Lana’s Story Part 30: The Last Picture on the Card

Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 29 here to catch up on what Sheriff Cole Pruitt hid in his glovebox, where he really was nine days ago, the pictures on the hayloft memory card, and the red cardinal key chain on the courthouse door.

Last time, Cole finally opened his hand and gave me the tiny memory card he’d hidden in his jacket. On Vera’s laptop, at June’s kitchen table, we watched our whole life go by, one hayloft picture at a time, until the pictures turned into the back lot of the county courthouse nine days ago. Rita Lane was standing in Land Records stamping the twelfth page Pulled. And the hand holding the back door open for her had Annie’s red cardinal key chain hanging from it.

Then the dogs found Annie’s white Ford empty in the creek bottom, and my phone buzzed with a text from Annie’s number. I know you have the card. The picture after the door is the one that matters. Please don’t let Cole see it. Come to the Kettering east pasture gate before sunrise. Come alone, and bring the blue folder.

There was one picture left on that card. I hadn’t opened it. And across the table, Sheriff Cole Pruitt was already standing up, reaching for the screen.

Before Cole Could Touch It

I didn’t think. I just shut the laptop.

The lid came down so fast Cole had to pull his fingers back. Before anybody could say a word, I pressed the side of the machine, the little card popped out into my palm, and I closed my fist around it.

“Lana,” Cole said. Not angry. Just tired, the way a man sounds when he’s been awake for two days and has just watched the last door in front of him swing shut.

“I’m going to look at it,” I said. “I’m just not going to look at it with you. Not tonight.”

“That card is evidence.”

June stood up beside me and slid her hand into the pocket of her egg-basket apron, palm open, waiting. I put the card in it. She buttoned the pocket shut.

“Then it’s evidence in my apron,” she said. “And you know exactly where to find me, Cole Pruitt. I’ve been in this kitchen longer than you’ve been wearing that badge.”

For a second I thought he was going to argue. Royce shifted his weight behind Vera’s chair. Vera was staring at my phone on the table like it might bite her. She’d seen the screen light up. She’d seen whose name was on it.

Cole looked at June for a long moment. Then he picked his hat up off the counter.

“I’ll be parked at the end of the lane,” he said. “All night. If anybody so much as turns a porch light on out there, you call me.” He stopped in the doorway without turning around. “I’d have hidden it from me too, Lana. After today.”

The screen door clapped shut behind him, and I hated how much that made me want to run after him.

The Last Picture

We waited until Vera and Royce went upstairs. Vera didn’t ask me about the text. She just touched my arm on her way past, and I could feel her hand shaking.

June put the card back in, and we sat shoulder to shoulder at the end of the table with one lamp on, the way she’d promised.

The last picture had been taken from the same spot as the others, across the courthouse back lot, through a long lens. It was a minute after the door picture, 11:15 PM. Under the orange lights, Cole’s unmarked car was idling by the curb. Rita Lane was halfway into the passenger seat with a folder pressed to her chest.

And the dome light was on, so you could see the driver’s face as clear as day.

It wasn’t Deke.

It was Abel Haskins. The locksmith. The man who had sat hunched in a corner turning his key ring over and over in his big hands, telling Cole what a hell of a thing it was to carry alone.

June put her fingers over her mouth.

“Cole said there were only two keys to that car,” I whispered. “His and Deke’s.”

“Abel Haskins has cut every key in this county for thirty years,” June said. “Including mine.” She didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “If he wanted a third key to that car, there’d be a third key.”

I finally understood why Annie didn’t want Cole to see it. Cole trusted that man. He’d have driven straight to Abel’s shop in the dark to ask him about it, man to man. And whoever Abel called before Cole made it back to his car, that would be the end of it.

June pulled the card out, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and buttoned it back into her apron.

“You’re going to that gate,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“She said to come alone.”

“She also held a door for Rita Lane.” June stood up and put the kettle on. “You’re going. And I’m going with you. We’ll figure out the alone part on the way.”

What I Left Out of the Blue Folder

We didn’t sleep. I don’t think either of us even tried.

At three in the morning, June set Clay’s old blue folder on the table between us and opened it. Twelve pages, twelve red stamps. The parcel map of our farm with the henhouse marked in pencil. Clay’s note, in his careful hand, with the crossed sevens Vera swore nobody could fake.

“Annie asked for the folder,” I said. “She didn’t say she needed all of it.”

