Part 5
On Sunday, when boots came up the porch steps, Leah’s whole body went cold. The knock was Joanie’s, two short raps. Joanie came in with a loaf of bread and a fistful of green onions from her garden.
Joanie worked at the post office and lived three houses down. She had one quality people in town held against her: she never passed anything along, and it made her boring. She sat down beside the wheelchair and started in about her niece Tessa, who’d gotten into the food science program at Boise State.
“Joanie,” Leah said. “Close the door and sit down.”
Joanie closed it.
Leah told her all of it: Vesta in the yard, the spitting, the two weeks last May, the butter-cookie tin, the thirtieth. Joanie’s face went stiller and stiller as she listened. When Leah finished, the room was very quiet.
“You don’t believe me,” Leah said.
Joanie got up, opened the door a crack to check the hall, and shut it again. Then she crouched in front of the chair.
“Last May you were standing at the window.”
Leah jerked.
“I came up with bread, and you were standing there looking at the mountain. I almost hollered, and then I thought you’d startle and fall, so I backed off. Then they came home and you were in the chair, and I told myself I’d imagined it. I’ve been kicking myself for a year.” She took Leah’s hands. “What do we do?”
They needed money first, and there wasn’t any. Leah’s disability payments went onto a card that lived in Darlene’s purse. Once a month Darlene read out where it had gone: adult diapers, prescriptions, the electric bill.
“I’ve got eight hundred till payday,” Joanie said.
“You’re not giving me Tessa’s tuition. Don’t argue.” Leah was quiet a moment. “I have cheese.”
At the very back of the cave, behind the crocks, on the bottom shelf Darlene never touched because she thought it was junk, sat five wheels of Grandma’s cheese. Leah had set them the last summer she could walk. They were three years old.
“Nobody in this valley has anything like it,” she said. “Nobody holds a wheel three years. They need the money now.”
She told Joanie how to photograph a cut face so the white crystals showed, with the stamped date in the frame, and where to find Matt Kessler’s number on the back page of the ledger.
Matt called the next day, all business so he wouldn’t overpay. “Leah, hey, good to hear you’re alive and kicking. Look, it’s August, I’ve got cheese coming out my ears. Two grand for all five.”
“No.”
“They’re probably dried out after three years.”
“They’re three years off the upper meadow. You’ve had that exactly once in your life, and it was mine. Put it on your menu, and one wheel pays for half of what you give me.”
A pause. “Thirty-five hundred. You deliver.”
“Five thousand. You pick them up at eight tomorrow at the lower bridge. Not the house.”
“Why the bridge?”
“Because it’s five thousand.”
He came. Joanie carried the wheels out in feed sacks the night before and came back with cash and half a wheel Matt had cut off and handed back. “For the cheesemaker,” he’d said. “She should taste what she made.”
Leah tasted it. It was amber and crumbly, and the crystals crunched between her teeth. It was the cheese she’d wanted to make her whole life. She ate one small piece and saved the rest for Sam.
On Thursday Darlene and Cody were driving to the county seat for the bank, the lawyer, and the feed store, and would be gone all day. They’d planned it out loud in front of her. The wheelchair had stopped counting as a person you lowered your voice around. Sam was going to his aunt Karen’s in Pinegrove. Joanie’s brother Ray was driving to Boise for a tractor part.
“You know there’s no coming back from this,” Joanie said. “If it doesn’t work, they’ll bring you home, and you won’t get out of that bed again.”
Leah looked out at the apple tree. “If I stay, I die in that bed anyway. I’d rather not wait for it.”
The truck pulled out at seven on Thursday. Leah listened to the doors slam and the engine fade up the grade, and then she got up.
She packed the ledger, Sam’s phone, her ID, her hospital records, and the cash wrapped in a scrap of flannel. In the shed she lifted the lid of Grandma’s trunk and felt under the rags at the bottom for the bundle in the waffle-weave towel.
The braid was inside: dark, limp, bound in the middle with a drugstore rubber band. Darlene had cut it last November on the back porch with kitchen scissors over a sheet of newspaper, because it had been coming out in handfuls. “Take it short. It’ll grow back thicker.” That night Leah had wheeled out, fished it from the trash, washed it, and hidden it. She hadn’t suspected anything. She was thirty-two, and it was her hair.
Ray pulled up at the gap by the woodshed at seven-thirty. He didn’t say a word helping her in or for most of the drive. Once, going over the pass, he asked, “Cold?” and put his jacket over her knees.
She couldn’t stop looking. She hadn’t seen the valley in three years. The river ran cloudy turquoise below the road, white where it broke over rocks. There were lodges along the banks she didn’t recognize, and honey stands and firewood bundles at the pullouts. The mountains stood over all of it, huge and calm.
Dr. Tim Espinoza was young, with a buzz cut and a mason jar of iced tea on his desk. He heard her out, tapping a pen, and then said, “Hop up on the table.”
He spent forty minutes on the hammer, the pinprick, squeeze my fingers, push against my hand. He shone a light in her eyes and took her blood pressure lying down and standing.
“I don’t see the polyneuropathy,” he said. “You’ve got reflexes, and sensation across the whole foot. If nerve disease had put you in a chair two years, I’d expect a particular kind of wasting, and it’s not there. What you’ve got is what anybody gets from two years of not moving. That’s months of work. But it’s work.” He tapped the pen once more. “And dry skin, dry mouth, lazy pupils. Some drugs do that, long-term. Blood won’t show much now, a month out.”
Leah laid the braid on his desk.
He looked at it for a long moment and started writing. “You need a lawyer, the sheriff, and a lab that does segmental hair analysis. Hair grows about half an inch a month. They cut it root to tip, one piece per month, and test each one.” He tore off the page. “That’s a diary, basically. Just nobody wrote it by hand.”
Kira Walsh worked out of two half-basement rooms with a map of Idaho on the wall. She wrote everything in pencil and erased constantly, so her desk was always dusted with gray crumbs. She listened for two hours, went through the photos, read the ledger, then took off her glasses.
“Okay. You’ve got three problems and I’m going to keep them in separate drawers. Drawer one, somebody poisoned you. That’s the sheriff. The best thing you did in this whole story is leave those vials where they were.”
“I thought I should’ve grabbed them.”
“If you’d brought them in your purse, the first defense lawyer to see them says you planted them. Sitting in that tin with a notebook in her handwriting, they’re evidence.” She erased something. “Drawer two, the guardianship. You’re going to walk into that courtroom on the thirtieth. Nobody gets a guardian for being sick or broke. They need proof you can’t understand your own life. Can you?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’ve got a folder and a pencil note. Drawer three is the ugly one. On paper, today, you’re a debtor who blew her grant and is selling her land.”
“I don’t remember signing any of it.”
“That’s our case. It’s your signature, so we’re not arguing forgery. We’re arguing about the woman holding the pen.” She tapped the ledger. “This helps. The braid might finish it. Today you file a police report, you write to the state ag department before they write to you, and we ask a judge to freeze that land so nobody sells it while we fight.”
They wrote until evening, Kira dictating and Leah writing by hand, until her letters ran downhill like the signature on the loan.
Detective Dana Ruiz of the county sheriff’s office wore her watch with the face on the inside of her wrist. She listened without a word, then asked, “Who knows you left?”
“My neighbor. Her brother.”
“I need the phone. We’ll copy your pictures in front of you.” She looked at Leah a moment. “If this is true, those people figure out tonight that you’re gone. They’ll have one night.”
Leah thought of the bulb under the stone vault, and the blue tin going into the river…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