Lana’s Story Part 37: The Envelope Clay Wrote to Royce

Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 36 here to catch up on the name Abel said once, the rest of Mama’s letter, and what Rita told me in the visiting room at the county jail.

Last time, I sat across a bolted-down table from Rita Lane in county orange. She told me something nobody in my family ever knew.

Two days after Mama wrote that letter, she walked up to Rita’s porch on Mill Street and asked one question. Where does Clay keep the paper?

Rita drove her out to Clay’s place that same night. The night before my mother died.

Mama was inside forty minutes. She came out without the paper. She came out with a sealed envelope. One name on the front, in Clay’s handwriting.

Royce.

“Come back tomorrow, honey,” Rita said. “And bring Royce with you.”

So now I had to walk out to that parking lot and tell him.

What I Told Royce in the Parking Lot

Royce was still leaning against the blue Chevy when I came out. Vera was in the cab with the window rolled down.

“Lana,” he said again. “What did she tell you?”

I didn’t know how to start. So I started with the easy part. Mama’s letter. The porch steps. Rita holding me for one minute.

Royce listened the way he always does. Hat in his hand. Not moving.

Then I told him the hard part. Mill Street. The drive. The forty minutes at the end of Clay’s lane.

“She came out with an envelope,” I said. “Sealed. Clay wrote one name on the front.”

Royce waited.

“Yours,” I said.

He didn’t say anything at first. He just put one hand flat on the hood of the truck, like he needed something solid.

“Clay wrote to me,” he said finally. “Twenty-five years ago. And gave it to Caroline.”

“That’s what Rita says.”

“Rita says a lot of things.” But his voice cracked right in the middle of it.

Vera had heard every word through the open window. She got out of the truck and came around the front slowly.

“Daddy wrote to you?” she asked him. “Uncle Royce, Daddy never wrote to anybody. He signed checks. That was it.”

Royce shook his head. “Fifty years, I never got so much as a Christmas card from my brother.”

“Then where did it go?” Vera asked.

“Rita says she knows,” I said. “But she’ll only tell it with Royce in the room. Tomorrow morning.”

Vera’s mouth went tight. “That’s exactly why he shouldn’t go.”

Royce put his hat back on. He pulled it down low, the way he does before he gets on a horse he doesn’t trust.

“I’m going,” he said.

Cole came out the side door just then. He’d been watching us through the glass.

“I heard the last part,” he said. “I’ll put you on the visitor list, Royce. Eight o’clock.”

“And this time I’m sitting in the room,” Cole said. “Not outside the glass. Inside.”

Nobody argued with that.

The Longest Night at June’s Table

We ended up at June’s again. I don’t think any of us wanted to be alone that night.

June put a pot of beans on the stove and didn’t ask a single question until we’d all eaten something.

Then she wiped her hands on her dish towel and sat down across from Royce.

“Tell me,” she said.

So I told it all again. This time it came out a little easier. Not much.

When I got to the part about Mama standing on Rita’s porch at nine o’clock at night, June closed her eyes.

“That sounds like Caroline,” she said quietly. “She never once in her life knocked on a door she was scared of. She just stood there till it opened.”

Annie sat by the window with her hands in her lap. She hadn’t said a word since we came in.

“Annie,” I said. “Did you ever hear about any of this? Mama going to Clay’s that night?”

Annie shook her head slowly.

“Nobody told me anything back then,” she said. “But I’ll tell you one thing about my sister. Rita never throws away anything she thinks she can use.”

“If she says she knows where that envelope went, she knows.”

Royce was turning his coffee cup around and around on the table.

“I left in the eighties,” he said. “Clay stayed. He ran Daddy’s business, and I trained horses on my own little place. We barely spoke.”

“If he wanted to reach me, he knew how. He had every address I ever had. Why would he hand a letter to a scared young woman in the middle of the night?”

Nobody had an answer for that.

Vera looked down at her hands. “Because he couldn’t mail it,” she said. “Daddy always said the Kettering office read every envelope that came through.”

“He didn’t trust his own mail,” Royce said slowly. “Lord. That sounds just like him.”

June got up and put another log in the stove.

“Then Caroline was carrying something Clay was afraid to send,” she said. “Sit with that a minute before you go to bed.”

I did sit with it. All night.

Around midnight I went out to the barn. Willow was dozing on three legs. She woke up and pushed her nose into my coat pocket looking for a peppermint.

I gave her two. I figured one of us should get something sweet out of this week.

Royce Across the Table

In the morning, the three of us drove to town again. Royce drove. Vera rode in the middle. June stayed home by the phone.

Royce had shaved so close he’d nicked his chin. He was wearing his good hat. The one he wears to church and funerals.

Cole met us at the side door. This time he didn’t have a folder under his arm.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “Same as yesterday. I’ll be at the wall by the door.”

Vera stayed in the truck again. She squeezed my hand so hard it hurt before I got out.

The visiting room looked exactly the same. The bolted table. The two plastic chairs. The clock in its little cage.

Somebody had brought in a third chair. It didn’t match.

Rita was already sitting there. Her silver hair was brushed flat this time. She’d made an effort.

She watched Royce come through the door. For one second, the church smile came back.

“Royce Kettering,” she said. “You’ve still got your daddy’s hands.”

Royce sat down slowly. He laid those hands flat on the table where she could see them.

“I don’t want one thing of my daddy’s,” he said. “I came for what my brother wrote me.”

