"You asked me once what I wanted out of this," he said. "I want it ended. Not with my bullet β I had my chance at that in your rocks and I shot a gun out of a boy's hand instead, and I'm not sorry. I want him in a courtroom, in the light, with his name said whole by men he doesn't own, and Rose's name said with it. And then I want to find out who Micah Stanton is when Garrett Sloan isn't in the room." He looked at her, finally. "That's the whole of the story. You've earned it, and I'm sorry it took earning."
Maren reached over, deliberate as any decision she'd made that summer, and put her hand over his where it rested on his knee.
"Then we'll end it in a courtroom," she said. "Together. And after that, Mr. Stanton, we'll see about the rest of the question."
Chapter 13
The Pattern of the List
The county clerk's office smelled of dust and hot paper, and the clerk β a nervous young man named Wilkes whose predecessor had retired suddenly to Ohio β brought out the deed books with the air of a man handing over loaded weapons and hoping not to be present for the shooting. Maren had not told him what she was looking for. She had told him she was doing her late husband's estate papers, which was even true, in the way that a sword is a kind of letter opener.
Stanton sat beside her in his road clothes, cleaned up to the edge of respectability, and said nothing, and turned pages when she told him to, and she understood that he was playing a part too: the hired man, the muscle, beneath a clerk's notice. Wilkes noticed nothing but the clock.
It took two days. The pattern, once she saw it, was so simple that she was angry at every year the valley β herself included β had spent not seeing it.
Thomas's list had twenty-three names. Beside the four marked gone, the deed books told the rest: the Pruetts had "sold" to a Mr. A. Callis of Tucson, who did not appear in any other record in the territory and whose signature, Maren realized with a chill, was in the same handwriting as the notary's. Old Man Ivers's ranch had been bought by a land company with a Prescott post office box. The Alvarado parcel had changed hands twice in one winter β each sale a little cheaper than the last, like a thing rolling downhill β and come to rest with the same Prescott company. Eleven of the twenty-three families had sold, died, or vanished into debt in three years. Every trail of paper, followed far enough, arrived at one of three doors, and behind all three doors, when Stanton inquired of the right drunk bookkeeper in the right saloon on the second evening, stood the same set of initials in the freight-office ledger: G.S.
"Straw men," Stanton said, walking the horses home under a sky the color of brass. "Callis of Tucson is a name on a mailbox. The land company is a drawer in Sloan's own desk, I'd stake my reputation β such as it is β on it. He buys through them so the valley sees a dozen different buyers and no pattern, and so any one sale, looked at alone, looks like hard luck instead of a war."
"And the ones who won't sell?" Maren said. "There are twelve names left on that list. Mine at the top."
"Yours at the top because yours is the keystone," Stanton said. "The Rocking E holds the center of the patchwork β the best drilling ground, the trail into the Cerros, the only year-round well on the north end. Without yours, the rest is a necklace with no string. With yours, he owns everything around the water in one piece and can shut the valley's throat with one hand." He rode a while in silence. "That's why you're getting the two months and the cut wire and the fire, Maren, instead of an accident in a ravine. Thomas was a man alone with a secret; he could be disappeared quietly. You β the whole town watches you. He needs you broken, publicly, so your selling looks like your idea and your neighbors take the lesson. He's teaching the other eleven names what refusal costs, using you as the blackboard."
She thought of the Gazette: grief, steadier management, a woman alone. "And if the blackboard refuses to learn?"
"Then at some point," Stanton said, "he stops teaching and starts the war we found in the canyon. But it's expensive, war. It's noisy. It draws Prescott and Washington. He'll do everything else first. That's our time β the space between his patience and his powder. We use it to make sure that when he finally moves, he moves in front of witnesses he can't buy afterward."
That night she copied Thomas's list by lamplight, in her own hand, twice β and beside each name that remained she wrote not gone or selling but the thing the valley had forgotten to call its people for three years: the Hendricks boy's age, Widow Brandt's rheumatism and her savage pride, the Okafor twins born the winter the well froze. Names Sloan counted as obstacles, she wrote down as neighbors. It took an hour. It felt like loading a weapon, and she supposed it was β just not the kind that went in a holster.