Part 6
“We go at seven,” Dana said. “With a warrant.”
Leah spent that night at Ray’s sister’s in Emmett, in a spare room with a rug hung on the wall. She didn’t sleep. Around midnight Ray’s sister knocked. Joanie had called her to say Cody was pounding on her door wanting a number, and she’d given him this one. Leah took the phone.
“Lee? Where are you?”
He didn’t sound angry. He sounded scared.
“With friends.”
“Mom’s lying down, her heart’s acting up. How’d you even get out of here? On your own legs?”
The line was quiet for a long time.
“Lee,” he said, hoarse now. “Come home. We’ll fix everything. I’ll explain. You just don’t understand.”
“For three years you handed me that cup every night.”
“I didn’t know!” He shouted it so loud her ear rang. “Mom said it was medicine. She’s a vet tech, how was I supposed to know what—”
He stopped. He stopped exactly where a man hears himself say that he knew.
“Leave Sam out of it,” Leah said. “Whatever else you do.”
She hung up.
At seven they drove into the valley in two vehicles. Dana told her to stay in the car. Leah watched through the windshield as they walked the path through the two gardens: Dana, Deputy Miles Sutter with a spiral notebook held shut by a strip of bike inner tube, and a second deputy with a camera and a box of evidence bags.
Darlene came out on the porch in her housecoat and followed them. While she was still a long way off she started talking, loud enough for the whole road. Her daughter-in-law was sick. People who lay in bed that long got ideas. She had spoon-fed that girl for three years with these two hands, and look what thanks she got.
Then they disappeared down the slope.
Leah counted minutes. The Gunnells’ dog barked and barked. Arlene Hobbs from the lower road came up and stood at the fence with her arms folded, the way people do when something is happening on their street.
After forty minutes Deputy Sutter climbed back up and waved. Leah got out with Joanie’s cane. She walked down the path through the two gardens, which had taken her half the night on her hands and knees, and down the four stone steps with the deputy one step below her, not touching her.
Arlene Hobbs had trailed them down the hill. The deputy stopped her outside the door, and she stood there on the slope, looking in.
The bulb was on. Darlene stood by the crocks, very straight, and Cody stood near the door. On a sheet of paper on the bottom shelf sat the blue tin, open: three brown vials and a stitched notebook.
“That’s veterinary,” Darlene said calmly, to Dana, not to Leah. “Twenty-two years a vet tech. You try holding a bull elk still for the velvet saw with nothing in him. It stays down here because heat ruins it. What’s illegal about that?”
“We’ll sort it out,” Dana said, writing.
“That notebook’s my ranch records.”
“Ranch records.” Dana turned a page. “‘Limp. Walks along walls. Fell on porch.’ That’s an elk?”
Darlene didn’t answer.
Then she made the only real mistake of that morning. She turned to Leah and said, in front of the deputies and her son, and loud enough for the open door:
“How’d you get down here? You don’t walk. It takes two grown men to carry you down those steps. Nobody knows that better than me. So you’ve been lying to us for three years.”
The cave went quiet. Outside, Arlene Hobbs turned her head slowly and looked at Darlene the way people in small towns look at something once and remember it for twenty years. Arlene had watched Leah Gunnell come down those steps herself, with a cane.
They walked Darlene up the slope to the house for questioning, and they were careful with her. They didn’t cuff her, since the vials still had to go to a lab. On the porch she stopped and turned, and her voice carried across both gardens.
“You’ll never see that boy again, Leah. You hear me? Not while I’m breathing…”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