Chapter 10 - Twelve Days
The foreclosure notice changed everything.
Truth was no longer an old mystery.
It had a deadline.
Caleb spread every document across his kitchen table.
Mary's ledger page.
Captain Ward's statement.
The forged land deed.
The ammunition records.
Dr. Price's notebook.
Tokala's journal.
Kalisa stood opposite him.
“Twelve days.”
“Less,” Caleb said. “He'll move faster if he thinks we're close.”
“To what?”
Caleb looked at the papers.
“The thing Mary found that scared him.”
They still did not have it.
They had evidence of corruption.
Fraud.
Weapon theft.
Intimidation.
But not proof that Reeves Hargrove caused Mary's death.
Kalisa pointed toward a notation in Tokala's journal.
“Here.”
Caleb could not read the Apache words.
“What?”
“My father wrote that Mary carried a black account book.”
“Account book?”
“He called it ‘the book of cattle numbers.’”
“Reeves's ledger?”
“Maybe.”
Caleb remembered Hargrove recording every transaction in black leather books.
If Mary had stolen or copied one, it might show payments.
“To Silas. Voss. Whoever staged the raids.”
Kalisa nodded.
“Where would she hide it?”
Caleb looked around the house.
Then at Mary's triangle symbol copied on paper.
“I know where she hid things.”
They searched until midnight.
The barn.
The root cellar.
The smokehouse.
Nothing.
Finally Caleb entered the bedroom.
He stared at the bed.
Five years earlier he had changed almost nothing.
Mary's side of the room still carried her sewing basket.
Her Bible remained on the shelf.
Caleb opened it.
A pressed flower fell out.
Behind it was a sentence underlined in pencil.
And the rock poured me out rivers of oil.
Caleb frowned.
Mary did not mark scripture randomly.
Oil.
He went outside.
Behind the barn stood an old wagon axle suspended over a barrel of lubricating oil.
He emptied the barrel.
At the bottom lay a sealed glass jar.
Inside was a folded note.
Not the ledger.
Caleb opened it.
C—
If you found this, then I was right to be afraid.
The black book is not here.
I gave it to someone Reeves would never search because Reeves believes women do not matter unless they belong to powerful men.
Ask Abigail Mercer about the blue dress.
Caleb stared.
“Abigail Mercer.”
Kalisa recognized the name.
“The seamstress?”
“Used to be.”
Abigail now ran the boardinghouse in town.
Widowed.
Sixty.
Caleb had known her for years.
They rode to town before sunrise.
Abigail opened the door wearing a robe and holding a shotgun.
“Caleb?”
“Blue dress.”
Her face went white.
She lowered the gun.
“Come inside.”
In her room, Abigail locked the door.
“I wondered if you would ever ask.”
“You knew Mary was investigating Reeves?”
“I knew she was frightened.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because she told me not to.”
Caleb's voice sharpened.
“She was dead.”
“And you were riding with Hargrove hunting Tokala.”
That stopped him.
Abigail opened an old wardrobe.
She removed a blue dress.
The hem was unusually thick.
She cut the stitches.
A narrow strip of paper slid out.
Not a ledger.
A list of names.
Twenty-two of them.
Ranchers.
Army men.
Merchants.
A banker.
Sheriff Pike's predecessor.
Beside several names Mary had written amounts.
Caleb's finger stopped at one.
SILAS BOONE — $300.
Another.
D. VOSS — $1,200.
Then:
WARREN PIKE — $500.
Caleb looked at Abigail.
“Our sheriff?”
“He was deputy then.”
Kalisa took the list.
At the bottom, one line had been underlined twice.
R.H. BLACK BOOK — COPY MADE. ORIGINAL RETURNED.
Caleb's pulse quickened.
“Copy.”
Abigail nodded.
“Mary gave me something else.”
She reached into the dress lining.
Her hand stopped.
Her face changed.
“What?”
“It is gone.”
“What's gone?”
Abigail turned the dress inside out.
A hidden pocket had been cut open.
“Someone was here.”
“When?”
“I don't know.”
Caleb saw fresh scratches on the wardrobe lock.
Kalisa moved to the window.
The frame had been forced.
Then they heard boots in the hallway.
Sheriff Warren Pike's voice came through the door.
“Caleb Whitlock?”
Everyone froze.
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Pike knocked again.
“I have a warrant for your arrest.”
