Chapter 33
Calvin glared at him. “If you came here to practice medicine, practice it.”
“I did. Your leg remains broken despite your personality.” Mercer drank his coffee without hurry. “Now I’m practicing patience.”
Henrietta returned to the statement. The figures had become less like numbers to her and more like footprints. Silas had expected nobody to follow them backward. He had scattered them across months, buried them under interest, shifted them between principal and penalties, and trusted Calvin’s pride to keep him from asking for help until the trail disappeared beneath fresh snow.
But the trail had not disappeared.
It had only waited for someone who cared enough to kneel and look closely.
“November twelfth,” she murmured. “One hundred and eighty dollars. Your ranch ledger records it. Silas’s statement records a payment of eighty dollars on November twenty-first.”
Calvin pushed himself higher against the pillows, anger sharpening his face. “That is not what I paid.”
“I know.”
“You can’t know.”
Henrietta tapped the page. “Because eighty dollars is not the only number here. Look.”
He made an impatient movement, then hissed as his leg shifted. Mercer started forward, but Calvin waved him away before the physician had crossed half the room.
Henrietta carried the paper to the bed. “He lists a one-hundred-dollar ‘late assessment’ on November fifteenth. Three days after you say you paid him in full for that month.”
Calvin studied the ink. His expression darkened by degrees. “There was no late assessment.”
“You are certain?”
“I’d remember a hundred dollars.”
“That is not always true of men who keep receipts in mysterious places.”
His mouth tightened. For a heartbeat she expected the old response—the cold rebuke, the reminder that this was his ranch and therefore his concern. The expectation was so familiar that she almost braced herself for it.
Instead Calvin said, “Fair.”
The single word unsettled her more than anger would have.
She returned to the table before he could see that it had.
For two days they had worked like this. Henrietta compared every entry in Calvin’s ranch books against every statement Silas had ever sent. Calvin supplied memories where paper failed. Mercer came and went between his small practice in town and Broken Spur, bringing information, food, and once a deputy’s warning that Silas had already posted notice of the auction at the mercantile.
Three days had become two.
Two had become one.
By tomorrow afternoon, if nothing stopped the foreclosure, strangers could stand in the Broken Spur yard and bid on the land beneath Calvin’s bed.