Chapter 2

The Four Corners intersection was near the southern edge of a 12,000-acre farm. Over the decades, each corner had been commercially developed for a specific purpose.

HERT — Hospitality, Entertainment, Residential, Transportation.

Hospitality, The northeast quadrant consisted of two motels, a destination restaurant called Chez Claire, and a large all-purpose shopping area. Other works, including a golf course were under consideration.

Entertainment This was the Pink Pussy strip club, with six double-wide custom trailers out back. And a dedicated poker room inside the club. This section was the real money-maker. The southeast corner.

Residential This was an unincorporated town in the northeast sector that everyone called The Village. It had begun as housing for the farmworkers, gas station attendees, and garage mechanics. It had grown organically and now over 800 people resided there. Many were still farm workers, others held hospitality, entertainment and transportation jobs. There was a K-6 school before the kids grew old enough to take the bus to regional schools.

Transportation This had been the original commercial development. It was now a full-service truck stop plus Claire’s Garage which catered to professional and civilian vehicles, and Mel’s Diner. The Southwest corner.

In addition to the four commercial areas, there was a family complex. Claire, Willow, and Luke each had a one-bedroom apartment. A kitchen, two bathrooms, generous living room, and an office. Claire and Willow shared a small gym, Luke had his own. There was also an indoor infinity pool that was used almost daily. Housekeeping cleaned the apartments every morning and kept the refrigerators stocked.

The roof of the complex was a giant deck with a hot tub, benches, and planters.

While Claire Stillman had turned over much of the Four Corners responsibility to Willow and Luke, she retained a 52% stake in the Class B stock, the voting stock. Willow was running the day-to-day operations with particular attention to Pink Pussy. Luke was head of the Security team. Claire had the final say on each of the significant decisions.

She was the eighth generation of Stillmans to own the acreage where a north/south highway crossed one going east and west. For six decades in the 1800s and a couple in the next century, the land was primarily devoted to agriculture.

The advent of the automobile changed a purely agrarian lifestyle to a mixture of farming, commercial, and residential land use.

Claire’s grandfather, Simon, had envisioned the future and opened the first gas station in the area. The Stillmans grew that into a truck stop, added a diner and and a huge parking area. Claire’s mother, Connie, introduced further changes — a strip club, a second, fancier motel, an upscale restaurant.

By the time Claire was 12, she was not only intimately familiar with the operations of the enterprise, she was double-checking the books. She’d always had a head for numbers, a skill that was passed down to Willow and Luke. She also was driving a tractor by the time she was 10, and shadowed the foreman, Clyde Humphries for weeks every summer.

By the time she was 18, she was effectively running Four Corners. Within the next seven years, she gradually bought out her parents who had been eager to retire to West Palm Beach. She opened Four Corners Savings & Loan to cater to the 800 Village residents and other workers. While it did turn a profit from conservative investments, its primary function was to buy loyalty to Four Corners and the Stillman family.

The institution made low-interest loans to cover car payments, college tuition, credit card debt, and the like. When applying for a loan, working for Four Corners was more important than a credit score.

Over 90% of the Four Corners acreage was still farmland — mostly soybeans which prospered in the rich, black soil — mollisols. The majority of that crop now went for biofuels. But with renewables on the horizon, Claire was experimenting with different crops — right now she had ten acres of hazelnut bushes — the deep-rooted perennials were good for soil conservation.

Thanks to historical and current practices, her farmland’s topsoil was mostly over 30 cc deep. High for Iowa. She knew she could sell her land for over $25,000 an acre, but had no plans to do so. Maybe someday, if Willow and Luke didn’t have children. Maybe not.

Claire herself had wanted children, wanted two of them, wanted a boy and a girl. Although she married Bobby Freestone, she retained her maiden name. ‘Stillman’ had garnered a lot of respect over the generations.

She had liked Bobby, sometimes quite a lot. And she was furious when he was murdered. But he’d always been more of means to an end — kids — than a husband to her. That said, the brutality of his death still ate at her. When the time came, when enough proof was gathered, she and Willow and Luke would take the appropriate steps.