Part 8
The lawyer was Kira Vance. Her office was in a half-basement: two rooms, a map of Idaho on the wall. Kira wrote everything in pencil instead of pen and erased as she went, so her desk was always covered in gray crumbs.
She listened for two hours. She went through the photos on Sam’s phone, spreading her fingers on each one to enlarge it, and she read the log. At last she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“Let me put this to you in plain words, no statutes. The statutes come later.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’ve got three separate cases right now, and they can’t get mixed together. One, criminal. Somebody poisoned you. Two, the court case where they want you declared incapacitated. Three, money and land: the loan, the deed of trust, the grant, the buyer’s earnest money.”
She folded down one finger.
“Criminal. That’s for the police. Our job is to report it right and make sure the evidence doesn’t disappear. And the smartest thing you did in all of this was leave the bottles where they were.”
“I thought I should have grabbed them.”
“Absolutely not,” Kira said. “If you’d brought them to me in your bag, any defense attorney would say you planted them yourself. As long as they’re sitting in that cellar in that box, with a notebook in somebody else’s handwriting, it’s evidence. Officers will collect it, document it, photograph it. You did the one right thing. You left and you didn’t touch anything.”
Jules let out her breath.
“Two. The guardianship case.” Kira folded down a second finger. “The hearing is set for September thirtieth. Strange as it sounds, that’s good.”
“Good?”
“Very good. They filed to have you evaluated at home, on the grounds that you’re bedridden and can’t be brought in. And you’re going to walk into that courtroom yourself and sit down across from the judge, and you’ll go to your evaluation yourself. A court can’t take away a person’s rights because she’s sick, or weak, or poor. It can do that only if she can’t understand and make her own decisions. Do you understand what you’re doing?”
“I understand.”
“Then they’ve got nothing. But you have to go. If you don’t show up, they’ll decide it without you.”
“Three,” Kira said, and folded down the third finger. “Money.”
She spread printouts from Sam’s phone across the desk.
“The loan is in your name. The collateral is your house and your land. The earnest money on the land has already been paid. The grant was made to you, and you’re the one on the hook for it. So as of today, Jules, on paper you are not a victim. On paper you’re a debtor, you’re in breach of your grant terms, and you’re about to sell a piece of land.”
“But I don’t remember any of it.”
“That’s exactly where we start. The law has a rule: if a person signed something in a state where she couldn’t understand what she was doing, that contract can be undone. Notice we are not trying to prove your signature was forged. It’s your signature. What we’re proving is your condition.”
“How do you prove that three years later?”
Kira tapped her pencil on the oilcloth notebook.
“With this log of yours, where it says in your own hand that you’re in a fog and don’t remember what you signed. With your medical records. And, if we’re lucky, with your braid. If the lab says that in exactly those months you had a drug for knocking down large animals in your system, no court on earth will believe you were cheerfully reviewing a loan agreement.”
“How much time do we have?”
“On claims like this, the clock starts when you find out, and it doesn’t run forever. You found out in August, so we have time. But we can’t wait a single day, because the land is on its way out the door.”
She pulled a clean sheet toward her.
“Today we do three things. First, a police report. Second, you write, in your own hand, to the USDA office that made the grant. Say it straight: I haven’t managed the farm in three years, the money was spent without my knowledge, please review. That won’t be pleasant. They’ll look at you too. But if you write first, you’re the one reporting it. If they write first, you’re the one accused.”
“And the third?”
“Third, we ask the court to freeze your land while this is being fought over. In plain words, so it physically can’t be sold. Without that, nothing else matters.”
They worked on the report until evening. Kira dictated and Jules wrote it out by hand, and by the end her hand was so tired that the letters slid downhill the way they had on the loan agreement.
The case went to a detective with the state police named Dana Whitford. She was about forty, with a very straight back, and she wore her watch with the face turned in toward the inside of her wrist. Jules noticed it when she signed the statement.
Dana listened the same way Kira had, silent to the end.
“Question,” she said. “Besides you, who knows you left and where you went?”
“My neighbor. Her brother. Nobody else.”
“Give me your phone. Your son’s phone, I mean. And don’t call anyone on it.”
“My photos are on there.”
“I’ll copy them in front of you and give it back.”
Dana looked at her.
“Jules, I’m going to be straight with you so you understand. If everything you’ve told me is true, then the people who did this to you are going to figure out tonight that you’re not home. They’ll have one night. What will they do?”
Jules thought.
“Throw out the box.”
“That’s why we’re going in tomorrow morning with a search warrant.”
Jules spent the night in Meridian, at Arlo’s sister’s, in a small bedroom with a rug hung on the wall. She didn’t sleep. She lay there picturing the bulb glowing under the vault in her grandmother’s cellar, and the tin cookie box sailing into the river.
Sam’s phone was with the detective, but around midnight Arlo’s sister knocked on the door and said someone was calling her number and asking for Jules. It was Travis.
“Jules. Jules, where are you?”
His voice wasn’t angry. It was scared.
“I’m with people.”
“Jules, what are you doing? Mom’s lying here with her heart. How did you even… how did you leave? On your feet?”
The silence on the line lasted a while.
“Jules,” he said, in a completely different, hollow voice. “Jules, come back. We’ll work it all out. We’ll fix it, the right way, you hear me? I’ll explain everything. You just don’t understand.”
“Travis, for three years you handed me that cup every night.”
“I didn’t know!”
He shouted it so loud her ear rang.
“I didn’t know, Jules! I thought it was medicine. Mom said it was medicine. She’s a vet tech, how was I supposed to… how would I have known…”
He stopped. He stopped exactly at the point where a man realizes he has said the word known out loud and can never take it back.
“Leave Sam out of it,” Jules said. “You hear me? Do whatever you want, but leave Sam out of it.” She hung up…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