"Every couple weeks. To Reading. Stamped and paid. And in August she bought a money order, sixty-two dollars, made out to a Miss L. Rudd, Penn Street. Paid cash." The postmistress hesitated. "I asked her where a girl of thirteen came by sixty-two dollars, and she said you'd given it to her to send, for Caleb's business. She had the order slip written out already in that nice hand of hers. I thought it was settling a debt. I thought, poor Nem, cleaning up after him." Her voice faltered. "Wasn't it?"
Nehemiah did not answer. He thanked her, in a voice that did not sound like his own, and touched his hat, and went out. Linnet followed him and found him standing beside the wagon with both hands on the wheel rim, as if the wheel were going somewhere and he were holding it back.
"Who is Kezzie?" she asked.
"Keziah Eskew," he said. "She's thirteen. Her mother cooked for us four years. Her father was a tie-hack on the railroad who went off to the Black Hills the year she was born and never came back, and her mother died of lung fever two winters ago, in our house, in the room off the kitchen. Caleb told Mrs. Eskew he'd look after the girl. Promised her. There wasn't any paper about it; there was just Caleb saying so, and that was as good as paper with him." He was looking at the wheel. "She's been living with us since. She keeps house. She's better at it than either of us. She goes to the school at Rock Creek in the winter months when there's a teacher, which there mostly isn't. She reads everything. She read Ivanhoe to my brother in the evenings two winters running, because he liked the fighting and she liked the Jewess."
"Rebecca," Linnet said.
"Rebecca," he agreed.
She stood beside him in the street and let it settle into her. The schoolroom hand. The careful loops. The letter that asked her to write about anything at all, even if it was only what she had set that day, because the writer wanted to think about something ordinary. A thirteen-year-old girl standing in a kitchen looking at a grave through the window.
"Did your brother know?" she said. "Before. Did he know she was writing his letters?"
"He must have. He couldn't have written to you any other way. He'd have sat at the table and said what he wanted and she'd have put it down." Nehemiah let go of the wheel. "I was out most evenings last winter. We had stock on the north range and I took the line camp. I'd come in Saturdays. I never saw them at it. I never asked what they did evenings. I thought it was Ivanhoe." He turned and looked at her, and his face was raw. "Miss Rudd, I don't know what's in those letters that's him and what's her. I don't know that she knows anymore. And I'll tell you the worst of it, since we're telling everything. That sixty-two dollars. I never gave her sixty-two dollars. There's only one place in that house sixty-two dollars could have come from."