CHAPTER 8 — LISA GANT WAS NOT UNDER THE TREE
The sheriff brought lights.
Then deputies.
Then a backhoe Clay had once bragged was “too much machine for a woman to handle,” which made its role in his humiliation feel almost poetic.
Clay arrived before they dug.
Of course he did.
He came tearing down the farm road in his truck, gravel spitting behind him, shouting before he even reached the fence.
“This is private property!”
Sheriff Danvers, who had spent most of the last ten years avoiding conflict with anyone who tithed publicly, surprised me by standing firm.
“Not tonight.”
Clay pointed at me.
“She did this.”
I almost laughed.
“I have impressive range from across the fence.”
Hank stood near me, one hand resting on his belt.
“Clay, stop talking.”
Clay did not.
“That land’s mine. That horse is mine. This is harassment.”
Junebug screamed again.
Not a pretty sound. Not cinematic. A raw, old, furious noise from an animal who had found something wrong in the earth.
The deputies dug.
I held my breath until my ribs hurt.
Not Lisa, I thought.
Please not Lisa.
I did not know her, not really, but nobody deserves to become proof beneath a walnut tree.
The backhoe bucket scraped metal.
Everyone froze.
They uncovered a long rusted farm trunk.
Not a hidden evidence box in the dramatic sense. A working trunk. Dad’s old seed storage trunk, the kind he kept in the equipment shed for tools, chain, spray nozzles, broken things he planned to fix and never did.
Clay went still.
Too still.
Sheriff Danvers ordered the deputies to open it.
Inside were burned file folders.
Half-damaged ledgers.
A notary seal.
Several old checkbooks.
And Dad’s farm stamp, the one he used on cattle sale records.
Not Lisa.
Paper.
Clay’s relief lasted exactly one second.
Then Hank pulled out a plastic sleeve holding a deed draft with my name still on it.
Margaret Anne Holt, sole heir to Willow Creek Farm.
Clay lunged.
Two deputies grabbed him.
The whole field erupted.
Emmett whispered, “Well, hell found a filing cabinet.”
The sheriff held up the notary seal.
“Clay, where is Lisa Gant?”
Clay stopped struggling.
His face changed in a way I did not understand.
“Gone,” he said.
“Where?”
“She left.”
“When?”
“Years ago.”
Hank stepped closer.
“Then why is her notary seal buried in your pasture?”
Clay looked at me.
For the first time, there was something like panic under the hate.
“You think I killed her?”
No one answered.
The question had answered too much by itself.
Then a voice came from the dark beyond the sheriff lights.
“No,” a woman said. “But he let everybody think I was crazy.”
A figure stepped through the fence gap near the creek.
Thin.
Gray-haired though she could not have been fifty.
Wearing a county hospital sweatshirt and boots too big for her.
Lisa Gant was alive.
Clay looked like he had seen the grave open and refuse him.
May you like
Lisa walked toward the lights, eyes fixed on him.
“I notarized one paper,” she said. “Then I found out what you changed.”
