Detective Lund saw my face and did not wait for me to speak. He stood up slowly, took the phone out of my hand, and set it on the desk between us. “Ms. Reinholt, I am going to do the one thing I can,” he said. “I am stepping out of this case. Take that recording to the Division of Criminal Investigation in Madison. I will call ahead and tell them you are coming, and I will give them a statement that I have not discussed it with anyone.” I looked at him for a long moment. Then I nodded, because it takes courage to disqualify yourself from the truth.
The agent in Madison was a patient woman named Sue Halvorsen with a gray braid and a legal pad full of tiny handwriting. She listened to all fourteen minutes twice, once with her eyes closed. Then she sent the file to the crime laboratory and had me sit with her while she called the records office at the county. By the end of the week, the lab had compared the calm voice on the tape with old recordings of public meetings. It was Douglas Lund. The phone company confirmed the other piece. The call to 911 at 4:51 had come from the telephone of my brother.
That left the papers my father had mentioned, the ones he said were in the milk house. Prairie Ridge Partners still held the title, but the company had no choice once the state asked, and the lawyer for the developer handed over the key with a polite, frightened smile. Agent Halvorsen and I walked out across the frozen yard on a Tuesday in January. The milk house was just as I remembered, cold and tiled and smelling faintly of bleach. Behind the old cooling tank, tucked into a dented steel milk can, lay a metal ammunition box. I knelt on the concrete and opened it with fingers that would not stop shaking.
A man who tells the truth into a dying phone leaves his daughter a farm, a witness, and a door that stays open.
Inside were three documents and a letter in the careful handwriting of my father. The first was a notarized refusal, dated the week before he died, in which he stated that he would never sell the farm and that anyone who claimed otherwise was lying. The second was a trust. Two years before, he had quietly deeded the whole place to a family trust with me as the sole trustee, so that Wade, as executor, never had any right to sell it at all. The third was a letter to me. It began, “Carla, if you are reading this, I was right to worry.” I sat down on the floor of the milk house and cried.
They arrested Wade on a Friday, at the job site in Milwaukee, in front of his crew. He did not struggle. In the interview room, he told the whole story, with his hands over his face. He owed Douglas Lund fifty thousand dollars from a run of bad bets, and Lund had offered to forgive the debt if Wade could get the signature of our father. Wade said he never meant for anyone to be hurt. He locked the door only to make our father sit down and listen. When he heard the thud, he ran down the ladder and out of the barn and did not stop. “I called it in,” he said, “because the man told me to.”
Douglas Lund was arrested at the office of Prairie Ridge Partners, in a tie, with a cup of coffee in his hand. He said he wanted a lawyer and said nothing else. The detective, his own brother, sat in a parked car outside the courthouse that morning and refused to say a word to reporters. I watched from across the street. I want to say that I felt triumph, but all I felt was an awful tiredness, as if I had set down a very heavy bag after carrying it for an entire year and could not remember how to stand without it.
The trial lasted nine days. The prosecutor played the recording for the jury on the fourth day, all fourteen minutes of it, in a silent courtroom. When my father said, “Get off my farm,” a woman in the second row put her hand over her mouth. The jury needed less than five hours. Douglas Lund was convicted of reckless homicide and fraud and sentenced to twenty five years. Wade pleaded guilty and testified against him, and he received eight. When the judge asked if I wished to speak, I stood up and said only, “My father would want it known that he never sold.”
Because of the trust, the sale of the farm was voided by the court. Prairie Ridge forfeited the land, the money it had paid went to the state, and one gray afternoon in spring I found myself standing in the yard of the place where I grew up, the sole trustee of ninety Holstein acres and a barn with no cows in it. I am a court reporter. I have never milked a cow in my life. I stood there for a long time and I laughed out loud, and the sound startled a pair of sparrows off the fence.
In the end, I leased the farm to a young couple named Amy and Josh Berndt, who had been working as hired hands for ten years and could not afford land of their own. They bought ten heifers and started a small dairy under the old name, Reinholt Farm. They do not own it. They farm it. When their first calf was born in the barn, they named her Hank. I drove out to see her in the cold gray hour before sunrise, and Amy let me hold the bottle while that wobbly, damp little creature drank.
I visit Wade once a month. He is thinner, and he reads a great deal now. He asked me last time if I would ever forgive him, and I said I did not know, but that I would come on the first Sunday of every month for as long as he wanted me to. On the nineteenth of September, I go out to the farm at 4:12 in the afternoon and sit in the open doorway of the barn, in the sun, with the door pinned wide. I play the recording once, at the end, so that I can hear my father say it, and so that I remember that the door is never locked now.