June almost smiled.

We took out Clay’s note and the twelfth page, the one Rita had stamped nine days ago. The one that proved somebody had planted it. June went to the hall closet and came back with Grandpa Hank’s barn coat. There was a tear in the lining near the hem that she’d been meaning to sew up for eleven years. She slid the two pages inside it, flat against the back, and held the coat open for me.

“If anybody wants those,” she said, “they’ll have to take your grandfather’s coat off you first.”

The rest of the folder went into an old feed sack under my arm. Eleven pages that told the truth about the past, and not one page that could hurt anybody this morning.

The only problem was Cole. His headlights were off, but we could see the shape of his car sitting at the end of the lane, right where he’d said it would be. There was no way to get a truck past him.

So I went out to the barn and saddled Willow in the dark.

She knew something was wrong. She kept turning her head to blow warm air on my hands while I did up the girth. When I led her out the back gate, June was already waiting there in her own barn coat and rubber boots, with Hank’s big silver flashlight in one hand.

“I haven’t been on a horse in nine years,” she said. “Don’t you dare let her trot.”

I gave her a leg up behind the saddle, and we rode out across the creek field without a single light, with my grandmother’s arms wrapped tight around my waist.

The East Pasture Gate

The Kettering east pasture is a mile and a half from our back fence if you cut along the creek. Fog was lying low in the hollows, and frost had silvered every blade of grass, so Willow left dark hoofprints behind us like a trail of ink.

We stopped in the cottonwoods a hundred yards from the gate. June slid down, stiff and shivering, and took Willow’s reins.

“Right here,” she said. “Where I can see you. You holler, and I’m coming, nine years or not.”

The sky was just going gray when I walked up to the gate with the feed sack. For a long minute there was nobody.

Then Annie stepped out from behind the old loading chute.

She looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. She was wearing a man’s flannel jacket two sizes too big, and her hands were red from the cold. The ring of keys with the little red cardinal was hooked on her finger, and she was turning it over and over, just like Abel did.

“You looked at it,” she said.

“I looked at it. Cole didn’t.”

She closed her eyes for a second, and her shoulders came down about an inch. “Thank you.”

“Why did you hold that door, Annie?”

She looked past me, toward the dark line of our farm. “Because Rita Lane knows what really happened on the county road the night everybody thinks I died. She told me if I didn’t hold that door, Vera would hear it from her. Not from me.” Her voice cracked. “I just got my daughter back, Lana. I couldn’t lose her again over a door.”

“Where are Nadine and Deke?”

“Somewhere Rita can’t find them. That’s all I’m allowed to say.” She held out her hand for the sack. “Rita’s expecting me to bring her that folder at seven. If the right pages are in it, Nadine’s boy is free, and so am I.”

I gave her the sack. She opened it and went through the pages fast, counting under her breath. Then she counted again, slower.

When she looked up at me, there was something in her face I couldn’t read. Not anger. Almost relief.

“June’s granddaughter, all right,” she said softly. “Clay would have done the exact same thing.”

Headlights on the County Road

That’s when we heard the engine.

It came from the county road behind the pasture, slow and low, with no headlights. A white van with a ladder rack on top rolled out of the fog and stopped on the gravel on the other side of the gate. I knew that van. Everybody in the county knew that van. It said Haskins Lock & Key on the side in red letters.

“He’s early,” Annie breathed. “Lana, he’s not supposed to be here until seven.”

Behind me, in the cottonwoods, a light snapped on. Hank’s big silver flashlight. June had pointed it straight at the van’s windshield, and in that white beam I could see Abel Haskins behind the wheel, squinting, one hand up against the glare.

Then the passenger door opened.

Rita Lane stepped down onto the gravel. Short silver hair. A long dark coat. A blue folder of her own tucked under her arm, the same faded blue as Clay’s.

She didn’t look at June’s light. She didn’t look at me. She looked straight at Annie, and she smiled like she was greeting an old friend at church.

“Morning, Annie,” she said. “You brought her. Just like we agreed.”

Annie didn’t say a word. She didn’t look at me either. And under Hank’s old barn coat, I could feel those two pages pressed flat against my back.

So now I’m asking you. Did Annie just set me up, or is she still trying to protect Vera the only way she knows how? What is in Rita’s own blue folder? And with June’s flashlight shining on that van, what do I do next?

Part 31 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss what happens next.