Chapter Seventeen
Devyn
“This looks really unprofessional,” Talia says with distaste when I hand her the crane’s manual with the front cover torn off.
“All he needed was the table in the middle. The weight’s even highlighted. That’s all he cared about.”
“Is it the correct amount?” she asks, studying the chart.
“We’d have to do that math. There’s a sheet somewhere that had the calculations on it,” I say, digging through the piles of interviews. “Beau said something about the framework being two tons.”
“And the truck weighs more than the load,” Talia says.
“Right.”
“And they use counterweight to balance the boom.”
“Right,” I say again.
“But why do they need counterweight if the truck weighs more than the framework? I don’t understand this at all,” she says, throwing the manual to me where it skids across the table’s surface.
“They use counterweight to ease wear and tear on the truck. It creates balance for the boom. A fifty-ton truck that’s hauling a two-ton load for a lift sixty-two feet into the air is going to need 12,400 pounds of counterweight. I did the math and got a headache for my trouble.”
“Where did you get sixty-two feet?” Talia asks, and I think back to where I found the figure. Sifting through the paper would be a lost cause. All of it looks the same to me now.
“They were raising the framework to the fourth story. Each story is around fourteen to fifteen feet high. The boom had more than enough reach—a fifty-ton truck has a boom reach of forty-eight meters and sixty-two feet is a little over eighteen meters.”
Talia lifts her hands, palms upward. “Then the lift should have been fine.”
“That’s the problem. It wasn’t fine.” I flip through the manual again. The cover and table of contents are ripped out. Very unprofessional.
“How do you think Beau and Rick are making out?” Talia asks, sifting through more paperwork.
“I hope they’re not making out at all,” I say, teasing, wanting to brighten her spirits.
It doesn’t quite do the trick, but she smiles, at least. “You know what I meant.”
“Yeah, I did. They won’t find anything. Mechanics fail all the time. It was probably just a glitch, or Tony stretched the truth. He ignored a warning and didn’t want to tell me. It was a while ago now, maybe he misremembered. If they don’t find anything, we’ll talk after dinner about what we’re going to do next. We need to stay in Portland until at least Christmas break so you can finish out your classes. I didn’t talk to Barney about that part of it, but I have until February, then he wants me in the office full-time. Until then, I can commute and work out of Portland.”
Talia twists an earring in her lobe. “Won’t you miss Rick? I can stay in Portland alone.”
Shaking my head, I say, “I don’t want you to do that. We need that time anyway, to put in our notice to the property management and pack our things. Rick said he has room for us. I don’t know what he meant by that, exactly, but I trust him. We can drive home tomorrow.” I’m disappointed there’s nothing more to stay for, but maybe a little distance would be good for Rick, too. We hopped into it so fast, a cooling off period would be good for both of us.
Talia doesn’t look any happier than I do, but a relationship can’t be built in a day, and if Beau wants to see her, he’ll find a way.
I reach for the manual again. The yellow highlighter catches my eye against the white and black. Sitting up, the figure swims before my eyes. “What did I just say the counterweight should have been?”
Talia digs through the papers, pulling a sheet out of the pile. “12,400 pounds.”
That’s not what the highlighted square in the table says. Quickly, I flip to the front of the manual, and there on the page after where the table of contents should have been, it says in fine print,Merritt Machines, eighty-ton crane, model FJ1504.
I dig through my purse and pull out the notebook I used when I went out to the site.
“What is it?” Talia asks.
I compare the two truck models, and I push the manual at her. “Tony used the wrong manual. The highlighted number is wrong. If he used what’s highlighted, he used double what he needed, and the counterweight was way too heavy for the truck and the load. We need to talk to him again. Come on.”
“I get to go with you this time?”