Lana’s Story Part 26: Twelve Miles With Rita Lane

Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 25 here to catch up on Royce’s still-warm truck, the 5:31 call to Rita’s cell, the truck-stop clerk who saw a small woman’s hand, and the torn locksmith page Sheriff Cole Pruitt found in the glovebox.

Last time, we found Royce’s old blue Chevy parked by the barn with the hood still warm, red truck-stop clay in the tires and the seat shoved all the way up. Somebody had used the farm phone to call Rita Lane at 5:31 this morning. Then Sheriff Cole Pruitt found page forty-one of Abel Haskins’ locksmith book hidden in the glovebox, signed R. Kettering in a hand that wasn’t Royce’s.

And June, standing at her own sink with a dish towel in her hands, finally told the truth.

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

Why June Signed Royce’s Name

Nobody moved. The coffee maker ticked. Out in the barn, Willow stamped once and went quiet, like even she was waiting.

Cole Pruitt pulled out a chair and held it for her. “Sit down before you fall down, Mrs. Whitaker.”

June sat. She folded her hands on the table, right beside the evidence sleeve, and she looked at Royce before she looked at anybody else.

“I’m sorry I used your name,” she said. “It was the only one that would work.”

“The last night Clay sat in this kitchen,” June said, “he gave me that post office box and the two hundred dollars. What I didn’t tell you is what he said at the door: ‘June, if Rita Lane ever comes back to this county, you get the blue folder out of my pantry wall before she does. Loose board behind the flour bin. Don’t read it. Just keep it.'”

“Two weeks ago,” I said slowly. “That’s when Rita’s truck was first seen at the feed store.”

June nodded. “Lois at the register called me. Said a woman with a Las Cruces sticker was asking about the Kettering place. I knew who it was before Lois finished the sentence.”

Clay’s house had been locked since the estate mess started, and Abel Haskins only cuts a Kettering key for a Kettering.

“Abel’s never laid eyes on you, Royce,” June said. “And his eyes aren’t what they were. I told him you were down at the motel with a bad back and sent me in your place. I signed your name the way I thought a man would sign it.” She looked down at the page and almost laughed. “Turns out I sign like a church secretary.”

“Did you tear that page out of his book?” Cole asked.

“No, sir.” Her chin came up. “I signed it, I took my key, and I went home. I never saw that page again until you walked in here with it.”

Which meant somebody else had torn it out. Somebody else had written Vera’s name on the page after it. And somebody else had folded page forty-one into Royce’s glovebox, so that if anybody ever went looking, they’d find a Kettering signature in a Kettering truck.

First Vera. Now Royce. Somebody was framing us one at a time.

The Text at 5:28

“Now tell us about this morning,” Cole said.

“I did go to the henhouse,” she said. “That part was true. I took the egg basket and went out the back door at about twenty-five after five. And when I came back in for my gloves, the farm phone lit up on the charger.”

A text. From a New Mexico number.

I know what you took out of Clay’s pantry, June. Red dirt behind the truck stop. Twenty minutes. Or I tell Vera what’s in that folder.

“I called her back,” June said. “Forty-eight seconds, you said? It felt longer. She laughed at me. And then she said, ‘Bring Royce’s truck. I want them all to know who came for me.'”

Royce closed his eyes.

“My Buick’s had a dead battery since Tuesday,” June went on. “Your keys were right there on Hank’s hook. Hank’s old ball cap was on the hook beside them. His barn coat was by the door. I pulled the seat up as far as it would go, and I drove.”

“You erased her text,” Nadine said quietly from the counter.

“I did. I didn’t know the phone keeps a list of calls.” June looked at me. “I’m seventy-six years old, Lana. I barely know how to make the thing ring.”

“And the four-oh-two text?” I asked. “The one to Annie?”

June looked straight at me, and I knew that look. It’s the one she gave me at ten, when I swore I hadn’t left the pasture gate open.

“I never sent that,” she said. “I never even saw it. When I picked up that phone at five-thirty, there wasn’t a thing on it but Rita.”

So somebody had sent the 4:02 text and deleted it before June ever touched that phone.

Royce finally spoke. His voice came out rough. “You could have asked me, June. I’d have driven you myself.”

“I know you would have,” she said. “That’s exactly why I didn’t. She wanted you seen, Royce. I wasn’t about to hand her that.”

Twelve Miles With Rita Lane

“What did she say to you?” Vera asked from the doorway. “In the truck. Every word.”

Annie stood behind her, one hand on the doorframe. She hadn’t come any closer.

June took a long breath.

“She was standing at the edge of that red dirt in a gray sweatshirt with her hair cut short as a boy’s. She climbed in like she’d been riding in that truck her whole life. She said, ‘You always were the smart one, June.’ And then she didn’t say another word for three miles.”

