Chapter 6

The house smelled like coffee and Vicks.

Corinne was in the kitchen at seven, and she had on her church coat and her good boots and she'd done her hair. She looked like a woman going to a meeting. She had Glen's pill organizer on the counter in front of her, and she was filling it from a brown pharmacy bag one tablet at a time, and she looked up when I came in and smiled at me.

"Morning, Josie."

"Morning."

"You sleep?"

"Some."

"Good." She snapped the lid on Thursday. "Ms. Provost will be here at seven-thirty. That's the social worker. She's going to ask you some questions about Glen's medication, and I want you to answer them honestly." The smile got a half-inch wider. "I've told her you've been struggling."

Seth came in from the mudroom with snow on his shoulders and took his coffee without looking at either of us.

I went out to the office.

This time the door was locked. I stood there with my hand on the knob for a full minute, and then I remembered the mudroom, and the junk drawer, and the little hook where Seth hung the spare set for the tractor shed.

The key ring had eleven keys on it. The fourth one fit.

I slipped in and shut the door behind me and stood in the dark and let my eyes adjust. The lamp switch was where I remembered. The folder was where I remembered.

This time I opened it all the way.

There were four documents in it.

The first was a guardianship petition, naming Corinne Tilden as guardian of the person and estate of Glen Allen Tilden. The second was a timber-rights sale agreement, ninety acres of softwood on the north ridge, to a company out of New Hampshire. The third was a physician's statement about Glen's incapacity. The fourth was a consent form, two pages, with a line at the bottom for a family member's signature.

There was a signature already at the bottom of the first three.

Glen's signature.

I know my father-in-law's handwriting. He signed every Christmas card in the family with the same fountain pen and the same crooked, spidery letters, right up until two years ago when the pen started shaking so badly he'd switched to a stamp.

The signature on the petition was beautiful. Level. Consistent. It didn't shake at all.

It looked exactly like Corinne's.

I stood there in the cold office and heard my own breath and finally understood the shape of it. She wasn't going to have him declared incompetent so she could take care of him. She was going to have him declared incompetent so she could sell the north ridge out from under him, and she'd needed him to look bad enough to justify it, so she'd been taking his pills.

And she needed a family member's signature on the fourth page, because a guardianship petition with only the petitioner's name on it is a piece of paper, and one with the daughter-in-law's name on it is a case.

The fourth page was blank.

Nine o'clock. The notary. The pen.

I took a picture of all four pages with my eyes, because Seth had my phone, and I had nothing to write with but a pencil stub and no time to use it. Then I closed the folder and turned around, and Seth was standing in the doorway.

He had his gloves in his hand.

He looked at the folder and then at me, and he didn't look surprised, which was the worst part.

"Find what you were looking for?" he said.

I moved for the door. He moved at the same time.

It was stupid and I knew it was stupid, but I was pregnant and hurt and I did it anyway-I ducked under his arm and made it into the mudroom, and he caught me by the back of the coat and spun me around, and there was a second of ugly struggle, both of us breathing hard, and the walkie-talkie came out of my apron pocket and hit the floor and slid.

We both looked at it.

Seth got there first.

He picked it up and turned it over in his hands and pressed the button, and nothing happened-dead, the battery finished-and something in his shoulders let go.

"What is this," he said.

"You know what it is."

He looked at it a while longer. Then he put it in his coat pocket, walked back into the office, and I heard the drawer open and close and the key turn.

"It stays here," he said through the door. "Until we're done."

From the kitchen, Corinne called out, sweetly, that Ms. Provost's car had just pulled in.