The man at the edge of the frame was Preston Vane, the developer from Seattle, who had sat in the third row of the funeral and shaken my hand with both of his. On the tape he stood among the trees with his arms folded, watching Brittany work the wrench on the base of the ladder, and he glanced at his watch like a man waiting for a bus. Daniel stopped the tape. Nobody in the barn spoke. Jack, who was ten, took my hand without being asked, and held it very tight.
Daniel started the tape again, and we watched all of it, because Gordon had wanted us to. Brittany loosened two bolts on the left rail and set a loose bolt beside the base, as if it had worked itself out over time. She walked away in her work gloves. At 6:41 the camera showed my brother come down the row with a bucket and a picking bag, humming, thin and tall in his old canvas coat, and set his foot on the first rung of the ladder he had trusted for forty years.
I will not describe the rest. I will say that the camera caught Brittany standing at the far end of the row with her hand over her mouth, not running, and the developer beside her, and that Gordon lay in the grass for eleven minutes while the two of them stood and counted. Daniel turned and went outside, and I heard him sick behind the barn. Owen put his arms around me from the back and said, “Aunt Ruthie, he knew. He knew, and he stayed anyway.”
The ones who love us leave their care in strange places, and it waits, patient as an orchard, for someone to look.
The envelope marked RUTHIE was in the bag, and I opened it on the lid of the cider press. It was one page, in the slow, square hand of my brother. “Ruthie,” he wrote, “I am an old fool and I loved a woman who did not love me. I think she means to hurt me. I am putting this where only the boys can find it. If something happens, the orchard is yours, and the house, and the boys will help. Dig up the coffee can by the north gate. It has the real will. Forgive me. Gordon.”
The coffee can was where he said, a foot under the grass, sealed in two plastic bags. The real will was dated nine days before the one the lawyer read, signed and witnessed by two neighbors, and it left the orchard and the farmhouse to me, with a trust for the grandsons. The other six tapes held hours of Brittany on the phone in the kitchen, talking to Preston Vane about the price, the timing, and the best way to make it look like an accident. She never once lowered her voice.
We took everything to the sheriff of Chelan County that same night, and by morning there were detectives at the farmhouse, and a prosecutor, and a man from the state patrol who watched the August tape three times without blinking. Brittany was arrested at the fruit warehouse, where she had gone to clean out her locker. Preston Vane was picked up at the airport in Seattle with a ticket to Phoenix. He told the arresting officer that it was all a terrible misunderstanding, and the officer said he would be sure to mention it.
The trial lasted nine days in the spring. Brittany sat very straight and kept her eyes on the table. When the August tape played, a woman on the jury put her hand over her eyes. Both of them were convicted of murder in the second degree and conspiracy, and the judge, a gray man who had known my brother, said that they had chosen to make a good man die alone in a cold row of trees. Brittany did not look at me. Vane looked at the floor.
I did not move out of the farmhouse. In May the court confirmed the real will, and Daniel and his sister Karen drove over from Seattle and stood in the kitchen with me and cried, the three of us, over cups of tea. They asked to keep the orchard in the family. We made a plan together: Daniel would manage the trees, Karen would handle the books, and I would run the little stand by the road where we sell the cider every autumn, as I have done since I was nine.
The boys came for the whole summer. Owen learned to graft, and Jack climbed everything. In August, on the anniversary, we all walked out to the old Honeycrisp at the end of the row, and Daniel had cut the ladder into four pieces. He set the pieces in a ring on the ground and planted a young apple tree in the middle. Owen read from the note in the bag. “Grandpa said to plant one where I fell,” he said, “so the next one grows up better.”
This fall the new tree is taller than Jack. The cider barn smells of cinnamon, the beam above the press has been cleaned and oiled, and the cavity at the end of it holds a single photograph of my brother in his canvas coat, grinning at the top of the ladder in 1974. I sit under that beam in the evening with a mug of cider, watching the light go gold over the valley, and I tell him out loud that we kept it all.
