Chapter 15 #2
"I'd like to say one thing that isn't an addition to my statement, and then I'm finished.
" His voice was steady and it was not the voice he used in rooms. It was flatter than that and about ten years older.
"My wife just told this county she's going.
She's right to. She's the only person who's been telling the truth about the twelfth of December since the twelfth of December, and everything anybody's put in front of you about that day — including mine — she'd have gotten to first if somebody had asked her. "
A pause.
"That's all. I've got nothing to add."
He sat down.
The chair said, "Thank you," and closed the session at three twenty-six, and two hundred and forty people stood up and started talking.
Renee sat in her chair.
Maggie was saying something. Somewhere behind her Bette Ridgeway was being spoken to by a commissioner and was not answering.
Fenner was standing in the second row with his hat in his hands looking at her, and Gil Vogel had his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, in the fifth row, in public, and did not care.
She sat and looked at the empty commissioners' table.
He didn't take it.
That was all she had. That one fact, sitting in the middle of her like a stone dropped in a bucket.
He had been handed the whole thing. He had been handed it by the chair of a county board, on a public record, with a court reporter typing and four reporters along the back wall, at the precise moment his wife announced she was leaving in three days — and every instinct that man had ever had, every reflex of fifteen years, every hour of a lifetime of getting out in front of things, had been pointed at one sentence he could have said in nine words.
I went back up that hill and Truman Fenner stopped me.
He would not even have had to say it well. He could have said it badly, and it would have worked.
He said she's right to.
Renee put both hands flat on her thighs the way she had on the second of April.
She got out through the side door because she could not do the room.
The gravel lot was full and the light was that hard late-April light and she got about eleven steps before Bette Ridgeway said her name.
"I am not going to keep you," Bette said. "You are going to be in that lot for forty minutes if you let anybody start. I want to say one thing and then I will go and be rude to a commissioner."
"Bette."
"Livermore is an hour and ten minutes from Pine Street," Bette Ridgeway said.
"I looked it up on Tuesday because I am not a fool and I have known you were going somewhere since March.
" Her chin was up. "You have a house here.
I said that in January as a fact and not a kindness, and it does not lapse because you are getting divorced from my son, and if you ever tell me it does I shall be extremely unpleasant about it. "
Renee had to look at the gravel for a second.
"Thank you," she said.
"Yes." Bette adjusted her bag. "He did not take it."
"No."
"I have known that boy forty-one years," Bette said, "and I did not think he had it in him, and I would like the record to show that I was wrong about that and about several other things, and that I am seventy-one and it is very inconvenient to be wrong at seventy-one."
And she went off across the gravel to be rude to a commissioner.
Fenner caught her at the truck.
He did not say anything about any of it. He put a hand on the door frame and looked at the hills and said, "Two hundred acres."
"With water."
"Prentiss's place?"
"You know it?"
"I know it." He nodded slowly, twice. "That's good ground, Renee. That's better ground than you've got."
"I know."
"Hell of a barn on it too." He straightened up. "You'll want somebody to look at that north gate before you run anything heavy through it."
Renee stood in the gravel lot of the county building and laughed until she had to lean on her own truck.
Gil Vogel was the last one, and he was waiting by the gate of the lot where she had to walk past.
"Two minutes," he said. "Then I'll never bring it up again."
"Gil."
"He never asked me." Gil had his hands in his coat pockets and he was looking somewhere over her shoulder.
"About the record. Four hundred and eleven pages walk out of a system that four people can touch, and I am one of four, and he has never asked me a single question about it. Not in March, not in April, not once."
"He told me he doesn't want to know."
"Yeah, well." Gil's mouth did something. "I'd have wanted to know. I'd have wanted to know inside of a day, and I'd have told myself it was about governance."
He shifted his feet.
"I've thought about resigning about nine times since February," he said.
"Wanted you to hear it from me that I'm not going to.
Somebody's got to run that place while he does whatever this is, and there's four hundred people who didn't do anything wrong, and I've decided that's my job now.
" He shrugged. "It's not heroic. It's just what's left. "
"Gil."
"Renee, I gave you those pages because I thought it'd blow it all up," he said.
"I want to be honest about that, standing here, because you're going and I'd rather not carry it.
I thought you'd take it to the paper and it'd be over and he'd have to live in it.
That's what I wanted, on the twenty-fourth of March, at seven o'clock at night, and I told myself it was about you. "
Renee stood in the gravel.
"And you didn't do it," Gil said. "You sat on it for five weeks and then you asked four questions about a retention policy, and then you stood up in there today and left.
" He finally looked at her. "I've been in business twenty-six years.
That's the best-run thing I've ever watched anybody do, and there wasn't a dollar in it for you anywhere, and I don't understand it, and I've thought about it every night for a month. "
"It wasn't run, Gil."
"No?"
"No," Renee said. "I just kept picking the thing I could live with afterward. That's all it ever was."
Gil Vogel nodded, and looked at the hills for a second, and said, "Larimer County's lucky," and walked off to his car.
She did not see Chase.
She looked for him. She wanted that recorded honestly, in her own accounting, and she made herself write it down that night: she stood in that lot for a minute and a half with her keys in her hand and looked for her husband and did not find him, and he had gone out the front and got in his car and driven back to a rented house on Mapleton, because he had said what he had to say in a room and there was nothing after it.
He did not call that night.
He did not call on the thirtieth.
She closed on the Prentiss place at ten in the morning on the first of May, at a title company in Fort Collins, with Hugh Prentiss's hand shaking hers and his son on the phone from Phoenix, and it took forty minutes and cost eleven hundred dollars in fees and she signed her name eleven times as Renee Tolliver.
He did not call then either.
And on the second of May, at eleven at night, sitting at the fold-down table in a trailer on eleven leased acres with a legal pad and the last of a beer, Renee wrote:
Apr 29 — he had it in his hand and put it down.
May 1 — closed. 200 ac.
He hasn't called. He's not going to.
She looked at that for a long time.
Then she wrote one more line, and it was the last thing she ever wrote on that legal pad, because the next one she bought was for the new place:
So it's mine now. Whatever I do next, it's mine.
God help me.