Trust me a little longer, sister. I have not failed you yet. Taji wrapped the knife carefully back into its hide fold. I will keep searching. A witness, if one exists, someone who saw Askala near the river that night or saw the rifles change hands at that ridge.
He looked to his sister, something fierce and tender both moving behind his eyes. Stay alive until I return with more. I intend to. He was gone as quick and quiet as he'd arrived, swallowed back into the tree line like the dark had simply reclaimed something it was only ever lending out. Wit and Inaba stood a long moment in the yard, the night settling cold and clear around them, neither one quite ready yet to go back inside and pretend the world hadn't just tilted sideways beneath their feet.
Adeline, Wit said finally, the name coming out rougher than he meant it to. You think Briggs' dealings go back that far? To her, too. I do not know. Inaba's voice gentled, careful with him now the way she'd been careful with the salve on his hand.
But a man who trades rifles for land does not begin with rifles. Wit called her. He begins small. Land surveys, boundary disputes, small enough that a grieving man might tell himself it was only ever an accident. You think that's what happened to her?
I think, she said, we will not know for certain until we pull harder on this thread than we have yet dared to. He nodded slow, jaw tight, something old and buried finally starting to work its way toward daylight after 2 years underground. Then we pull, he said. Except pulling, as it turned out, meant risk neither of them had fully weighed until the pulling was already underway. 3 days later, Witt rode into Wolf Creek alone against every ounce of Yanaba's protest.
Though she'd finally relented once he'd pointed out correctly that a giant Apache woman walking Main Street unguarded was a far surer way to end up back under a rope than one careful rancher asking quiet questions at the land office. The town felt different to him now than it had 3 weeks back. Same dusty street, same tired storefronts, leaning shoulder to shoulder against each other like old men too stubborn to fall down proper. But he saw it clearer now, somehow. Saw the way conversations dropped half a register when he passed.
Saw the way certain eyes wouldn't quite meet his. Guilt or fear or some uneasy mixture of both working behind faces that had cheered a hanging 3 weeks back and hadn't fully reckoned yet with what that cheering might come to cost them. Because a town doesn't forget its own cruelty just because the sun keeps rising after. It only buries it, and buried things, Witt had learned plenty by now, had a habit of surfacing eventually, usually at the worst possible hour. The clerk there, a nervous young man named Holloway, who'd sold Witt his original deed 6 years back, went went pale the moment Witt asked to see the survey records from 2 years prior.
"Those files," Holloway said, not meeting his eyes, "went missing. Fire in the back room. Spring before last. Convenient fire. I wouldn't know anything about that, Mr. Calder.