16 years back, the Beaumont Hotel had burned to its foundations on a January night and a man had died inside it. That man was Arthur's father, Samuel Callaway. Though the boy had no memory of him, only a photograph soft at the corners and a story that everyone in Harlan County seemed to know better than he did. The story went that Samuel had been inside the burning hotel when he had no business being there and the polite version stopped at that.
The unkind version, the one boys had thrown at Arthur across school yards his whole life said that Samuel Callaway had gone into the Beaumont to help himself to whatever a dying rich man left lying around and that the fire had been God's own opinion on the matter. Arthur had never believed it. He had also never been able to prove it false, which in a town like Harlan was nearly the same as it being true. So, when the auctioneer's list came around that week, tacked to the post office board and read aloud at the feed store, and Arthur saw the words Beaumont Hotel fireproof safe contents unknown, sold as-is, something in his chest went very still.
The hotel was gone. The land had been sold and resold. But the safe had survived the fire the way only a heavy old thing can survive and it had sat in a county storage shed for 16 years until somebody finally decided it was worth the trouble of hauling out to be sold. It was the last thing his father had ever touched.
Arthur was certain of that, the way he was certain of very little else. Whatever Samuel Callaway had been doing in the Beaumont that night, he had been doing it near that safe. The steel had outlived him, and now it was going to be sold to whoever raised a hand and a dollar. Arthur had $90 rolled in a sock under a loose board in the room he rented above the hardware store.
It had taken him two years of swept floors to save it, dollar by dollar, and it was every cent he had in the world. He brought all of it. The auction barn out on the county road was full that Saturday, the way it always was when the weather turned warm and folks came as much for the show as for the goods. Dale Coburn was there, of course.
Coburn was the man who bought things in Harlan County. He had bought the failed lumber mill in the old Beaumont land and half the storefronts on Mercer Street, and he drove a long white Lincoln that he parked across two spaces as if daring