Chapter 11 #2
The rest of it she found herself, on a Tuesday night in June, on the internet, in about four minutes.
The Thayer Family Foundation had a website that was updated twice a year by somebody's niece. The board page listed eight names.
Whit's was not one of them.
She sat back in the chair.
It had been there in December — she was sure of it, she had looked at that page in some idle moment years ago and seen his name at the top of it where it had been since 1988.
Now the top of the page said Board of Directors and the first name was a woman from Grand Junction who ran a community college.
She looked at the archived version. February: Whit Thayer, Chairman. April: gone.
Tess sat in her kitchen and worked out what she thought about it, and what she thought was this: the board finally moved him out.
He was seventy-four. The whole thing had been in the gossip since December, and a foundation with a family name on it does not want a chairman whose son is in that kind of a story, and somebody with a spine had finally said so at a meeting.
That was a completely reasonable reading and she believed it for six weeks.
She called Delphine about it, which she would think about later.
She told herself it was about the insurance, and she did ask about the insurance, and she got a broker's name in Steamboat out of it, and then, at the end, in the tone of a woman mentioning the weather:
"Whit's off the foundation board."
"He is."
"Since April."
"Since the eighth of April," Delphine said.
Tess put her boot up on the bench.
"Did the board move him out?"
There was a pause. It was not a long pause. Tess had spent five months learning to read that woman's silences the way she read a sky, and this one had something in it.
"The board voted unanimously," Delphine said.
"Okay."
"Mrs. Thayer."
"Tess."
"Tess." A breath. "I want to say two things and then I'm going to talk about the insurance again, and you should notice that I am doing that on purpose."
"Go on."
"The first is that I have been the lawyer to that family for twenty-six years and there is a great deal I know that I will never tell you, and you would not respect me if I did.
" Her voice was very dry. "The second is that there are things I know that I would like you to have, and I cannot be the one to give them to you, and it is not because of privilege.
It's because you would receive them from me as gossip and you would be entitled to. "
Tess stood in the tack room with the bridle over her shoulder.
"Is there something you're not saying?"
"Yes."
"Is it about him?"
"Yes."
"Is it bad?"
Delphine actually laughed — one syllable, entirely without humor.
"No," she said. "Now. Your broker is a woman named Bright on Oak Street and you should call her before Friday, because the umbrella has to be clean before you put paying clients on that ground."
And that was all Tess got, and afterward she stood there and turned it over and decided — because it was three weeks out from her first trip in twelve years, and because a person has only so much — that a lawyer being cagey about a family's business was not news, and that she would think about it in the fall.
The first shakedown was the second of June and it took the top off everything.
They ran the whole string up the drainage with full loads and no clients, four days, Tess and Toni and Tate and a girl from Yampa they were trying out. The weather went bad on the second afternoon and stayed bad, which was the point of doing it.
Tess had forgotten how much of it was in her hands.
Not the riding — the thinking: where the water is when the snowmelt is late, which side of a bench to put a camp on when the wind is going to swing at three in the morning, how long it actually takes to get nine animals across a creek that is running higher than the map says.
She got two things wrong and fixed both of them.
On the third night, in the dark, in the rain, with a picket line to redo, she stood in the middle of her own camp and realized she was happy — not content, not at peace, happy, the ordinary kind, the kind that has nothing to do with anybody — and she filed it away to look at later.
She came off the mountain on the fifth of June with a blister the size of a nickel and a plan.
Porter called on the twelfth of June. It was the first time in three months.
She let it ring twice and then answered it, standing in the tack room with a bridle over her shoulder, and her heart did something stupid and she ignored it.
"Tess. It's a practical thing. Say no and hang up."
"Go ahead."
"The ranch insurance renews on the first of July and the policy still has my name on the umbrella, and if it renews that way you'll be tied to a policy I control, which I don't want and you shouldn't accept.
Ed's gone, so nobody's minding it. You need to have your own broker do a clean one in your name and I'd get it started this week, because they'll take three weeks and I don't want you uninsured for a day with paying clients on your ground. "
Tess leaned against the bench.
"Okay," she said.
"That's all of it."
"Ed brought me a box."
"Good," Porter said.
And that was all he said. There was a silence of about four seconds in which she could hear a truck going by wherever he was, and she waited, because she knew what came next, she had been braced for it since Whit stood in her barn — the accounting.
I closed the office. I told the trustees in March.
I did it before Marin came up there, I did it when you'd taken the ranch and there was nothing in it for me.
Any man would have said it. It was true, and it was enormous, and it was the single best card he had ever held.
"Okay," he said. "That's it. Get the broker started."
And he hung up.
Tess stood in the tack room for a while with the phone in her hand.
Then she hung the bridle up and went out and helped Toni load the panniers, and she did not think about it again until the last week of June, when she found out what it had actually cost him, and had to sit down on the ground.