Saturday, May 09, 2015

Opening: Day 6

Word Count: 36,005

Summary of Events:
Chapter 11:
Sophia discovered a map drawn on the back of some of Sheriff Evans' notes. Keiller helped her put it together and discovered some pieces missing which included his yardsite; he then went hunting around his yard and found a buried jug with another map in it.
Chapter 12:
Sophia and Keiller went out to find what was hidden at the end of the route given on the second map —being as Keiller needed a lady's stride — and found a barrel containing papers and money which Sophia looked at after Keiller left for Coyoteville.

Excerpt of the Day:
"Sophia forged on reading, trying to find some kind of sense in the documents, then she spotted numbers, big numbers, with lots of zeros behind them, tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Had they been planning to form a company? Sophia remembered Papa talking about starting a business in Minnesota like he'd had before they'd gone to Minnesota, and he'd been talking about big numbers too, but he and Mama had always been worried about the numbers. Sophia had never fully understood it.
Why would they hide a company? Why had the sheriff been murdered over a company? It didn't make any sense. Sophia looked at the big words and wondered if it would make more sense if she knew the meanings of those words.
Sophia set the water damaged papers to the side and climbed under the table to get the rolls of paper. Undoing the string around one of them, Sophia unrolled it and looked at the drawing.
It was a large building, there were notes of measurements for different distances, marks for doors, all sorts of things. These were plans for a building. What kind of building, though?
From the looks of things it wasn't a house, there was an office marked as one of the rooms; Sophia looked down at the writing at the bottom that said what the plans were for, that was where her answers would come from.
Emerald Hills Logging Company Sawmill, main floor. So they were wanting to start a logging company? That made sense, trees were abundant here, and wood was a construction necessity. It would make the area profitable.
Why were they hiding it? Had someone else been wanting to make a logging company too? Why would the sheriff get murdered over a logging company? It seemed quite ridiculous for the sheriff to be murdered over such a thing.
There was no legitimate reason or motive for the sheriff to be killed over a logging company. It made no sense whatsoever. Sophia found there were more pages to the plans and looked at the rest of them for the sawmill; she then rolled them up and retied them with the string.
Taking up the other roll of papers, Sophia unrolled them and found plans for a storefront, with road names written all around it: Coyote Avenue across the top, Main Street running in front of the building, Coyote Avenue Alley at the bottom, and Main Street Alley West behind the building. Mr. Bartlett would probably know where those locations were, he would probably be interested by this all too.
Emerald Hills Logging Company Lumber Store, was what the plan read at the bottom. It was a one-floor building, as there were no other pages and no listing of other floors. There was still no motive, though.
Why would the sheriff be killed over a business? But there was that note, the one written by the sheriff that'd said he was bringing notes, likely banknotes. Had he been robbed on the way to their gathering and killed?" 

No comments:

Post a Comment