"Thomas married a woman who is done being patient," she said, and folded the map along its old creases, gently, the way you fold a flag or a letter from the dead. "We start at the ravine tomorrow. I want to look at the place he died with these eyes."
Outside, the windmill turned in the hot dark, creaking, patient as the water under the hills.
Chapter 8
An Accident That Wasn't
The ravine cut down off the north pasture a mile from the Cerros trail, a crack in the earth full of shadow and loose stone, with a game track switchbacking down its face that riders used as a shortcut to the upper spring. Thomas had ridden it a hundred times. His horse, a bay gelding named Preacher, had the reputation — deserved — of being the surest-footed animal in the county, a horse that picked its way down trails in the dark like a cat in a pantry.
"He was found at the bottom," Maren said, standing at the rim with the morning wind worrying her skirts. "Preacher was standing over him. Not a mark on the horse. Not a mark. I held on to that for three years, Mr. Stanton. The horse was fine, so it had to be fate. A horse falling would be hurt. A horse thrown—"
"A horse thrown is a different story," Stanton said. He was down in the ravine already, moving in the slow spiral of a man reading a page that weather had tried hard to erase, and she climbed down after him on the switchbacks, her boots sliding in the scree, to where a flat stone marked nothing anyone had thought to mark. She had never come back here. In three years she had ridden around this ravine by a half-mile, every time, and called it respect.
Stanton crouched at the bottom of the game track where it hairpinned above the drop. "Three years is a long time for sign," he said. "Mostly gone. But stone keeps what dust won't." He pointed with a twig, not touching. Along the inside of the hairpin, at ankle height for a horse, an old weathered pine had been cut — not broken, cut, the flat of an axe scar still visible under lichen, at exactly the height to put a rope or a wire across the track where a rider coming down at dusk would never see it until his horse's legs found it.
Maren looked at the scar for a long time. She thought she might be sick. She was not sick. What came up in her instead was something older and colder than sickness.
"A rope across the track," she said. "Stretched after he rode up in the morning. Collected after he came down in the dark. Preacher didn't fall, Mr. Stanton. Preacher was tripped, and my husband's neck broke on these stones, and somebody stood up there—" she pointed up the rim, to a juniper with a view of the whole track, "—and watched to be sure of it, and then rode home and took off his boots in a warm house."
"Yes," Stanton said.
"Three years," she said. "I have sent Garrett Sloan a Christmas ham. Every year. In gratitude for the bank carrying my note through the first winter, I sent that man a ham, and all the time—"
"Maren." Stanton was in front of her, and he did not touch her, because she had not given him leave and he was a man who understood leave in his bones. "Listen to me. What you know now can't be unknowable, and it can't be rushed. A trip-rope scar in a ravine proves nothing to a jury — it's three years old and it could be a fence line. What proves things is the box, and the pattern, and catching him in the present tense. If you ride into Dry Fork today and call him a murderer, he wins. He wins with a smile and a libel suit and the whole valley saying grief finally unhinged you."
She stood in the ravine with the stones her husband died on under her boots, and she breathed, and breathed, and put the rage down in the place inside her where she kept things that had to wait — the place that had held her grief for three years without spilling a drop of it in public.
"Then we catch him in the present tense," she said. "How?"
"We make him hurry," Stanton said. "Men like Sloan make their mistakes at a gallop. Right now he thinks you're a widow with a dry creek and a note at the bank, two months from folding. We let him keep thinking it — while we copy every page of that box, and hide the copies in two places he doesn't own, and talk to the families on that list, one by one, quiet as confession."
She nodded slowly. Then she bent and picked up a stone from the place, an ordinary fist-sized piece of the ravine floor, and put it in her pocket, and climbed up out of the shadow into the sun.