Chapter 8
The problem was the easement, and the problem took three days.
Two of the eleven Phase I parcels sat on the bench below the ridge, and the only way to get a drill onto them without going forty minutes around by the highway was across the top of the Ridgeway place and down the old ranch two-track — the same two-track Truman Fenner had come around on the twelfth of December.
The county needed a temporary construction easement.
The land was in Renee's name alone. The insurance settlement was joint until the adjuster closed it. The chimney was a public hazard on a parcel the county now needed access across, and there was a clause about debris removal that referenced the structure, and the structure included the cellar.
So it needed both signatures. All three days of it.
"You could send Danielle," Renee said on the phone.
"I'm not sending Danielle."
"You could send anybody, Chase. That's the entire point of you."
"I'll be there at eight," he said.
He was there at ten of.
They stood in the yard — what had been the yard — and waited for the adjuster and the county and the demolition contractor, and it was the first time either of them had been up there together since the twelfth.
Renee had been up four times alone. She had thought that would make it easier and it did not.
Two months on it was gray and orange. The stone walls of the 1924 part stood to about waist height in a rectangle you could still read as rooms, and the chimney went up out of the middle of it, forty feet, perfectly intact, with the iron crane still in the firebox.
Everything after 1924 was gone to slab. The four aspens Bette had planted for the wedding were black sticks. The flagstone was still flagstone.
Chase stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at it.
"They keep saying it like it's a fluke," he said. "The chimney."
"It's not a fluke."
"No?"
"It's rubble stone with a lime core. It's the only thing up here that was built to be on fire." Renee walked out along the north foundation. "Everything your grandfather did is standing. Everything after him is a slab."
Chase laughed, once, surprised.
And that was the first one. Ten of eight on a Tuesday morning, and she had made him laugh, and it went through her like a stone through ice.
Here is what nobody tells you about being married nine years to a man you are leaving.
They were extremely good at this.
The adjuster came at eight and the county at eight forty and the demo contractor at nine fifteen, and by ten o'clock Renee and Chase Ridgeway were running that site the way they had run four hundred dinners, three funerals and a foundation.
She did the ground. He did the room.
She had not agreed to that and neither had he.
It happened. He took the adjuster and the demo contractor, because they wanted to be talked to by a man in a good coat who understood money, and he was so good at it that she caught herself watching him do it.
He knew both their kids' names. He knew the demo contractor had lost a shop in the fire and he did not mention it until the man mentioned it first, and then he asked the exact right question and shut up and listened.
Meanwhile she walked the two-track with the county's access engineer and the crew boss from Wiggins, and she put a flag in every soft spot and every place a loaded truck was going to sink in April, and she said no twice, and the second time she said it in a way that ended the conversation.
At eleven the demo contractor wanted to talk about the chimney and the adjuster wanted to talk about the cellar, and the two of them arrived at Renee and Chase from opposite directions at the same time.
Chase looked at her over the adjuster's shoulder.
He did not say anything. He tipped his head about a quarter inch toward the chimney, which meant I'll take this one, you take the ground, and Renee said "Mm" out loud, to nobody, and turned to the access engineer, and they split the two conversations and had them both done in nine minutes.
She went and sat in her truck at eleven twenty for no reason and put her hands on the wheel.
You are not doing this, she thought.
The photographer showed up on the second day.
He was not from anywhere. That is to say he was a stringer, and he had a long lens, and he was on the county road at the bottom of the drive where he was entitled to be, and he got about four hundred frames of Chase Ridgeway and his estranged wife walking a burned foundation together.
Renee saw him first.
"Two o'clock, at the cattle guard," she said.
Chase did not look. "How long?"
"Twenty minutes at least."
"Okay." He picked up his end of the tape they were running along the north wall for the adjuster. "You want to go in, I can finish this."
"No."
"Renee, they're going to run —"
"I know what they're going to run." She pulled the tape taut. "Hold your end up. It's dragging."
That afternoon it was on two sites: RIDGEWAYS REUNITE AT BURNED ESTATE, with a photograph of the two of them at forty yards, and if you did not know anything you would have said they looked like a couple.
