Chapter 2 of 3Old Family Things

Mariah Sandoval's refusal cost the clinic its best account before Lena had signed a single contract of her own, and the sale was already done. Dr. Lena Petrova owned the Verbena Creek Veterinary Clinic outright — the building, the lot, the equipment, the name still sun-bleached on the sign out front — and she could not open the basement file room, because the only key to it had ridden off to Phoenix in Desmond Langdon's pocket.

Beatriz came in through the front door with her cardigan buttoned to her throat and two cups of Circle K coffee held against her chest like something breakable.

"I brought you the good kind, mija. Doesn't taste like the can."

"Beatriz." Lena set down the intake sheet she had been not-reading since sunup. "I need to ask you about Mariah Sandoval."

"Ask me what?" Beatriz set a cup on the counter and straightened a stack of brochures that did not need straightening.

"She came in here yesterday afternoon for feed. She wouldn't let me put a hand on her horses."

Beatriz took up her own cup and held it without drinking, watching the flatbed trailer parked out on the lot with nobody working at it.

"That one." She shrugged. "She's been sour on this place since before I retired."

"Sour how?"

"Ranchers." Beatriz fanned her fingers at the window. "A horse goes off its feed, it's the vet's fault, it's the weather's fault, it's the farrier's fault. Mostly the weather."

Lena left her cup where it sat and gave her the room a nervous dog gets — no hands, no hurry, let the animal come.

"She said 'not this clinic.' Not 'not you.' Not 'not a stranger.' This clinic."

"Well." Beatriz drank. "Her youngest grandbaby started school up in Rimrock, did you hear? Cute as a bug. And the Fry's over in Camp Verde has chicken thighs on special, if you're making anything this week."

"I hadn't heard." Lena pulled the brochure stack an inch toward herself, then pushed it back. "You worked beside Dr. Langdon a long time."

"Long time. Good years." Beatriz moved the brochures again, squaring them against the counter edge. "Different years, near the end."

"Different how?"

"Different." She said it pleasantly, as if she'd been asked about the weather, and then she patted the counter twice and turned for the kennels. "Now let me get those hosed out before the sidewalk gets hot enough to fry an egg on."

Lena let her go. In an exam room she would have kept pressing, because a horse that flinches at the saddle will tell you where it hurts if you keep your hands quiet and your questions dull, but Beatriz had backed into the far corner of the stall and handed over a grandbaby and a grocery sale instead of an answer, and there was no sense crowding an animal that had already made up its mind about you.

The truck came up the drive while Lena was still drying her hands. Silver and waxed, clean enough to look borrowed. The man who climbed out of it wore a pearl-snap shirt pressed to a shine and jeans with no dust on them, and he took his sunglasses off before he reached her, which told her he wanted to be looked at.

"Dr. Petrova." His handshake was firm and brief. "Miles Langdon. I wanted to welcome you properly."

Lena folded the rag she was holding and tucked it into her back pocket. "Mr. Langdon. That's kind."

"Kind is easy." He looked past her at the building, at the chipped stucco and the sagging gutter over the exam room door. "This place means a great deal to my family."

"I'll take care of it."

"I believe you will. That's why I drove out." He turned back. "So. What are you planning to change?"

Lena had spent the whole morning counting what she could not fix and had not once counted what she wanted to change.

"Change?"

"Folks get curious. New owner, new methods."

"I haven't decided anything yet." She said it slowly, testing him as she would a joint — close it, and watch where he pulls away. "First I want the records in order."

"Ah." Something shifted behind his smile and settled again. "Dad kept everything, you know. Every invoice, every receipt, filed back to the day he opened the doors. You won't find a clinic in the county with better paper."

"That's what I'm counting on."

"Good. Because those files are family history to me." He said it lightly. "I'd hate for anything to go missing."

"Nothing goes missing in my building."

He laughed at that, one short note, and glanced up at the gutter again. "One thing, and I'll say it as a friend rather than a neighbor. Verbena values tradition. People here don't mind a new face. They mind new methods."

"I don't fix what isn't broken."

"That's exactly right." He put his sunglasses back on. "I've got a project in front of the county this fall, so I'll be around more than usual. Verbena Estates, up past the wash. You'll hear plenty about it, and some of it will be from me."

"I'll keep that in mind."

After the truck was gone, Lena walked the building with the method she used on a new barn: find the load-bearing parts first. The basement door was off the back hall, narrow and painted the color of oatmeal, and the switch was on the wrong side of the jamb. Down at the bottom, past the water heater and a shelf of paint cans gone solid, a door stood in the wall with a brass deadbolt above the handle. She tried the knob. It held. She knocked, out of reflex, and the knock came back hollow and roomy, the sound of space behind it rather than shelving.

Upstairs, the office was the opposite problem. Nothing was locked. Everything was loose: banker boxes stacked in the corner, receipts in a plastic grocery sack, a shoebox of index cards held with rubber bands gone brittle, invoices jammed in a drawer with the tabs worn off. Whatever system Desmond Langdon had used, it had come apart somewhere along the years he was running the clinic.

The phone rang while she was still sitting on the floor with the shoebox between her knees.

"Dr. Petrova? It's Miles Langdon, from this afternoon, and I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time."

"It's fine."

"Just remembered something." A keyboard clicked somewhere behind him. "I'll need to swing by sometime in the next few days, whenever suits you. Dad left some of our old family things down in your basement storage."

"Family things."

"Old crates. Papers, mostly. Nothing to do with the practice, I promise you. Langdon clutter, that's all."

Lena looked at the door at the end of the back hall, then down at the shoebox in her lap.

"I haven't been down there yet."

"Then leave it to me. I'd hate for you to trip over it."

"I'll leave it exactly where it is."

"Good enough. Good to see you today, Doctor."

Lena set the phone in its cradle and sat a moment longer, then got up and went back down the stairs with the light off and on again behind her. She stood in front of the door with the brass deadbolt and laid her fingers against the wood, which was cool, and the smell came up through the gap under it — faint pipe tobacco, in a building where the previous owner had never smoked a day in his life.

The basement storage. He had said it in the same warm voice he used for everything, and what he meant by it was the one door in the building she could not open, and every record Desmond Langdon had ever kept sat behind it. He would be back in a few days to carry out whatever he wanted from there, and Lena did not have the key.