Lana’s Story Part 25: The Hood Was Still Warm

Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 24 here to catch up on Annie Kettering’s sunrise visit, the truth about Rita and her younger sister, the text sent from a phone inside June’s house, and the blue Chevy that picked Rita up at the truck stop.

Last time, the woman everyone said died twenty-three years ago drove up our lane at sunrise and said “Hi, baby” to Vera. Annie Kettering told us Rita Lane is her older sister, the forger who framed her and ran her out of the county. She bailed Rita out because of a text sent at 4:02 this morning from the farm phone on the charger by June’s back door.

Then Annie told us who picked Rita up at the truck stop. An older blue Chevy. Farm plates. A dent in the tailgate shaped like a horseshoe.

Parked out by our barn, right where it sits every morning, was Royce’s old blue Chevy.

The Hood Was Still Warm

Nobody said a word. We just walked. All of us, out June’s back door and across the wet yard in a line, like a funeral nobody had planned.

Royce went first. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t hang back. He walked straight to his own truck the way a man walks to a witness stand, with his hat in his hand and his jaw set.

“I haven’t moved this truck since Tuesday,” he said. “I want that on the record before anybody touches it.”

“Then you won’t mind if I do,” I said.

He stepped aside.

I laid my palm flat on the hood. It was still warm. Not hot. But warm in a way that cold October steel doesn’t get on its own at seven in the morning with frost still sitting in the shade of the barn.

Vera put her hand next to mine. She felt it too. She pulled her hand back like the metal had bitten her.

I walked around to the tires. Red clay was packed into the treads, the sticky orange kind that doesn’t exist anywhere on our place. Our dirt is black and our gravel is gray. The only red clay within twenty miles is the new lot they’re grading behind the truck stop on the highway.

Annie came up behind me and looked at the tires for a long time.

“That’s where I dropped her,” she said quietly. “Right at the edge of that red dirt.”

I opened the driver’s door. The bench seat was pushed all the way forward, so far up that the steering wheel almost touched it. Royce Kettering is six foot three. He drives with that seat shoved so far back he has to reach for the pedals.

“I couldn’t drive it like that if you paid me,” Royce said, and for the first time his voice cracked. “Lana. Look at me. Somebody small drove my truck this morning.”

The Hook by the Back Door

We went back inside.

I stopped at the back door and made myself see it like a stranger would. The farm phone on its charger. The muddy boot mat. And right above the charger, the little row of brass hooks Hank screwed into the doorframe thirty years ago, where everybody who lives or works on this farm hangs their keys.

June’s keys. The tractor key. The barn padlock key. And Royce’s truck key on a strip of worn leather.

The phone and the truck key, eight inches apart.

“Whoever picked up that phone could pick up that key without taking a single extra step,” Nadine said. She’d seen it too.

I unplugged the farm phone and opened the messages. The 4:02 text to Annie was gone. Deleted. But whoever erased it hadn’t thought about the call log.

At 5:31 this morning, somebody had used this phone to call a number with a New Mexico area code. Forty-eight seconds.

Annie leaned over my shoulder. Her face went white under the tan.

“That’s Rita’s cell,” she said. “They hand you your property back when you walk out of that jail. She’d have had it in her hand by five-thirty.”

So somebody in this house called Rita Lane four minutes after she walked out the side door of the county jail. Forty-eight seconds. Long enough to say I’m coming. Wait by the red dirt.

I turned around and looked at the people in June’s kitchen. My people. The ones I’d have sworn on Willow’s life I could trust.

“Where was everybody at five-thirty?” I asked.

Cole Pruitt Comes Back

Sheriff Cole Pruitt asked the same question twenty minutes later, standing in the same kitchen, with the same tired eyes.

He’d driven out the second I called him about the truck. He didn’t sit down this time. He stood by the stove with a small notebook and wrote down every answer like he was going to read it back to us in court.

Royce said he went out to the barn at about five-thirty because Willow was kicking her stall. He was out there maybe twenty minutes, calming her down. He left his keys on the hook. He always does.

June said she went to the henhouse for eggs. “Because somebody in this house has to think about breakfast,” she said, and her voice was sharp in a way I’ve only heard a few times in my whole life.

Nadine said she was on the front porch trying to get enough signal to send the photographs of Clay’s papers to her own email, “in case the house burned down.” She showed Cole the timestamps. 5:22. 5:40. 5:57.

Vera said she was on the kitchen floor. Then she said, “Except when I went to wash my face.” Then she said, “Five minutes. Maybe less.” Then she stopped talking.

And me? I was sitting on that floor beside her the whole time. Except I wasn’t. Because when Vera got up to wash her face, I went out to the porch to breathe. I don’t remember looking at the hooks by the back door.

