Dock Bass is a carpenter-turned-realtor in upstate New York. He has a social-climbing wife he doesn't love, or even like, a job he hates, and a rapidly crumbling sense of self-respect and self-worth. Like a lot of people, he yearns for a change. Like very few, he decides to leave his life behind, hit the road, and go looking for it.

He finds it in Pennsylvania, of all places. Summoned to Gettysburg by a law firm, he learns that he's inherited an ancient house from a deceased relative he never knew existed. Renovating the place, Dock stumbles upon a treasure trove of Civil War memorabilia squirreled away in an old root cellar, including pictures and possibly even a recording of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. And in a world where John Kennedy's golf clubs are worth $750,000, what dollar figure does one place on items connected to the greatest Americal president at the venue of his most inspiring and memorable speech?

Plenty, Dock soon finds out, as he's forced to defend his new find from the onslaught of collectors, history buffs, and media hounds descending on his doorstep. Fortunately, like Honest Abe himself, he's the right man for the fight—independent, funny, loyal, and stubborn as a Missouri mule. When the scallywags and opportunists—including an easy-on-the-eyes television reporter with one hell of an attitude—start crawling out of the woodwork, he'll need all of that.

And maybe a little more.

ONE

Who’s to say why a man will do the things he does? It’s a mug’s game to speculate on the reasons behind a man’s actions, particularly when there’s a very good chance that he himself doesn’t know why he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing. A man doesn’t go to a bar after work and drink a dozen bottles of beer because he’s thirsty. He doesn’t hit his thumb with a hammer because he wants to. He doesn’t forget his wife’s anniversary because it seems like a good idea. As often as not there are other forces at work and sometimes those forces are best left unknown. No one needs to know everything.

Fortunately, things are not always that complicated. In fact, there are times when matters are a hell of a lot simpler than they appear. Sometimes it’s true—as Dooley Wilson so famously warbled—that a kiss is just a kiss.

It seemed as if everybody had a theory on why Dock Bass left town that fall. Of course, theories, as Dock’s father used to say, were like assholes or elbows—everybody had one or two. And while any one of the theories surrounding Dock’s sudden departure from Coopers Falls could have been right, the fact was that every one of them was wrong.

One popular and misguided conjecture was that Dock became unnerved after the incident at the Thursday night poker game at Ma Harper’s. They were playing jacks or better, and about an hour before the sun came up Willy Johnson shot Pooch McDougall—a rather unexpected development that woke up the neighborhood, put Pooch in the hospital, and brought the game to a screeching halt. Willy suspected Pooch of plucking a king of clubs from the slush, the addition boosting Pooch’s hand from a pair of cowboys to three of a kind, a hand that would have won the pot had the gunshot not interrupted the proceedings. Actually, Willy more than suspected the deed; he himself had moments earlier discarded the king in question.

Nobody took the shooting too seriously. Somebody made a joke about whether Pooch should be taken to a veterinarian or a people doctor. Pooch had long been suspected of resorting to some sleight of hand when his luck was sour, although getting shot for his transgression did seem a tad harsh. But Willy only carried a little hammerless Iver Johnson .22, a relic that was at least as dangerous to the person holding it as to anyone out in front. Willy liked to brag that he carried the weapon in case a jealous husband came looking for him, but the truth was that the married women in Coopers Falls cut as wide a swath around Willy as did the single ones. In any event, the slug went into Pooch’s shoulder and came to rest under the skin by his collarbone. The doctor who took it out closed up the wound with three stitches and refused to provide Pooch with so much as a Demerol, the denial of pharmaceutical relief actually pissing Pooch off more than getting shot.

By noon, the story around town was that Willy had gunned down Pooch in cold blood with a .357 magnum and that Pooch had been holding, of course, aces and eights at the time of his demise. That version held up pretty well until about nine that evening, when Pooch was spotted shooting pool at Soupy’s Sports Bar.

Another theory had Dock pulling up stakes because of Terri walking out on him. This notion had a lot of support for a couple of reasons. The more romantic-minded of the couple’s acquaintances garnered some perverse pleasure in the image of Dock leaving town with a broken heart, presumably with Patsy Cline or Hank Williams wailing away in the tape deck. But most people bought into the idea because Terri sold the hell out of the story. Her vanity wouldn’t allow her to reveal the truth, which was that it was Dock who’d done the walking.

In fact, Dock had been waiting for Terri to leave for a couple of years, and he was quite sure that she would have earlier had he not—at her insistence—acquired his real estate license and gone to work for Phil McMurter. Dock was under the assumption that Terri was waiting around to see if he would become as successful as Phil, an eventuality that would make Terri quite happy and Dock quite miserable, as there was nothing about Phil he liked or envied, including his innate ability to make a lot of money.

The day after the shoot-’em-up at the poker game, Dock slept late, which was unusual for him, but then he hadn’t arrived home until nearly six in the morning. He got out of bed at noon and was eating a ham sandwich in the kitchen when Terri walked in, dressed in her leather pants and a red silk blouse. She was flushed, he saw at once, which meant that he was about to be forced into a conversation about whatever it was that had her fired up.

