18. Vindicated
EIGHTEEN
Vindicated
Autumn
We’d fought fire with fire, and for the first time in a year, the Eatons were the ones smelling smoke.
We found the videotape of Marlene trying to pay me off.
With a prayer, before Cash left Wyoming, we had him turn over copies of it to each of the boards where Marlene served, and to the hospital, and the church.
The chain reaction landed brighter than a nuclear bomb.
The regional stations played it in the news for a week: MATRIARCH BANNED. FALL FROM GRACE.
My favorite was the highlight of her saying “You were never going to be one of us.” By the end of the week, two of her charity boards had “regretfully accepted her resignation,” the hospital planned a repainting of the wing with her name on it.
I assumed there’d be one less church pew as well in the next Sunday’s service.
But Brantley was still out there. So we lived nearly glued together, never alone—if I wasn’t with Jake, I was with Dot or Jamie or Mr. McCall or Ivy, and Stetson was never more than one room from somebody who loved him.
Jake had taken several days off from the ODRR, which he never did, and wore his paranoia the way he wore his hat: constantly, and tipped so you almost couldn’t see his eyes.
Some days I missed being alone. I’d scared that man down to the depths of his soul with two days gone and an empty coffee can, so for him I stayed glued by his side.
Except this morning I spent it up to my elbows in flour at the ODRR mess hall.
Thanksgiving was a week out and Eldon baked for the whole ranch family.
This year I’d been drafted along with Willow and the Wylde sisters.
We made pie crust by the ton for pumpkin pies, from our own patch, and for apples from the Wylde orchard.
Daisy complained how a winter storm was supposedly coming for Thanksgiving.
I gazed longingly out the window at the old pumpkin patch.
“Hard to believe on this breezy fall day that snow is coming. It’d be perfect for a picnic today, wouldn't it?” The next thing I knew, Eldon had made sandwiches, cider, and two slices of yesterday’s practice pie for us in a basket, and loaded me and Stetson into his car headed for the Double M.
On the way up the county road, we passed a little white car parked on the shoulder near the McCalls’ mailboxes, the magnetic U.S. MAIL sign hung crooked on the door.
“There, see?” I said. “Mail’s back. Dot will be so happy. She’s been complaining about not receiving her mail lately.”
Eldon lifted two fingers off the wheel at it, country-polite, and drove on. He quickly dropped us off at the house build site, muttered about too many pies to cook, and left us.
“There you are,” Jake greeted us.
“Brought food.” I held up the basket.
“Well I have sad news. Cash is packing to leave us—his lost-souls trail has finally coughed up a lead about a woman named Luna. He has his saddlebags loaded on the chopper,” Jake explained.
“One last day swinging an axe with your husband,” Cash said, winking at me. “Then I hit the trail again.”
“Bring Nanette back something from the gift shop,” I teased.
“For her, I am the gift shop.” Nanette never did say much about what happened between the two of them, but if the name Cash was brought up, she smiled ear to ear.
Our future homesite took my breath every time, elevated a little, with a pleasant view of the goats in the main meadow.
Jake had staked the outline of the whole house with string—kitchen here, big south windows there, the porch swing already ordered. All the felled timber sat stacked, wood chips in bright piles, too. The two men finished up, sweaty and pleased with themselves at the work.
One tree still stood at the edge of the clearing: the big dead cottonwood. Hung up in its crown, a branch the size of a fence post, cracked and caught in the fork. It swayed when the wind caught it enough.
“We call that a widow-maker,” Cash chuckled, following my eyes as he shrugged into his leather jacket.
“That’s the technical term, and it earns it—a branch like that’ll wait a month or drop in an hour, hard to tell.
I gave Jake instructions how to take it down.
He and his father can tackle it next week.
Until then, nobody works under that tree.
” He kissed my cheek, ruffled Stetson’s hair, and swung onto the chopper.
“Save me pie, McCalls. I’ll swing by again soon. ”
The bike rumbled off down the lane, Jake waved at him, and it was just the three of us and a picnic in the last warm hour of November.
We ate in the string outline of our house, in the taped shape of our kitchen.
Jake walked me room to room through thin air—“pantry here, mudroom there, that’s where the tree’ll go at Christmas”—and in the string rectangle that would someday be our bedroom, my husband kissed me like the walls were already up.
Stetson toddled the length of the future hallway with his wooden goat in one fist, narrating in a language only Bah spoke fluently, and I took pictures of everything.
Jake mid-laugh with Stetson framed in string.
The kind of pictures you take for a moment in time to last forever.
I cleaned up the picnic and thought Jake had an eye on Stetson. For a few minutes, I scrolled today’s photos to find the best ones and sent them off to Nanette, to Ivy Wylde, to Dot.
Only the babble changed. A little too far away. Not Stetson’s hurt sound. Not the happy shriek. A small uncertain “Da?” aimed the wrong direction.
My head snapped up. A man stood at the edge of our clearing with my son in his arms.
“Jake!” I screeched. I hadn’t heard a car approach, but somehow Brantley Eaton, meaner around the eyes, held my squirming son. Not his son. Stetson didn’t get to be his anymore.
Every drop of blood I owned went to ice. Jake had popped up from where he was stacking logs and turned to stone, pale like me realizing the severity of it all.
My thumb slid the camera to video and pressed the red dot, praying Brantley didn’t notice.
“What are you doing here?” Jake shot him with a frosty tone.
“Just a little visit with my son,” he smirked. “What’s it look like?”
“You never wanted Stetson.” I stepped forward, drawing his eyes to me and away from my husband. “You didn’t come to the hospital. You didn’t sign the custody petition. You don’t want him now, Brantley.”
“Doesn’t matter.” His jaw did the petulant thing I’d once mistaken for character. “She does. So I’m taking him back. Maybe then she’ll leave me alone.”