Cole closed his notebook.

“I talked to the night clerk at the truck stop,” he said. “Kid named Dustin. He remembers the blue Chevy because of the dent. He says the driver never got out. Just leaned over and opened the passenger door for a woman with short silver hair. He says the driver had on a ball cap and a barn coat.”

Every single one of us owns a barn coat. There are four of them hanging on the hooks in June’s mudroom right now.

“Did he see a face?” Royce asked.

“No,” Cole said. “He saw a hand on the door. Says it was a small hand. A woman’s hand.”

Mother and Daughter on the Porch

Cole asked to search the truck. Royce told him to tear it apart if he had to. While Cole went out with a flashlight and a pair of gloves, I found Vera and Annie on the front porch.

They weren’t talking. They were sitting on opposite ends of June’s porch swing, about three feet of chain and cedar between them, both staring out at the paddock where Willow was finally standing quiet in the sun.

I almost went back inside. Then Vera spoke, and I stayed in the doorway.

“Did he ever visit you?” she asked without looking at Annie. “Daddy. In Silver City.”

“Twice a year,” Annie said. “He’d tell everybody he was going to a horse sale in Amarillo. He’d bring me pictures. You on your first pony. You in a Christmas play dressed as a sheep, crying because the costume itched.” She laughed, and it came out wet. “He told me you bit a boy at church once for calling your horse ugly.”

“He was ugly,” Vera said. “But he was mine.”

Annie smiled. Vera didn’t. But she didn’t get up either.

“I don’t know you,” Vera said. “I want you to understand that. I don’t know you, and I’m so angry I can’t feel my hands.”

“I know, baby.”

“Don’t call me that yet.”

“Okay,” Annie whispered. “Okay.”

Vera slid six inches closer on the swing. Just six. Then she put her left hand on the cedar slat between them, palm down, crooked pinky and all. After a long time, Annie put her hand next to it. They didn’t touch. They just sat there with their hands side by side, the same long fingers, the same crooked pinky, two people looking at proof they couldn’t argue with.

I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and went back inside before either of them saw me.

What Was in the Glovebox

Cole came in from the yard with something in a clear plastic evidence sleeve. He set it on June’s table, right next to Clay’s lockbox, and nobody breathed.

It was a single page, torn out of a ledger. Narrow blue lines. Yellowed edges. The ragged left side still had little paper teeth where it had been ripped from its binding.

“Found it folded up inside the owner’s manual in the glovebox,” Cole said. “Royce, you ever seen this before?”

Royce leaned over it. “Never in my life.”

Nadine grabbed her phone and called Abel Haskins on speaker. When Cole described the page, the old locksmith went quiet for so long I thought the call dropped.

“That’s mine,” Abel finally said. “That’s page forty-one out of my sign-out book. I noticed it gone the day after I showed you girls the log. Thought it got wet and fell out in the van. I never told nobody because I was ashamed.”

Page forty-one. The real page. The one somebody tore out before they wrote Vera’s name in a fake hand on the page after it.

I read the entry from two weeks ago. Date. Time. Kettering spare, house key, front door. And in the signature column, in faded blue ink:

R. Kettering.

Every head turned toward Royce.

He didn’t flinch. He picked up a pen from June’s counter, pulled a feed store receipt out of his shirt pocket, and signed his name on the back of it in big square letters that leaned hard to the right. Then he laid it beside the page.

The R on the ledger was small and round. It leaned left. It looked nothing like his.

“That’s my name,” Royce said. “But that is not my hand. And I’ll stand in front of any judge in this state and say so.”

“Rita,” Vera said from the doorway. Annie was behind her. “Rita practiced everybody’s hand. She said it herself.”

“Rita hasn’t been within fifty feet of my truck,” Royce said. “Somebody in this house put that page there.”

That was when I noticed June.

She hadn’t said a word since Cole walked in with the evidence sleeve. She was standing at the sink with her back to all of us, and she was wiping her hands on a dish towel. Slowly. Over and over. The way she always does when she’s deciding whether to tell the truth.

“June,” I said.

She set the towel down and turned around. Her eyes were dry. Her hands were not steady.

“It’s not Rita’s hand, Lana,” my grandmother said. “It’s mine. I signed that book two weeks ago. And I’m the one who drove Royce’s truck this morning.”

So now I’m asking you. Why would June, the woman who mailed Vera’s picture to Silver City every Christmas for eleven years, sign Royce’s name to get into Clay’s house? Did she really pick Rita up at that truck stop, and if she did, what did those two women say to each other on that drive? And if June has been keeping one secret this big, how many more are hidden in this kitchen?

Part 26 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss what happens next.