"I know," Margaret said. "That's why we're going at first light."
They left before the sun was fully up, she and Nathan riding north on the Benton Springs road with the cold air still dark blue around them and the horses breathing steam. They didn't talk much on the ride. This had become, over two weeks, one of the things she valued most about being in Nathan's company: the silences were comfortable rather than demanding. He didn't fill space with words just to fill it.
She found herself, somewhere in the second hour of riding, doing something she hadn't done since Henry died: she was not cataloging problems; she was not running calculations; she was simply riding on a cold Wyoming morning in good company toward something that might work out. The feeling was unfamiliar enough to be startling. She hadn't realized how much of her interior life had become occupied by the machinery of survival until this small, quiet moment when the machinery wasn't running. She didn't say any of that. She rode.
Margaret found Agnes Carver in her sister's back parlor—a small woman in her sixties with quick, nervous hands and eyes that moved to the door every time a sound came from outside. She looked at Margaret the moment she walked in, and something crossed her face: relief and terror at the same moment. The particular expression of someone who has been carrying a secret long enough that the prospect of setting it down is indistinguishable from the prospect of disaster.
"Mrs. Lawson," she said. "I heard you were fighting him."
"I am," Margaret said. She sat down across from her without being invited, because there wasn't time for the ritual of invitation, and Agnes Carver didn't look like a woman who needed ceremony right now. She looked like a woman who needed someone to be direct. "Tell me what you saw," Margaret said.
Agnes's hands went very still in her lap. "If I tell you," she said, "and it goes to court and he finds out it was me—"
"He'll know," Margaret said honestly. "I won't lie to you about that. He'll know, and he'll be furious, and his fury won't have any power, because by the time you testify, he will be under active fraud investigation by the territorial court, and anything he does to retaliate becomes additional criminal exposure for him." She leaned forward slightly. "Agnes, there are eleven families in this valley that we know of whose land and savings and futures were taken by this man using exactly what you saw. You have the ability to stop it from happening to anyone else."
Agnes looked at her. She looked at Nathan, who was standing quietly by the window and not making any demands with his posture or his expression.
"He changed the entries himself," Agnes said. Her voice was not much above a whisper. "Late, after the store was closed. I came back one evening in February—I'd forgotten my shawl—and I saw him at the account books. He didn't hear me come in. I stood in the doorway and I watched him write over an entry in a different ink. He scratched out the original amount and wrote a higher figure, and he was very careful to match Henry Lawson's handwriting above it." She stopped. "He'd been practicing the handwriting. There was a sheet on the desk—practice, over and over, the same numbers in Henry's hand."
The kitchen was absolutely silent.