Chapter 8

Dane came in at six.

Junie was in the hallway, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and the plastic horse in her lap. She had been there every evening for a week. Nobody had ever told her not to be, because nobody watched her.

She heard him stop in the middle of the room.

She leaned out far enough to see. The two words were still on the board, tall and crooked, and Dane Kettering was standing in front of them with his hands at his sides.

He didn't say anything for a while. Then he took the rag off the tray and wiped the board clean - corner to corner, top to bottom, slow, the way he always did it. He did it twice.

He turned to the man in the chair.

"Nothing today either, Uncle Amos," he said.

His voice wasn't warm. It wasn't anything at all.

Then he went out to his truck, came back with an electric screwdriver, and took the whole board off the wall - four screws, one after another - and carried it out through the hall past Junie without looking down, and laid it in the bed of the truck, and drove away.

Junie sat in the empty room and looked at the wall. Two screw holes. A metal bracket. A rectangle of paint that had never faded.

Della called Bennett Coy at eight that night.

Coy had been the Kettering family's attorney for thirty-one years. He had drawn the will, the trust, the operating agreement, and the power of attorney. He was seventy-two and spoke slowly, which made people underestimate him, which he did not mind.

"Bring it to my office," he said. "Don't tell anyone you called me."

She brought it at seven the next morning. He put on reading glasses and read it twice, then held it under the desk lamp and looked at the last line for a long time.

"That's his hand," he said.

"You're sure."

"I've notarized that man's signature for thirty-one years, and I watched it change after the stroke. The shake in the K. The way he crosses his sevens." He set the page down flat. "Where has it been?"

"Behind the whiteboard. In the frame. Since the night he collapsed."

Coy took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Two weeks after the stroke," he said, "Dane brought me a physician's letter and asked me to prepare a power of attorney. I prepared it. I asked to see Amos alone and was told he wasn't up to visitors." He folded his hands. "I have thought about that sentence for nine years, Ms. Marsh. What do you want to do?"

"Friday morning," Della said. "The closing."

Coy nodded slowly. "Then be there at nine. And bring the child. If she found it, she should be the one to put it down."

Friday, nine in the morning. Cold November light came through the tall window and lay in a bar across the long mahogany table.

The buyer's attorney, Grant Lisle, slid the contract across. Fourteen million dollars for the road frontage - a quarter mile of Kettering land along the pike, sold to a Lexington developer who wanted the frontage and would leave the rest of the farm alone.

Dane's fountain pen was already moving.

Junie walked in from the hall in her puffy blue jacket with the safety pin. Her boots made two flat sounds on the hardwood. She laid the folded, yellowed ledger page flat across the signature line.

The pen stopped.

Dane's voice went flat. "Put that down."

She didn't.

His hand came across the table. Junie slid the page clear and lifted it to her chest and held it up so the whole room could see it - the date, the name, the initials in shaky black ink.

Then, from the hallway behind her, three slow taps of a wooden cane on hardwood.

Every head turned.

Amos Kettering stood in the doorway of the office he had not entered in nine years, in his barn vest and a white shirt buttoned to the collar, his right hand wrapped around the blackthorn, his jaw working.