“Arthur Bell offered him money in the nineties. Dad told him the shop wasn't for sale.”
Vanessa nodded.
“Was it a good offer?”
I considered that.
“Probably.”
She looked toward me.
“Then maybe your father knew something about the property Arthur didn't want other people to know.”
The thought stayed with me.
The next morning, I went through the old storage cabinet in my father's office.
Not the ordinary service files.
Those I'd examined a hundred times.
I opened the bottom drawer, where Theo kept old business records, tax documents, and photographs from the shop's earliest years.
After an hour, I found a narrow cardboard folder.
Across the front, in my father's handwriting, were three words.
Bell Property Proposal.
Inside were several letters dating back to 1996.
Arthur Bell had offered to purchase the garage and three neighboring parcels as part of an industrial redevelopment scheme.
Theo rejected the offer.
Then Bell wrote again.
And again.
Each proposal increased the price.
But one letter contained a condition my father had circled in red ink.
The purchase would require Theo to sign a statement acknowledging that the property had no outstanding access rights or shared utility obligations benefiting neighboring businesses.
My father refused.
Attached was a handwritten note from Theo to his attorney.
The rear access road was reserved for the businesses on this block when the lots were divided. Bell knows that. I'm not signing away somebody else's access just so he can close the street for a development.
I stared at the paper.
The rear access road.
It ran behind the garage, connecting several small businesses to a public street.
During construction projects, it was often the only practical route for deliveries.
If a developer assembled all the parcels and closed that access without addressing the recorded rights, neighboring businesses could suffer.
Bell's proposal wasn't just about buying one garage.
It was about obtaining control over a strategically important section of the industrial block.
I called Rachel.
She asked me to photograph every page.
Then she examined the recorded property documents.
By that afternoon, we'd found the old easement mentioned in Theo's letter.
It didn't mean the property could never be sold.
It didn't automatically protect my garage from foreclosure.
But it complicated the redevelopment assumptions behind Harbor Gate's proposal and showed that Arthur Bell had known about the access issue for decades.
Rachel sounded thoughtful.