Chapter 18
Lucas Shoemacher outlasted the election by exactly one week.
Hank spent all of those nights at the ranch, talking the old heart down off its panic with medication and patience while the nurse hung a drip and the oxygen machine labored in the corner.
By dawn the rhythms had settled into something sullen but survivable, and Lucas opened his eyes, took inventory of the room, and rasped that if Hank thought he was dying before he finished his letters, Hank had another think coming.
The children began arriving two days after the election.
Ellie came first, off a red-eye through Salt Lake City, and walked into the sickroom still towing her suitcase with travel in her clothes and her father’s stubborn chin on a kinder face.
Whatever passed between them passed in private.
But when Hank made his next call, her chair was pulled up against the hospital bed, and her hand was inside the old man’s, and Lucas was asleep holding on to it like a man holding a rail on a heaving deck.
Trent drove in Thursday with a flatbed of tools and went straight past the house to the fence lines.
He was out there dawn to dark every day after, replacing warped and broken boards, resetting posts, and painting the bare gray wood back to the bright white it had been in the racing stable’s heyday.
He’d sworn never to set foot in the house again, not while Lucas lived, and nobody made the mistake of asking him to come sit inside. Some men only had the language of their hands and under his, the fences got straighter all week.
The rest of them came by ones and twos, in rented cars, and kept mostly to the separate rooms upstairs. Hank met them on his daily calls, polite, exhausted strangers wearing pieces of Lucas’s face. Not one of them asked him whether their father was in pain. All of them asked him how long.
On Sunday, Lucas finished writing.
Hank knew it the moment he walked in because the lap desk was gone and the old man’s hands were washed clean of ink for the first time in two weeks.
On the bedside table sat a banded stack of sealed envelopes with a name on each one in a shaky, careful hand.
On top of the stack lay one envelope thicker than the rest, addressed not to a person but to all of them: To my children and to the town of Cobbler Cove.
“Sutter’s coming for them this afternoon,” Lucas said. “Instructions are in the will. That one . . .” his finger found the thick envelope without his eyes going to it “. . . gets read out loud. Before they put me in the ground, not after. Folks should know who they’re burying.”
“All right,” Hank said.
The old man lay back into his pillows and looked down the valley for a while, at the uncut hay going gold, and the town small and far away in the heat. Each breath he drew was wet and hard-won.
Lucas’s gaze locked on Hank, his eyes sunk deep now and steadier than they had any right to be. “Answer me one thing, Doc. The things I set down on that paper. Do they count? This late in the day?”
Hank thought about whether to lie to a dying man and didn’t.
“It won’t count for you,” he said. “You won’t be here to benefit from it. But it’ll count for everybody else. That’s mostly why it’s worth doing, anyway.”
Lucas took that the way he’d taken every hard dose of truth all summer: a long pause, a slow nod, the flicker of the old defiance giving way to something quieter. “Good enough,” he said.
He died early Wednesday morning in the first gray stirrings of the day with the window showing him his valley.
The nurse called at four-forty and Hank drove up through a dark that was already loosening at the eastern ridgeline, and there was nothing for him to do when he got there, which was as it should be.
Ellie sat where she’d sat for a week, holding her father’s hand. Trent stood in the doorway with his work gloves clutched in one fist. The others gathered in the hall in bathrobes and hastily donned clothes, seven exhausted strangers with one face among them.
Not one of them wept and not one of them left.
Hank did his quiet work. He noted the time. Switched off the oxygen machine. The silence where its chugging had been was the largest noise in the house.
Lucas Shoemacher died with all seven of his children under his roof and one of them holding his hand, which Hank reckoned was more than the man had let himself hope for.
Dawn’s light came in the wall of windows, sweeping across the valley the way it did every morning, indifferent and orange, flowing through the enormous gap in the outbuildings where the horse barn wasn’t.
The will was read Friday morning in the formal living room of the Shoemacher house, two rows of folding chairs facing the cold fireplace, and Lincoln Sutter presiding over it in a charcoal gray suit with the gravity of a man who had read his share of wills but knew this one was different.
