On the boardwalk outside, the Gazette office was setting the week's edition, and she could see the headline through the glass in reverse. That evening Tomás brought the paper up from town with his mouth set in a line, and she read, in the editor's best sorrowful style, of the Ellison ranch's latest misfortune, and of how a woman alone, however spirited, cannot be expected to hold what two hands let slip, and how the valley would surely wish to see the Rocking E pass to steadier management before grief makes another widow of the land itself.
Maren read it twice. Then she folded it carefully and put it in the stove, and watched Sloan's version of her burn with more satisfaction than the event deserved.
"Steadier management," she said. "Tomás, saddle the gray in the morning. Mr. Stanton and I are going to read the county's books, since Mr. Sloan has been kind enough to read mine."
Chapter 12
What the Creek Remembers
The spring pool on Dry Fork Creek was the last of the creek that still deserved the name — a green eye of water under the cottonwoods a mile from the ranch house, where the flow came up through gravel and held, cold and stubborn, while everything around it turned to dust. Maren rode there with Stanton in the late afternoon, two days after the town, because she had asked him for the rest of his story and he had said, not at a table, and not in a house, and she had understood that some things a man can only say looking at water.
They sat on the bank with the horses cropping what little shade-grown grass remained, and he told it the way a man lays out tools — in order, without ornament.
"Her name was Rose," he said. "Rose Delany. She taught school in a one-room schoolhouse outside Las Cruces, and she had a laugh that made other people laugh, like a bell makes other bells ring. We were married in the spring of sixty-four. I was twenty-four and wearing a deputy's badge for Harlan Beckett, and I thought the pair of those things — the badge and her — made me about the luckiest man the territory had produced."
The ambush at Moccasin Creek he described briefly and without self-pity: the horse that screamed, the shooting in the dusk, Sloan gone out the far side of the water with two men while Beckett's lay in the shallows. "We hunted him six weeks, but Sloan understood something I didn't yet. He understood that a lawman is a man with an address."
"They didn't come for me, Maren. That would have been soldier's work, and Sloan has never wasted soldier's work when butcher's work was cheaper. They came to the schoolhouse on a Friday, when I was three days out on a scout I wasn't even needed for — he'd arranged that too, a false report to draw me off. Rose was setting the room to rights. There were children due back Monday." His voice stayed level the way a man's does when he has carried a thing so long that the levelness is the scar tissue itself. "The coroner said it was quick. I've chosen to believe him, the way you choose to believe the horse was fine, standing over Thomas. Because the alternative doesn't change it, and believing it lets you get up in the morning."
"Beckett found me two days later, burying her. He'd resigned by winter — the territory called Moccasin Creek his failure, and Sloan let them. I gave back the badge in sixty-six and went looking on my own account, and I've been looking since. I found him twice. Once in Colorado, where he'd gone respectable under another name and the local law laughed me out of the county. Once in Sonora, where I was the gringo with a gun story and he was a mine owner's guest. Both times he was wrapped in money and men. So I learned patience — his own weapon. I learned to read the ground and follow the money instead of the man. When I heard a Garrett Sloan was buying up a drought valley in Arizona, piece by piece, quiet as mildew—" Beckett's words, she realized; the old man and the young one had the same litany — "I rode down to look. I'd been in the territory four days when I found your fence."
"And hid in my story like a stone in a shoe," Maren said quietly. "Planning to use my ranch as your vantage. My grief as your cover. Were you ever going to tell me, if the tracks hadn't forced it?"
"No," he said, honest as a blade. "That was the plan, and it was a poor one, and I've been ashamed of it since the morning I read your husband's note. You asked me at the ravine if there'd be anything left of me that isn't about Garrett Sloan. The truthful answer is that Rose is twenty years in the ground and I have spent those twenty years making sure her murderer had a furnished room in my head, rent-free, every day of it. That's not justice, Maren. That's just a second grave, and I've been living in it."
The horses drank.