They had come for the seven. For three days Louisa and Weatherby sat at the long table in the meeting house while the seven families came in, one at a time, with whatever they had. Eli Strickland brought a Bible with every payment written on the flyleaf in his wife's hand. The Overtons brought a cigar box of receipts, half of them in Lindqvist's writing, half missing. A widow named Mrs. Carrow brought nothing but her memory, and gave the dates and sums for seven years without looking at a paper, and Louisa wrote them down, and Weatherby said quietly afterward that he did not know if a court would take it, and Louisa said, "I would."
Hester Bly fed them. That was the extent of it. She fed them well, and at her own table, and she did not once smile at Louisa or ask her a single question about herself. On the third evening, as Louisa was helping clear the plates, Hester said, without turning from the dishpan, "Gabriel says you offered to pay the seven out of your own pocket."
"From my mother's money. It isn't much. It would cover what's owed."
"And he told you no."
"He said you would."
Hester dried her hands. She was a long time doing it. "My mama was sold off a place in Tennessee when I was six," she said. "Gabriel was nine. The man that sold her was sorry about it. Wrote it in his diary, I expect. Sorry." She hung the towel on its nail. "I don't need a Kittredge to be sorry, Miss Louisa, and I don't need a Kittredge to be kind. I need the Kittredge Western to stand up in court and say it took that money and it knows it did. You paying it out of your mama's purse just lets them off from saying it."
Louisa stood with a plate in her hands.
"Then what can I do?" she said.
"There's a second book. That clerk said so."
"Yes."
"Where would it be?"
Louisa set down the plate. "There is a safe," she said slowly, "in my father's library. Behind my mother's portrait. I have known the combination since I was fourteen. It's her birthday."
Hester Bly looked at her for the first time that evening, really looked, the way her brother looked at things until they told him something.
"Well," she said. "That's one thing you could do."