CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
What Curtis Pratt Eventually Said
He did not speak again, not properly, until well past dawn, when the pavilion had settled back into something resembling its ordinary rhythms, breakfast cooking on the stoves, the Pruitt children herded into a hushed, wide eyed cluster near their parents, everyone else moving quietly around the edges of a room that now held, chained and silent near the stove, the man responsible for so much of the grief this whole book of my life had carried.
Sam had gone to fetch Idella's letters and Everett's papers both from the equipment shed once full light returned, judging correctly that whatever danger the shed had once represented no longer applied with its would be thief chained six feet from where he sat, and he laid them now, deliberate and deliberate, across the small table Marion had cleared for exactly this purpose, close enough that Curtis Pratt could see them plainly without being able to reach them.
"I'd like to tell you what we know," Sam said, quiet, sitting across from him with the particular patient stillness I had learned, over years of watching him work, meant he was in no hurry at all, that he intended to let the silence do whatever work it needed to before pressing further.
"Not because I need your confirmation, Mr. Pratt.
I've got enough here to bring this to a courtroom without a single word from you.
But I think, given everything this storm has cost the people in this room, you owe at least Deloris Vance the truth, plain, in your own voice, rather than making her wait months yet for a trial to finally hand it to her secondhand. "
Deloris had come to sit nearby, Otis close beside her, her hands folded tight in her lap, her face schooled into a careful stillness that didn't quite hide the fierce, exhausted hope underneath it.
Pratt looked at the letters a long moment before he answered, a piece of it moving behind his tired eyes that I couldn't immediately name, not quite shame and not quite defiance, something more complicated sitting somewhere between the two.
"Idella Marsh," he said at last, low, "was the most stubborn woman I ever had the misfortune of crossing paths with.
My cousin Desmond built the full mess, you understand.
Bought off a clerk here, adjusted a filing there, over years, decades really, before I ever had any real hand in it myself.
I inherited land from him when he died, and I inherited, along with it, considerably more exposure than I ever asked for or wanted.
" He laughed, short and bitter, entirely without humor.
"I told myself for years it wasn't truly my crime to answer for.
I hadn't moved a single boundary line myself.
I'd only kept still about ones my cousin had already moved, and kept collecting the benefit of land that was never rightfully mine to hold. "
"But Idella found it," Sam said, quiet, not quite a question.
"Idella found it," Pratt agreed, something almost admiring threading through the bitterness.
"Three years before she died, working her way through old plat maps nobody else had bothered looking at truly in decades, patient as anything, measured as anything.
I heard about it first through the old clerk she'd gotten talking, a foolish man who couldn't keep his own mouth shut about who'd been asking questions.
" His jaw tightened. "I told myself, at first, she was an old woman chasing old ghosts, that she'd tire of it eventually, the way most people do.
She didn't tire of it. She kept going, soft and careful, for years, and every month that passed, I understood a little better that she wasn't going to stop until she'd found her way all the way to my own name, specifically, not just my cousin's. "
"So you stopped her," Deloris said, her voice flat and terrible, the first words she'd spoken since he'd begun.
Pratt looked at her a long moment, and some part of it in his face finally, fully cracked, the last of whatever composure he'd been holding onto through decades of cautious deniability eventually giving way.
"I didn't plan it the way you're imagining," he said, low.
"I want that understood, for whatever it's worth to any of you, which I understand is probably not much.
I didn't hire anyone. I didn't hold a knife to her, or force anything on her by hand.
I simply arranged, through a mutual acquaintance who owed me a favor, for her regular pharmacy to fall briefly short on a certain medication she depended on, for just long enough that a substitute filled in its place happened to interact badly with a heart that had, by then, quietly begun weakening from age alone.
It looked, to anyone examining it afterward, like an old woman's heart simply giving out the way old hearts eventually do.
" His voice had gone hollow, distant, the voice of a man reciting something he had rehearsed telling himself for years without ever once saying it aloud to another living soul.
