Chapter 3
The box sat open on the lace cloth.
Nobody touched it.
In the ceiling light the inside was gray and clean.
It looked swept.
Cooper looked at the empty box and started to cry again.
Quiet, so nobody would hear him.
Opal turned his face into her skirt with one hand.
"There was a will," she said.
Della laughed once.
Short. Hard. Nothing funny in it.
"There is no will, Clay."
"There never was."
She set the lid back on the box.
"Sarah died without one."
"The county told us that."
"Because the county never got anything to read."
Clay looked from one woman to the other.
His hand lay flat on the table.
"Opal. If you know something, say it plain."
So she said it plain.
"The farm was Sarah's. Her dad's before her."
"Her will left all of it to Cooper, in trust."
"She wrote it the March before she got sick."
"I signed it as a witness. So did the lawyer in Ord."
Della spoke fast.
"Then where is it?"
"Ask the woman who had it in this house."
"Meaning me?"
"You had the office key."
"You put it in my hands," Della said.
"Every week. To clean."
She turned to Clay.
"She's had a year in that barn, honey."
"A year to read everything in it."
"You think she sat in this kitchen for twelve months because she likes my cooking?"
Two of the women had come back for a forgotten dish.
They stood in the mudroom and listened.
The sandy-haired one was slow to speak.
"Opal. Why didn't you say something sooner?"
Opal's chin came up.
"Because the last time I said something, I got a letter."
"From a lawyer. Telling me to stay off this property."
She looked at Clay.
Clay said nothing.
He remembered the letter.
Then Dustin stood up from the end of the table.
"Dustin. Sit down," his mother said.
He did not sit down.
He was sixteen and his voice cracked in the middle of it.
"I saw you take it."
The room went still.
"Last April. You had a file under your coat."
"I asked what it was. You told me to shut up."
"You drove to Ord and came back with a deed."
"You said, this is how it's done."
Della's face went smooth and blank.
"You're lying for them."
"You're my son."
"You let her put him out in the cold."
That was the whole answer Dustin ever gave her.
Della walked to the sideboard and opened a drawer.
She came back with a long envelope and dropped it on the table.
Stiff paper. A raised county seal.
"There. That's a deed."
"Sarah signed this farm to me before she passed."
"It's filed. It's stamped. It's recorded at the courthouse."
"Check it yourself."
Clay's hands were slow, like the envelope weighed something.
He slid the paper out and laid it flat.
The type was fine and even.
At the bottom, the line for the grantor's signature.
Sarah's name, curling and neat.
Opal said one word.
"Turn it over."
Clay turned it over.
A notary block. A name. A date.
The date was the ninth of March.
Clay read it three times.
Then he looked at the calendar hanging in the hall.
His voice came out flat.
"Sarah died on the fourteenth of December."
"That's not even three months later."
He set the deed down.
"And you weren't a Rutledge in March."