“…the bank statement for my monthly allowance,” I told Ellen Weaver on the telephone that night, “and I think I am about to learn something I do not like.” She asked me to bring it to Boise in the morning, along with every paper I had. I put down the phone, sat at my desk in the lamp light, and unfolded the statement. For nine months I had accepted eight hundred dollars a month from my sons without asking where it came from. I had trusted them. I had trusted them because I had raised them, and in my mind that was proof enough.
The statement was not from my account. It was from a joint account opened in February, in the names of Ingrid Lund and Erik Lund. The opening deposit was six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was precisely half of the ranch sale. Under it, in tidy columns, were the withdrawals. Eight hundred dollars a month to me, and between them, large transfers to a company called Ridgeline Ventures LLC, for three hundred thousand, then another two hundred thousand, then fifty thousand more. I had never signed a single paper for that account. Erik had signed my name.
I did not sleep. At five in the morning I put on my good wool coat, packed the letter in its plastic sleeve, the bank statement, my marriage certificate, and Sven old homestead papers in a canvas tote bag, and drove the two hours to Boise under a pink and silver sky. The offices of Weaver and Daughters occupied the second floor of a brick building near the capitol. Ellen Weaver met me at the top of the stairs. She was a stout woman of fifty with silver hair, reading glasses on a chain, and a kind, tired face.
A letter found behind a sorting machine, a bank statement she did not expect, and a mineral claim that never expired.
She spread my papers across a long oak table and went through them for an hour without speaking. Then she took off her glasses. She said the mineral claim was real and recorded, and that a mining company named Clearwater Gold had offered, in writing, two point four million dollars for a lease on the Lund parcel, with a royalty on future production. The company had sent three letters to a Lund family address in Twin Falls. All three had been signed for, she said, by the same person. By Erik Lund. He had known about it since at least last spring.
I sat very still. Ellen poured me a cup of tea from a thermos and waited. After a moment I asked her what the law said about a power of attorney that had never been signed. She said it was worthless, that it had been used to open an account fraudulently, and that she could file for an emergency order that very afternoon to freeze the account and restore my control. She said, “Mrs. Lund, you will have to testify. Are you willing to do that against your own son?” I thought of Sven, and of forty years of waiting. I said, “I am.”
The judge signed the order at three o clock. By four, the bank had frozen the joint account, and Ridgeline Ventures had been served. Ellen drove me home herself, and we talked about her father, who had kept my husband file open for nearly twenty years. She said he used to say that some letters take their time. At my gate she gave me a card and told me to call anytime. I thanked her and carried my tote bag into the house, where my younger son Nils was sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.
Nils had driven down from Boise. He looked as though he had not slept in days. He said he had learned that morning what Erik had done, from an angry phone call, and that he had come to say he knew nothing about it. He said he had signed the ranch papers believing the money would be split fairly. Then he wept. I pulled out a chair and sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulders. I told him that I believed him. I told him that he could not be blamed for what his brother chose to do.
Erik arrived the next evening, in a pressed gray suit and a dark tie, pale and exhausted. He did not shout or make excuses. He stood in the doorway of my kitchen and said that Ridgeline Ventures was a land development company he had started, that it had lost money, and that he had panicked. He said he had meant to repay everything once the mineral lease was signed. I looked at my elder son, forty seven years old, with Sven blue eyes, and I said, “Erik, you did not need my signature. You needed my trust. You could have simply asked.”
It took four months. Erik returned what remained of the ranch money, sold his house to cover the rest, and signed a settlement that Ellen drafted carefully. I did not press charges. That was my decision, and I made it without bitterness. Clearwater Gold signed the mineral lease in June, with a royalty that Ellen negotiated for three weeks. Nils drove me to Owyhee County in his truck, and we stood together at the edge of the old homestead, looking out across the sagebrush and the pale purple hills, and I read the letter aloud to the wind.
I funded a scholarship at the Twin Falls community college in Sven name, for young people from ranch families who wished to study geology or law. At the dedication, in a crowded hall, I held up a framed copy of the letter from April 1984, in its battered plastic sleeve. I told the students that sometimes the most important news in your life arrives forty one years late, and that the only thing to do is open the envelope, read it aloud, and begin. Then I sat down, and Nils took my hand, and the applause went on for a very long time.