Part 7
The attorney’s name was Claire Whitney. Her office occupied two rooms half below street level. A map of Montana hung on the wall.
She wrote everything in pencil and rubbed things out with an eraser. Gray crumbs were always scattered across her desk.
She listened for two hours. She looked at every photograph on Sam’s phone, enlarging each with her fingers. She read the ledger. Then she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“You have three separate problems,” she said. “What you were given, which belongs to the police. The petition to put someone else in charge of you. And the money: the loan, the land, the grant, the buyer’s deposit.”
“I thought maybe I should have brought the bottles.”
“Leaving them was the best thing you did. If you’d carried them here in your bag, their lawyer would ask whether you’d put them in the cellar yourself. Right now they’re still in that tin, with a notebook in someone else’s handwriting. Officers can document where they find them.”
Julia let out a breath.
Claire turned the phone toward her. On the screen was the letter from the title company.
“And this is why they need a judge. The power of attorney wasn’t enough, because the title company wouldn’t trust it. Once a court makes Lydia your conservator, she can ask permission to sell, supposedly to pay your debts. Nobody will question it.”
She picked up her desk phone, dialed, and waited.
“Linda, it’s Claire Whitney. I need the next available emergency setting on a request to stop a sale and foreclosure. River Road, Cedar Fork. Yes, today’s filing.” She listened, wrote a date in pencil, and hung up.
“That’s the land,” she said. “Now you. At the September thirtieth hearing, they’ll say you can’t be brought in. You’ll be in the courtroom yourself, sitting across from the judge. Being ill, weak, or poor doesn’t mean someone else gets to decide for you. They have to prove you can’t decide. Do you understand what you’ve been doing?”
“I do.”
“Then we’ll show that.”
“And the loan? I signed it.”
“You did. We aren’t saying the signature was forged. We’re saying you weren’t able to give real consent.” Claire tapped the oilcloth ledger with her pencil. “Your own entries about the fog, about signing things you couldn’t remember. The medical records. And, if the testing gives us anything, the braid. We have to move quickly now that you know.”
“They’ll investigate me too. Over the grant.”
“Yes. So you write to the agency yourself, today. Your account goes on the record before someone else tries to make you responsible for everything.”
They worked on the statements until evening. Claire dictated; Julia wrote by hand. By the end her hand was so tired that the letters wandered, just as they had on the loan agreement.
The detective assigned to the report was Dana Reed. She was about forty, sat with a very straight back, and wore her watch with the face turned inward. Julia noticed when she signed the statement.
Dana listened as Claire had, silently, until Julia finished.
“Who knows you left, and where you’ve gone?”
“My neighbor. Her brother. Nobody else.”
“I’ll need your son’s phone. Please don’t make more calls on it for now. We’ll preserve the pictures and document what we take. You’ll get it back.”
Dana looked at her.
“If what you’ve told us is true, the people who’ve been doing this will realize by tonight that you’re gone. They’ll have the night to act. What do you think they’ll do?”
Julia thought for a moment.
“Throw away the tin.”
“That’s why we’re seeking a search warrant immediately. If the judge issues it, we’ll go in first thing tomorrow.”
Julia spent the night in Lolo, at Cal’s sister’s house, in a small room with a woven wall hanging. She did not sleep.
She imagined the bulb burning beneath the cellar vault and the cookie tin dropping into the Alder River.
Near midnight, Cal’s sister knocked on the bedroom door. Someone was calling her number and asking for Julia.
It was Derek.
“Julie? Julie, where are you?”
He did not sound angry. He sounded frightened.
“I’m staying with people.”
“What are you doing? Mom’s lying down with her heart acting up. How did you even get away? Did you walk?”
Julia said nothing. The silence on the line stretched.
“Julie,” he said in a different voice, worn and low. “Come home. We can work this out. I’ll explain everything. You just don’t understand.”
“For three years, you brought me that cup every night.”
“I didn’t know!”
He shouted so loudly that her ear rang.
“I didn’t know, Julie. I thought it was medicine. Mom said it was medicine. She worked for a vet. How was I supposed—”
He stopped where a person stops when he realizes the word know has been spoken and cannot be taken back.
“Leave Sam alone,” Julia said. “Do you hear me? Whatever else you do, leave him alone.” She hung up…
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