Chapter 10

The sale died on a Tuesday. Grant Lisle's client sent a two-line email withdrawing the offer "pending resolution of certain title and capacity matters," which is what lawyers write when they mean they don't want to be anywhere near it.

The court revoked the power of attorney eleven days later. Coy filed the petition, a physician evaluated Amos over two days, and the judge signed. Dane Kettering was removed as attorney-in-fact and as farm manager, and his access to the operating accounts ended at four o'clock that afternoon. There would be hearings on the trust and the frontage after that, and Coy said it would take a year and nobody should hold their breath.

The Commonwealth's Attorney opened the review in the second week of December. It moved faster than anyone expected, because the case had never been complicated. It had only ever needed one document and one person willing to hand it over.

The fire marshal's file came out. The January memo came out of the file cabinet. The dispatch log went in. Two former barn hands, men in their sixties who had worked for Amos Kettering in the old days, gave statements that they had been told the thinner drums were moved and had not moved them, because they were told to leave it, and they named who told them.

In April, a grand jury indicted Dane Kettering on charges arising from the fire and the insurance claim. He pleaded not guilty. The trial was set for the fall.

On the eleventh of February, the court vacated Owen Pike's conviction and the Commonwealth declined to retry. Nine years, ten months, and six days.

They don't release a man to the street when he is sixty-eight and his heart is failing. They release him to a bed. The bed was at a hospice house in Lexington with a wide porch and a nurse named Nora Beasley, and Della Marsh spent four weeks getting it.

The warden's office called it a medical release, which meant there was no gate ceremony and no cameras - just a wheelchair through a side door at ten past noon, and a man in a brown jacket that didn't fit him, looking up at the sky for a while before he let anybody touch him.

Junie got to him first. She put her arms around his neck, and he said, "Well," and then he couldn't say anything else for a minute.

Della drove. Amos Kettering sat in the passenger seat with the blackthorn across his knees and watched the road go by. Owen Pike sat in the back with his granddaughter's hand in his. Nobody said much, because there was a lot of it.

They stopped at Kettering Hall, because the hospice didn't take him until four.

They got him up the ramp and into the east wing, into the good chair by the window, and the two old men looked at each other across a rug that needed vacuuming.

Owen said, "Della tells me you finally said something."

Amos's mouth worked.

"No," he said.

Owen Pike laughed until he had to stop and put a hand flat on his chest, and then he laughed a little more, carefully, with his eyes shut.

Coy had the whiteboard brought back from the bed of a truck parked at Dane's mother's house in Scott County, and it was hung on the same four holes, because the holes were still there.

It filled up.

Junie wrote on it first: JUNIE WAS HERE. Then Della wrote the vet's number and the feed schedule. Then a nurse wrote a shopping list. Then Owen Pike, who could still write fine, wrote the name of a horse he'd liked in 2004.

And Amos wrote on it every day, because he could, because it was three feet from his hand and nobody wiped it.

The full sentence came on a Sunday afternoon in March, eleven days after Owen moved into the hospice house, at the kitchen table, when Junie asked him a question.

She asked, "Are you glad I pried your board?"

And Amos Kettering said, "Thank you for asking."

Della was standing at the sink with her hands in the water and she didn't turn around, because she didn't want him to see her face.

The board in the east wing was never clean again. It was the only object in that room anybody touched, and now it was the only object in that room with anything on it - a grocery list, a vet's number, the name of a horse, and, across the bottom half of the panel in tall crooked capitals, written by a man who had spent nine years being furniture:

ASK ME ANYTHING.

It stayed there. Nobody ever wiped it off.