"Good night, Margaret."
She was almost out of the room when he said quietly, "He deserved better. And so did you."
She didn't respond. She went to bed. She lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling and turning the words over the way you turn a stone over to see what lives underneath it. And she didn't know what to do with them any more than she'd known what to do with anything else about Nathan Cole since he'd walked into her worst moment yesterday morning and simply refused to keep walking.
The next two days were relentless work and no sleep, and the constant background hum of a problem that had more moving parts than she could hold in focus at once.
They rode the fence line and found three more cuts on the east boundary. Nathan fixed them without being asked and without making it a production. She documented each location in a new ledger she'd started specifically for this purpose: dates, locations, descriptions of damage consistent with deliberate action, not weather or animal pressure.
Documentation: that was her native language. If Mercer was going to bury her in manufactured paper, she was going to bury him in real paper, in numbers that didn't lie, in a record so thorough and so clear that any judge with functioning eyes would see exactly what had been done and who had done it.
The reply from Daniel Hart arrived on the third morning—not by wire this time, but by a rider directly, a young man from his office in Laramie who handed Nathan a sealed letter and accepted a cup of coffee in exchange before heading back. Nathan read the letter. Then he handed it to Margaret without a word.
She read it standing in the yard in the morning cold, and when she finished, she read it again.
Hart was coming. He would arrive in Red Hollow in four days. He had already begun pulling the territorial records on Mercer's property transactions over the past five years, and what he had found in the first two hours of looking was enough, he wrote, that he believed the situation in Red Hollow was considerably larger and more serious than one widow's disputed debt. He used the word systematic. He used the phrase pattern of acquisition. He said he would explain the rest in person.
She lowered the letter. "He's found other cases," she said.
"Sounds like it."