At last Tasin spoke. "In my father's time," he said, "a man who had done harm and came into a house asking shelter from his own chief β we fed him, and we listened, and we did not promise. The listening is owed. The promise must be earned." He rose slowly. "I will ride home before my people worry the sun up looking for me. What you steal in Paloma, steal well, Caleb Wren. Your father crossed that town's rooftops once, in the flood year, carrying medicine for a family that had none. He told me the tiles are loose on the hotel side." His eyes rested on Sorrell a moment. "Keep your prisoner breathing. A dead witness testifies poorly."
After he had gone, Tess untied one of Sorrell's hands so he could hold a coffee cup.
"Don't mistake it for trust," she said.
"I won't," Sorrell said. "I'm learning this house."
Chapter 19
: Through the Roof
Paloma at midnight was a town holding its breath β the land office and the company building standing shoulder to dark shoulder along the boardwalk like two men pretending not to know each other. Caleb, Tess, and Tasin came in on foot from the creek side, having left their horses in the cottonwoods below town.
"The law had its chance at dawn, at the spring," Tess whispered, reading him the way she always could. "It asked for time. This is us giving it some."
Tasin said nothing, but his presence at Caleb's shoulder was itself an argument. The old chief had arrived at the ranch at dusk with two fresh horses and a shoulder bound so tight it was nearly a splint, and had refused to be left out of the evening. "Voss's men burned a barn in my valley and shot at my friend's house," he had said. "Also, I am the only one of us who has done this before."
The alley behind the company building smelled of ash barrels and horse. The climb began at a rain barrel, went to the lean-to roof over the back stoop, and from there to the main roof by way of a drainpipe that Tess pronounced sound and Tasin pronounced doubtful. The chief went last and climbed like smoke, one-handed, making no sound at all on the tiles.
The rooftops of Paloma were a country unto themselves β tar paper and tin and loose tiles, chimney pots standing like a huddle of old men, the whole terrain silvered by a half-moon. They crossed two roofs at a crouch. On the hotel side the tiles were indeed loose, exactly as Tasin had warned a lifetime ago in another man's story, and Tess caught one as it slid, holding it against her chest like a platter, freezing until they were sure no one below had stirred.
The skylight of the safe room sat in a shallow well of roof on the company building's north slope, four panes of thick glass in an iron frame, green with age at the corners. Sorrell had been right about Pegram: through the glass, by moonlight, they could see the whole little kingdom of paper below β the steel door, the shelves of ledgers, a desk with a green-shaded lamp β and beyond the open inner doorway, in the front office, a shape in a chair with a lantern turned low beside it, rising and settling in the rhythm of an old man's sleep.
Tasin worked the latch with a knife blade slipped between the panes, patient as a man picking a lock on a door belonging to time itself. The skylight lifted on oiled hinges β someone, sometime, had maintained it, perhaps for the light, perhaps because builders hate a squeak β and the smell of the room rose to meet them: dust, leather bindings, lamp oil, and the dry, sweet rot of old paper kept too long in the dark.
Caleb went down first on the knotted rope, hand over hand, with Tess's whispered instruction to mind the desk lamp following him like a prayer. The floor was brick. The shelves were labeled in a clerk's neat hand. His father's compass, hanging against his chest on its cord, swung once and knocked softly against a shelf edge, and he stilled it with his palm.
Tess came down next, light as a cat, and went straight to work. They had agreed on what mattered, in order: the lease book first, bound in red morocco with LEASES tooled in gilt that had gone dull; the folder of transfer papers, their own ranch's among them, with Caleb's forged mark already flourished on a signature line like a signature learned by practicing someone else's name; and the bribery file, a tin dispatch box of receipts and memoranda in Voss's own hand, names and sums set down with a bookkeeper's calm. Tess held their ranch's transfer paper up to the moonlight from the skylight and her face did something Caleb had never seen on it.
"That's meant to be your hand," she whispered. "He couldn't even be bothered to forge it well."
"No," Caleb said. "He didn't think he'd ever need it to be good. That's worth remembering. That's a man who believed no one would ever look."