Craving (Steel Brothers Saga #1)(61)

Marj gave me a devious grin. “Want to bet? I think we need to do some investigating. We can start with my father’s old files. I’ve always thought about going through them, but then figured it was none of my business. But you know what? I own a quarter of this ranch. And Talon is my brother. I love him. So it is my business.” She grabbed my arm and yanked me off the bed. “Come on.”

Marj led me not to the office, where I thought we would be going, but down the stairway to the basement. The basement was finished into a gorgeous rec room and three extra bedrooms, but she took me to none of those places. In the back was some crawl space. She slid the door open and crawled inside, beckoning for me to follow. I did, hurting my knees in the gravelly dirt. It smelled musty and moldy.

“Marj, do I really need to be in here? Can’t you just find what we need and pull it out?”

“It’s just that I’m not quite sure what we need, Jade. There are a bunch of boxes in here marked private. They’re taped up pretty good.”

“What are they?”

“Old stuff of my father’s. I was always told it was junk, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

My eyes adjusted to the dark. Lots of brown cardboard boxes, well over twenty, sat in the space, taped up just as Marj had said.

“Let’s get them all over here close to the doorway,” she said. “Then we can pull them out one by one and go through them.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

The two of us yanked all the boxes near the entrance. By the time we were done, my knees were crusted with dirt and hurt like hell. I crawled out of the crawl space, and Marj followed, lugging the first box. She pulled it down into the extra bedroom and then repositioned the door to the crawl space.

“We’re going to need something to cut through this tape,” I said.

Marj smiled. “Not a problem.” She pulled a Leatherman out of her pocket. “I always come prepared.”

She quickly cut through the tape and opened the first box. “Just as I suspected. Bunch of old files and records.” She sighed. “Well, let’s go through them.” She handed me a pile.

I opened the first file and went through it. “This looks like mostly old quitclaim deeds. I mean, these go way back, over a century ago.” I leafed through the delicate papers. “There are even some old chattel mortgages in here. You don’t see those anymore.”

“What’s a chattel mortgage?” she asked.

“A mortgage on a thing, rather than on a piece of property. These are old ones, from England.”

“The Steels are originally from England,” she said.

“You don’t see them in the US,” I said. “What we have here are secured transactions.”

“You mean like collateral?”

I nodded. “A chattel mortgage is basically the same thing. For example, it looks like this one is on a threshing machine.” I handed it to her.

She shook her head and gestured for me to put the document back. “I probably wouldn’t understand it anyway.”

“What exactly are we looking for?”

“To be honest, I have no idea. But I bet we’ll know when we find it.”

I let out a giggle. This was kind of fun, like a game, looking for clues. I finished going through my stack of documents and reached for another. “What do you have in your stack?” I asked.

“Some old census documents, it looks like, from when the Steels first came over here from England several generations ago. A couple of birth certificates for relatives I’ve never heard of.” She kept going. “Are these more of those chattel mortgages you were talking about?” She handed me some papers.

“Yep,” I said. “We’ve got to be getting to the bottom of this box soon.”

Marj let out a sigh. “Is it worth going through these boxes? This is all ancient history.”

“Yeah, you could be right.” But something in me wanted to continue. “Maybe we should look at one more box.”

“Okay.” Marj put the lid on the first box. “I’ll re-tape this later.” She opened the door to the crawl space, pulled out the second box, and opened it.

She handed me a stack of files and took a stack for herself. I opened my first file, and lo and behold. “I think this is your dad’s birth certificate,” I said, handing her a document.

“Yeah. Bradford Raymond Steel. I wonder why his birth certificate has been boxed up with all this other historical stuff?”

“I think what that means is that this is all historical stuff,” I said. “We may have to go through all these boxes after all.”

“You’re probably right.”

I kept shuffling through the folder. “Hey, I have your parents’ marriage certificate. Bradford Raymond Steel to Daphne Kay Wade.”

“Wade?” Marj bit her lip. “Are you sure?”

I handed it to her. “Pretty sure.”

She perused the document. “I’m not sure what this means, but I was always told that my mother’s maiden name was Warren. In fact, Ryan’s middle name is Warren, after my mom’s maiden name.”

I didn’t see how this could have any relation to Talon, but it was definitely suspicious. “We should probably ask Jonah about it.”