Part 9
In the morning they drove to town in two vehicles. Jules didn’t get out of the car; Dana had told her not to. She sat in the back seat and watched through the windshield as people walked the path across the two gardens: the detective, Deputy Myron Shaw from the county with his spiral notebook held shut by a strip of bicycle inner tube, and an evidence technician with a camera. Neighbors drifted along behind at a distance, the way neighbors do: Doris from down the road and Mr. Hadley, who taught shop at the school.
Linda came out onto the porch and followed them. She was in the same housecoat, and while she was still a good way off she started talking loudly enough for the whole road to hear: her daughter-in-law was sick, people get all kinds of notions from lying in bed, she had fed that girl with a spoon for three years with these very hands and never got a word of thanks.
They all disappeared over the slope.
Jules sat in the car and counted to herself. The minutes dragged. The Pruitts’ dog barked and barked.
After forty minutes the deputy came back up, waved to the driver, and they brought Jules down into the cellar.
The bulb was on. Linda stood by the barrels, very straight. Travis stood by the entrance, and Doris and Mr. Hadley hovered in the doorway. On the bottom shelf, on a sheet of paper spread out underneath it, sat the tin cookie box, open. In it were three dark glass bottles and a quarter-size notebook stitched with thread.
“That’s veterinary,” Linda said.
She said it calmly, looking not at Jules but at the detective.
“I was a vet tech twenty-two years. I’ve got syringes and needles too, and that. Try cutting velvet off a bull elk without it. You couldn’t hold him down. It’s kept cold because otherwise it goes bad. What’s illegal about that?”
“We’ll sort it out,” Dana said, not looking up from her inventory.
“And the notebook is my farm records.”
“Farm records,” the detective repeated. “Sluggish. Walks by the wall. Fell on porch. That’s about elk?”
Linda didn’t answer.
That was when she made the one real mistake she made that morning. She turned to Jules and said, in front of the deputy, the neighbors, and the men crowding the doorway above:
“How did you get down here? You don’t walk. It takes four men to carry you down here. I know that better than anybody. So you’ve been lying for three years.”
The cellar went silent.
Mr. Hadley cleared his throat. Doris slowly turned her head and looked at Linda, the way people in a small town look at someone once and remember it for twenty years. Everybody had just watched Jules Pruitt come down those steps with a cane, slowly, on her own feet.
After that came three weeks that Jules would later remember as one long stretch without sleep.
She was living in Meridian at Arlo’s sister’s, going to physical therapy, learning to walk again for real. At night her legs hurt so badly she bit the pillow. Muscles that had slept that long woke up angry. And every day she thought about Sam.
Sam had stayed in the valley. She couldn’t take him. She had no place of her own and no job. On paper she was still a bedridden disabled woman with a guardianship petition pending against her.
Linda struck first, and she struck accurately.
A week after the search, she filed in magistrate court for temporary guardianship of her grandson and made a report to the state child welfare office. The boy’s mother had left home, she said, abandoned her child, was behaving erratically, and was making accusations against her family. Her health did not allow her to care for him.
Child welfare set a review meeting for September 21, at the county building in Garnet.
Jules arrived half an hour early. She sat in the hallway on an uncomfortable chair, in a white cardigan Arlo’s sister had given her, with the cane leaning against her knee, and listened to her mother-in-law talking behind the door.
Linda had a good voice for it: tired, warm, cracking just a little in all the right places. She described how she had cared for her daughter-in-law, turned her, bathed her, fed her with a spoon. How the girl had grown suspicious and mean. How she’d started accusing her own family of God knows what after listening to some woman from out past the ford who went around messing with people’s heads. How the boy was nervous around his mother and slept badly.
“You have to understand,” she was saying. “I don’t hold anything against her. She’s a sick woman. She can’t even get up. Without us she couldn’t make it to the porch.”
“Let me in,” Jules said.
A woman from child welfare opened the door a crack.
“Please wait. You’ll be called in.”
“Let me in,” Jules said again. “They’re talking about me. I want them to see who they’re talking about.”
She went in.
She crossed the whole office. It was about twelve steps from the door to the table, and they took her a long time. The cane tapped on the linoleum. Her left leg swung out a little to the side, and she had to set it down with effort, the way you set down a heavy suitcase. Nobody said anything.
Jules reached the table, took hold of the back of a chair, and didn’t sit down. She stood.
“Good afternoon. I’m Julianne Pruitt, Samuel’s mother. You just heard that I can’t get up and couldn’t make it to the porch. Today I made it here from Meridian.”
Linda sat with her back straight, looking at the wall.
“I didn’t abandon my son,” Jules said. “I left home because for three years I was being given a drug that took away the use of my legs. That’s being investigated now, and I’m not going to say anything ahead of the investigation. I’m asking for one thing: don’t decide anything today. Wait for the findings.”
The supervisor running the meeting, a heavyset woman with a dragonfly brooch, looked at her over her glasses.
“Are you able to care for your child right now?”
“No,” Jules said. “Not yet. I’m learning to walk. I don’t have a place of my own. My house is tied up with the bank. I’m not going to lie to you so I can take him today and then fall apart tomorrow. What I’m asking is that nobody stop me from seeing him, and that nobody makes decisions for me while I’m alive and in my right mind.”
The meeting put the matter off for a month. The findings came sooner…
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