"It's enough time if we use it correctly. I need everything you have, Mrs. Lawson. Every ledger, every letter, every record Henry kept. I need to build the cleanest possible documentation of the discrepancies. And I need to do it in a form that holds up under cross-examination from Mercer's attorney, who is, I should tell you, a man named Aldridge out of Cheyenne, who is experienced, expensive, and not above procedural tricks."
"I have the ledgers," she said. "Twelve years of them. And I've already marked every discrepancy." She stood and went to the shelf. "Nathan and I cross-referenced the entries for the past eighteen months against Mercer's claimed figures. We found six points of contradiction, totaling $112 in payments that Henry made and Mercer didn't record."
She set the marked ledger in front of Hart. He opened it. He looked at the first marked entry. Then he looked up at her over the top of the page.
"You did this?" he asked.
"Henry taught me the system," she said. "I've been maintaining these books for the past four years."
Hart looked at Nathan. Nathan said nothing, but something in his expression communicated what he didn't say out loud. Hart looked back at the ledger with an expression Margaret couldn't quite read—something between relief and a sharp, professional interest.
"All right," he said quietly. "All right, this changes things." He turned a page. "This is actually very good work, Mrs. Lawson."
"I know," she said, and sat back down.
Nathan made a sound near the window that was definitely not a laugh, and definitely sounded like one.
They worked through that afternoon and into the evening, the three of them around the kitchen table, with the ledgers spread out and Hart's documents beside them, building the case entry by entry. Hart asked questions the way a surgeon works: methodical, focused entirely on what was necessary. He didn't waste words. He didn't repeat himself. He made notes in a handwriting so small and dense it looked like another language. And periodically he would stop, look at what he'd written, and ask Margaret to explain the context behind a specific entry in her own words, which he would then transcribe with even greater precision.
By the time the lamp burned down toward midnight, they had documented nine discrepancies—not six, but nine, because Hart had found three more in the earlier records that Margaret had flagged as possible, but uncertain.