Ruth Calder stared at her brother-in-law across the kitchen table. Walter stood beside the stove in the cabin that had been hers for six years, wearing her late husband’s wool coat as though he had inherited the right to wear everything Elias had left behind. His wife, Margaret, sat with the claim papers spread before her. She kept one pale finger pressed against the signature at the bottom.

Margaret gasped, dropping the porcelain cup. It shattered on the pine floorboards, splashing hot tea across her skirts.

Walter surged to his feet, knocking his chair backward. His hand flew toward his belt, where a pearl-handled revolver rested in a tooled leather sheath.

Click.

Sheriff Vance stepped from behind the pantry partition, his Colt leveled squarely at the center of Walter’s forehead.

“Touch that walnut grip, Walter,” Vance said softly, “and you won’t live long enough to see the inside of a territorial cell.”

Walter’s hand froze an inch above the holster. His face turned the color of curdled milk. “Vance? What in God’s name is this? She was trespassing! She signed away her right—she left of her own accord!”

“I left because you forced me out at gunpoint into a blizzard,” Ruth said. She walked forward until she stood on the opposite side of Elias’s table.

Judge Horner shrank back into his seat, his watery blue eyes darting toward the door. “Sheriff, this is an irregular intrusion. I am an officer of the territorial court—”

“You’re an accessory to high fraud and capital murder, Horner,” Vance interrupted without shifting his aim. “Shut your mouth and keep your hands flat on the table, or I’ll have Henry tie you to the hitching post outside until your fingers turn black.”

Horner slapped both hands onto the table and clamped his mouth shut, trembling.

Walter tried to muster his bluster, his eyes bulging as he glared at Ruth. “You have no proof of anything! Elias died of the lung rot! The land was Calder land before you ever set foot in this territory! You’re a penniless nobody with no family and no backing!”

Ruth unslung the oilcloth packet from her shoulder. With deliberate slowness, she unwrapped the layers and laid the contents on the wood.

First came the original land patent, signed by the President of the United States, bearing the pristine, unblemished boundary lines of the Calder homestead.

Second came the Helena chemist’s ledger receipt for five ounces of white arsenic.

Third came Elias’s black leather book.

The moment Walter’s eyes fell on the crescent-stamped leather cover, the arrogance drained from his posture. His shoulders slumped inside Elias’s coat, and a terrible, suffocating silence filled the room. Only the crackle of the birch fire and the rattling of the windowpanes against the gale broke the quiet.

“He found it,” Walter whispered, his voice cracking. “He knew.”