“Where did you take her?” Cole asked.

“She told me to drive out to the grain elevator at the county road crossing. There was a dark car sitting there with its lights off. I couldn’t see who was in it.” June swallowed. “Before she got out, she said three things.”

“She said, ‘I didn’t send for Annie. I was sitting in a cell at four in the morning, June. Somebody in your house did that.'”

Nadine’s pen stopped moving.

“Then she said, ‘Somebody in that house has been sending me every page you find before the ink is dry. How do you think I knew about the lockbox before Abel ever opened it?'”

Royce swore under his breath. Cole wrote it down.

“And the third thing?” I asked.

June looked past me, at the woman in the doorway.

“She said, ‘Tell my baby sister she still can’t lie to me. She never could.'”

Annie’s hand slid off the doorframe. Vera turned around and looked at her mother, and for one second I saw something cross Annie’s face that I couldn’t name. Then it was gone, and she just looked tired.

“Rita says that about everybody,” Annie said. “That’s how she gets inside your head.”

Vera didn’t answer her. She walked back out to the porch, and after a moment, Annie followed.

What Was Hidden in the Henhouse

“Where’s the folder now, June?” Cole asked.

“Where nobody would ever think to look,” she said, and pushed herself up from the table.

We followed her across the yard, me and Cole and Royce. June walked straight into the henhouse, shooed out two complaining Buff Orpingtons, and reached into the third nesting box from the left.

Under the straw, under an old plastic feed sack, was a faded blue folder with a rubber band around it gone stiff with age.

“Two weeks it’s been sitting under these hens,” June said. “I never read it. I promised him.”

She held it out to me.

I didn’t take it right away. I looked at her instead, standing there in Hank’s old barn coat with straw stuck to her sleeves and her eyes red. June Whitaker isn’t my grandmother by blood. My own grandma has been gone a while now. But June taught me to wrap a horse’s leg and sat up with me the night Willow colicked. She’s the only grandmother I have left.

“You should’ve told me,” I said.

“I know, honey.”

I put my arms around her. She smelled like coffee and chicken feed and the lavender soap she’s used my whole life, and she held on to me so hard I could feel her shaking.

Then I opened the folder.

It wasn’t much. A dozen photocopies of county land files, each one stamped Pulled with a date. Every date fell a week or two before one of Rita’s forged papers turned up. And clipped to the front was a single page in Clay’s square handwriting:

Rita isn’t doing this alone. Somebody inside Land Records pulls the files for her and copies everything first. Whoever it is, they’re patient. If they ever get near the lockbox, it’s already too late.

Royce read it over my shoulder. Then he looked at me, and I knew we were both thinking the same name.

The only person in our kitchen who worked in Land Records.

The one who had photographed every single page we’d found.

The Laptop on the Counter

We came back through the mudroom fast. The kitchen was empty.

Nadine’s cardigan was gone from the back of her chair. Her car keys were gone from the hook by the door. But her laptop was still sitting open on June’s counter, the screen dimmed, the fan humming like she’d only just walked away from it.

I touched the trackpad. It woke right up.

Her email was still open. I clicked on Sent.

There they were. Three messages from this morning, right where she’d told Cole they’d be. 5:22. 5:40. 5:57. Every one of them stuffed with photographs of Clay’s papers. The notarized letter. The amendment. The Christmas card from Silver City.

Nadine had told us she was sending them to herself, in case the house burned down.

She hadn’t sent them to herself.

Cole leaned over my shoulder and read the name in the To line out loud, slowly, like he wanted to be sure he had it right.

“Annie Kettering.”

The first email had gone to Annie at 5:22 this morning. More than an hour before her white Ford ever pulled up at the end of our lane and she said “Hi, baby” like she was seeing her daughter for the first time in twenty-three years.

Before I could even breathe, Vera screamed my name from the front porch.

I ran. Royce was right behind me.

The porch swing was still rocking. Vera stood alone at the top of the steps with her hand pressed over her mouth. Down at the end of the lane, two cars were pulling away in the same cloud of dust: Nadine’s little gray sedan, and Annie’s white Ford with the New Mexico plates.

Tucked into the swing chain, right where Annie had been sitting, was a folded piece of paper.

Four words. Small, slanted handwriting. The same hand as the Christmas card.

Don’t trust June’s folder.

So now I’m asking you. Was Annie ever really the little sister Rita framed, or was Rita telling June the truth in that truck? Why would Nadine send every page we found to a woman who was supposed to be hiding in Silver City? And if not even Clay’s own folder can be trusted, who in this valley is still telling us the truth?

Part 27 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss what happens next.