Lana’s Story Part 42: The Girl Who Tied the Red String

Just finding Lana’s story? Read Part 41 here to catch up on the four lines Clay wrote in Wade’s tally book and what Deke found hidden under the seat.

Last time, Royce finally read the four lines Clay wrote in Wade’s little tally book on the day my mother died.

It wasn’t Wade in that white Ford on Friday. It was Clay. He took Wade’s truck to get my mother out of the county before their daddy could get to her.

Cole told us the truth he’d carried for twenty years. He was the boy who signed the weigh tickets at the co-op scale.

Then Deke folded the bench seat forward and opened a hidden steel box. Inside was an envelope with one word on it, in my mother’s hand. “Lana.”

Out fell a brass key with a red string tag. “Box 14.” Nadine went dead still when she saw it.

And the very first line of the folded paper made Royce drop the flashlight in the gravel.

The First Line

The flashlight hit the gravel and rolled. The beam spun across the white Ford, the elevator, our boots, and then pointed off into the dark at nothing.

Deke picked it up. He didn’t shine it on Royce. He just held it low so the light fell on the paper in my hands.

Royce had gone down on one knee. Not like he fell. Like his legs had decided for him.

“Read it to me, sweetheart,” he said. “I saw it. But I need to hear it in somebody’s voice.”

So I read it out loud. My mother’s round, quick handwriting, leaning forward like it couldn’t wait.

“Lana, my baby. If Uncle Clay kept his promise, then your granddaddy is standing right next to you.”

Royce put his hand over his mouth.

Twenty-five years ago, my mother sat down and wrote a letter to a grown woman she’d never get to meet. And she knew exactly who would be standing beside her.

She didn’t write that Clay would be there. Or Ruth. Or Hank.

She wrote Royce. The father who left in the eighties and never came home in time.

“She knew I’d come,” Royce whispered. “How did she know I’d come, when I didn’t know it myself?”

Nobody had an answer for him. Nadine was crying without making a sound. Cole had his hat in his hands.

I knelt down in the gravel next to Royce. I didn’t plan it. It was just where I needed to be.

“There’s more,” I said. “Do you want me to keep going?”

“Every word,” he said. “Don’t you skip a single one for my sake.”

What My Mother Wrote

“I’m writing this at Uncle Clay’s kitchen table on Thursday night. You’re asleep in the next room. You snore a little. I hope nobody ever fixed that.”

I laughed. It came out wet and broken, but it was a laugh. Royce laughed too.

“Your great-granddaddy says I signed away what Granddaddy left me. He’s right. I signed it.”

“I was scared, and I wanted us to be left alone. I thought one paper would buy us that. I was wrong, and tomorrow I’m going to say so.”

Royce closed his eyes. “Tomorrow,” he said. “She thought she had a tomorrow.”

I kept going before I lost my nerve.

“Uncle Clay wants me to leave the county. I told him I will, if he keeps this for you. He’s the only Kettering I trust with it.”

“This isn’t about money, baby. I don’t care about the money. It’s about the land, and the people it was taken from, and the papers they used to take it.”

I thought about the Whitaker land. June’s land. The papers Wade put on it in ’98 because the old man told him to.

“Everything I could find is in Box 14. Nobody in that family knows it’s there. Not even Uncle Clay. I didn’t want him carrying one more thing.”

“A girl at the front desk helped me. She tied the string on that key herself. She was kind to me when nobody in that building was.”

“If she’s still around, she’ll show you where it is. Don’t you blame her for anything that comes after. She was just a kid.”

I stopped reading. I looked up.

Nadine was staring at the key in my other hand. At that little red string, faded almost pink now.

“Nadine,” I said.

She didn’t answer. She just nodded at the letter, like she was asking me to finish before she had to say anything.

So I read the last part. It wasn’t about land or papers at all.

“I hope you ride. I hope somebody taught you to be gentle with them, the way my daddy was. I hope you’re braver than me.”

“And if your granddaddy is there, tell him I was never angry. Not one day. I just missed him. Love, Mama.”

I folded it back the way she’d folded it. My hands knew how without me telling them.

Royce reached over and took my face in both his rough hands. The same hands that taught a thousand colts to trust.

“You are,” he said. “You’re braver than all of us put together. She’d have seen it in about two seconds.”

Cole’s Decision

The tin on the elevator roof started banging again. The wind had come back.

Cole put his hat on. He looked at the white Ford for a long time, and then at the tally book in Royce’s coat pocket.

“Mr. Royce,” he said. “You read me the last line, like I asked. So now I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.”

Nadine grabbed his arm again. He let her.

“When this is done,” Cole said, “I’m driving to the district attorney two counties over. I’m handing him that book myself. My name, my tickets, every Friday.”

“Cole, no,” Nadine said.

“I was twenty-two and I didn’t know,” he said. “But I’ve been a sheriff for a long time, and I’ve known every single day of it. That part’s on me.”

“Clay wanted you clear of it,” I said.

“Clay wanted me to have a choice,” Cole said. “He gave me one. This is it.”

Then he looked straight at me.

“But not tonight. Tonight, Caroline’s girl has a key and a letter. And I’m still the sheriff of this county until somebody says I’m not.”

He reached up and switched his radio back on. It crackled right away. Somebody in town was still asking where he was.

“I’m out at the old grain elevator,” Cole said into it. “All quiet. I’ll be off the air a while longer.”

He let go of the button. “That,” he said, “is the second lie I’ve told this year. You’re a bad influence, Lana.”

It was the first time I’d seen him almost smile since the high beams came on.

