W She Asked If I’d Fed a Dog That Died 11 Years Ago, and Only I Knew What It Really Meant

My daughter asked me, in front of everyone, if I’d remembered to feed Biscuit. Biscuit was a beagle we buried under the pear tree eleven years ago. Her new husband squeezed her wrist until she went quiet, and I thought I knew exactly who the monster at my table was. By sundown, a deputy was digging up my late husband’s grave.

My name is Lorraine Pruitt. I’m sixty-four, and I live on the same forty acres outside Ava, Missouri, where I’ve lived since I was a bride.

Every October we make apple butter. It’s a family tradition. The copper kettle comes out of the barn, the fire gets going by seven in the morning, and somebody has to stir that paddle for nine hours straight or it scorches. My Dale used to say apple butter teaches you patience or it teaches you to cry.

Dale’s been gone three years now. Heart attack in the deer stand. His hunting buddy Harlan Beecher found him.

Harlan’s the reason I didn’t stir alone last year. He started bringing me sweet tea after church. Then fixing the porch step. Then sitting with me on Sunday evenings. He’s a widower too. Gentle man. Calls me “Miss Lorrie.” I won’t pretend I didn’t like it.

This year my daughter Kayla was coming home for apple butter day. First time in almost two years. She’d married a man named Travis over the summer at a courthouse in Springfield. I wasn’t invited. That stung worse than I’ll ever tell her.

“Mama, please just be nice to him,” she said on the phone. “Things are complicated right now.”

Complicated. That’s a word girls use when they can’t say the real one.

They pulled in around ten. Travis got out first. Big shoulders, crew cut, a jaw like he’d been chewing nails. He shook my hand too firm and looked past me at the house. At the barn. At the road.

Kayla looked thin. She hugged me a second too long.

Harlan was already at the kettle, stirring, sleeves rolled up. He waved the paddle at them.

“Well, look who finally came home!” he called.

Travis didn’t wave back. He just stared at him.

We ate lunch on the porch. Ham sandwiches, deviled eggs, and the last of my green beans. Harlan did most of the talking, the way he does. Asked Kayla about Springfield. About her job at the dental office.

Travis answered every single question.

“She quit.”

“We don’t go out much.”

“She’s fine.”

I watched my girl push an egg around her plate. She didn’t eat one bite.

Then Harlan reached for the tea pitcher, the one he brings every Sunday, and offered to pour her a glass.

Travis grabbed Kayla’s wrist. Hard. I saw his knuckles go pale. She put her glass down.

“She doesn’t drink sweet tea anymore,” he said.

Harlan laughed it off. I didn’t.

That’s when Kayla looked right at me. Her voice came out bright and strange, like a radio station that isn’t quite tuned in.

“Mama, did you remember to feed Biscuit this morning?”

The porch went quiet. Harlan chuckled. “Who’s Biscuit?”

I set my fork down very slowly.

Biscuit was our beagle. He died when Kayla was eighteen. But that’s not why my hands started shaking.

When Kayla was little, Dale made up a rule. If she was ever at a sleepover, or a party, or anywhere she felt scared and couldn’t say so, she was to call home and ask if we’d fed Biscuit. No questions asked. We’d come get her. Dale would drive over in his pajamas if he had to.

She used it exactly once, when she was fourteen. We never told anyone. Not even her friends knew.

And now she’d said it at my own table, with this hard-jawed stranger holding her wrist.

“I fed him,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Kayla, honey, come help me bring up some jars from the cellar. We’re going to need more pints.”

Travis started to stand.

“I’ll help,” he said.

“No,” I said. Too sharp. I softened it. “That cellar’s tight. Just us girls. You sit.”

He looked at Kayla. She gave him a little nod. That nod bothered me more than anything. Like she needed his permission.

The cellar is cut into the hillside behind the house. Stone walls, a single bulb, shelves of tomatoes and peaches going back to 1997. I pulled the string on the light and turned around to grab her.

“Baby, listen to me. My truck keys are on the nail by the door. We can go right now. Out the back, through the orchard. He’ll never…”

Kayla grabbed both my hands. Her fingers were ice.

“Mama, stop. Stop talking and listen.”

She glanced up at the cellar door. Then back at me.

“Travis isn’t the one I’m scared of,” she whispered. “Travis is a sheriff’s investigator from Greene County. He’s here because of me. Because of you.”

I didn’t understand. I said so.

Her eyes filled up.

“The man stirring your apple butter has buried two wives before Daddy died. And both of them were sitting with him on a porch, drinking his sweet tea, the year before they went.”

I sat down on an overturned bucket. I had to.

