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wants before her own.
    What would happen to Ivy if the Rocking P was cut in half or disappeared altogether? Like the baby King Solomon threatened to divide in the Bible, a ranch the size of the Patterson spread was of no more use cut in half than half a child would be. It took the whole ranch to make a living, to make a life.
    Returning to the table with the box, Sandra Henning easily turned her key in the lock. Harold’s hand trembled as he attempted to insert his own. It took three separate tries before the key clicked home. The long metal drawer flipped open, and the old man slumped back into his chair.
    By eleven o’clock, Harold had sorted through all the papers in the drawer. In one stack, he put the papers that would stay in the safety-deposit box—the insurance policies he didn’t need in order to change the beneficiaries, the few ribbon-wrapped letters he and Emily had exchanged during those rare times when he was actually away from home. In the other stack were the things Harold would need to take with him to Burton Kimball’s office—his will and the deed to the Rocking P.
    At the very bottom of the drawer, Harold foundthe last item, the single yellowed envelope that he and Emily had together solemnly sealed away years earlier. Emily was the one who had insisted on a greasy candle-wax seal that now allowed some of the loopy, old-fashioned writing from the letter itself to bleed through onto the outside surface of the envelope. It was almost as if the words themselves were eager to escape their paper-bound prison.
    Harold could have broken the seal and opened it, but he didn’t. There was no need. The faded pencil-written words were committed to memory, seared into his heart even more clearly than they were into his brain. He remembered them all; was incapable of forgetting even one.
    He sat holding the envelope and wondering what he should do with it now. He had kept it all these years because he had promised Emily he would; because she had begged him to, and because he had been afraid he might someday need it. Now, though, if his gamble paid off, if he could go to Holly and get her to listen to reason, maybe he could finally destroy the letter and be done with it. Maybe he could go to his grave taking the letter’s ugly secret with him.
    Finally, after many agonizing moments of indecision, he placed the fragile, unopened envelope in the stack with the insurance policies and placed the whole pile back in the drawer. If Holly and Ivy didn’t take his word for it, didn’t accept his version of what had happened, then it would be time to remove the letter from the safety of its hiding place. By then he would know if he wastaking the letter out to show it to his daughters or to burn it once and for all.
    Pushing back his chair, Harold stood and signaled to Sandy Henning. “I’m ready to go now,” he said.
    When she came to retrieve Harold’s safety-deposit box, Sandy peered closely at Harold through her red-framed bifocals. “Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Patterson? Your color’s not all that good.”
    Harold stood and picked up his hat. “I’m fine, Miz Henning,” he said, carefully replacing the tiny key in the narrow pocket of his jeans. “I’m just a little wore out is all. Don’t go getting all pistol-sprung about me.”
    Leaving the bank, Harold drove straight to Evergreen Cemetery. For a long time, Evergreen had been the only burial game in town. During the first half of the twentieth century, it had been a lush, green, and well-tended place, irrigated for free with the mineral-rich effluent pumped from the underground mines. Then, in the late fifties, when Phelps Dodge started a leaching operation on the new open-pit tailings dump, the circulation of free mine water was removed from the community and returned to industrial use.
    Bisbee’s would-be gardeners had been left literally high and dry. They could