The Barn the Adjuster Called Rotten
I had braced for a man in a suit. Stuart Whitcomb was sixty, thick through the chest, with a gray crew cut, a short-sleeved shirt, and a tie loosened a long time ago, a man who had started in the field and been promoted out of it. He got out, put his hands on the small of his back, and looked at the shed, and at us, for what felt like a full minute.
Then the passenger door opened and the adjuster got out.
He was in the same navy windbreaker, and his face was very pale. He looked at the six of us, and I watched him understand that this was not going to be an appeal on paper.
“Mr. Hanke,” Whitcomb said, and held out his hand. “Stuart Whitcomb. I’ve read Mrs. Oberg’s file. Show me.”
We went in.
The whole frame of the barn lay in two rows on the blue tarps, chalked and numbered. The two soft ones were first, with Brantley’s stars on them. The adjuster went in ahead of his manager and stopped just inside the door.
“Good Lord,” Whitcomb said quietly. “Where do you want us to start?”
“At the beginning,” Arvid said. “Number one.”
The first post lay at the east end of the row, broken a few feet from the top. The adjuster walked to it slowly, as if crossing ice. I saw him put his hand in his jacket pocket, where his steel probe with the little red handle was, and take it out.
He crouched. He set the point against the broken end of the oak, and the oak was so full of long white splinters that the point had nothing to stand in. He pressed. It went in a quarter of an inch and stopped.
He took it out and moved to the next one. Then the next. Nobody said anything. He picked up a splinter as long as his forearm and turned it to the light from the high window, and the room was so quiet I could hear a swallow moving in the rafters. Then he laid it back down in the exact place he had found it and went on to number four.
Nobody shouted. Whitcomb sat down on an overturned bucket at the end of the row and read the eight statements one at a time, the way a man reads a deed. At Arvid’s he stopped and read it twice. “Mr. Davenport, you timed this?”
“I look at my watch. It’s a habit.”
“Seven forty-eight.” Whitcomb tapped the page. I handed him the weather service printout, and he laid it beside it. “The survey puts the touchdown at your fence line at seven forty-six. I’ve been in this business a long while, and I’ve seen one claim file with eight witness statements. I’ve never seen one where all eight agree to within two minutes.”
“They didn’t read each other’s,” I said.
“I can see that.” He put the pages in order on his knee. “Mrs. Oberg’s photographs?”
Maxine handed them over. “Posts and beams sound,” she said. “I wrote it down because it was true.”
The adjuster worked for two hours. He went down both rows with the probe and a pencil and the clipboard that I had last seen him writing on in my yard, and he wrote down every timber by Brantley’s number. When he reached post six he looked up at Marvin, and Marvin lifted one shoulder. The blade had not gone in for him, either. At the joint with the sheared peg he was down on his knees a long while. At the end of the row he came back, still holding his clipboard, and handed it to Whitcomb without a word.