Chapter Six

Dylan didn't attend the funeral.  He thought about Terry Neilson and the pills that he had sold her.  He didn't put a gun to her head.  She had come to him.  He wasn't responsible for her death.  She did what she did under her own free will.  

Dylan Brown was in his late forties, wore glasses and was mostly bald.  He was always in a ball cap and had a mustache and goatee that hid he double chin.  A little over weight for his five ten frame, he liked to wear bib and brace overalls for effect. It made him look more country and got people to under estimate him.  He played the country bumpkin role to great effect.  He adopted y’all and you’uns and strove to erase any remnants of the Yankee accent that he had when he first moved to Eden.  He wanted everyone to forget that he “Wasn’t from around here.”

Dylan thought himself smarter than most and he probably was.  He liked to say that “He highly valued his own opinion.”  Untraditional in many ways, the idea of working for someone rubbed him the wrong way.  Yes, he earned a wage, but someone profited from his efforts.  He wanted to keep all the money his labors brought.

In high school it had been a challenge to fit in.  He eventually just gave up and resigned himself to the fact that it was never going to happen.  He didn’t go to college and after school, he went back up north and stayed with his grand parents for a couple of years.  He found the same feeling of being an outsider.  Although he was from there, the years spent in Eden had influenced his speech patterns and he didn’t sound like the local residence.  He was from two worlds and didn’t fit in either.  He returned to Eden and lived in a trailer on part of his parents property.    

He had always been good at fixing things, so he started working odd jobs.  Painting a shed and fixing a fence led to other jobs and eventually he made a living as a handyman.   It was a cash business and that meant it was easy for him to conceal his success.  He used an old pickup truck and bought a trailer for his tools.

Dylan looked for the angles and tried to think out of the box.  He admired D.B. Cooper for his inventiveness.  No one had ever hijacked a plane before Cooper, let alone escape with a parachute out the back of the plane.  It was Cooper’s ingenuity that Dylan admired.  

 On top of that, people paid good money for a pet rock.  This was insane to Dylan and confirmed what he thought about most people.  He devoted many evenings trying to come up with his own original idea.  

Dylan studied and thought about what it took to get ahead in life.  A profession would enable his to make good money while working for himself.  That took years of effort to get the education and he was already behind.  He had skipped college and now was out of the habit of going to school.  And they made you study all those things that were designed to round out the individual.  Art appreciation was a waste of his time.  Dylan eventually focused on real estate.  They weren’t making anymore land and everyone needed a place to live.  

Starting small in the next county, he began buying distressed property.  His experience as a handyman was put to use and he had the house fixed up and rented out in no time.  The rent covered the mortgage and them some.  He applied all the of rent money to pay down the mortgage.  In a few short years he had the house free and clear and was working on his next project.  He fixed that one up and use the rent from both houses to pay down the mortgage.  It too was mortgage free in a quarter of the time.  He continued this process until he had twenty houses, all free and clear, rented out and producing income.

Dylan had kept his investments at a distance.  He continued to live in his trailer on his parents land in Eden.  Eventually, his father passed and shortly thereafter his mother followed.  Dylan inherited the land and moved into the family home.

Keeping a low profile was important to Dylan.  In his dealings with his tenants, he was never the owner, he was just the manager and handyman.  When ask to wait on the rent, he would say, “I just work for the owner.  He expects me to collect the rent.   I need this Job.  I will get fired if I let you slide.”

Dylan began buying up land in the valley around Eden. It all started when he was called for a job and the owner told him he was getting ready to sell.  He would make a deal and buy the land before it got on the market. 

 He quickly decided to have a straw man take title to whatever he bought to hide his growing holdings.   He had grand plans for developing the area.  Subdivisions instead of farms. He used the straw man to make applications for building permits on the land that he owned.  It was all zoned for agriculture and he wanted to build houses.  The local authorities refused to allow the change in use, citing infrastructure concerns and the developments impact on the character of the community.  Dylan didn’t want to be a farmer.  He didn’t care about the character of the community.  He wanted to develop his land.

Dylan knew he was right.  The people of Eden would thank him one day.  The old refrain “You’re not from around here, are you?”  would be replaced with “We needed someone from outside to show us the way.”  He would not be an outsider, he would be their savior.

There were others that felt the way Dylan felt.  Others that saw the opportunity to make a fortune if the attitudes of the locals could be changed.  The locals wanted to preserve the way of life in their community.  They just needed to be shown that not only can you not go home again, even if you stayed home, things would always change and you can never insure that the status quo would remain forever.  

The most potent motivating factor is fear.  It was fear of change that the kept the town small and prevented development.  Dylan needed something that would create fear in the locals that if they did  not change, the result would be even worse.  He would think about that later,  right now the Neilson property was up for sale.