“It won’t count for you,” he said.“You won’t be here to benefit from it.But it’ll count for everybody else.That’s mostly why it’s worth doing, anyway.”
Lucas took that the way he’d taken every hard dose of truth all summer: a long pause, a slow nod, the flicker of the old defiance giving way to something quieter.“Good enough,” he said.
He died early Wednesday morning in the first gray stirrings of the day with the window showing him his valley.The nurse called at four-forty and Hank drove up through a dark that was already loosening at the eastern ridgeline, and there was nothing for him to do when he got there, which was as it should be.
Ellie sat where she’d sat for a week, holding her father’s hand.Trent stood in the doorway with his work gloves clutched in one fist.The others gathered in the hall in bathrobes and hastily donned clothes, seven exhausted strangers with one face among them.
Not one of them wept and not one of them left.
Hank did his quiet work.He noted the time.Switched off the oxygen machine.The silence where its chugging had been was the largest noise in the house.
Lucas Shoemacher died with all seven of his children under his roof and one of them holding his hand, which Hank reckoned was more than the man had let himself hope for.
Dawn’s light came in the wall of windows, sweeping across the valley the way it did every morning, indifferent and orange, flowing through the enormous gap in the outbuildings where the horse barn wasn’t.
The will was read Friday morning in the formal living room of the Shoemacher house, two rows of folding chairs facing the cold fireplace, and Lincoln Sutter presiding over it in a charcoal gray suit with the gravity of a man who had read his share of wills but knew this one was different.
The seven children sat in the front row.Behind them, summoned by formal letter as named parties, sat eight widows in their good clothes, Jenna, Natalie, Charlotte, Rose, Molly, Bonnie, Tessa, and Grace.
The atmosphere in the room was tense and unbelievably awkward.The widows were none too happy to be in the home of the man they suspected in having some part in killing their husbands nor to be sitting only a few hundred feet from where their husbands perished horrifically.
Lucas’s children weren’t any happier to be here.Not only did they seem uncomfortable to be back in this house, they also seemed embarrassed to be in the presence of the widows.Clearly, none of them had any idea what to say to the widows.
While everyone greeted each other politely, it was stilted at best.Nobody was making eye contact with anybody from the other group of attendees.Only Bonnie and Ellie spoke quietly to each other for a few moments before Lincoln Sutter asked everyone to take their seats.
Hank considered how the sight of those two families, the Shoemacher family in front and the fire’s family behind them, seemed fitting today.They were all tied together by tragedy and separated by the same tragedy.And now they’d been brought back together to witness the end of Lucas Shoemacher’s legacy.
Sheriff Clint Wheeler and Deputy Cooper Anderson stood at the back in uniform, with their hats in their hands, present at the deceased’s written request.So was Hank, by the same instruction, though he suspected his assignment was the one he always drew.To be in the room when people’s legs went out from under them.
The legal part went quickly.The property and its assets were given to the seven children in equal shares.To Bonnie Watson, his grandfather’s brass desk clock that had sat in the mayor’s office for thirty years and one sealed envelope.
Lincoln read out a long list of assets and their estimated value.The four-hundred acres of land the Shoemacher Racing Stables sat on.The house, buildings, vehicles, and equipment on this property.A fishing camp on a private lake in Canada.Stocks, bonds, savings accounts, and interestingly, half interest in a two-year-old Thoroughbred race horse named Starting Over.
The Shoemacher children looked at one another in consternation at that one.That particular asset was obviously a surprise to all of them.
And then Lincoln read out the paragraph in the will that explained the second row of chairs.Lucas had established an educational trust for the children of the eight men who died in the Shoemacher barn fire, sufficient to fund any schooling any of them should ever choose to pursue.
Lincoln Sutter stopped reading and looked up from the will.“For the record, the trust was established and fully funded some years ago.I’m the named trustee and will administer it going forward.It’s been in the care of an excellent financial manager and is growing steadily.It will, indeed, fund all your current children’s and any future children’s educations easily.If there’s money left in the trust after all of your children have completed their educations, I’ve been instructed to continue accruing money in the account to offset the cost of your grandchildren’s educations.”
A stir went through the widows like wind swirling through a meadow of tall grass.Hank watched the women blindly reach for the hands of the women beside them and hang on to one another the way they always had and probably always would.
“There’s one last instruction in Mr.Shoemacher’s will,” Sutter said.
He turned and lifted the thick envelope sitting on the fireplace mantel behind him, and the room, which had been quiet, went silent.“I’m instructed to read it aloud, in private, to this exact group of people, before the burial.”
That caused both families to stir in their seats.Hank saw more alarm than interest in the way they all shifted and glanced sidelong at one another.
Lincoln continued, “I’ve not seen its contents.It was sealed and notarized in my presence eight days ago.”He opened the wax seal with a pocketknife, unfolded a good many pages of close, shaky handwriting, put on his glasses, and began to read.
“’I’ll say it plain at the top,’” Sutter read, “’so nobody has to sit waiting for it.I set the fire that burned my barn.I killed those eight men.Nobody helped me, nobody knew, and nobody ever suspected me until those Lawton boys came to town and started poking around again.”
Lincoln stopped reading.He stared blankly at the people staring back at him.
Nobody moved.
Hank stood against the wall and watched seven children and eight widows take the bullet they’d all been bracing for in their separate ways for five years.
The widows had suspected it.All the evidence unearthed in the past few months pointed at Lucas.
