Inside were letters. Perhaps a dozen, folded once, each in the same strong, slanted hand β not Samuel's upright script. The topmost was addressed not to Samuel at all but to a name Caleb knew from Paloma, and it was signed, in full, at the bottom of the page, with a signature he had last seen at the foot of a courteous refusal in an office that smelled of leather and coal oil.
Harlan Voss had written these letters himself. And Samuel Wren, surveyor, promise-keeper, poor clerk of God's water, had kept every one of them hidden in the dark of his own desk, like a loaded weapon laid by for a day he hoped would never come.
Chapter 14
: What the Letters Confess
They read the letters at the kitchen table, in order of their dates, with the lamp turned up and the curtains drawn, though no soul was within a mile of the house. Tess read over Caleb's shoulder at first, then took half the stack herself. Neither of them spoke for a long while. The clock Samuel had wound every Sunday of his life ticked on the wall, keeping a dead man's habit.
The earliest letter was dated in the spring of 1881 and addressed to a territorial land commissioner whose name Caleb knew only from newspaper print. It was businesslike until its second paragraph, where Voss set down the sum of four hundred dollars to be paid on delivery of a certified copy of the valley filings, and a further sum when the new ledger was made up in a manner convenient to the company. Convenient. A ledger with a valley missing from it was convenient indeed.
The next letters were worse, in the way of a creek rising. Money to a clerk in the survey office for advance word of filings. Money promised to a member of the territorial council if a water bill died quietly in committee. A note, brief as a telegram, arranging payment to a man identified only as our friend in the sheriff's office, for keeping certain complaints from reaching the capital. Caleb thought of Deputy Odell's eyes sliding away at the spring, and felt the phrase settle onto the right shoulders.
The judge was never named outright β the closest Voss came to caution. But one letter, written to Odell himself, spoke of Whitcomb as a man whose caution could be purchased by flattery and whose rulings leaned toward whoever assured him there would be no trouble afterward. There will be no trouble, Voss had written. I guarantee the valley takes it quietly. Reading it, Caleb understood the hillside shot in a colder light: trouble, manufactured on schedule, so that a cautious judge could be assured it was necessary.
Tess set down the last letter with care, as if it were a plate that might crack. "It is not only the valley," she said. "It is the whole territory, bought in pieces, like a harness. And Pa had the receipts."
Now the secret compartment explained itself. Samuel β whose 1868 map stood between Voss and the spring β had not collected these letters by accident. Somewhere along the way, being the territory's memory for boundaries and water, he had got hold of them, perhaps from a clerk with a conscience or a grudge. And he had kept them not to use, Caleb believed at once, but as insurance: a quiet word to Voss that the price of harming the Wren family, or the Apache at Ojo Azul, would be these pages laid before men in the capital whom even Voss could not buy.
Insurance only works while the man holding it lives.
"He died in the autumn after the last of these was written," Tess said quietly. "A beam fell, Caleb. In a barn he built, with beams he set, and the coroner said the peg had worked loose, and everyone was very sorry, and the company sent flowers." She had been fifteen. Her voice did not shake, which was worse than if it had. "Flowers. I put them on the grave myself."
Caleb sat with his father's compass in his hand β he did not remember taking it from his pocket β turning the brass case over. He wanted the letters to prove the last step, the barn, the peg worked loose by hands other than time's. They did not. They proved the buying of a territory, the forgery's foundation, the reason a surveyor's map had to vanish from a ledger. The barn they only pointed at, the way smoke points at a fire over a ridge. It was enough to hang Voss's company. It might never be enough to name his father's killer in a court, and Caleb knew he would have to carry both truths at once, like two buckets on a yoke, without spilling either.
"We cannot keep these in this house," Tess said, practical through her grief, as she always was. "If they come for the ranch, the desk is the first thing they will burn."
So before they slept, they divided the letters. Half went back into the oilcloth and into the compartment. The other half Tess sewed into the lining of Caleb's spare coat, and one letter β the commissioner's, with the four hundred dollars plain as print β she folded into her father's Bible, between the pages of Exodus, where the waters were divided and a people walked free. "Let Voss search for Moses," she said, "and see how it goes for him."