Rita studied him for a long moment. Then she looked over at Cole by the wall.

“Sheriff, you’re going to write down that I helped,” she said. “Today. In your report.”

“I’m going to write down exactly what you do,” Cole said. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

Rita almost laughed. “Fair enough. You always were the honest one.”

Then she turned back to Royce. And for the first time since I’d met her, she didn’t look amused at all.

“Your brother was a hard man,” she said. “But he wasn’t the hardest man in this county. Remember that when you read it.”

I felt Royce go very still beside me.

The Front Seat of Rita’s Car

“Caroline got back in my car with that envelope in both hands,” Rita said. “Like it was a baby bird.”

“I asked her what Clay said. She told me it wasn’t for me. It was for Royce, hand to hand. Not the mail.”

“Clay told her that. Not the mail.”

Royce’s jaw moved. He didn’t say anything.

“I pulled out of the end of Clay’s lane with my lights still off,” Rita said. “I didn’t turn them on till the county road.”

“About a mile on, a pickup came up behind us. Fast. Brights on. Right on my bumper.”

I hadn’t expected that. I don’t think Cole had either. He took one step off the wall.

“Whose truck?” Cole asked.

“I couldn’t see,” Rita said. “Brights in my mirror the whole way. I only know your mother didn’t breathe for about two miles.”

“She shoved that envelope under my seat. Way back, under the springs. Then she sat on her hands.”

“The truck turned off before Ruth’s lane. Just like that. Gone.”

“I dropped her at the mailbox. She got out without a word. She never asked for the envelope back.”

Rita looked down at her bitten nails.

“I think she meant to come get it in the morning,” she said. “Where nobody could see.”

The clock ticked behind the cage. Nobody in the room said a thing.

“The next afternoon, I heard,” Rita said. “Everybody in town heard by suppertime.”

“I went out to my car and got down on my knees in the gravel and reached under that seat. It was still there.”

“What did you do with it?” Royce asked. His voice was barely a whisper.

“I took it back to Clay,” Rita said. “That same night. I didn’t want it in my car one more hour.”

“He opened the door and saw what was in my hand. And I never saw a man go gray that fast.”

“He took it from me. He didn’t open it. He walked over to the shelf above his rolltop desk and took down his Bible.”

“He put it in the back. Behind the last page. Then he said, ‘That stays shut till Roy comes home.'”

Royce made a sound I’ll never forget. Like somebody had let all the air out of him at once.

“Clay’s house,” I said slowly. “Where Vera lives now. That’s where it went?”

“That’s where it went,” Rita said.

I leaned forward. “You cleaned out that house when Clay died. You found Mama’s letter in that same Bible. You took it.”

“I took hers,” Rita said. “I left his.”

“Why?”

“Because it had his name on it, honey. Not mine.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m a lot of things. I don’t open a dead man’s letter to his brother.”

“And because I was scared of what was inside it. I still am.”

Cole spoke from the door. “Time.”

Rita stood up. This time she looked at Royce, not at me.

“Read it sitting down,” she said. “That’s all the advice I’ve got.”

The Back Cover of Clay’s Bible

Vera was out of the truck before we even reached it.

“Well?” she said.

I told her as fast as I could. The pickup with its brights on. The envelope under the seat. The shelf over the rolltop desk.

Vera’s face went white, then pink, then white again.

“Daddy’s Bible,” she said. “It’s been sitting on that shelf my whole life.”

“I dust it every Sunday. He told me there were things in the back that belonged to other people. I never once opened the back cover.”

Cole followed us out in his own truck. He said he wasn’t letting anything out of his sight this time.

The drive out to Clay’s place took twenty minutes. It felt like two hours.

The old oak was dropping leaves all over the porch. Vera unlocked the door with shaking hands.

The kitchen smelled like woodsmoke and coffee, same as always. The rolltop desk sat in the corner where it’s always been.

The Bible was right there on the shelf above it. Black leather, cracked down the spine, with a faded ribbon hanging out the bottom.

Vera lifted it down with both hands, like Rita said Mama held that envelope. She set it on the kitchen table in front of Royce.

Royce didn’t touch it at first. He just looked at it.

“That was our mother’s,” he said. “I haven’t laid eyes on it since the day I left home.”

He opened the back cover.

It was there.

A long envelope, gone yellow at the edges, with a brown coffee ring on one corner. Sealed. And across the front, in a heavy, slanted hand, one word.

Royce.

Royce sat down. Just like Rita said to.

He slid his pocketknife under the flap so carefully it barely made a sound. Inside were two pages, folded in thirds.

He read the first page silently. His lips moved a little. I watched his eyes go back to the top and start over.

Then he turned to the second page. And I watched every bit of color leave his face.

“Royce?” I said.

He didn’t answer me. He looked up at Cole.

“Sheriff,” he said. “Clay wrote this the night before Caroline died.”

“He’s telling me who he was afraid of. Who he thought would come for her if she ever crossed the Ketterings.”

My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it.

“Rita?” I whispered.

Royce shook his head slowly. He laid the page flat on the table and put his hand over it.

“No, sweetheart,” he said. “Not Rita.”

So now I’m asking you. Who was driving that pickup with its brights on, right behind Mama, the night before she died?

Was Rita finally telling the truth, or did she just send us exactly where she wanted us to go?

And whose name did Clay Kettering write on that second page?

Next Part: Lana’s Story Part 38 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss it.