You told me they moved to Oregon. They did 4 years ago. Ida paused. But they left in a hurry and they left the house and whatever was in it behind. Eleanor was already standing up.
She went through the farmhouse the way she had never thought to go through it. Not as a practical woman assessing structural integrity, but as someone looking for something. She went through the kitchen, through the back rooms, through the leanto at the east side she'd been using as a cold storage area. She went through every shelf and corner and loose board. She found it behind a panel in the leanto that she had thought was simply a storage niche.
A flat tin box sealed with a rusted clasp with her name written on the top in handwriting she did not recognize. She sat down on the cold dirt floor of the leanto with the box in her hands and she did not open it for a full 2 minutes. Then she opened it. There were two things inside. A letter and a smaller envelope.
The letter was addressed to her in that same handwriting. She read it twice through without stopping because her eyes wanted to rush ahead and she made herself slow down because she understood that whatever was in this letter had been sitting here for 11 years waiting for her. James Whitmore. Uncle James, who she remembered as a tall man with her father's eyes and a laugh that came easily, had known 11 years ago that the family's finances were in worse condition than anyone admitted. He had not been the cause of the trouble.
As the family story implied, he had tried to stop it and failed and left rather than watch it unfold. He had left the letter with Harker because he didn't know where Eleanor would end up, but he knew the family connection to that land and thought eventually someone might find their way here. The smaller envelope contained a promisory note and a deed transfer document. Old, carefully preserved. For 20 acres of land in the eastern section of Willow Creek County.
20 Acres that were, according to the document, hers by right of a bequest from her grandmother that Thomas had either not known about or had chosen not to mention. 20 Acres that she was currently farming as part of her 60 acre property because they were contiguous, because nobody had told her they were separately deed because nobody had expected her to be here at all. Eleanor sat on the cold floor of the leanto with the documents in her hands and she felt something move through her that was not triumph or anger though both of those were present. What she felt underneath everything was a kind of profound and particular grief for her father who had not known for her mother who had worried in silence for the years in Thomas's house. And then the grief moved through her and left something harder and cleaner behind it.
She got up. She washed her face at the pump. She put on her second best coat. She drove the wagon into Willow Creek and she went to find Ida Marsh. "I need a lawyer," she said.
"The best one in the county." Ida looked at her face and did not ask any questions. "Martin Gould," she said immediately. "Two streets over. Tell him I sent you." Martin Gould was 60, meticulous, and had the professional impassivity of a man who had heard a great many things in his office, and had learned that his own reactions were rarely helpful. He read the documents Elellanor put in front of him with a care that felt like respect for the paper itself.
When he was done, he looked up. "These are valid," he said. "I know," Eleanor said. The bequest was registered in this county in 1862, your grandmother's estate. He looked at the documents again.
It's possible your brother was unaware. It's possible, Elellanor said. Something in her tone made him pause. He looked at her the way a man looks when he is revising an assessment and is honest enough to admit it. It is also possible, he said carefully, that he was not.