Chapter 5

Opal took her coat off the hook by the mudroom door.

The deputy held the door for her.

Cooper's hand closed on her skirt and would not open.

"It's all right," she told him.

"I'm not going anywhere."

They stood on the porch in the cold.

Deputy Prentiss was young, maybe twenty-eight.

He wrote in a notebook with his gloves off.

Della talked first.

She talked for a long time.

Uninvited woman in her house. Hands on her in front of guests.

A liar who had been spreading stories about her family for months.

The deputy wrote it down.

"Is that your husband inside?"

"That's him."

"Did he see it?"

"He's upset."

The deputy turned a page.

"Ma'am," he said to Opal. "Your turn."

Opal told it short.

The door was open. The boy was in his socks.

The woman dragged him toward the freeze.

"I put my hand on her wrist and stopped it."

The deputy nodded slowly.

"And the rest of it?"

"There's something in my bag."

She went in and came back with a canvas tote.

Inside was a manila envelope, soft at the corners.

She had carried it for a year.

Inside was a folded copy of Sarah's will.

Two pages, stapled, with a blue cover sheet.

The letterhead said Marian Hovde, Attorney at Law, Ord, Nebraska.

The deputy read it under the porch light.

He read the second page twice.

"Ma'am. Do you know what this is?"

"It's my daughter's will."

"It leaves the farm to her son."

"It makes me the trustee until he's twenty-five."

The deputy lowered the paper.

"Where's the original?"

"In that barn office. In a fireproof box."

"The box is empty now."

The deputy looked across the yard at the dark barn.

Then he went inside to use the radio.

The kitchen went very quiet.

Della stood by the sideboard with her arms folded.

"It's a copy," she said.

"You can type anything on a computer."

"So can you," Opal said.

Clay sat down at the table.

He sat like a man whose knees had quit.

Opal stood by the stove and let it come.

She had watched all of it from that kitchen.

The flowers were still on the counter when Della carried her suitcase in.

The deed was written in the spring.

The letter warning Opal off the property went out in the summer.

By fall the ring was on Della's hand.

By winter the office key was on her own ring.

And every month money moved out of the farm account.

"I kept the statements," Opal said.

"Della leaves the mail on the office desk."

"Eleven transfers. Sixty-one thousand dollars."

"Out of an account that belonged to a seven-year-old."

Della's voice went high.

"That was household money. I run this house."

"You ran the checkbook," Opal said.

The deputy came back in with his radio against his shoulder.

The county attorney wanted everything bagged and a statement from everyone.

The recorder in Ord opened at eight.

Della started talking again, fast, about lawyers and slander.

The deputy let her talk.

He was looking at the deed on the table.

"There's a second page under this," he said.

He drew it out and laid it flat.

A stapled page. An affidavit, three lines of print.

Clay leaned over it.

Then he stopped moving.

His own name was at the bottom.

In his own handwriting.

A date in April.

He remembered the pen.

He remembered the back steps and the cold.

He remembered his wife handing it to him with the bank envelope.

"Sarah's land," he said.

"That is not what she told me this was."

He had signed it in April, on the back steps, before supper.

Because she said the bank needed it by Friday.

Nobody had read him one word of it.

His own signature had sold his son's farm.