Chapter 8
The strangers showed up on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday the whole valley had taken sides about them.
There were three. Two investigators from the state fire marshal’s office and a sheriff’s detective down from Helena. They had come, the better part of five years late, to take a second look at the barn that had burned and killed the all town’s volunteer firefighters.
Hank heard the whole of it the way he heard most of the town’s gossip: in pieces, on his exam table and across his desk.
One patient told him the widows of the fire had undoubtedly stirred the pot and they ought to let it lie. That Lucas Shoemacher was a sick old man being hounded into his grave by a bunch of whiny women who needed somebody to blame.
An hour later a woman in for her blood pressure told him that the Shoemachers had buried the truth under money and a smile, and it was high time somebody looked into it.
The town had begun to rub itself raw along the line between the two sides.
Hank said the same thing to all of them, in the same unhurried tone.
Let the investigators do their work. And then the matter would be put to rest once and for all.
He’d learned a long time ago that a doctor’s steadiness was contagious.
If he was calm, frightened patients would borrow the calm they couldn’t manufacture on their own.
Personally, Hank didn’t think the widows were stirring the pot.
They were the only people in the valley who had truly had a right to ask questions about the fire.
But he also knew what the asking was going to cost the town.
And, as the town’s doctor, he dreaded the pain to come even if he knew it was necessary.
He braced himself for what the investigation was going to do to the normally tight knit community.
It would cost Dale Tolliver something too, Hank suspected. The man had built his whole run for mayor on the comfortable idea that nothing in Cobbler Cove had ever been wrong. That Lucas Shoemacher was a good old boy, and the widows were grieving too loudly.
State investigators with clipboards, however, were a poor fit for that story. The harder the state looked, the worse Dale’s easy answer was going to play with voters. And a cornered politician was someone Hank had learned to keep one eye on.
What he hadn’t expected was for the trouble to come looking for his home office. But a town determined to fight will cast around for the nearest weak, vulnerable thing to fight about. And in the three days since the investigators arrived, the town turned its attention to Sunny.
New in town, hired by Bonnie to tinker with the town’s books, a woman nobody had any history with and everybody suddenly had a theory about.
He caught wind of it as a patient went oddly quiet when Sunny’s name came up. Then a man at the hardware store asked Hank, a shade too casually, just what it was the doctor’s pretty new accountant got up to over at Town Hall.
He didn’t mention either incident to Sunny. He hoped it would come to nothing.
It came to something on Thursday.
Cy Bray came in that afternoon about his high blood pressure he’d been ignoring for a decade, and his wife, Marlene, along to make sure he didn’t fib about his symptoms.
Cy was sixty-some, built like a fence post and roughly as flexible.
He was one of the ranchers up the valley who’d staked a Tolliver sign at the end of his drive the day Dale announced his run for mayor.
Marlene did his talking on any subject he considered beneath him, which was most topics that weren’t cattle.
Hank wrapped the cuff around the old man’s arm and was watching the needle climb past numbers it shouldn’t be getting close to when he heard it start out in the foyer. He’d put a small desk out there for Sunny to work at when he was seeing patients in here.
Marlene had stayed out front to settle the bill, and her voice carried in here loudly enough that Marlene clearly meant for him to hear her, too.
“You’re the one doing the town’s books for Bonnie Watson.”
Sunny replied, pleasant and careful. “I’m doing an audit for the town, yes.”
“That’s a polite word for your shenanigans.” Marlene warmed to it. “The way I hear it, you’re fixing the books for her. Hiding away whatever it is she doesn’t want the state to find. My cousin’s girl does the books for some folks and she says you . . .”
Hank didn’t hear the rest because he’d already set down Cy’s chart and walked out of the exam room.
Sunny was standing behind the desk. He had watched her field a great many things in three weeks: a screaming toddler, stubborn insurance agents, his own catastrophe of a filing system. She’d fielded every one with brisk, unbothered competence that never once cracked.
But it had cracked, now. She stood there with her mouth slightly open and nothing coming out of it. She’d gone pale, and he realized in an instant that of all the daggers a person might have thrown at her, accusing her of financial deceit was the one that cut her.
“Mrs. Bray,” Hank said bluntly enough to cut her off, but not loudly. He’d found, over the years, that loud was for men who were not certain they were right. He came around to stand beside Sunny. Not in front of her, but beside her.
“Sunny Carter works for me. She’s a certified forensic accountant, which means finding the truth in a set of financial records is what she’s good at. It also means she holds herself to a code of ethics a good deal stricter than anything you or I answer to.
“In three weeks she’s found thousands of dollars insurers owed me, caught several billing mistakes that were mine, and put all my records in an order the IRS could read in their sleep.
I’ve watched her work. I would put my own license behind her honesty.
She wouldn’t falsify a figure to save her own life, let alone to do somebody a favor.
Whatever you’ve heard is false. Not exaggerated.
Not half true. False, from top to bottom.
I’d be obliged if you didn’t bring such lies past my front door. ”
Cy came out of the exam room with his sleeve still rolled up, looking at Hank as though he had expected a great many things from a doctor’s visit but not this. Marlene’s mouth had thinned to a white line.
“Well,” she said. “I’m sure I only repeated what . . .”
“I know,” Hank said, gentler now because the work was done and there was no profit in grinding it. “That’s how lies spread. You can just as easy be the one who stops it.”