“That’s not possible,” I said. “Harlan’s from Arkansas. His wife Peggy had cancer. He told me all about it. He cried.”

“Her name was Peggy Ann Loveless,” Kayla said. “She died in Mountain Home in 2012. Not cancer, Mama. They called it kidney failure. Before her, there was a woman named Rhonda in Oklahoma. Same thing. And both times, Harlan ended up with the land.”

I thought about the papers on my kitchen table. The ones Harlan had been gently nudging me to look at. A “simple” trust, he called it. So the farm wouldn’t get tied up in probate. So I wouldn’t have to worry.

“How do you know all this?”

Kayla wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“After Daddy’s funeral, I couldn’t stop thinking about how he died. He had a heart checkup four months before. Perfect. And Harlan was the only one with him. So I started digging. Library records. Old obituaries. A girl I went to school with works for the county recorder in Baxter County. I found Rhonda’s sister online. She’d been trying to get someone to listen for nine years.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I tried, Mama. Remember Easter two years ago? I said I didn’t trust him. You told me I was jealous. That I couldn’t stand you being happy. You hung up on me.”

I remembered. God help me, I remembered every word I said.

“So I stopped calling. And I went to the sheriff’s office instead. Travis took my statement. He believed me. We…” She almost smiled. “Well. That part just happened.”

“And the wrist? The answering for you?”

“I’m a terrible liar, Mama. You know that. Travis was keeping me from blowing it. If Harlan figured out we knew, he’d run. Or worse. And the tea…” She swallowed. “Travis has a warrant. They want what’s in that pitcher. But they need it to come out of Harlan’s hands, today, in front of a witness.”

I looked at her. My baby. Twenty-nine years old, carrying this alone for two years because her mother was too proud to hear it.

“Why Biscuit?” I asked. “Why not just whisper it to me?”

“Because Harlan never leaves us alone. And because Daddy made that rule.” Her chin trembled. “It felt like he was helping.”

We carried up two boxes of empty pint jars. My legs worked somehow.

On the porch, Harlan had poured me a fresh glass of tea. It was sweating in the sun beside my plate. He smiled at me the way he’d smiled every Sunday for fourteen months.

“Everything all right down there, Miss Lorrie?”

“Couldn’t be better,” I said.

I picked up the glass. I could feel Travis watching me. Kayla’s hand found my knee under the table.

I didn’t drink it. I handed it to Travis.

“Son,” I said, “you look thirsty.”

Harlan’s smile didn’t move. But his eyes did. Just for a second, they went to the gravel road.

Travis set the glass in a plastic bag he pulled from his jacket. Then he stood up and took a badge out of his back pocket.

Harlan never touched the paddle again. Two deputies came up the drive within six minutes. They’d been parked at the Methodist church half a mile down, waiting.

The apple butter scorched. First time in thirty-eight years.

The lab found antifreeze in that tea. Ethylene glycol. Sweet enough you’d never taste it in sugar water. It works slowly when you give it a little at a time. That’s what kidney failure looks like. And that’s what heart failure can look like too.

I’d been drinking that tea since last August.

My doctor ran my bloodwork the following Tuesday. My kidneys were at sixty-one percent. Another winter of Sunday visits and I’d have been gone by spring, and Harlan Beecher would have been standing at my funeral, shaking hands, holding the papers to my forty acres.

They got the order to exhume Dale in November.

I stood by the cemetery fence with Kayla on one side and Travis on the other. It was cold and gray, and a backhoe I’d known since it belonged to the Hendersons was doing the digging.

I thought that would be the worst day.

It wasn’t.

Three weeks later, the investigator from the state lab called me himself. He said there was no antifreeze in Dale’s remains.

I almost laughed with relief. Then he kept talking.

There was a single small-caliber wound in the back of Dale’s skull. Hidden under his hair. Missed because nobody looks for a bullet when a sixty-one-year-old man slumps over in a deer stand and his best friend says it’s his heart.

Harlan hadn’t waited for the tea with Dale.

Dale had figured him out first.

They found it in Harlan’s truck, folded inside the owner’s manual. A note in my husband’s handwriting, dated nine days before he died. It was addressed to Kayla.

If anything ever happens to me, ask your mama if she fed Biscuit.

I keep that note in my Bible now.

Harlan Beecher is charged with three murders and one attempted. Rhonda’s sister calls me on Sundays. We don’t drink tea.

And every October, I stir the apple butter with my daughter and the son-in-law I almost ran off my land. Nine hours, like always.

Dale was right. It teaches you patience.

Or it teaches you to cry.