Chapter 12 #2
"I am not finished." She was not shouting.
Bette Ridgeway had never shouted in her life; she got quieter, and it was much worse.
"There is a version of this where he has had a collapse and everybody around him is too polite to say so, and I have been living with that possibility since March.
And there is a version where he is doing something deliberate that he will not explain, which is worse, because a man who will not tell his mother why he has burned down his own company is a man who has decided the reason is nobody's business. "
She stopped. She looked at the window for a moment.
"He asked about you," she said, in an entirely different voice.
"When?"
"On Tuesday, when I was shouting at him about the utilities.
He waited until I ran out, and then he said, 'How did she seem, at the forum.
'" Bette's hands were folded on her knee.
"I told him you were magnificent. He said, 'She always was.
' And then he asked me not to tell you he'd asked, and I have been sitting on it for two days, and I have decided I am seventy-one years old and I do not take instructions. "
Renee drove home on the diagonal with the window down and the heater on, which was a thing she did when she needed to think, and she thought about it the whole way.
And by the time she got to the second cattle guard she had it worked out.
The hearing was on the twenty-ninth.
That was the shape of it, and it fit, and it fit so well that she felt something in her chest ease — because a thing that fits is a thing you can put down.
The inquiry had been calling company witnesses since February.
Its scope was cause, response, and evacuation.
Bristlecone had modeled that burn, advised this county, had a founder in a docket admitting a judgment failure at 3:33 in the afternoon and a mitigation lead who had just come apart in a public forum over a records question.
Of course he was closing the practice.
You close the practice, you withdraw from the county, you hand over the data for free — and on the twenty-ninth of April, when somebody asks about the ninety-minute call, there is no practice, no advisory relationship, no commercial interest, nothing for the county to look at.
You do it three days before a forum where your mitigation lead is going to be asked about records retention in front of four reporters, and you do it as termination for convenience by provider, which is a phrase that means we chose this, and you file the letter on the docket yourself so that it reads as candor.
It was clean. It was extremely clean. It was, Renee thought, coming up County Road 9 in the dark, the single most Chase Ridgeway thing she had ever seen in her life: get out ahead, pay in public, look like a man doing the right thing, and by the twenty-ninth there is nothing left to ask him about.
She parked at the trailer and sat with her hands on the wheel.
"He's clearing the board," she said out loud.
And she was so relieved.
That was the part she would have to sit with, later, in a rented living room the night before a hearing. Not that she got it wrong — anybody would have gotten it wrong, Maggie got it wrong, Bette had gotten something adjacent to it wrong. It was the relief.
She had spent four months unable to tell.
And she had been handed, in one week, the largest and most expensive fact of the entire winter, and she had found a reading of it that put him back inside the shape she could manage — the operator, the man out in front of it, the man who did nothing that was not also a move — and the moment she got there her shoulders came down for the first time in eleven days.
She wanted it to be a play.
She would not understand that for eighteen more days.
He came out on the sixteenth for the last of the ridge paperwork.
The chimney was coming down on the twentieth and there was a form about it, and he brought it out himself rather than sending it, and they stood at the tailgate in the sun because April had finally arrived and there was actual warmth in it for the first time since October.
She had the drill running on the bench that week. He could hear it from the yard.
"That's yours?" he said.
"That's mine. Third parcel. We're a day and a half ahead."
"How many acres."
"A hundred and ten so far."
"Out of nine forty."
"Out of nine forty," she said, and did not tell him about the establishment guarantee or the eighteen months or the fact that she had lain awake three nights running about the drainage on the fifth parcel.
Some of that was discipline. Some of it was that she wanted to tell him so much it made her careful.
He signed the form.
He asked about the water share and she corrected him again, and he took it again, and there was a moment — small, about two seconds — where they were just two people at a tailgate in April.
And she gave him the opening.
She did it deliberately. She had thought about it in the truck on the way back from Pine Street and decided that she was going to leave a door standing open and see whether he walked through it, and she did it, and she was almost casual.
"I read the county agenda," she said. "Six-C."
Chase capped the pen.
"Yeah," he said.
She waited.
He put the pen in his pocket — her pen, again, the third one that winter — and he squared the form on the tailgate and looked out at the bench where the drill was working.
"You've got a soft spot at the top of that two-track," he said. "About sixty yards down from the gate. It'll take a loaded truck now but it won't in three weeks."
"Fenner flagged it."
"Course he did." He nodded slowly. "Okay."
He got in the car.
That was all. That was the entire thing: yeah, and then a soft spot in a road.
Renee stood in the yard with the form in her hand and watched him drive down to the second cattle guard and out, and she thought — with the ease of a woman who has just found a reading that fits, standing in her own yard in the April sun:
Of course he didn't say anything. There's nothing to say. It's a business decision three weeks out from a hearing, and he knows I'd see straight through him if he tried to sell it to me as anything else.
She went back to work.
Behind her, four hundred yards away on the bench, the drill went up and down the third parcel, north to south, because of the wind.