Part 10
They sent the braid to Denver. There it was cut into segments from the root to the tip, and each segment was tested separately.
Dana read Jules the results out loud in her office, running her pen along the lines, her watch turned face-in on her wrist as always. The drug had been found along almost the entire length. It appeared in the segment that matched the beginning of fall three years earlier and continued from there, month after month, sometimes more, sometimes less. In one segment, the one that fell in May of last year, the level dropped almost to nothing. In the next it came back, higher than before.
“Two weeks,” Dana said. “Your Salt Lake trip.”
Jules sat looking at the paper, where her life had been laid out half an inch at a time.
“That’s not all, is it?” she said.
“It’s not. We tested the bottles. Two of the three contain the same substance. And we pulled the drug logs at the ranch over the pass. We found what you always find at any ranch if you look hard enough: the drug was being signed out for animals that weren’t treated on those days.”
The ranch vet, Dr. Burl Mickelson, a man who had worked there his whole life, first spent a good while explaining that record-keeping varies from place to place. Then he said it straight out. Linda took it. She’d taken it before, and she kept coming by for it after she retired. Nobody could turn her down, because she was one of their own.
Travis broke at his third interview.
Jules wasn’t there. Afterward they let her read the transcript, and as she read it she kept hearing his voice, the everyday one that used to say, Jules, don’t make this a thing.
It had started, as it turned out, not out of malice but out of shame. The grant money came in the spring. Part of it went to the vat and the equipment, and Travis took part of it to Salt Lake, to a man a buddy from the elk business had pointed him to. The man promised to double it in a year. It was a sure thing, serious people were in on it. Travis hadn’t told his wife because he wanted to lay the finished result on the table in front of her. By fall the man had stopped answering his phone.
The grant report was due that winter. That fall Jules, for the first time, had started going through the paperwork herself. She wanted to drive to Boise, to the USDA office, and straighten out the accounts, because the numbers didn’t add up for her.
“She’d have gone,” Travis said in the interview. “That’s how she is. She’d have gone and found out everything. And that’s when Mom said she needed something to calm her down. She’s worked herself up, that’s why she’s poking her nose where it doesn’t belong. A week of drops and she’ll settle.”
For a week she was quiet. She slept a lot, didn’t argue, and signed papers without reading them.
In that week Travis managed to take out a loan in her name, cover the hole in the grant money so the review would pass, and put up the house, because without collateral nobody would lend that much. After that they had to keep her from finding out about the loan. Then they had to keep her from finding out about the missed payments. And after that she couldn’t get out of bed anymore, and nothing needed deciding, because it all decided itself.
“I told her to stop,” Travis said. “I said, Mom, enough, she can’t even walk anymore. And Mom said, now we can’t. If we stop now, she’ll be up in a month and remember everything.”
The detective asked whether he had known exactly what he was giving his wife.
Travis was silent for a while. Then he answered the way people answer who have spent their whole lives knowing how not to look at what they don’t want to see.
“I didn’t ask.”
The hearing on the petition to declare Jules incapacitated took place on September 30, as scheduled. It lasted twenty minutes.
She came on her own, with the cane, in the same white cardigan. Kira sat down beside her and laid out her pencils. Linda didn’t appear; she sent a motion to postpone on grounds of illness.
The judge, a woman with a very soft voice, asked Jules the usual questions. What’s today’s date? What season is it? Who’s the president? What’s forty minus seven? Who is her son? Where does she live? How would she manage money if she were given some?
Jules answered.
Then the judge asked, “Do you understand what they’re asking the court to find?”
“I understand. They’re asking you to find that I’m somebody other people make all the decisions for.”
The court ordered an outpatient evaluation. Jules went three weeks later, in Boise: three hours of interviews, tests, charts, and pictures. The report was short. No mental disorder was found that would prevent her from understanding the nature and consequences of her actions.
The petition was denied.
Jules came out of the courthouse and sat down on the steps, because her legs wouldn’t hold her. It wasn’t weakness. Everything had let go of her at once.
Kira sat down next to her.
“Now comes the part that can still take your house,” she said. “The bank.”
The bank wasn’t a villain. The bank had lent money and wanted it back, and it didn’t care who in whose family had been dosing whom.
Kira filed suit to undo the loan agreement and the deed of trust, on the grounds that Jules could not understand what she was signing when she signed them. The bank was the defendant. Travis, Linda, and Robert Vickers were brought in as additional parties. By then Vickers was already demanding his earnest money back, with the damages the purchase agreement spelled out.
“He’s not our enemy,” Kira said. “He was buying land and had no idea how it came to be for sale. But he’ll want his money back, with the penalty, and he’s entitled to it. The only question is who pays.”
The first hearing was in November. By then the file held the lab findings on the braid, the findings on the bottles, the ranch’s drug logs, Travis’s statements, the oilcloth log, three hospital discharge summaries, and the bank’s security footage.
The footage itself was gone; three years had passed. But an internal note from the loan officer had survived, the woman with the cactus in a teacup on her desk. The note said that the client had signed the documents with relatives present, appeared sluggish, and answered questions in single words, and that the employee had brought this to her manager’s attention. The manager had said at the time: If she’s signing, she’s signing.
The bank’s lawyer, a young man in a suit, shuffled papers through the whole hearing. He said the bank had acted in good faith.
“I don’t dispute that,” Kira said. “We’re not accusing the bank. We’re saying there was no agreement. A person in that condition can’t agree to anything or object to anything. And the bank not noticing is a question for whoever wrote ‘If she’s signing, she’s signing.'”
The case dragged on until February. The judgment came down at the end of the month, on a day when the valley was drifting so badly that the bus from Garnet took four hours.
The loan agreement and the deed of trust were set aside.
“No contract means each side gives back what it got,” Kira said afterward at the kitchen table, drawing little boxes in pencil on the back of an old receipt. “The bank stops charging you interest and penalties. The lien comes off, and the house is yours. But the money that actually landed in the farm account has to go back.”
“So I still owe.”
“You owe. A lot less than two hundred forty thousand plus interest, and not by yourself. The court found who controlled that money. They’ll be paying it back too.”
The earnest money went back to Vickers with the penalty the agreement called for, and the court put that on Linda, who had signed for the seller and spent the money.
He came to town once himself, in March. Jules saw the white car from the window, parked by her grandmother’s place, and a man in a good jacket walking along the fence, looking up at the slope. Then he knocked.
“I didn’t know,” he said from the doorstep. “Believe me or don’t, that’s up to you, but I didn’t know. They told me the woman was sick, the money was for her treatment, her mother-in-law was handling the sale.”
“I believe you,” Jules said.
“Are you still going to sell the land?” he asked. “I’m not pushing. But you understand, with these debts you’re not going to…”
“I’m not selling.”
He looked at her, at the cane in her hand, at the slope behind the garden.
“That’s a shame. You’ve got a view of the river and three hundred yards to the water. It’s a gold mine, this spot.”
“There’s a cellar here,” Jules said…
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