"I thought she was just partial to wildflowers, sir," Isaiah admitted. "Lots of ladies like to cut flowers for the house. Didn't think nothing of it."
"No reason you should have," Harlan said grimly. "But I think we ought to go have a look in her sewing room."
Tobias Reyes stood watch outside Eleanor's private sewing room door. She had retreated there hours earlier, refusing supper, refusing to speak further to her husband, while Harlan and Isaiah searched it with careful, methodical hands.
It was Isaiah who found it, in the bottom of a hatbox pushed far back beneath a shelf of folded quilts. A small tin, once meant for peppermints, now holding a careful cache of dried leaves, long and toothed and unmistakable. And beneath the tin, folded small, a letter.
Harlan unfolded it with hands that were not quite steady. It was written in a hand neither of them recognized, unsigned, but the meaning was plain enough, even in its careful, guarded language. It spoke of the arrangement of a sum of money to be paid upon the completion of the widow's business, of a gentleman waiting in Cheyenne who had grown impatient with the pace of nature, and wished to know when he might expect to hear that Harlan Miller's considerable estate had passed, at last, into more agreeable hands—hands that would be glad to sell the Sweetwater grazing land at a fair price to a certain railroad syndicate eager to lay track straight through it.
Harlan sat down heavily in the small chair by Eleanor's sewing table, the letter trembling faintly in his grip, and for a long moment, he said nothing at all.
Isaiah stood quiet beside him, understanding without being told that some pain a boy could only stand witness to, not fix.
"Four years," Harlan said finally, his voice rough. "Four years I thought that woman loved me. Turns out I was just a clock she was waiting to run down, so some railroad man in Cheyenne could get his hands on my river land cheap, and she could walk off with whatever they'd promised her for the trouble."
He looked up at Isaiah, and there was something almost pleading in his weathered face now, the look of a man who has just had the ground taken out from under him and is grabbing for anything solid. "How did you see it, son? Everyone else in this house, grown men, hired hands, even Cook who's known Eleanor for years, nobody else saw a single thing wrong. How does a 13-year-old boy carrying a tea tray see what nobody else in this whole ranch managed to see?"
Isaiah thought about it seriously before he answered, because the question deserved a real answer and not just a modest shrug.
"I think, sir," he said slowly, "it's because nobody ever really looks at me. Folks talk right past me, like I'm not even standing there, because I'm just the stable boy, just a servant, just a colored child nobody expects much from. So, I got real good at looking at everybody else instead. My grandmother always says the folks the world don't bother to notice end up noticing everything right back. It's about the only power we get given, so we learn to use it good."
Harlan was quiet for a long moment, absorbing that the way a man absorbs a truth he has never once had cause to consider about his own house, his own land, his own life.
"Your grandmother," he said finally, "sounds like about the wisest person on this entire ranch, and I'm ashamed I've spoken maybe ten words to her in three years."
They confronted Eleanor together the next morning in the same parlor where the whole terrible day had begun, with Tobias Reyes standing solemn by the door and Sheriff Daniel Cobb, sent for at first light, seated grimly beside a small table where the tin of dried leaves and the unsigned letter now lay in plain view.
Eleanor had had a night to compose herself, and she entered the room with her chin high and her performance of wounded innocence fully restored. But Harlan set the letter down on the table between them before she could speak a single word of it.
"I know about the railroad man in Cheyenne, Ellie," Harlan said quietly. "I know about the arrangement. I found the tin in your hatbox myself. And the boy remembers seeing you gathering foxglove by the back fence more than one early morning these past weeks. So before you open your mouth to lie to me one more time, I'd think carefully about whether that's really how you want to spend whatever's left of your freedom."
Eleanor's composure did not shatter all at once. It went slowly, the way ice goes on a warming river, cracking in long jagged lines before the whole surface finally gives way. She looked at the letter. She looked at the tin. She looked last of all at Isaiah, standing quiet and steady beside her husband, and something like genuine hatred flickered across her face before she mastered it back into stillness.
"You have no idea," she said finally, very low. "What it is to be a woman in this territory with nothing of your own. Everything I have, everything I am, belongs to whichever man's name I happen to be wearing at the time. Harlan is a decent man. I'll grant him that much—decent as they come out here. But decent isn't the same as generous. And I grew tired four years ago of waiting patiently for a man 22 years my senior to simply die of his own accord on his own schedule."
"So you decided to hurry it along," Sheriff Cobb said flatly. "With a poison a child could identify better than half the doctors in this county."
Eleanor said nothing further after that. There was little left to say. Sheriff Cobb took her into custody that same hour, and within the month, the man in Cheyenne—a railroad speculator named Whitfield Cross, who had indeed been corresponding with Eleanor for the better part of a year, promising her a comfortable new life and a healthy son once the Sweetwater grazing land came free for cheap purchase—was arrested as well on charges of conspiracy that would keep both of them well occupied with lawyers and judges for a long while to come.