"Yes."
"Which one first?"
She looked at him. He was asking her, not telling her. "The records," she said. "Because if we can build a clear enough picture from the ledgers, the lawyer's job becomes simpler, and a simpler case moves faster."
He nodded. "Then that's where we start." He pulled the ledger toward him. "You want to walk me through the system Henry used, or you want to show me the flagged entries and let me work backward?"
"Walk you through the system first," she said, "or you'll miss the patterns."
"All right." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, full attention on the open page. "Walk me through."
Outside, the wind picked up and moved through the tall grass and turned the weather vane on the barn roof three full points west, which, if a person believed in such things, was the direction winds blew when they were finally, after a very long time, about to change.
Margaret Lawson opened her mouth and began to explain her dead husband's accounting system to a stranger who had ridden into town that morning planning to keep going, and didn't. She didn't notice, because she was focused on the numbers, that every time she leaned over the ledger to point something out, Nathan Cole listened the way a man listens when he is beginning to understand that what he's hearing matters. Not just the accounting; all of it. The twelve years of records, the careful handwriting, the woman across the table who had been holding an entire life together with nothing but intelligence and stubbornness, and the quiet, ferocious refusal to let a bully win.
He'd ridden into Red Hollow planning to keep going. He was already wondering, in the back of his mind where he kept the things he wasn't ready to look at directly, if he'd ever actually leave.
They worked through the ledgers until the oil lamp burned low. Margaret had expected him to lose patience within the first hour. Most men did when the columns of figures stretched across page after page, and the differences between entries were measured in fractions of cents, and the significance of a single line depended on understanding three other lines written six months earlier in a different context. Henry's system wasn't complicated, but it required attention, and attention was something most people rationed carefully when the subject bored them.
Nathan Cole did not appear to be bored. He asked questions that surprised her—not the obvious ones, not "what does this number mean" or "who is this payment to," but the questions that lived underneath those questions: Why did Henry record freight costs separately from supply costs when most ranchers folded them together? What did the notation in the left margin mean, the small letters she'd always assumed were Henry's private shorthand? Had there ever been a year when the cattle count didn't match the sale records, and if so, what had Henry noted as the reason?
She answered all of it. She answered it precisely and without softening the parts that reflected badly on Henry, because she had learned months ago that defending the dead against inconvenient truths was a luxury she couldn't afford right now. The truth of Henry's ledgers was her best weapon, and she was not going to blunt it by sentiment.