Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 9 here to catch up on the name on Grandma’s deed, the diary in the cedar chest, and the stranger who showed up at my gate at midnight.
Last time, I was standing on my porch in my pajamas and boots, with Jesse limping behind me holding a lunge whip, and an old man named Royce Kettering holding a photograph up into his own headlights. A photograph of my grandmother, young and laughing on a horse. And holding the reins, fifty years younger, was the man standing at my gate.
“Ruth and I were going to be married,” he said. “Did she never tell you?”
So many of you said he was lying. A few of you said to call the police first and ask questions later. One of you just wrote, “LANA. DO NOT OPEN THAT GATE.” I didn’t. Not right away. Here is what happened next.
The Man at My Gate
I called Eli Ortiz before I said another word. He picked up on the second ring, which told me he wasn’t sleeping either, and he said he was twenty minutes out and to keep that gate shut.
So I kept it shut. Royce didn’t seem to mind. He just nodded, folded the photograph back into his shirt pocket, and leaned against the fender of that big silver truck like a man who had waited a long time for something and could wait twenty more minutes.
Raven was still pacing her stall. I went down and put my hand on her neck, and I could feel her heart going as fast as mine. Then she did something strange. She stuck her head out over the stall door, looked straight down the driveway at the old man, and went quiet.
Jesse noticed it too. “Huh,” he said. “She doesn’t do that for anybody.”
When Eli’s truck finally came up the road, Royce stepped back from the gate with both hands where everyone could see them. Eli talked to him for a long time in the headlights. I couldn’t hear what they said. But when Eli walked back up the driveway, he looked at me like he didn’t know whether to be worried or sorry.
“He’s not armed. He’s not drunk. He drove fourteen hours by himself,” Eli said. “And Lana, I think you should hear him out.”
Ruth and Royce
We sat on the porch. Jesse brought out coffee nobody drank. Royce took his hat off and held it on his knee, and in the porch light I could see his hands shaking a little, the way Grandma’s used to near the end.
He told me he met Ruth at a county fair the summer she was nineteen. She was barrel racing a borrowed paint mare that kept trying to run her into the fence, and she kept winning anyway. He said she was the most stubborn person he had ever met, and that he asked her to marry him three weeks later.
She said yes.
“My father said no,” Royce said. “Kettering men married into land and money, and Ruth had a pickup truck and a horse she didn’t own. He told me if I married her I’d never see a dime or an acre of his. I was twenty-two and scared, and I asked her to wait while I talked him around.”
He looked down at his hat. “She didn’t wait. A month later she came home to this valley and married your grandfather, and she never answered another one of my letters. I spent fifty years thinking she just stopped loving me.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had never heard any of this. Not one word. My grandmother told me everything, I thought. How to sit a bucking horse, how to tell when a cow is about to calve, how to make pie crust with ice water. She never once said the name Royce.
What Happened in 1998
“Then why,” I said, and my voice cracked, “did your company try to take her farm?”
Royce flinched like I’d hit him.
He told me his younger brother, Clay, took over Kettering Land and Cattle when their father died. Clay was everything their father was and worse. Royce said he walked away from the family business in the eighties and spent his life training cutting horses on a little place of his own in Oklahoma, and he and Clay barely spoke.
“Clay died in August,” he said. “I was the one who had to go through his files. And I found a folder with this valley’s name on it. Your farm. June Whitaker’s place. Notes about who was behind on their taxes and whose barn was too close to the road.” He swallowed. “And I found a copy of that deed with Ruth’s signature on it, dated October 1998.”
He said that was the moment he understood that his brother had gone after Ruth on purpose, because of him. Because Clay knew who she was.
“Those two men who tried to buy June’s mare last week worked for Clay for twenty years,” Eli said quietly. “They were still following his old plans. They didn’t even know he was gone.”
Royce nodded. “I came to make it right. Whatever that takes.”
The Letter Grandma Never Sent
Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope. It was old and soft at the corners, addressed in Grandma’s loopy handwriting to a P.O. box in Oklahoma. It had a stamp. It had never been postmarked.
“This was in Clay’s folder too,” Royce said. “I don’t know how he got it. Maybe someone at the post office in town. Maybe she handed it to the wrong person. I never opened it.” He held it out to me. “I didn’t think I had the right. I think you do.”
My hands were shaking so hard Jesse had to help me tear it open.
It was one page, dated the winter after she left the fair. I read it out loud, because I knew if I stopped I’d never get through it.
Royce. I am sorry I left without telling you why. Your father came to see me. He said if I married you, he would make sure you lost everything, and I could not be the reason you lost your family. So I let you go. But there is something you deserve to know, and I cannot carry it alone anymore.
And then the letter just stopped. The rest of the page was blank, like she had set down her pen and never picked it back up.
Royce put his face in his hands. Nobody said anything for a long time. Down in the barn, Raven nickered once, soft and low, and Willow answered her from the paddock.
One More Secret
Eli was the first one to speak. He said the deed in the coffee can had never been recorded, and the copy in Clay’s folder was just that, a copy. Legally, it was paper. Royce said he would sign whatever Eli’s lawyer friend in town needed to make sure no Kettering ever touched this valley again.
I should have felt relieved. Instead all I could think about was that unfinished sentence. Something you deserve to know.
Then I did the math. Grandma left that fair the summer she was nineteen. My mother was born the next spring. I had always been told she came early.
I looked at Royce. Really looked at him, for the first time, in the porch light. The way his eyes turned down at the corners when he smiled. The little cleft in his chin. I have seen that chin every morning of my life in the mirror over my bathroom sink.
Jesse saw it too. I felt him go very still beside me.
Royce lifted his head and saw my face, and I watched him understand at the exact same moment I did.
“Lana,” he said, barely above a whisper. “When was your mother born?”
So now I’m asking you. Do I tell him? And who in this valley already knew?
Part 11 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss what Lana finds out about the man on her porch.