Chapter 3 #2
It was true. It was the truest sentence on the pad. And she took it out, and she was honest enough with herself, sitting at a library table on Arapahoe with her coat still on, to know exactly why: not because it was unfair to him, and not because it was none of the county's business.
She took it out because if she put it in, the whole letter became about a woman whose husband had been on the phone, and every person who read it would file her under something, and she would never again be the person who knew what time Fenner came up the drive.
She wanted to be believed more than she wanted to be avenged. She wrote that down too, on the folded page, because it seemed like the sort of thing she should keep.
She signed it Renee Tolliver Ridgeway, which she had not written on anything in six years.
She dropped it at the clerk's office at four twenty and it was a public filing by Monday morning.
The trailer had been on the old ground since before her father died.
It was a fifth-wheel with a busted axle, up on blocks at the north fence, and it had been used for lambing and storage and once, memorably, for a nineteen-year-old Renee Tolliver to live in for a summer after a fight with her mother that neither of them ever explained to anybody.
She got the water on Saturday. There was a hydrant forty feet off, frost-free, and it worked on the second try, which she took as more of a sign than she should have.
Eleven acres. Dormant beds under old fabric, the rows still there under nine years of nothing because that is the thing about a good bed — it does not forget its shape.
The lease ran three years with an option.
She had signed it on the nineteenth of November at a kitchen table in Niwot with a woman named Rue who had known her father.
Maggie came Sunday with a generator and a truckload of firewood and a bad attitude.
"This is a shed," Maggie said.
"It's a trailer."
"It's a shed that used to be a trailer." She kicked a block. "There's no propane."
"There's propane Tuesday."
"It's December, Renee."
"Yes."
Maggie stood in the cold with her hands in her coat and looked at eleven acres of dead-looking ground, and Renee watched her look at it.
"They're the same beds," Maggie said.
"They're the same beds."
"Huh," said Maggie Sutter, and went to get the generator out of the truck, and did not say another word about the propane.
The first night alone out there was nineteen degrees and she did not sleep at all.
The trailer held heat about as well as a coat with the front open.
She ran the little wood stove somebody had put in it badly in 1994 and she slept in the ugly coat and two pairs of Maggie's socks, and at two in the morning she gave up and sat at the fold-down table with the lamp on and a mug of instant coffee.
She had a legal pad, a pencil, and a seed catalog Rue had given her out of a drawer.
So she did the thing she knew how to do.
She wrote out the beds. Eleven acres was not eleven acres of production — it was maybe four, realistically, in year one, and only if she got the south fabric off in March and the lines pressure-tested before the ground moved.
She wrote lines and underlined it twice.
She wrote hoop house — used — Fort Lupton?
She wrote out the mix she would need for a foothills reclamation spec, from memory, pounds per acre, and got most of the way through before she had to stop and think about western wheatgrass.
She had not done this in six years and it came back in about forty minutes, the way a language does.
Around three she wrote a number at the bottom of the page. It was what she would need to get to March, and it was not a large number, and she sat and looked at it for a while.
She had access to about eleven million dollars.
That was the thing nobody tells you about it.
She had never in her life not been able to buy something; for nine years there had been a card in her wallet with no ceiling on it that she had used mostly for groceries and vet bills and other people's wedding presents.
And she sat in a trailer at three in the morning at nineteen degrees and did the arithmetic on a used hoop house out of a bank account with her own name on it, first, from before, that had four thousand one hundred dollars in it.
She did not decide anything grand about that. She did not swear an oath.
She just noticed that the number at the bottom of the page was the first number in six years that was actually hers, and then she got up and put another piece of wood in the stove, and by then it was light enough to walk the rows.
Chase found out on Monday.
Not from her. She thought about calling him for two days and did not, and she was not proud of that, and she also did not do it.
He found out because her filing went public with the rest of Monday's clerk batch, and somebody at Bristlecone flagged it inside of an hour, and at the bottom of the second page, under her signature, was the address for service.
11414 County Road 9.
He called at eleven forty in the morning.
"You're living on the Tolliver place," Chase said.
"Yes."
"There's a trailer up there. Is that —"
"Yes."
A long pause, and traffic behind it, because he was driving. He was always driving.
"Renee. It's nineteen degrees at night."
"There's a generator and there's wood and there's propane coming Tuesday."
"That's not —" He stopped. She could hear him make himself stop, which was new. "Whose ground is it?"
And there it was.
She stood at the north fence of eleven acres in the middle of the afternoon with the phone against her ear and the wind coming down off the divide the way it had on the twelfth, and she thought about the lease in the pocket of a coat that had burned, and the copy of it in a drawer in a trailer forty feet behind her, and the woman named Rue who had known her father, and November nineteenth.
Three weeks before the fire. Twenty-three days.
"It's leased," she said.
"To who?"
"I have to go, Chase. The propane guy's here."
The propane guy was not there. The propane guy was Tuesday.
She hung up and put the phone in her pocket and stood in the cold looking at her own rows coming up out of the dirt in straight lines under the fabric, and she thought: I have to tell him.
And then, immediately after, in a voice that did not sound like hers at all:
No I don't.