Part 4
She found the postcard at two-thirty in the kitchen drawer where she’d swept everything off the refrigerator the week after the funeral. She set it beside Jace’s coffee cup and went back to bed and didn’t sleep.
Jace read it standing up at six.
“Somebody needs to look inside that pipe,” Deb said. “The rental yard in Delta has a sewer camera. I’ll pay for it.”
By nine he was in Delta, and by noon he was back with it: a coil of black cable on a frame, a lens the size of his thumb on the end, and a small screen in a plastic case. Eighty-five dollars a day, on her card.
Deb had paced the line the evening before as best she could guess it, following a faint sunken seam in the brush uphill from the tank. She’d tied surveyor’s tape to the Selden fence where it seemed to cross. A hundred and sixty feet, by her count. They broke the red union loose with two pipe wrenches and half a can of penetrating oil and fed the cable uphill into the inlet. The screen showed a tunnel of orange scale and pale mineral rings, wobbling as the lens bumped along.
The reel counter read 160, then 170. At 178 the rust ended. There was a ring of bright metal, smooth and even all the way around, and past it a flat gray disk with letters molded into the plastic.
Jace leaned in until his nose nearly touched the screen.
“That’s a saw cut,” he said. “Look how clean. Somebody went through this with a reciprocating saw and dressed the edge with a file. That’s a plastic cap glued on a coupling, right off a hardware store shelf.” He sat back. “Eighteen feet past the fence. On his side.”
He saved the video to his phone, then to hers, then emailed it to himself. Deb had watched certified letters vanish in ways nobody could explain, and she didn’t tell him he was being paranoid.
That night she took Dennis’s lockbox down from the hall closet. In the title policy, at the end of the long description of their sixty acres, a line began TOGETHER WITH the water and pipeline rights reserved in Book 233, Page 418, and beside it Dennis had penciled one of his question marks, shaped like a fishhook. The four pages she bought from the county website at a dollar apiece answered it. Amos Tolliver had sold the Seldens the upper ground and kept the spring, with the right to pipe it down the slope, for whoever owned the home place after him.
“That’s us,” Jace said behind her. She hadn’t heard him come in.
On her relief day she drove an hour and a half to Grand Junction. Elaine Mortensen had practiced water law for forty years out of a converted bungalow near the railroad tracks, and she looked like someone born on a ranch and sent to law school over her objections. She ate almonds from a coffee mug while she read, six at a time, and she read everything Deb brought twice: the instrument, the title policy, the video on Deb’s phone, the glossy card announcing the spring-fed pond.
A reserved right like this one stayed with the land, Elaine said, unless somebody gave it up on purpose. Going without water didn’t kill a right by itself; the law looked for intent. And Deb had a tank, a pipe, and six trees that had been drinking until somebody on the other side of the fence cut the line. She dropped an almond back into the mug.
“Your husband thought God took his water,” she said. “God didn’t use a glue cap.”
Then she told Deb the other half. If Curt wanted to fight, he could stretch it out two years and run it to forty or fifty thousand dollars in experts and depositions, in front of a water judge who heard cases like Deb’s between hearings on city reservoirs. Most people with a case this good settled. Some people with a case this good went broke first. Her retainer was twenty-five hundred dollars.
On the shelf above Deb’s refrigerator sat a coffee can with masking tape on the side that said ROCK. It held three thousand four hundred dollars, two years of whatever she could hold back from each paycheck, for a granite marker to replace the temporary metal one the funeral home had put on Dennis’s grave. That night she counted twenty-five hundred onto the kitchen table and sealed it in an envelope for Elaine. When she looked up, Jace was in the doorway. He looked at the can, the envelope, and her. Then he went back to his room without a word and closed his door very carefully.
Curt came on a Sunday afternoon in mid-August, which he’d never done either. He sat on the porch step below her chair, which put him lower than her, and she figured he’d thought about that. He’d talked to his accountant. He could go to sixty-four thousand for the fourteen acres, a silly number for oak brush, and he’d appreciate her not spreading it around. Deb said she was still thinking and told him nothing else. Elaine’s letter wasn’t finished, and Elaine had told her to keep quiet until it was.
He stood to go. The horses had drifted up to the corral for evening hay, and Pie stood at the near fence, a little apart from the others as always. Curt was halfway to his truck when he stopped. He didn’t seem to decide to. He stopped the way a man stops when someone calls his name in a crowded store, and he turned toward the fence.
“Hey, Tansy-girl,” he said, under his breath.
The old mare’s head came up. She walked to him along the fence without hurrying and set her forehead flat against the front of his pressed shirt. Curt Selden’s hand went to the notch in her left ear, and his thumb settled into it without his looking, as if the notch had been cut to fit it.
In two months the mare hadn’t walked up to anyone like that. Not to Jace, who fed her twice a day. Not to Deb, who had fed her apples for a year…
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