PART 2: Ten Minutes and Four Tons of Concrete
I didn’t move from my chair. "Those blocks weigh two thousand pounds each, Trent." He revved the engine in reply. The sound echoed down Larkspur Lane, and curtains began twitching in every window on the street.
Instead of driving, he called the police. Officer Brandt, the same young man I’d spoken to months earlier, pulled up fifteen minutes later. He looked at the car, the blocks, and the two of us, and he rubbed the bridge of his nose. "This is a civil matter," he said. "For both of you." Trent demanded that he order me to remove the wall. I told him it was on my property. Trent smirked. "Is it?" he said, again.
Officer Brandt told us both not to do anything stupid, wrote down our names, and left. By then, half the neighborhood had gathered on the sidewalk. Linda Hargrove came in her bathrobe. The Bennett twins from across the street sat on their bikes, filming on their phones.
Danny arrived around nine in his orange vest, his skid steer still parked at the curb from the night before. He walked straight up to Trent. "Look, man. I can lift one block out in ten minutes. You drive off, you never park here again, everybody goes home."
Trent stared at him. "You’re the one who built it. I’m not taking help from you."
He called a tow company. A wrecker showed up an hour later, and the driver, a heavyset man named Gus, walked a slow circle around the wall. "Can’t winch it over that," he said. "You’d tear the undercarriage right off. You need a crane. Maybe Monday, if you’re lucky."
"I’m not waiting until Monday," Trent snapped. "I have a closing in Columbus at two o’clock." Gus shrugged, took his call-out fee, and drove away.
Trent climbed back over the blocks and got in the car. I watched him put it in reverse. I understood his plan before Danny did. He was going to try to shove one of the rear blocks out of the way with his bumper. Danny shouted, "Don’t! You’ll wreck the car!"
The first bump made a dull, heavy thud. The block didn’t budge. A murmur rippled through the crowd, and I’m ashamed to say I laughed out loud.
The second hit was harder. The tires spun, chewing into the soft ground and spraying mud across the concrete.
On the third try, the Range Rover’s rear bumper crumpled against the gray blocks with a sickening crunch. The back tires whirled, spitting black mud and shreds of dead thyme into the air. Through the windshield I could see Trent gripping the wheel, red-faced and teeth bared. I was halfway down my porch steps by then, and Danny stood at the edge of the wall with both hands raised, shouting at him to stop.
Danny suddenly turned and ran to me. His face had gone pale. "Aunt Maggie," he said quietly, "where’s the cistern? Exactly?"
I froze. I looked at the car. I looked at the bowl-shaped sag beneath its back tires. I looked at the eight concrete blocks we’d set around it, at eight thousand pounds of concrete plus a three-ton SUV, all of it sitting on the same corner.
"Right under him," I whispered.
Walter’s voice came back to me so clearly that I nearly turned to look for him. That cap’s older than both of us. I had spent four months furious that Trent wouldn’t listen. And in one night, I had piled four tons of concrete onto the one spot Walter had begged me to protect.
I ran down the steps, waving my arms. "Trent! Stop! Get out of the car!" He saw me through the side window. He gave me a thumbs-down and gunned the engine again.
On the fourth try, the rear wheels didn’t spin. They sank. Then came a sound I will hear for the rest of my life, a deep, splintering crack, like a giant oak limb snapping beneath the earth.
The crowd went silent. Around the back tires, the grass puckered and split in a jagged ring. Little clods of dirt began trickling inward, as if something underneath were breathing in.
Trent must have thought he was stuck in mud. He threw it into drive and floored it.
And the ground beneath the back half of the Range Rover simply gave way.
