote the note must have been collecting the documents as well. All of the papers must be related to each other and to some story. Mitzy moved them into chronological order. Mrs. Baker may have been writing a local history. But what else could it have been?

  The box also held a small carbon copy of a paper receipt. The receipt was handwritten on a blank printed form. It recorded the purchase of several “pieces” from “DoC” and was initialed J. M. S. Mitzy thought it was reasonable that the S was for Simonite. It was dated Jan 10th, 1968. Mitzy looked at the receipt for a long time. It was thin and had been folded. If it was part of the collection then the note about Mrs. Baker had to be written more recently than 1968.

  There was one more piece in the box. A list of Russian names written in pencil on a piece of yellowed paper, light in weight with no special characteristics that Mitzy could distinguish. It seemed like a piece of old typing paper. It was most likely what the Feds wanted. Mitzy read the list carefully. She recognized some of the names from the papers Alonzo had recovered from the hiding spot in the ceiling of the butler’s pantry.

  In the spring, when the soon to be inn had first been threatened with foreclosure, Mitzy had made the acquaintance of Evangeline Simonite-Wilber, an elderly woman related to the family who had originally built the home. But Mrs. Simonite-Wilber was touchy, and possibly touched in the head. She wouldn’t welcome the questions that Mitzy was dying to ask her.

  Someone had to know some of the answers. Mitzy turned to her lap top and started googling. She began with City of Portland and D. M. Lee. Mayor Dorothy M. Lee, the first female mayor of Portland wasn’t hard to find. Mitzy read her bio.

  A smart lady, she was a lawyer in her 20’s and a State Representative in the 1920’s. She was the Mayor by 1949. Tough on crime. Unpopular. Called “Do-Good Dotty.” Dorothy took the broken window approach to crime, cleaning up petty concerns in the town, working her way up, in theory, to big crime.

  Mitzy’s spirits began to lift, and she found herself grinning. A list of locations that this mayor typed up had to have something to do with crime. Mitzy turned back to the short list of locations, yes. Baltimore Street was on it. She put the address into Google maps. That address was HistoricOldChurch on the corner of Baltimore and Smith. Google maps gave her pictures of the rest of the locations. Three of them were currently still churches, two of them Presbyterian Churches that still used their historic buildings and one a Lutheran church with a very new building and school at the location. Two of the locations were parking lots, and the last one was an office building. The Lutheran church and HistoricOldChurch were in South East Portland, the office building was near the Ladd’s addition neighborhood, and the rest were on the West Side.

  Considering what she had read in Do-Good Dottie’s bio, the churches probably ran bingo games and raffle sales. Mitzy’s pulse slowed a little and
she took a deep breath. Bingo wasn’t very dangerous. But would the Feds be interested in “illegal gambling” from 60 years ago? Mitzy thought not. She set the list down. Maybe the Lentz family had had a gambling problem. They seemed to have had a reversal of fortunes. Was Mrs. Baker’s story a cautionary tale about society’s ills? Mitzy hoped not.

  Mitzy did a fruitless Google search for Mrs. Baker, writer, Portland Oregon. Too many people called Mrs. Baker did too many things for too many years on websites that sometimes contained either Portland or Oregon but not always both. Mitzy shut down her laptop and stared at the papers considering their implications and the implications to herself for keeping them. She wasn’t willing to go to jail just to have a pretty wedding certificate on the wall of the new inn. But she also wasn’t willing to send any number of local families to jail for having names on a list that might mean nothing.

  The next workday Mitzy stopped at the Smythes on her way to the inn. She was delighted to see that the painting had already started.

  “How do you like Orlando?” Mitzy asked Dawn. “Is he working out for you?”

  “Yes! Thanks. The price he offered was so low I couldn’t believe it at first. But it’s looking good, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, it’s looking terrific.” She stood back from the house at the curb, admiring what updated colors could do for an out-of-style house. “I have one more suggestion though, if you don’t mind. We are painting the house because houses need fresh paint now and again. But also so people will look at it with a new eye when we put it back up for sale. With that in mind, how would you feel if we removed the blue spruce on the corner here?” The tree was a shaggy, overgrown article that now clashed with the color of the house. “I hate taking trees out myself, but if I took it out for you I would replace it with a flowering cherry that was in better scale to the rest of the home.”

  Dawn looked at the tree. “If we take it out we’d have a lot of work just there. The tree is big so when it is gone the bare patch that shows will need to be planted up and mulched.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Mitzy smiled patiently. “No problem. Think on it. I think it would help the house stand out as different from before. But it’s your call. I’ll go talk to Orlando. I want to make sure he knows this house is his top priority and has to be done by Friday.”

  “Thanks. That was my only worry. Sometimes a great price means the job never gets done.” Dawn said with a little frown.

  Orlando confirmed his previous promise for timeliness. He turned his spray gun back on with an irritated motion. “I’d have thought asking once was enough,” he said under the rumble of the sprayer.

  “What?” Mitzy said, attempting to speak over the noise.

  “Your assistant checked yesterday!” Orlando hollered.

  “Really?” Mitzy said. She hadn’t sent Sabrina over.

  “What happened to Sabrina?” Orlando asked, the machine still making a racket.

  “What?” Mitzy said again. She looked at her watch. She didn’t want to stand here shouting over the sprayer all day.

  “Why did you hire that ugly little guy?” Orlando said, “I liked Sabrina much better.”

  “Why did I what? You aren’t making sense and I can’t hear you.” Mitzy said. She moved to turn off the sprayer.

  “Never mind,” he mouthed, waving her away from his air compressor.

  Mitzy looked at her watch once more. “Who talked to you yesterday?” She asked once more.