Standing right there, never leaving Sunny’s side, he wrote Cy a prescription for blood pressure mediation, told him to take it every day and not only on the days he remembered to be scared.
Then he walked the two of them to the door with the same courtesy he would’ve shown anyone because he knew a person didn’t win over a town by humiliating its people.
He shut the door and turned around. Sunny was looking at him gratefully.
He hadn’t come out and said those words so she would look at him the way she was looking at him now as if she’d braced for a blow and instead he’d stepped between it and her.
“You’ll want a coffee,” he said. “I’ll put a pot on.”
“Hank.” Her voice was not quite level. “You didn’t have to . . .”
“I know,” he said from the kitchen doorway and left it there. He’d done it because it was true, and she was being lied about under his roof.
She didn’t take the coffee right away or go straight back to her desk. She stopped in the middle of his exam room with her arms wrapped around herself as if the warm June afternoon had a January draft blowing through it.
She said, “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Once it’s said out loud, some people will just believe the worst. And there’s nothing you can do to . . ."
She caught herself the way she had a dozen times, right at the edge of saying more about wherever she’d come from.
“Maybe,” he said. “But the lie got said out loud in my house. And in my house, it got answered.”
She looked at him a long moment. Then she did go back to her desk, and the set of her shoulders on the way was a little different than it had been. Hank counted that a fair day’s work, whatever it ended up costing him.
Ruth Sanger came in Friday for her annual checkup that Hank suspected she scheduled mostly for the conversation.
Ruth was in her eighties, healthy as a horse, and sharp as a tack. She knew more about everyone in the Stillwater Valley than the census did. She wasn’t unkind. And that was the trouble with her. A town could arm itself against an unkind gossip.
She handed out her information as if she were doing folks a favor, and half the time she was, The other half, she lit fires that she didn’t seem to know she’d lit.
He listened to her heart, which was sound, and her lungs, which were better than a woman who had smoked until a few years ago had any right to expect. While he was writing a prescription for mild pain pills to combat her arthritis, he said, as easy as he could, “Ruth. I need to ask you a favor.”
“Anything for you, Dr. Steele.”
“There’s a story going around about my bookkeeper.
That she’s doing something crooked with the town’s accounts.
It isn’t true. I know that for a fact and it’s the kind of story that does real harm.
She’s a good woman who came to this town with four children and no soft place to land.
You hear most rumors in this town before they’ve got their boots on.
I’d take it as a kindness if you’d step on this one.
Tell folks it’s false. They’ll believe it from you faster than from me. ”
Ruth patted his hand. “Oh, Doc. I never start those things. I only ever pass along what’s already out there. There’s a difference.”
“I know there is,” Hank said, though he was less sure of it than he had once been. “So pass along the truth, then. That’d be a new thing under the sun.”
She laughed, delighted, and promised that she would, she surely would.
Hank knew before she had her sleeves re-buttoned that she would not. Not because she wished him or Sunny any harm, but because the truth, that Sunny was an honest hardworking woman, was no kind of story at all.
The lie had a villain in it, and a rich dying mayor, and a beautiful, mysterious widow newly come from California. He could no more expect Ruth Sanger to carry the truth in place of that than he could ask the lake to run uphill.
“It’s a shame, is what it is,” Ruth went on, gathering her purse. “A woman like that, all those children, and no husband to speak of. Folks do wonder how she manages. And then they see her over here every day, and they see the way you look at her . . .”
She stopped, and smiled, and didn’t finish her sentence, which was a good deal worse than finishing it. “Well. People wonder. You can’t stop people from wondering, Doc.”
“You can stop telling them what to wonder,” he replied a shade sharply.
She only laughed again. She paused at the door and turned and gave him a look he liked a great deal less than the gossip.
“You went out of your way for her yesterday,” she said. “Cy Bray’s been telling it all over the feed store. How the doctor came out of his exam room to defend his accountant like she was . . .” Ruth tipped her head, bright-eyed and merciless and fond. “Well. Like she was more than his accountant.”
“She’s being lied about,” Hank said. “I don’t care for lies.”
“Mm-hm,” said Ruth Sanger, in a tone that put the entire valley on notice. She let herself out, carrying, Hank knew with sinking certainty, not the story he’d handed her, but a far better one she’d just found.
He sat on the porch, in the aluminum chair that had earned its place all over again, and watched the town go red as the sun set.
He’d tried to calm the town all week. He’d protected Sunny the only way he knew how, by stepping between her and a lie and trying not to make a thing of it.
And for his trouble the town was going to take the plain, true, decent thing he’d done and spin it into precisely the kind of story he had no defense against. The worst of the new rumor to come was that it wasn’t even a lie.
He’d spent years making himself into a man with nothing left to lose. Into a settled, quiet, self-sufficient man. A good father and a good doctor and nobody’s fool this time around. It had been a great deal of work.
And in three weeks a woman with four children and a paint scraper had walked into his front room and undone every bit of it. And apparently, the whole valley could read it on him plain as day. The only person who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it before now was himself.
Sunny was working inside, moving through his house in the way he had grown used to. He sat out here in his ridiculous chair and let himself feel, for exactly as long as the red sunset lasted, the size of the feelings he wasn’t ready to acknowledge.
Then color faded from the light, the houses and trees and yards turned gray, and he got up, and went inside to heat water for Sunny’s evening tea. She would want a cup before she drove home, and he was, after all, the easiest boss in Montana.