“You’re finally up.”

“Yup.”

She sat down across from him. “I went to see that house. On Loudon Road.”

“Yeah?”

“Phil took me through it.”

Dock knew that he should have asked why his wife went to look at a house with another realtor when he himself was in the business. He should have, but he didn’t.

“It is absolutely gorgeous, Dock. It’s even nicer than I imagined. I think we should put in an offer,” she said then. “Phil thinks they’re eager to sell.”

“Why would I make an offer on a house I have no interest in?”

“Because I’m interested in it.”

“Then you put in an offer.”

“You know I don’t have any money.”

“Better make it a low offer.”

She fell into a pout then. Terri could fill up a good-sized auditorium with her pout. Dock finished his sandwich and then carried his golf clubs out to the black Lexus parked in the drive. When he turned back toward the house, she was standing on the porch.

“Are we not going to talk about this?”

“I thought we just did.”

“I’m not going to live in this little shit-hole forever,” she said.

Dock looked at the house behind her. “Me, neither.”

“And now you’re going golfing?”

“I’m going out to the subdivision,” he told her. “I have to show a house at one. I’m golfing later on with the guy who owns the stucco company. Business,” he reminded her.

She stood with her lips pursed, arms crossed. After a moment she indicated the pickup truck beside the garage. “When you going to move that thing? It’s a fucking eyesore.”

Dock turned. The truck was a ’91 Ford, faded red, with a 302 automatic and rally wheels; it had been his daily vehicle back when he was in the framing business. It had some rough on it, but it didn’t qualify as an eyesore to him.

“One of these days,” he told her and he got into the car and drove off.

The third popular theory on Dock’s sudden departure was that he was embarrassed about getting fired by Phil McMurter. And while it was true that he was fired, there was no truth to the notion that he was in any way humiliated by the act. In fact, his dismissal was about as self-inflicted as a wound could be.

Coopers Falls was an unremarkable little town straddling the Cooper River in upstate New York, an hour’s drive north of Albany. There were differing accounts as to how the town—and the river—got its name. One was that the area was first settled in the mid-1700s by a group of German immigrants who happened to be expert coopers. A conflicting view held that the esteemed American scribbler James Fenimore Cooper was the first to visit the area and to discover the rather unimpressive falls that eventually gave the town its name. This thesis seemed to suggest that the Mohawk Indians, who’d hunted and fished the countryside for generations, had done so without ever actually noticing the waterfall. That unlikelihood mattered little, as did the fact that the James Fenimore version was false. Apparently, the chamber of commerce had long ago decided that a famous author made for a better town-origin tale than did a bunch of mid-European barrel makers.

Oak Ridge Estates was the new subdivision on the west bank of the Cooper River. The old town was positioned on the east shore and it was showing its years, sagging here and there like a fading chorus girl. The downtown commercial interests had, predictably, moved to the strip malls outside of town. Many of the stores, three- and four-story brick buildings dating back a century or more, sat deserted, waiting for an unlikely resurrection. From time to time there would be enthusiastic talk of turning the core into an artists’ community, but the plan was constantly stymied by the fact that there were no artists in the area to colonize.

Across the river, though, things were hopping. Several hundred acres of farmland had recently been rezoned from agricultural to residential, and this—along with the fact that young professionals working in Albany were willing to endure a daily one-hour commute for the combined benefits of fine country living and the opportunity to raise their children in a small-town atmosphere—had created a building boom.

The largest of the new subdivisions was Oak Ridge Estates. The first phase of the development was recently completed—150 houses of varying styles and shapes and price tags. The second phase, which would include an additional two hundred homes as well as a condominium complex, was now under construction, with some units nearing completion while others were waiting for start-up. The whole ball of wax was owned by Phil McMurter, who had quite presciently purchased most of the surrounding farmland before it had been rezoned. McMurter Real Estate, which employed Dock Bass, was the on-site realtor.

Dock arrived at the home he was to show a little before one. It had rained heavily the night before and the yard in front, not yet sodded, was a muddy pond. Dock made his way through the mire and used his master key to let himself into the house. The entranceway was a glassed-in foyer beneath a dormered roof; when Dock entered he found a puddle of water on the tiled floor. Looking up, he could see where the rain had come through the ceiling; the new paint was bubbled and the sodden drywall, bulging downward under the weight of the water, was about to come crashing down.

The prospective buyers—a young couple on the cusp of marriage—arrived, and Dock showed them in. He pointed out the leaky ceiling, and they asked what would have caused it.

“I’m not sure, but I’m guessing it wasn’t Old World craftsmanship,” Dock told them, quoting a phrase from the brochure. A moment later the woman suddenly remembered an urgent appointment and the couple, tossing their regrets over their shoulders, departed.

Dock found Phil McMurter over in phase two, standing in the living room of a partly constructed saltbox and talking to Stu Lewis, the building inspector, who was in the process of inspecting the insulation and vapor barrier.

“Hey, Dock,” Lewis said when he walked in.

“Stu.”

