“I have been watching you for exactly one minute, Ruthie,” Tom answered, and he sounded wounded, as if I had accused him of something low. “The camera pings my phone when anyone opens the barn door. It does that for the cattle thieves. You are not a thief, of course. I am simply worried. You have not been sleeping.” I stared up at the little black eye of the camera. Four years of marriage, and I had never once asked how many cameras he had put on the ranch of my father. “Tom,” I said, “where are you right now?” He paused. “I am turning into the lane,” he said.
I did not wait to hear the rest. I dropped the phone into my coat and went down the stepladder two rungs at a time. the old mare of Daddy, Biscuit, was in her stall at the end of the aisle, twenty years old and as steady as a church pew. I did not stop to saddle her. I opened the half door, grabbed a halter, and swung onto her bare back the way I had done when I was ten. Through the gap in the barn wall I could see a gray sedan coming up the gravel. I leaned down to the mare ear and whispered, “Go.”
We went out the back door and across the south pasture, through the wet grass, with the water gap of Daddy on my left and the big mountain standing up behind it like a wall. I heard a car door slam. I heard the voice of Tom, rising, calling my name in a tone I had never heard from him in four years, thin and furious. I did not look back. I rode the mile to the Pruitt place with my cheek against the neck of the mare, and the whole time I clutched the little brown bottle in my fist so hard that the cap left a mark in my palm.
A saddle kept a father last warning dry through five winters, waiting for a daughter to ride toward it.
Mrs. Pruitt, who was seventy six and had known me since I was in diapers, opened her kitchen door in her robe and looked at me, barefoot in the saddle blanket, with my hair in my face. She did not ask a single question. She pulled me inside and locked the door and dialed Sheriff Dan Torres in Virginia City with the telephone from the wall. Ten minutes later, her son Ed came in from the barn with a deer rifle and stood in the front window, quiet as a gate post, watching the lane. I have never been so grateful to a family in my life.
Sheriff Torres arrived with two deputies and a state investigator. By then I had told Mrs. Pruitt all of it over a cup of coffee that I did not drink: the note in the saddle, the bottle behind the liniment, the key to Box 9. The sheriff drove me to the post office in Ennis himself. The clerk, an old friend of Daddy, looked at the key and at my face and went to the back without a word. He returned with a padded envelope, brown with age, that had not been touched in five years. It was addressed in a hand I knew better than my own.
Inside was a laboratory report from Bozeman, dated one week before my father died. He had found some pills in his own coat pocket, pills he had not been prescribed, with the name of Dr. Whitfield on the label. He had them tested. The report said the tablets contained digoxin, in a dose strong enough to stop an old heart in the middle of an afternoon. Under it, in the blocky ink of Daddy, was a note. If I die, it was not natural. Tom wants the water. Sissy, forgive me for not seeing it sooner. I was proud of you for marrying a doctor.
They exhumed my father in October. I stood at the fence of the cemetery in a coat the color of slate while men in white suits did what they had to do. Three weeks later, the state medical examiner confirmed digoxin toxicity, far above any medical need. Tom was arrested at his clinic in the middle of a patient visit. He asked, I am told, whether he could finish writing a prescription. The deputy said no. He was charged with murder in the first degree, with fraud against the estate, and with attempted fraud involving the water rights of a ranch worth four million dollars.
At the trial, in the old courthouse in Virginia City, I sat in the front row with Mrs. Pruitt and watched the man I had loved for four years explain, to twelve strangers, that an old man was going to die soon anyway. The jury deliberated two hours. When the foreman read the word guilty, I did not feel victory, just a long quiet. Tom was sentenced to life without parole. He turned once and looked at me across the courtroom, and I thought of every night I had fallen asleep in the crook of his arm, and I looked away.
The ranch is mine now, wholly, with the water and the mountain and the creek that Daddy loved. I sold the house in town and moved back to the old kitchen, and I took the cameras down myself, one at a time, with a stepladder and a screwdriver, and burned them in the stove. My daughter rode in her first horse show that summer, on a borrowed saddle, because I could not bear to oil the old one yet. She won a ribbon. She came out of the ring with her chin held high, and I swore I could hear him laugh.
Biscuit died in her sleep the next winter, in the straw, with her head on my arm. I buried her on the hill beside my father, under the pine, and I carved a board with both of their names on it. Sometimes, when I ride out to check the fence in the early light, I let the new gelding choose his own path through the sage, and I think about a note folded under a leather seat for five years, waiting for a daughter to come looking. Sissy. He had called me that to the end.