Chapter 2
Ward turned his cool gray eyes toward the bed. "Clayton. Can you hear me?"
Clayton’s eyelids fluttered. The yellowed whites of his eyes rolled toward the sound of Ward’s voice. His tongue ran over lips that were crusted and split.
"The woman..." Clayton rasped. The sound was like two dry shingles grinding together. "She... she bought something in town... Alcott, check the apothecary... rat bane... she put sheep dip in the kettle..."
"I already visited the apothecary, Clayton," Ward said calmly, pulling a worn calfskin notebook from his coat pocket. "Old man Fletcher hasn't sold a grain of arsenic or strychnine since August, and every dram in his cabinet is accounted for in the territorial poison register. Furthermore, your kitchen girl, young Mary, and your house cook, Mrs. Gable, were in that scullery from two in the afternoon until nine that night. Mary says Kate Hayes never touched the roasting spit. She never touched the stew kettles. She never peeled a single turnip."
Clayton’s chest hitched. A dry, ragged cough rattled deep in his ribs. "She... served the platters. She brought the plates."
"Yes," Ward said. "She did. And that is where your trouble begins, Clayton. Because when Mary and Mrs. Gable washed the china the next morning, they noticed something very peculiar about five specific settings."
Three days before the banquet, Kate Hayes had sat in the small kitchen of her homestead, ten miles up the north fork of the willow creek.
Her right hand was wrapped in clean strips of unbleached flour sack. When she flexed her fingers, the broken bones in her fourth and fifth metacarpals—crushed under the brass-studded heel of MacIntyre’s boot while Clayton held her down in her own dirt yard—ground against one another like gravel. The hand was swollen, mottled purple and yellow, useless for roping, milking, or driving fence pickets.
Clayton had assumed the injury would force her hand. Without a working hand, an unmarried woman could not put up hay before the first blizzard. She could not haul winter wood. She could not skin a beef or repair the stone foundation when the frost heave set in. He had offered her three hundred dollars for two sections of bottomland that held the only perennial spring within fifteen miles—a spring his five thousand head of Texas steers needed if he was to survive the coming dry winter.
When she refused, they had broken her fingers. Then Clayton had sent a message through the circuit rider: Come cook the feast for the district commissioners and cattle buyers on Thursday night, show the county you know who provides your bread, and maybe I’ll pay five hundred for the deeds instead.