Misgivings: Day 11

Word Count: 65,005

Summary of Events:

When he went out on his run the following morning, Greyson discreetly looked for tire tracks in the yard, as well as pondering how exactly the big semi tractor and trailer loaded down with cargo had gotten out of the yard, before determining that the tractor had driven in the field beside the driveway to avoid the ruts and bumps. As he ran, he pondered everything, having proof it wasn't a dream, and came to the conclusion that the reason why the tractor had come at night was because the vehicles which had been loaded aboard it in disassembled form had been stolen, and were being illegally dismantled to be sold wherever there was market for those kind of parts…

Excerpt of the Day:

It was entirely believable that Mr. Fransbergen, Ayers, and Andy were hiding all kinds of things, from illegal vehicle-altering equipment to stolen cars, in those buildings, aided by the fact that none of the buildings had windows for people to snoop in, nor did the buildings look like they would be holding something more than junk.

Greyson had seen farms — he’d grown up on one — and he had to say that they were kind of like organisms. A farmer could build a brand-new farm and it would be all clean and organised, but over time, things would accumulate, and by the end of forty, fifty, even sixty years, he’d have a whole host of stuff to sort through and auction off when he went out of the business, and there were times that even he didn’t know where it’d come from.

Even Dad — who was still farming last Greyson had seen him — had things accumulated in places, whether it was little things like nuts and bolts on a shelf in the garage, or bigger things like buckets, hoses, and tires piled up somewhere outside, and had sometimes observed things and wondered aloud about where they’d all come from. It was as if the used tires mated and made more used tires under the cover of darkness, along with the nuts, bolts, hoses, and buckets.

There were also places on the farm where Greyson remembered there’d once been nothing, or little, but by the time he’d left there’d been a pile of stuff there that had looked like it’d always been there. It was just how farms worked.

Another thing about farms was that even if new buildings were erected to replace old ones that had stored livestock, machinery, or other things that were valuable to farmers, the old ones wouldn’t necessarily be razed, but would be retained so long as they were structurally sound, as places for more stuff to accumulate.

As a result, no one would likely think it suspicious that an old farmer had old buildings on his yard. In fact, even if they looked run down, those two long, low buildings — which Greyson supposed had previously been chicken barns before the metal clad ones replaced them, considering the similarity of shape and size — looked pretty structurally sound, unlike the leaning sheds, swaybacked wood quonsets, and partially-collapsed hip roof barns Greyson had seen on other farms over his life.

It would be reasonable to anyone who came to the place that they would’ve been retained, and it probably would’ve been presumed by anyone that those buildings were simply used for storage of something or another, with no real curiosity to know exactly what was within.

Therefore, a chop shop or other criminal enterprise wouldn’t be the first thing a newcomer would think of when they arrived. It hadn’t been for Greyson and he’d even been forewarned that Mr. Fransbergen was kind of shifty and definitely unfriendly — although he seemed to have more rational brain between his ears than Andy did.