Daddy, Can You Teach Me Some Naughty Night Things? novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Hard Knot

Hank says the signature on the note is a fake and names the hand that made it.

Hank Applebee set a second paper on the kitchen table beside the burned note.

"That signature's a fake," he said. "And I can tell you whose hand made it."

He pulled out the chair across from me.

He sat down without being asked.

He turned the burned note toward the lamp and put on his reading glasses.

I stayed standing. The paper was still warm from the stove.

"Who?" I said.

Hank laid a copy of the county creek-rights record beside the note.

His cracked finger tapped a clause halfway down the page.

"Water goes with the deed," he said. "Whoever holds the Gentry deed holds the creek."

I looked at the line. It was plain as day.

"So the water's mine to defend," I said.

"It's yours to defend," Hank said. "That's not the same as easy."

He slid the burned note back toward me and pointed at my mother's name.

"Look at the C in Carol."

I looked. The loop trailed off at the bottom, thin and unfinished.

"She closed that letter with a hard knot," Hank said. "Every check, every note, every list. I watched her do it forty years."

My throat went tight. "So it's not just me."

"Two of us can see it now," Hank said.

He sat back and rubbed his bad hands.

"There's more," he said. "Lyle's hired man's been damming the creek since April."

"Damming it?"

"Drying the lower pasture," Hank said. "You can walk out there and see the mud."

The image came before I could stop it. The lower channel cracked into gray plates, a dead carp half sunk in the silt, the water not moving because there was no water.

"So the note's not a debt," I said. "It's a lever."

The kitchen door opened and Wayne came in from the barn.

He stopped when he saw Hank at his table with the note.

Then he set his checkbook on the counter beside it.

Hank didn't look at him. "You paid him," Hank said.

"Forty-one thousand five hundred," Wayne said. "Out of that book."

I stared at him.

"You paid a man you think cheated you," I said.

"I paid him to keep the paper quiet," Wayne said. "It didn't work."

Hank let out a long breath through his nose.

Wayne reached into his shirt pocket and took out a folded document.

He laid it on the table without a word.

I opened it. The date at the top was the day after my birthday.

It was a transfer. Every share he held in Gentry Ridge, signed over to me.

My hands went cold.

"The day after my birthday," I said. Out loud. To the room.

"It was never mine to keep," Wayne said.

He said it plain, and he didn't look away, and I knew he had never said it to another living soul.

The porch steps creaked outside.

Dessa was already on the porch. She had been there when Wayne came in.

She had the ledger under her arm and her phone in her hand.

Her thumbs were moving on the screen.

I crossed the kitchen and pushed the screen door open.

I took the phone out of her hands.

The message to Lyle was half-written. My name was in it.

"Give me the ledger," I said.

Dessa's bright smile didn't move. "You don't have to take it. I'm handing it over."

She put it in my hands.

I flipped it open to April, two years back.

There it was. A payment of forty-one thousand five hundred from the ranch account to Lyle Kenyon.

Signed with my mother's name.

"That's her name again," I said. "Same trailing C as the note."

I did the arithmetic in my head. It took a second.

"The foal crop sold in June," I said. "In April we didn't have that money. Not anywhere."

Nobody said anything.

"So somebody wrote a payment the ranch couldn't have made," I said. "And signed my mother's name to it."

Dessa pulled the page out of the ledger and held it out to me.

"I only copy the books," she said. "I don't write them."

Her hands were steady. Her voice wasn't.

"He'll know you gave me this," I said.

"He already knows," Dessa said. "That's why I'm giving it to you."

I folded the burned note into my shirt pocket.

I folded the ledger page and the creek record in with the burned note, and the burned note stayed on the outside, where I could feel it.

Then I walked out to Hank's truck.

Hank was already behind the wheel. He didn't ask where we were going.

"Lower pasture," I said. "The dam."

The truck bounced down the county road with the headlights cutting the dark.

The creek came up on my side, black and slow where it should have been running.

The truck stopped at the dam and the headlights swung across the water.

I was already out on the bank with the papers in my fist.

A Kenyon Ranch truck sat nose-out by the dam frame, its door hanging open.

The half-built dam was lashed together with green tarp and new lumber, and a Kenyon brand was burned into the crossbeam.

A man stood over the frame with a nail gun in his hand.

He turned toward the light.

Beside him, pinned to the dam frame, a work order fluttered under a roofing nail.

I saw the signature at the bottom before I saw his face.

The loop trailed off at the bottom, thin and unfinished.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend