Page 55 of She Autumn Be Mine

Then Autumn stepped back, dug into her coat pocket, and pressed folded bills into my free hand.

“What’s this?”

"The money left from the coffee can. I know you want to build us a house here on Double M. Take this and pour it into the foundation. I mean it." Her jaw set, and through the tears. "I want my running-money under our house, in the concrete, where I can stand on it every day for the rest of my life."

I put it in my pocket, over my heart, where it would ride until the mixer truck came.

Later, at Dot’s table, over the kind of supper my mother produces out of thin air, Autumn set her palms flat on the wood. “I had a lot of time to think.The custody suit was never the plan. Marlene must have known it would get dismissed, she’s smarter than that. She probably only filed to distract us, to drain us. The news story is to shame you and split the town. See, this is what she does. She’ll keep pulling little threads until everything falls apart. She has a whole plan, A to Z. A was the custody petition. B was your reputation. And we’re only on⁠—”

She stopped, mouth open, eyes fixed on the distance. “Oh my God. Why didn’t I think of this months ago?”

“Think of what?” I asked, finally understanding how cunning Marlene can be.

“She’s done this to me before, and I never told a soul.” A story tumbled out of her fast. “When I was pregnant she came to the Ropin’ Roadhouse where I worked with Nanette. She sat in the back booth like a health inspector, ordering tea she never drank, and waited for closing time. She invited me to sit and she slid an envelope across my table. It had a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, and a paper to sign: leave the state before the baby came, no Eaton on the birth certificate, never contact the family. She said—I’ll never forget this—‘Every problem has a number, dear. Be smart. You were never going to be one of us. I would never have allowed my son to make you a part of this family.’ She never thought I was good enough for Brantley. I pushed the envelope back and went and cried in the stockroom, so ashamed you’d think I’d been the one offering money, not her.” Her eyes came up frosty blue. “If there’s one thing Marlene protects, it’s her reputation. She sits on boards, she makes hefty donations. She’s a major figure in the women’s shelter, Jake. What if… What if I could prove she tried to pay me off? Nanette’s daddy has cameras over every booth in that bar, and Roper Ripley has never deleted anything in his life. Keeps the drives in his office safe, years of them, labeled in marker by day. There has to be a video of Marlene Eaton in her church dress trying to pay off her son’s pregnant girlfriend to erase her grandchild?”

“Cash is still in Sheridan, looking for you and Brantley.” I pulled out my phone and called.

He answered on the second ring, and when I’d laid out the mission he whistled down the line. He put Nanette on and she and Autumn talked through dates Marlene could have been there so they’d have a starting point to look.

“We’ve got her now. You know we’ll scour Dad’s tapes until we find the proof. Oh, but I was so worried about you. Don’t ever run again, hear me?” Nanette scolded her through the line, three hundred miles away, a repeat of my words.

Cash got back on the line. “Jake, I have other news. I was going to call you and the sheriff tonight, waiting on a few more pieces of information to come in. Brantley Eaton cleared out of Sheridan before the leaves turned. He broke his apartment lease. Let his gym membership lapse in August. Friends say his truck has been gone since Labor Day, and another ex-girlfriend who hates him says nobody’s seen or heard from him in a month, until today when he reached out to her from Billings. He’s not in Wyoming, Jake. He’s in Montana.”

EIGHTEEN

Vindicated

Autumn

We’d fought fire with fire, and for the first time in a year, the Eatons were the ones smelling smoke.

We found the videotape of Marlene trying to pay me off. With a prayer, before Cash left Wyoming, we had him turn over copies of it to each of the boards where Marlene served, and to the hospital, and the church. The chain reaction landed brighter than a nuclear bomb. The regional stations played it in the news for a week: MATRIARCH BANNED. FALL FROM GRACE.

My favorite was the highlight of her saying “You were never going to be one of us.” By the end of the week, two of her charity boards had “regretfully accepted her resignation,” the hospital planned a repainting of the wing with her name on it. I assumed there’d be one less church pew as well in the next Sunday’s service.

But Brantley was still out there. So we lived nearly glued together, never alone—if I wasn’t with Jake, I was with Dot or Jamie or Mr. McCall or Ivy, and Stetson was never more than one room from somebody who loved him. Jake had taken several days off from the ODRR, which he never did, and wore his paranoia the way he wore his hat: constantly, and tipped so you almost couldn’t see his eyes.

Some days I missed being alone. I’d scared that man down to the depths of his soul with two days gone and an empty coffee can, so for him I stayed glued by his side.

Except this morning I spent it up to my elbows in flour at the ODRR mess hall. Thanksgiving was a week out and Eldon baked for the whole ranch family. This year I’d been drafted along with Willow and the Wylde sisters. We made pie crust by the ton for pumpkin pies, from our own patch, and for apples from the Wylde orchard.

Daisy complained how a winter storm was supposedly coming for Thanksgiving.

I gazed longingly out the window at the old pumpkin patch. “Hard to believe on this breezy fall day that snow is coming. It’d be perfect for a picnic today, wouldn't it?” The next thing I knew, Eldon had made sandwiches, cider, and two slices of yesterday’s practice pie for us in a basket, and loaded me and Stetson into his car headed for the Double M.

On the way up the county road, we passed a little white car parked on the shoulder near the McCalls’ mailboxes, the magnetic U.S. MAIL sign hung crooked on the door.

“There, see?” I said. “Mail’s back. Dot will be so happy. She’s been complaining about not receiving her mail lately.”

Eldon lifted two fingers off the wheel at it, country-polite, and drove on. He quickly dropped us off at the house build site, muttered about too many pies to cook, and left us.

“There you are,” Jake greeted us.

“Brought food.” I held up the basket.

“Well I have sad news. Cash is packing to leave us—his lost-souls trail has finally coughed up a lead about a woman named Luna. He has his saddlebags loaded on the chopper,” Jake explained.

“One last day swinging an axe with your husband,” Cash said, winking at me. “Then I hit the trail again.”