“Okay,” Lewis said to Phil and he signed a paper on his clipboard. “This one’s ready for drywall. Give me a call when the board’s up.”

Dock waited until Lewis was gone and then he said, “We got a roof leaking to beat the band in that unit I was showing over on Poplar.”

“Shit.”

“How can a roof leak in a new house?” Dock asked.

“I’d blame it on the rain.”

“Or that peckerwood you got contracting for you.”

Two young guys walked in then. They were in their early twenties and looked as if they’d been kicked out of Mötley Crüe for poor grooming. They immediately began to cut the plastic vapor barrier from the walls and then carry the new insulation outside. Dock looked out the window and watched as they carried the pink batts into the half-constructed house next door. Moments later they returned and repeated the act.

“What the fuck is going on?” Dock asked.

“I’m stretching my insulation dollar,” Phil told him, and he smiled. “I’ll have Murphy take care of the roof. I might have to stick my boot up his ass.”

Dock, observing the ongoing insulation exchange, said nothing.

“I thought you were golfing with the stucco king,” Phil said then.

Dock looked at his watch. “I am.”

“Make sure he picks up the tab,” Phil said. “The business I send his way.”

On his way to the golf course Dock realized that Phil never mentioned showing Terri her dream house that morning. He wondered for a moment if his wife was fucking his boss. The possibility didn’t bother him, but then the fact that it didn’t began to bother him. It didn’t seem the type of thing that a man would willingly let slide. If nothing else, it gave him a good excuse to give Phil McMurter a shit kicking, but he already had a half-dozen reasons to do that.

The stucco king was a pain-in-the-ass, ten-cent millionaire who wore Hawaiian shirts every day of his life and who insisted on picking up every check, in an effort to win friends or to lord his somewhat debatable wealth over others. He brought along two buddies, and they teamed up and played four-man Nassau for a hundred dollars a side. Dock wasn’t interested in the golf or the networking or even being there for that matter, so of course he shot lights out and he and his partner—a fat flooring distributor who smoked a cigarette a hole and two on the par fives—won all of the cash.

They had a beer in the clubhouse afterward. When the stucco king started to complain about Phil McMurter’s overdue accounts, Dock said he had to go.

Driving home, he decided on a whim to swing by the old place. He turned onto the river road south of town and wound his way north, following the meandering stream until he reached the cedar-lined lane leading to the house where he had grown up.

It had been a good place to grow up. As a boy, he’d enjoyed a Huckleberry Finn existence, living on the shore of the shallow river, building rafts and catching turtles and fishing the deep holes his father had shown him. The family—there was just Dock and his parents—had lived in a two-story frame house on a rise above the river. Dock’s father had a workshop alongside the house, where he kept his tools and also the table saws, lathes, planers, bandsaws, and countless other tools that he—and later Dock—used in the trade.

The house now belonged to strangers. Dock’s father had sold it the previous year, and moved into a town house. The relocation may have contributed to his sudden death as Dock couldn’t imagine his father in such surroundings, without his tools, his garden, his plank rowboat. Not to mention his purpose. It was, of course, all speculation on Dock’s part and that’s all it would ever be.

Now he turned onto the lane, crested the rise, and saw his childhood home—the home where he’d learn to walk and to talk and to read and write, the home where he had begun to learn the difference between right and wrong (although lately that line had become a little blurred)—lying scattered on the ground, flat as the proverbial pancake. The bulldozer responsible for the flattening was still at it, pushing the debris that had so recently been a home into a large pile of sticks and bricks, broken windows and doors. Dock, nearly driving into a ditch, slammed on the brakes and just sat there for a time.

When he drove over to the wreckage, the dozer operator was locking the cab. Dock recognized the man when he turned around.

“Charlie—what the fuck?”

“Hey, Dock.” Charlie jumped to the ground. “Ain’t this a corker?”

Dock stood with his arms out. “What happened?”

Charlie pointed his chin to the property to the east, where an ugly but supposedly palatial mansion had gone up a year previously. The house was a full three stories and the grounds covered four acres of land, complete with Greek fountains and ivy-covered stone walls and rock gardens. The owners were a computer programmer from Albany and his wife, a former flight attendant.

“It was blocking their view,” Charlie said.

“What?”

“They couldn’t see the sun set over the river from their balcony. So they bought it and hired us to tear it down.”

“Sonofabitch.”

“Ain’t it?”

Dock walked around the house, kicked halfheartedly at what was left of his childhood, and then stood there.

“You know, Dock,” Charlie said. “I always kinda wondered why you never bought the place from your old man.”

Dock knelt down and extracted an ancient square nail from a collapsed doorjamb. The nail, despite its age, was in perfect condition. “I never knew he was selling. We didn’t talk—I don’t know—the last couple years. More like three or four, now that I think about it.”

“Since you left the business?”

Dock nodded and put the nail in his shirt pocket.

“Funny thing,” Charlie said then. “The owners came down when I got here earlier. Said that now they were thinking of buying some horses, putting a barn up right here on this spot.”

“How they gonna see the sun set then?”

“I was wondering that myself,” Charlie said. “Maybe they’ll build the barn out of glass.”