“Marlene? You don’t have to do this for her.” One more step. Stetson whimpered, reaching past Brantley’s shoulder for me, and I schooled my voice to stop shaking and be strong for his sake. “She’s a terrible person, and she’s making you do a horrible thing. Look at yourself. Snatching a baby—”
“Shut up.” It cracked out of him, loud enough that Stetson began to wail, and Brantley took a step back from the sound of his own voice.
Back. Toward the treeline. Toward the dead cottonwood swaying in the breeze more than it had when Cash advised us on it.
“Brantley. Careful.” Jake held out a hand, and saw the branch too.
“Or what? You think I’m afraid of you? Should have taken the money, Autumn. Should have asked for more. Hell, if I’d known I’d have gone in with you. We could have split mom’s money and she’d never been wiser.”
I heard it—a crack like the world split itself.
The widow-maker let go.
What happened next took two seconds, a scene that would play on repeat in slow motion for the rest of my life.
Jake sprinted toward them. One arm ripped Stetson out of Brantley’s grip.
His shoulder hit him square, a shove that sent him staggering backward into the timber’s path, while Jake spun, curling around my baby, diving—
Several lower limbs came crashing down on them.
The sound it made hitting them—no words could describe.
Then the clearing was just dust and one goat-shaped toy lying in the wood chips near my feet.
“JAKE! STETSON!” A blood curdling scream pulled out of me. Pulled small limbs and whatever was in my path, calling to them.
“We’re okay.” Jake’s voice reached me. Muffled.
Alive. I found him face-down under the fan of the branch, pinned across both legs by wood thick as a body, and beneath him, in the cage he’d made of his arms and chest, he’d hovered above my screaming son, the furious, air-filling wail of a scared baby boy.
“He’s okay. Hurry. Get him out from under me, I can’t—hold my weight off him much longer. ”
I flattened into the wood chips and worked my boy out from under my husband’s body.
“Oh, baby, you’re alive.” I ran my hands over every inch of him, checking for a scratch, as he screamed into my neck.
Jake’s body gave out, and he flattened beneath the pile of branches. “I’m… okay… Call for… help.”
Only then did I peek at the rest.
Brantley Eaton lay six feet away where the heart of the branch had come down across his legs. What it had done to them, I couldn’t say, and couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. He wasn’t moving, at least.
I ran for my phone and made the calls. First to Harper because she could alert the sheriff and rescue.
Then a voice mail to Cash. He couldn’t have gone too far.
I prayed he’d come back to help me get Jake out.
And finally a call to Dot. She and Mr. McCall arrived first, and worked hard to clear the debris from their son.
All at once the sheriff, deputies, and ambulances swarmed the Double M—and a helicopter flew overhead. It was over.
Katherine Dunn paid a personal visit to us in Jake’s room in the hospital. “Well. Termination of parental rights just became a formality. Brantley signed on the dotted line from his hospital bed upstairs. The good news is, that paves the way for you to adopt Stetson when you’re ready.”
“I’m ready. Draw up the papers immediately,” Jake instructed. We’d already discussed it two days ago. Jake was always Stetson’s dada and nothing would change that now.
Katherine added one more thing. “Mrs. Eaton is here, upstairs in Brantley’s room, throwing a fit.
She’s demanding her son be transferred to a Sheridan medical center.
Can you believe her nerve? The Sheriff is dealing with her and of course denying her.
No way would he let that prisoner out of this state.
She’d have to get him past five of the sheriff’s men if she tried. ”
Denied. The word stuck with me. A mother denied seeing her son again. We almost both were.
Katherine left, and Jake grew sleepy. He’d be fine. His left leg was broken, back achey, but miraculously that was it.
Brantley broke both legs and it would be a long time before he walked again. He was likely to spend many years locked away, not only for kidnapping, but for stealing a mail car and a week’s worth of the county mail.
I made sure Jake was resting soundly, and slipped out of the room. Stetson was with Dot, so there was only one thing I worried about since Katherine left us earlier.
I searched the halls and asked every nurse I came across until at last I found Brantley’s room, heavily guarded as Katherine said. Through the window of the hallway into the room, I spotted the woman who would forever turn my blood cold.
“Please, officers, can I have a word with Marlene Eaton?” They tried telling me no, but she saw me, too.
Her icy stare shot through me. But she came to the door and stepped out about a foot.
Uneasy was hardly the right word for facing someone who basically had become my mortal enemy. What did I ever do to her other than exist, and grow up in a life less privileged than hers?
“What do you want?” Her steely gaze down her nose almost drove me away. But I inhaled and picked my chin up to say what I came to say.
“From one mother to another: I would never wish harm on a mother’s child.
That pain is unbearable, and I’m sorry for you.
But hear me. You sent Brantley here. What happened to him was an act of God—but it never would have happened if you weren’t so selfish.
You decided I wasn’t worth it. You spent a year trying to take my son.
In the end, you nearly lost yours. Was it worth it, Marlene?
Can we move on now? You take good care of Brantley. Good luck.”
She gasped but if she planned to say anything, and she probably did, I walked away, head held as high as I could, while a lump collected in my throat. I didn’t need any reply from her.
I was done.
One of the officers who’d been standing apart from the others stopped me. “You’re a better woman than she’ll ever understand.”
About two hours later, while Jake dozed. My phone lit up with a message.
Two words, from an undisclosed number.
You win.
I stared at those two words until they blurred. She’d sent it, of that I was certain. What it took for her to send it must have cost her plenty.
A winner—hardly. Was this a game I didn’t know I played? Did either of us really win in the end?
I turned the phone face-down, and laid my head on my husband’s shoulder.
My husband. My Jake.
Okay. If there had to be a winner named, I really did come out the winner in all of this.