Chapter 45
The door slammed open.
Snow burst into the room.
“Silas!”
He was already across the yard.
Henrietta reached the threshold in time to see him mount his horse with the ledger shoved beneath his coat.
Mercer appeared behind her.
“Leave him.”
“He has the proof.”
“We have the statements.”
“Not enough.”
“He can’t erase everything.”
“He can erase the account that ties all of it together.”
Silas kicked his horse forward.
Snow swallowed him between barn and road.
Calvin’s voice came from behind them, raw with pain. “Henrietta.”
She turned.
He was half on the floor.
Mercer swore and went to him.
The next several minutes shattered into movement: blankets pulled back, splint checked, Calvin’s teeth clenched while Mercer tested the leg, Henrietta gathering scattered pages with trembling hands. The fracture had not broken through the skin. Mercer said that twice, as though repetition might make it better.
Calvin barely heard.
“He took the ledger.”
Henrietta knelt beside the fallen papers. “I know.”
“Can we rebuild it?”
“Some.”
“All?”
She did not answer.
Calvin looked at her.
“Henrietta.”
“No.”
The word tasted like iron.
Mercer finished binding the splint tighter. “Then we take what we have to the deputy tonight.”
Henrietta shook her head.
“Silas will say the loose statements are incomplete. He will say corrections were ordinary. He will say Calvin’s own ledger would support him, and conveniently that ledger will vanish.”
Calvin struck the mattress with the flat of his hand. “Damn it.”
Mercer rose slowly. “Your father’s letter establishes motive.”
“Motive is not the account,” Henrietta said.
“The old foreclosure notice?”
“Powerful. Not enough alone.”
Calvin stared toward the open space on the table where the ledger had been.
“I should have killed him when I had two good legs.”
Mercer gave him a cold look. “Then we could enjoy losing the ranch while you awaited hanging.”
“I said should have. I didn’t say I was planning poorly now.”
Henrietta almost smiled.
Almost.
She gathered the final page.
Her fingers stopped.
One corner of the table was wet.
Not water.
Lamp oil.
The lamp had tipped when Silas seized the ledger.
Henrietta stood quickly and righted it.
The flame still burned.
She wiped the spilled oil with a rag, then carried the lamp to the far end of the room.
“Careful,” Mercer said.
“I am.”
But a new thought had begun pressing at the back of her mind.