Bette called her about it and Renee said she was fine. Maggie called and said one word — "Sweetheart" — which was worse.
And Chase, at four o'clock, standing in the wind with the tape measure in his hand, said, "I'll have somebody deal with the photo."
"No, you won't."
"It's a two-minute call."
"Chase." She looked up from the pad. "That is the whole thing.
That right there. Somebody deals with it, and I find out about it later, and I never once know what actually happened.
" She wrote a number down. "Let it run. Everybody in this county has seen us at a fence line in two months. They can see us with a tape measure."
He stood there.
"Okay," he said, and put his phone away, and Renee wrote her number down twice because she had lost the first one.
Fenner came up on the second afternoon to walk the two-track, because he had driven it in the dark on the twelfth and nobody alive knew it better.
Renee had asked him to. She had thought about it for a day and asked him anyway, because the crew boss from Wiggins needed somebody who knew where the culvert was, and because she was not going to start arranging her business around who was standing where.
She watched the two men see each other from about eighty yards.
Fenner got out of his truck. Chase, up at the foundation with the adjuster, stopped in the middle of a sentence.
Renee stood between them with a clipboard and did not breathe.
Chase came down.
He came down the slope with his hands out of his pockets and he stopped about six feet short, which was exactly the right distance, and he said, "Truman."
"Mr. Ridgeway."
"Chase."
"I know it," Fenner said, and that was as far as he was willing to go, and Renee watched her husband take it.
"I read your testimony," Chase said.
"I figured."
"I want to say —"
"You don't have to say anything to me," Fenner said.
"I'd rather you didn't, honestly, and I'll tell you why, since we're standing here.
I've got no argument with you about the eight hours.
I've got an argument with you about the ten minutes and it's not mine to have.
It's hers." He nodded at Renee without looking at her.
"So there's nothing you can say to me that's worth either of us saying. "
The wind came across the bench.
"That's fair," Chase said.
"It's not fair. It's just true." Fenner got his gloves out of his coat. "Where's this culvert."
And that was it. That was the whole thing, and Renee stood there with a clipboard while the two of them walked off down the two-track together to look at a culvert, and she found she had to put her hand on the fender of the truck for a second.
They walked the bench parcels for two hours.
She had needed this walk for a month. The two Phase I parcels below the ridge were the ones that scared her — steeper than the flats, a drainage running through both, and a soil break she had flagged in February that she wanted to look at again with somebody who had run equipment on it.
Fenner talked. That was the astonishing part; on his own ground the man would not shut up.
He knew where the old ditch had been. He knew which side of the drainage held water into June and which side was dry by the fifteenth of May.
He knew that the flat above the second gate had been hayed until 1979 and that everything in it was introduced and would fight her.
Renee wrote all of it down and changed two of her four mixes on the spot.
Chase followed them.
He did not contribute. He was a man whose company modeled the fire behavior of exactly this ground at eleven-meter resolution, and he walked behind his wife and his property manager for two hours across a burned bench and did not say one single word about any of it.
Twice she caught him doing something she had never seen him do, which was watch her work.
Not watch her. Watch her work — the flagging, the probe, the way she went down on one knee and took a handful and let it fall and said "no, that's the break, it's forty feet north of where I put it.
" He stood back with his hands in his pockets and watched her be the most competent person on that hill, and she felt it on the side of her face like sun.
At the top, going back to the trucks, Fenner said, "You'll want to run the drill north to south on that one."
"Because of the drainage."
"Because of the wind," Fenner said. "You'll lose the top inch on a west line before you get the second pass done."
"Huh," said Renee, and wrote it down, and Fenner looked pleased with himself for the rest of the afternoon.
It was the third day that broke it.
They had the debris scope to finish, which meant walking room to room in a house that was a rectangle of knee-high stone, saying what had been where, so the contractor could price the sort.
Renee had a pad. Chase had the drawing from 1924 that Bette had found in a drawer on Pine Street.
"South wall," Renee said. "That's the pantry and then the back stairs."