Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 31 here to catch up on the eleven pages, Grandpa Hank’s barn coat, Rita’s blue folder, and the old accident report that made the sheriff go white.
Last time, Rita Lane counted the pages in the feed sack twice and came up one short.
She knew exactly where the missing two were. Pressed flat against my back, inside the torn lining of Grandpa Hank’s old barn coat.
Then she opened her own blue folder and held up a photocopy of a county accident report. The only report anybody ever wrote about the night Annie Kettering went into the creek.
Sheriff Cole Pruitt came running across the frozen pasture, following Willow’s hoofprints in the frost.
Rita told him to say whose name was signed at the bottom. He didn’t answer.
And Annie whispered the four words I still hear when I close my eyes.
“Cole. You promised me.”
You Promised Me
Nobody moved. Not Abel by the open gate, not June beside me with the flashlight, not even Willow.
The sun was just starting to come up behind the cottonwoods. It turned the frost pink, then gold, and it made all of us look like we were standing inside a photograph.
Cole’s headlights were still on behind him. His breath came out in big white clouds.
“Annie,” he said quietly. “I kept it.”
“I know you did,” she said. “That’s what scares me.”
I looked from one of them to the other. They weren’t talking like a sheriff and a stranger.
They were talking like two people who had shared a secret for a very long time.
“Somebody tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Right now.”
Rita smiled. She looked like she’d been waiting all night for somebody to ask that.
“Go ahead, Sheriff,” she said. “It’s your signature. It ought to be your story.”
Cole took his hand off his belt. For a second I thought he was going to walk straight back to his car and leave.
Instead, he looked at me. Not at Rita. At me.
“I was twenty-four years old, Lana,” he said. “I’d been a deputy for about a year and a half.”
Twenty-Three Years Ago at the Creek Crossing
He told it slowly, like every word cost him something.
The call came in a little after one in the morning, in the middle of a cold February. A car off the county road at the creek crossing.
He was the only deputy on nights back then. So he went.
“Water was up near the windows,” Cole said. “Headlights still on under the surface. You could see them glowing green.”
June made a small sound beside me. I don’t think she even knew she’d done it.
“I climbed down that bank with a flashlight in my teeth,” he said. “I’d never been so cold in my life.”
“The driver’s door was hanging open. The current had it swinging back and forth, real slow.”
“And nobody was inside,” Rita said softly. Like she was helping him remember.
Cole didn’t look at her. “When I climbed back up, Clay Kettering was standing at the top of the bank. Waiting for me.”
His truck was parked on the shoulder with the lights off. And in the passenger seat, wrapped in a horse blanket, was Annie.
Alive. Soaking wet. Shaking so hard her teeth were clicking.
“She looked right at me through that truck window,” Cole said. “I’ll never forget it. She looked at me like I was the one holding the rope.”
“You were,” Annie said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it.
June’s flashlight beam had drifted down to her boots. She didn’t bother to lift it back up.
I turned and looked at Annie. She was staring at the frozen grass like she could see that night right there in it.
“Clay didn’t say hello. He didn’t explain. He just said, ‘Cole, you’ve known me since you were in diapers.'”
“Then he asked me for one thing,” Cole said. “He asked me to write down that nobody came back up.”
“And you did,” I said.
“I did.” His voice cracked on it. “I wrote driver not recovered, and I signed my name under it.”
“And I told myself I was saving a life instead of ending a career.”
Annie finally spoke. “He made me a promise in that truck,” she said. “That he’d never tell a soul I was alive.”
“And that he’d keep Rita away from my baby for as long as he wore a badge.”
So that was it. That was the promise.
I thought about every time Cole had shown up at the worst possible moment. The fence line. June’s kitchen at two in the morning. The end of our lane, all night long.
I’d always wondered why a county sheriff cared so much about one small family farm.
The same sheriff who’d been sitting at the end of June’s lane all night, watching over us. He’d been keeping that promise for twenty-three years.
The Report Nobody Could Find
Something didn’t add up, and I couldn’t let it go.
“Nadine checked,” I said. “That night at June’s table, she searched the records in four counties.”
“There was no accident report with Annie’s name on it. Not one.”
“That’s because I never filed it,” Cole said.
Everybody looked at him.
“Clay told the whole county Annie was gone. Folks brought casseroles to his door for a month,” he said.
“Nobody ever asked to see a piece of paper. So I put it in my bottom desk drawer and I locked it.”
“For twenty-three years,” June said.
“For twenty-three years.”
Then I remembered what he’d told us in June’s kitchen, the night he brought Clay’s quitclaim. That he’d kept quiet because Rita had something on his late brother.
“You said Rita had something on your brother,” I said.
“She did.” Cole rubbed his face with both hands. “That was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.”
“So how does she have a copy?” I asked. “If it was locked in your desk?”
Cole turned his head. Very slowly. And looked at Abel Haskins.
Abel was still standing by the gate with his hands half up. The little brass key was still between his fingers.
“Wafer lock,” Abel said with a shrug. “Cheap county furniture. Took me about four seconds.”