  “That guy from your office!” Orlando shouted.

  Ben. That explained it. He had come and irritated Orlando in the middle of the painting job. She nodded and turned away as Orlando tried to speak again.

  “Even Ben is better than the new guy!” he said not quite loud enough to be heard clearly.

  Mitzy left wondering what Ben had done that made Orlando say she should hire a new guy.

  The front door of the inn was open when Mitzy got there. “It’s too cold to leave the doors open!” she hollered as she entered. It was quiet inside, no footsteps sounding overhead. No tools buzzing. The agents must have come by and left the door open. Mitzy hated careless agents. Mitzy turned to look out the front windows, but none of the regular unmarked cars were parked on the side of the road. She rubbed her arms and stamped her feet. It was cold, only 49 degrees this morning and the building felt like it had been open all night. She looked at the inlayed compass in the middle of the foyer. It pointed, as always, to the dumbwaiter that led to the basement laundry. The basement laundry had been a stone cistern with a rough edge for scrubbing and a drain. But that wasn’t what the compass had so cunningly pointed to over one hundred years ago when it had been put in.

  In the chill of the wet spring earlier in the year, Mitzy and Alonzo had purchased the old home, anticipating what they would find hiding in the laundry dumbwaiter. They hadn’t been disappointed. A small fortune in jewels had been hidden there. A dreamer had built the home. He was an old Indian Scout living in the land of the closed frontier and had married an exiled Russian Princess. It could have been the stuff of romance novels with destitute Russian Princesses and out of work, aging Indian Scouts if they had not been a dime a dozen in the 1890’s.

  However this Princess had a relation who wasn’t entirely destitute. And it was that relation, Irena Mikhaylechenko-Romanov’s jewels that had been hidden and, as Mitzy had assumed, been the attraction the house held for the local Russian Mafia.

  Alonzo and Mitzy had already forfeited the jewelry collection to the Russian ambassador as the nation claimed to be the rightful owners. And having gone over the home from cellar to attics, there was nothing else to be found. Unless you considered the FBI’s claim that a bunch of difficult to read, mouse eaten papers from the past century might have something to do with legal and illegal immigrant members of said Mafia. Or Soviet spies.

  All Mitzy, Alonzo and Carmella wanted to do was open an inn.

  Carmella was coming over from next door in just a few minutes and together they would finish painting the upstairs sitting room and tour the attic nursery and servant’s quarters again. At times Mitzy thought there were altogether too many nooks and crannies in this building.

  Mitzy stamped her booted feet and rubbed her arms to warm up. Leather jackets were cute but the fall mornings were very cold. Warmed up a bit, Mitzy headed to the kitchen to check on the work being done.

  The original pine floors were declared impractical for a commercial kitchen and were to be replaced with oak. The new floors looked good. They were in, and sanded. They were getting stained and sealed today. Rolls of plastic sheeting stood against the wall, the doors in and out of the kitchen would be sealed to keep dust off of the floors as they were being finished. The renovators were making great progress. Mitzy felt a sinking in her gut as she thought of the Feds ripping it all down to the studs again.

  Stepping through the kitchen and into the butler’s pantry where they had found the first stash of mystery papers, Mitzy admired the repair work. The papers had been stashed in the mouse-eaten plaster ceiling. It was now beautifully replastered by Alonzo himself. He had started his career as a builder in plaster work and still thought no one could do it as well has he could. He was probably right, which was why he was coming back the next time he was free to finish the ceilings on the second floor. Control issues, Mitzy thought, could make relationships and business…interesting.

  The dining room, with its refinished floors and fresh paint, opened into a sunroom which was being remodeled to make a dining room that could accommodate enough tables for when the inn was at capacity. So far, everything she had checked on looked good; everything was going according to schedule.

  Mitzy stepped out the French doors that led from the sunroom to the stone patio. A movement in the woods at the back of the lot caught her eye. At this hour it might have been a raccoon headed home. The landscaping was coming along bit by bit. In the foggy fall morning light, even the woods, her favorite bit of their property, looked
run down.

  But the stone patio was great and wouldn’t need to be replaced. It was as smooth as the day it was laid. No root bumps or sunken spots. Mitzy thought about going back into the treed corner of the lot, about a half an acre all told, that she considered the woods. But she shivered and turned back into the house instead.

  Carmella came in time, dressed to paint and ready with gossip.

  “Diego has had it with the FBI,” she said in a loud whisper, though no one else was in the rambling building.

  “Haven’t we all,” Mitzy said.

  “But no, listen. They went up on the roof again. Can you imagine?” Carmella said.

  “They seem stupid enough to do that. I wonder why they did it though.” Mitzy dipped her brush in the paint carefully. “I wonder how they didn’t fall off up there in their leather soled loafers.”

  “Now Diego’s got to get back up there and make sure they didn’t do any damage. He’s supposed to be out working on the community center today. I don’t know when he’ll be able to get over here but obviously it has to be during the daylight.”

  “At least it’s September and not likely to rain.” Mitzy made W’s of creamy ivory paint on the wall of the sunroom, focusing on the work at hand. She’d let the job foreman and Diego handle this problem with the Feds. Mitzy needed to save her energy for the dinner party that night with her family.

  Mitzy arrived at her mother’s house sore from a day of painting and tense at the thought of being with her whole family all at once. She was determined to make this dinner a calm, pleasant event if she had to die trying.

  Drying her hands on a towel, Mitzy sat down at the table next to her grandma. “Dinner is looking good,” she said.

  “I should say so,” Pearl MacDonald said, kissing Mitzy on the cheek. “Your mother is a gifted cook and you are a sweet girl to help her. Shall we have a coffee?”