The Girl Who Tied the Red String

Nadine walked over and sat down on the running board of the white Ford. Right where she must have sat a thousand times as a girl.

“I was seventeen,” she said. “The spring before I married Wade. I answered the phone at Kettering Land and Cattle.”

“The office on the square?” Royce asked.

She nodded. “Front desk. Coffee. Mail. And the key board in the back room. That was my job too.”

“There’s a wall back there,” she said. “Little steel boxes, floor to ceiling. Your daddy kept deeds in them. Brand papers. Notes he didn’t want in the bank.”

“Every key had a paper tag. I tied every one of them with red string. He liked red. Said it was easy to find in a hurry.”

She looked at the key in my palm. “I’d know my own knot anywhere. That’s my knot. I’d tie it the same way right now.”

Deke sat down next to her. He looked like he was hearing his mother’s life for the first time.

“Your mama came in one afternoon that week,” Nadine said to me. “The old man was at the sale barn. Nobody was there but me.”

“She asked if she could see her granddaddy’s papers. She was polite about it. Nobody in that building was ever polite to me.”

“I knew I shouldn’t. But I let her in the back room. She was in there almost an hour.”

“When she came out, she asked me for an empty box. Just one. And the only key to it.”

“Number fourteen was empty,” Nadine said. “So I gave her fourteen. And I never wrote it in the ledger. Not ever.”

“Why not?” Cole asked quietly.

“Because she said thank you,” Nadine said. “She looked me in the eye and said thank you, like I was a person. I was seventeen. Nobody ever did that.”

“And the next day she was gone.”

She pressed her hands flat on her knees.

“I’ve spent twenty-five years trying not to remember that afternoon. Thinking maybe I’m the reason. Maybe if I’d said no.”

“She told you not to blame yourself,” I said. I held up the letter. “It’s right here. In her own hand. She was just a kid. That’s you.”

Nadine took the letter from me like it was made of glass. She read that part for herself. Then she read it again.

“She remembered me,” Nadine said. “All this time. She remembered the girl at the desk.”

Vera’s Ring of Keys

It was past four in the morning when we rolled back into Clay’s yard. Cole’s truck first, then Royce’s blue Chevy, then Deke in the white Ford.

Every light in Clay’s house was on. June was on the porch with the shotgun across her knees and a dish towel over her shoulder.

“Well,” June said, looking at the white Ford. “I’ll be. Somebody tell me I’m not seeing a ghost.”

“You’re not seeing a ghost,” Royce said. “You’re seeing a long story. Put the coffee on, June.”

Vera came out behind her. She looked at Nadine for a long second. Then she just opened the screen door and held it.

That’s how it is out here. Sometimes the kindest thing is not asking yet.

Inside, I told Vera about Box 14. About the office on the square.

“Daddy had keys to that building,” Vera said slowly. “After the old man passed. He was the only one left who’d deal with it.”

She went to Clay’s rolltop desk and opened the bottom drawer. It stuck, and she kicked it, and it gave.

She came back with a heavy iron ring of keys. Old ones, worn smooth. Every one of them had a faded red string.

Nadine touched one of the strings and didn’t say anything at all.

“Front door. Back door. The vault room,” Vera said. “I never once went in there. Daddy wouldn’t let me. Said that building ate people.”

Cole looked at the clock above the rolltop desk. “Square’s empty till six,” he said. “Diner opens at six. If we’re going, we go now.”

“I’m coming,” June said, already reaching for her coat.

“No, ma’am,” Cole said. “Somebody has to be here by the phone. And somebody has to keep that shotgun pointed at the right door.”

June huffed. But she sat back down. And she laid the shotgun across her knees again.

Royce put his hand on my shoulder before I stood up. Just the way my mother asked him to. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it.

The Light in the Old Man’s Office

The square looked like a painting of itself at that hour. The courthouse dark. The diner dark. One streetlight humming on the corner.

The Kettering building was old red brick, three stories, with tall windows on the ground floor.

Somebody had painted the name across the front glass a long time ago, in gold. Most of it had flaked away. You could still read KETTERING if you knew what you were looking for.

Cole parked around back, in the alley, with his lights off. We walked up to the back door in a tight little line. Cole, me, Royce, Nadine, Deke.

Vera handed me the iron ring. “It’s your box,” she said. “You do the doors.”

I found the key marked BACK in that faded handwriting. Nadine’s handwriting, twenty-five years younger.

It didn’t fit.

I tried again. It wouldn’t even go in halfway.

Cole leaned in with his flashlight. The lock on that old door was bright. Brand new brass. Not a scratch on it.

“That’s not twelve years old,” Cole said. “That’s not even twelve weeks old.”

He ran his thumb over the face of it. Then he went very quiet.

“I know this work,” he said. “Abel Haskins put this lock in. I’d know his work anywhere. He’s cut every key in this county for thirty years.”

“Who would ask Abel to change the locks on a dead man’s office?” Royce said.

Nobody answered. Because right then, we all saw it at the same time.

There was a light on inside. A thin yellow line under the door to the back room. The vault room.

Somebody was in there. At four-thirty in the morning. With Box 14.

And while we stood there holding our breath, the light under that door clicked off.

So now I’m asking you. Did you cry when Lana read the last line of her mother’s letter? Because I couldn’t get through it.

Was Cole right to decide to turn himself in, after all these years? Or should he let Clay’s wish stand?

And who do you think is inside the old Kettering office, behind a brand-new lock, at four-thirty in the morning?

Next Part: Lana’s Story Part 43 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss it.