Chapter 8
Eleven O'Clock
The affidavit came to Coldwater on a folded sheet of tally-house paper, carried by Bell himself and read aloud on the porch with Deya standing in the doorway and the dog asleep at Nate's feet, as if the ranch were staging the scene it described.
It was Wray's statement, sworn before Bell that morning, and it said that Rafe Colt had died at eleven o'clock on the night in question, in an Apache attack on the supply trail near the northern camp, and that the body had been recovered at dawn and buried with respect.
Eleven o'clock. Nate heard the words and felt something cold settle in his chest, not fear but the weight of a fact come down in the wrong place, like a stone dropped into a well that rings against the sides all the way down.
Nate asked Bell to wait. He went into the house and came back with the blue book, and opened it on the porch rail to the page for that night.
At eleven, Nate had written, he was at the stone well. The coyote had come up out of the dark and eaten from his hand β the tin ladle held low, the animal's tongue rough on the metal. The dog had been asleep on the porch. There had been no hoofbeats. No gunfire. The basin at eleven o'clock had been still as held breath, and he had written that too: quiet, not a sound, coyote ate from my hand.
"Marshal," Nate said, "a gunshot carries in this basin. You can hear a rifle crack from the supply trail on a still night β I've heard it a dozen times. At eleven I was outside, awake, listening to nothing. There was no attack anywhere within earshot of this ranch. It is impossible."
Bell read the page twice. He read the date at the top, and the weather note in the margin β wind down, stars out. A man forging an alibi did not, in Bell's experience, sketch the well in the margin beside it.
Deya stepped forward then and spoke, in Spanish, fast and low, and Bell held up his hand β he didn't follow it. Nate translated as she went, his voice flat: the cousins, Tayo and Itza, shot four days back near the fence line while walking a surveyor's line; her own wound; the graves in the wash. She said she had seen CB&L riders near the fence at dusk that day. She said the word for token, and Nate took the brass disc from his vest pocket and set it on the porch rail beside the blue book.
Bell picked up the token and turned it over. CB&L around a steer skull. He set it down carefully, as if it were hot.
"Wray swore the tracks were unshod," Bell said slowly. "Small ponies."
"Ask to see them," Nate said. "Ask him to show you one track."
Bell stood a long time with his hat in his hands, looking from the blue book to the token to the woman in the doorway. By-the-book men had a particular look when the book stopped fitting the facts, and Nate recognized it because he'd worn it himself the day he'd found the graves.
"Mr. Gentry," Bell said at last, "I'll need this page for the record. And I'll need you to swear to it."
"I'll swear to every word I ever wrote in that book," Nate said.
Bell took out his notebook and copied the entry word for word, and when he had finished he looked up at the sky, which was going the color of a bruise to the west, and he said, almost to himself, "Eleven o'clock."
That night Nate could not sleep. He sat at the table with the blue book open and the brass token beside the lamp, and he thought about eleven o'clock β an hour he had always thought of as the middle of nothing, the dead center of the night, when honest men were asleep and the rest were up to whatever they were up to. He had been at the well with a tin ladle and a wild animal, writing down the quiet, while eleven miles off a man had bled out in an arroyo, and somebody had decided the story of it before the blood was dry.
Deya came and sat across from him without being asked, and she poured water from the pitcher into the tin ladle and drank, and set it down between them like a thing they both understood. She pointed at the entry for eleven o'clock and then at the sky, and said one word in English, clear as a bell: "Truth."