Part 4
Mercer called the next morning to arrange a time to take Beth’s full statement. She offered to come to his office. He said he would be back at the property anyway, and they settled on two o’clock.
She spent the morning doing things that were almost preparations. She wiped the kitchen table, found the lease, and moved a stack of client folders into the office. She started a fresh page headed BARN and wrote June, then underlined it so firmly the pen nearly tore the paper.
Rachel had sent one message just after midnight: All eight out. Nell reached the facility alive.
Beth had typed Thank you, honey and deleted it. She had typed I love you and left it sitting in the reply box without sending. Every possible answer seemed to ask her daughter to take care of one more thing.
Frank knocked a little before noon. Beth had never heard that knock on an ordinary weekday; he usually let himself in and called her name from the kitchen.
He carried a folded shopping bag. Inside were Sam’s fence pliers and a pair of leather work gloves with one fingertip repaired in blue thread.
“These were in my truck,” he said.
She put them on the counter. “Thank you.”
He glanced toward the coffeepot. Beth took down two mugs before deciding whether she wanted him to stay, and he sat in his usual chair while she filled them. The underside of the table still bore his neat repair to the loose leg.
“Have you heard about Nell?” he asked.
“Only that she got there.”
He nodded and turned his mug by the handle. Without his cap, he looked badly slept-in, the gray hair above one ear bent outward. Beth remembered Sam looking that way after a night calving, before illness made exhaustion mean something else.
“I’m going to give them the contacts,” Frank said. “The people who brought the animals. Everything I have.”
“Good.”
“Some of them won’t thank me.”
Beth waited. He rubbed at the rim of the mug with his thumb, a habit she had seen when he was about to ask for a favor.
“They’ll ask what you agreed to.”
“I have the lease.”
“They’ll ask more than that.” He looked up. “You knew I was finding places for animals. Don’t let this turn into you saying you thought I was storing lawn chairs.”
“You told me equipment and two birds.”
“You saw the meat delivery.”
“You said it was for the program.”
“And you didn’t ask which animals.”
She had no answer. In August, when the refrigerated truck sat by the barn, she had been carrying an envelope of tax receipts. Frank had come up from the gate with a rent check already made out. She remembered noticing that the amount was correct and the date was early.
“I should have asked,” she said.
“I’m not trying to hang you with it.” He leaned forward. “I need you to remember that you knew I was doing temporary care. Not every detail. But enough to understand why I needed time.”
“I knew what you told me.”
“You knew more than you want to say now.”
Beth looked at the gloves on the counter. Frank had found the blue thread in her sewing tin because she couldn’t bear to mend Sam’s things after he died.
“You told me you’d show Rachel the paperwork,” she said. “That’s what I agreed to wait for.”
“And what did you write when you sent her message?”
Beth kept her hands around the mug. She remembered the words without opening her phone.
“She thinks I can’t manage my own property. Get this sorted before she brings an officer out here.”
Frank sat back. The kitchen refrigerator hummed, then stopped.
“You see?” he said. “I didn’t imagine it was something we were handling between us.”
Beth put the mug down and pushed it away from the papers.
“I’m giving Mercer that message,” she said.
He watched her for a moment. “You don’t need to volunteer every angry thing you’ve ever written.”
“He needs to know why you thought you had until Friday.”
“You’ll have your insurer asking what you knew. Maybe somebody deciding you owe for things you can’t afford.”
“I’ve already called the insurer.”
It was true, although the call had ended with a request for documents and no answer about coverage. She had written the claim number on the same page as June. The space beneath it was still blank.
Frank pushed his coffee away. “Sam would have understood what I was trying to do.”
For a moment she saw her husband’s thin hand on the hospital blanket, Frank’s larger hand resting beside it. She could not turn that memory into evidence for either of them.
“I don’t know what Sam would say,” she answered. “I know he isn’t here to say it.”
Frank stood. Beth stood too, and for a second they occupied the familiar positions of people ending a visit after lunch. She almost asked whether he wanted to take the leftover casserole.
At the door, he turned back.
“I didn’t stop caring about them.”
Beth looked at his hands, still roughened where the water containers had rubbed them. He was waiting for her answer.
“I know you didn’t,” she said.
He left without his coffee finished. Beth poured it away and washed the mug by hand. She put the repaired gloves in the drawer with Sam’s good pocketknife, then returned to the table.
When Mercer arrived, she had the lease and rent records ready. Her phone was charging beside them, the screen dark.
He asked her to begin with the rental agreement. Beth did, keeping to what she remembered and saying when a date was an estimate. Mercer stopped her to clarify the August delivery and the change of padlock. He did not tell her whether any answer was good or bad for her.
On his notepad, her ordinary summer became a series of things she had noticed and left alone.
Then they reached Sunday. Beth described the argument at the kitchen door, Rachel’s later voicemail, and Frank’s request for more time. “I wanted him to answer her concerns,” she said. Mercer began writing that down, and she put a hand beside his notebook.
“That’s not all of it,” she said.
Mercer waited with his pen still. Beth unlocked her phone, opened the exchange, and placed it on the table between them.
“Rachel asked me to get answers. She didn’t ask me to send him what she’d said. I did that myself. And I wrote this underneath.”
She turned the screen toward him. He read it, asked whether she would provide the complete exchange, and explained how it would be kept with the information he was collecting. Beth agreed without selecting messages to leave out.
Afterward, he read back the account he had written. Beth corrected the date of the well repair. Then she pointed to the sentence about the deadline.
“Put in that he thought I was keeping the officer away until Friday,” she said. “I didn’t use those words. But you should put in what I actually sent.”
Mercer made the addition and let her read it. Her signature beneath the statement was smaller than the one on the lease.
When he had gone, Beth sat at the table for a while before picking up her phone. She cleared the unsent reply to Rachel and wrote a new one.
Mercer has my messages to Frank, including what I wrote about you. He knows you didn’t authorize me to pass yours on.
She read it once and sent it. Then she set the phone facedown and called the woman who had asked, twice over the last year, whether Sam’s stock trailer was for sale…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