“You broke into my office,” Cole said.
“I opened a drawer, Cole. I’ve been opening drawers in this county for thirty years.”
Abel’s eyes flicked toward Rita, then away. “And she wasn’t the first one who ever asked me to open that one.”
Cole went very still. “Who was?”
But Abel just pressed his lips together and looked at the ground.
And I knew, the way you know a storm is coming, that we’d be hearing that answer later. At the worst possible time.
Annie’s Choice
Rita clapped her gloved hands together, one soft little clap. Like a teacher calling the class back to order.
“Lovely,” she said. “Now everybody knows the sheriff’s little secret. Which means you all understand what this paper is worth.”
She held out her hand toward me across the gate. “Clay’s note and the twelfth page, honey. Then I drive away and you never see me again.”
I thought about Vera, still asleep in June’s spare room under the quilt with the blue stars on it.
I thought about her hand next to Annie’s on the porch swing. Same long fingers. Same crooked pinky.
My hand went to the top button of Hank’s coat. I didn’t even decide to do it. It just went there.
June didn’t say a word this time. She just put her hand over mine and held it there.
Her fingers were ice cold, but they didn’t shake. Not one bit.
Then Annie stepped up to the gate.
She was so close to her sister that their breath mixed in the cold air.
I’d never noticed how alike they were until that second. Same jaw. Same way of standing with their weight on one hip.
“Go ahead,” Annie said.
Rita blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Drive to the feed store. Show everybody. Hang it on the bulletin board next to the hay ads, for all I care.”
“Annie,” Cole said. “Don’t.”
“I’m done, Cole.” Annie never took her eyes off Rita. “Twenty-three years I let her hold that night over my head.”
“I’m going home to June’s table and I’m telling my daughter myself. Today. Every word of it.”
I have never seen anyone’s face change as fast as Rita’s did right then.
The warm church smile didn’t fall off. It just froze in place, like the frost on the fence wire.
Because Annie had just taken away the only thing Rita had. You can’t threaten to tell a secret that somebody is about to tell on their own.
“You’d really do that,” Rita said. “To her.”
“I’d do it for her,” Annie said.
For a long moment the only sound was the creek running under the ice and Willow chewing her bit.
Then Rita laughed. Quietly, this time. And it was so much worse than the loud laugh.
“Oh, baby sister,” she said. “You’re going to tell her the brave version. The one where Clay was a hero and you were so scared and the deputy was so kind.”
She tapped the folder against the top rail of the gate. Once. Twice.
“Ask Cole what was in the back seat.”
Page Two
Cole’s jaw tightened. “The car was empty when I got down there, Rita.”
“When you got down there,” Rita repeated. She said it slowly, like she was tasting every word.
I looked at Cole. He wouldn’t look back at me.
That was when we heard the second engine.
It came rattling down the field road behind Cole’s car, loud and familiar. An old blue Chevy with a dent in the tailgate shaped like a horseshoe.
Royce.
He must have woken up, found our beds empty, and followed the same dark hoofprints Cole did. Straight across the creek field.
My heart sank straight into my boots. Because Royce wasn’t alone.
The passenger door flew open before the truck even stopped. Vera climbed out in one of June’s old sweaters, her hair still flat on one side from the pillow.
“I woke up and the whole house was empty,” she said, out of breath. “Willow was gone. Cole’s car was gone.”
“What is everybody doing out here?”
Then she saw Annie. Then she saw Rita. And she stopped walking.
“Vera, honey,” June said. “Go back to the truck.”
Vera didn’t go back to the truck.
Rita slid a second page out of her blue folder. Not the accident report.
Something else. Older paper, soft at the folds, with handwriting on it instead of typing.
She held it out across the gate. Not to me. To Vera.
“Page two, baby,” Rita said gently. “It’s about you. I think you’ve waited long enough.”
“Don’t touch it,” Annie said. Her voice broke right down the middle. “Vera, please. Let me tell you first.”
But Vera had spent twenty-three years being told things. She reached over the gate and took the page.
Royce came around the front of the truck and stopped beside me. He looked at Rita, then at the folder, then at me.
“Lana,” he said under his breath. “What did I just drive her into?”
I didn’t have an answer for him.
She read it in the glow of Cole’s headlights. I watched her eyes move down the paper, line by line.
Halfway down, her hand started to shake.
When she got to the bottom, she didn’t look at Annie. She didn’t look at Rita.
She looked straight at Cole Pruitt.
“This is your handwriting,” she whispered. “It says you went into the water for a little girl. It says you pulled her out of the back seat.”
Cole closed his eyes.
“Vera,” Annie said. “That’s not what happened.”
And for the very first time since I’d met him, Sheriff Cole Pruitt looked at Annie like he didn’t believe her either.
So now I’m asking you. Was Vera really in that car the night it went into the creek?
Did Cole lie to all of us at the gate this morning, or is Annie the one still hiding something?
And who asked Abel Haskins to open that desk drawer before Rita ever did?
Next Part: Read Lana’s Story Part 33 here. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss it.