"No autopsy was ever ordered. No doctor ever thought twice about it.
I told myself, for a long while afterward, that I hadn't truly killed her at all, that nature had simply happened to arrive at a convenient moment.
I have had a great deal of time, since, to understand exactly how thin that particular comfort actually was. "
The room had gone totally silent, even the low crackle of the stove seeming to hush itself in deference to what had just been said, and I felt Sam's hand find mine under the table, gripping tight.
"That's a confession," Sam said, quiet, careful, though I heard the controlled fury underneath the calm. "You understand that, Mr. Pratt. Everything you've just said."
"I understand it," Pratt said, and something in his voice, for just a moment, sounded almost relieved, the specific exhausted relief of a man finally setting down a weight he had carried alone and unspoken for years.
"I've understood it every single day since it happened, whatever I told myself in the daylight to make the nights bearable.
I'm an old man now myself, Mr. Whitfield.
I don't imagine I've got the energy left in me to keep pretending otherwise, not after last night, not after watching my own hands go white with cold under a cedar tree because I panicked like a boy instead of facing what I'd already known, for years, was eventually coming for me regardless. "
Deloris had gone very still beside me, and I watched her draw a long, deliberate breath before she spoke again. "My father," she said. "Joseph Corliss. What happened to him."
Pratt's face shifted at that, a piece of it genuinely uncertain crossing it for the first time in the whole conversation.
"I don't know," he said, and I believed him, watching the honest confusion in it.
"That was Desmond's doing, before my time, before I'd inherited any of it properly.
I know he was pressured to falsify records, the same as I later pressured others in quieter, more careful ways.
I know he refused, and I know he vanished not long after, and I've heard, over the years, whispers that Desmond's people made certain he'd never resurface to cause trouble, but I never asked directly, and I was never told plainly, and I don't know, even now, whether that means he's buried somewhere on land my family still holds or whether he simply ran far enough that nobody ever found him again.
" He looked at her, something almost gentle in it, an old man's belated, useless regret.
"I'm sorry I can't give you more than that. I understand it isn't nearly enough."
Deloris held his gaze a long moment, her jaw tight, and then, slowly, nodded, something in her posture settling rather than breaking further.
"It's more than I had yesterday," she said, hushed.
"I didn't expect certainty. I've made my peace, mostly, with never getting that.
But thank you, at least, for not lying about not knowing. "
"I've told enough lies," Pratt said, low. "I find I haven't got the stomach left for one more."
Sam gathered the letters back into their case, measured and deliberate, and looked at the man across from him a long moment before he spoke again.
"The sheriff's people will be out here the moment the roads allow it," he said.
"You'll have your lawyer, your proper hearing, everything the law entitles you to, same as anyone.
But I want you to understand some part of it plainly, Mr. Pratt, before that happens.
Idella Marsh spent the last years of her life afraid in her own home, trusting almost no one, because of what you did to protect a fraud you didn't even build yourself.
Everett Boyle carried her fear and her evidence both for years afterward, too frightened to come forward directly, dying before he ever got the chance to finish what he'd promised her he would.
And Deloris Vance spent twenty five years not knowing what happened to her own father, because your family taught an entire county that asking questions about your land holdings carried real, dangerous consequences.
" His voice had gone very quiet, very steady.
"Whatever comfort you've managed to build for yourself, telling yourself it wasn't truly your hand that did it, I'd ask you to sit with the actual cost of it instead, for however many days we've still got left snowed in together.
I think you owe these people that much, at minimum. "
Curtis Pratt said nothing further, only bowed his head, and I watched something in him that had, for decades, carried itself with a certain practiced ease at last, fully collapse into something small and old and thoroughly, thoroughly ashamed, and understood that whatever else this long confession had cost the room to hear, it had also, finally, after two full books of searching, given Idella Marsh the plain, undeniable justice she had spent the last years of her life quietly, patiently working toward.