The seven children sat in the front row. Behind them, summoned by formal letter as named parties, sat eight widows in their good clothes, Jenna, Natalie, Charlotte, Rose, Molly, Bonnie, Tessa, and Grace.
The atmosphere in the room was tense and unbelievably awkward. The widows were none too happy to be in the home of the man they suspected in having some part in killing their husbands nor to be sitting only a few hundred feet from where their husbands perished horrifically.
Lucas’s children weren’t any happier to be here. Not only did they seem uncomfortable to be back in this house, they also seemed embarrassed to be in the presence of the widows. Clearly, none of them had any idea what to say to the widows.
While everyone greeted each other politely, it was stilted at best. Nobody was making eye contact with anybody from the other group of attendees. Only Bonnie and Ellie spoke quietly to each other for a few moments before Lincoln Sutter asked everyone to take their seats.
Hank considered how the sight of those two families, the Shoemacher family in front and the fire’s family behind them, seemed fitting today.
They were all tied together by tragedy and separated by the same tragedy.
And now they’d been brought back together to witness the end of Lucas Shoemacher’s legacy.
Sheriff Clint Wheeler and Deputy Cooper Anderson stood at the back in uniform, with their hats in their hands, present at the deceased’s written request. So was Hank, by the same instruction, though he suspected his assignment was the one he always drew.
To be in the room when people’s legs went out from under them.
The legal part went quickly. The property and its assets were given to the seven children in equal shares. To Bonnie Watson, his grandfather’s brass desk clock that had sat in the mayor’s office for thirty years and one sealed envelope.
Lincoln read out a long list of assets and their estimated value.
The four-hundred acres of land the Shoemacher Racing Stables sat on.
The house, buildings, vehicles, and equipment on this property.
A fishing camp on a private lake in Canada.
Stocks, bonds, savings accounts, and interestingly, half interest in a two-year-old Thoroughbred race horse named Starting Over.
The Shoemacher children looked at one another in consternation at that one. That particular asset was obviously a surprise to all of them.
And then Lincoln read out the paragraph in the will that explained the second row of chairs. Lucas had established an educational trust for the children of the eight men who died in the Shoemacher barn fire, sufficient to fund any schooling any of them should ever choose to pursue.
Lincoln Sutter stopped reading and looked up from the will.
“For the record, the trust was established and fully funded some years ago. I’m the named trustee and will administer it going forward.
It’s been in the care of an excellent financial manager and is growing steadily.
It will, indeed, fund all your current children’s and any future children’s educations easily.
If there’s money left in the trust after all of your children have completed their educations, I’ve been instructed to continue accruing money in the account to offset the cost of your grandchildren’s educations. ”
A stir went through the widows like wind swirling through a meadow of tall grass. Hank watched the women blindly reach for the hands of the women beside them and hang on to one another the way they always had and probably always would.
“There’s one last instruction in Mr. Shoemacher’s will,” Sutter said.
He turned and lifted the thick envelope sitting on the fireplace mantel behind him, and the room, which had been quiet, went silent. “I’m instructed to read it aloud, in private, to this exact group of people, before the burial.”
That caused both families to stir in their seats. Hank saw more alarm than interest in the way they all shifted and glanced sidelong at one another.
Lincoln continued, “I’ve not seen its contents. It was sealed and notarized in my presence eight days ago.” He opened the wax seal with a pocketknife, unfolded a good many pages of close, shaky handwriting, put on his glasses, and began to read.
“’I’ll say it plain at the top,’” Sutter read, “’so nobody has to sit waiting for it. I set the fire that burned my barn. I killed those eight men. Nobody helped me, nobody knew, and nobody ever suspected me until those Lawton boys came to town and started poking around again.”
Lincoln stopped reading. He stared blankly at the people staring back at him.
Nobody moved.
Hank stood against the wall and watched seven children and eight widows take the bullet they’d all been bracing for in their separate ways for five years.
The widows had suspected it. All the evidence unearthed in the past few months pointed at Lucas.