Then another name.
ORTEGA, MANUEL.
Clara looked up.
"Who is Manuel Ortega?"
Rafael answered quietly.
"The man who owned your father's ranch before your father."
"My father bought it legally."
"No."
The word came from Isaiah.
Clara's face hardened.
"You don't know that."
"I met Ortega."
"My father paid for that property."
"He paid Carrow."
The room seemed to shrink.
Isaiah explained.
Manuel Ortega had borrowed seventy dollars after a drought.
He repaid the loan.
Carrow's office destroyed the receipt.
A second document appeared claiming Ortega owed four hundred dollars.
The property was seized.
Three weeks later, Charles Bennett purchased it from Carrow for less than half its value.
Clara stood.
"My father would never do that."
Rafael said nothing.
"My father was a decent man."
Still nothing.
"He didn't steal land."
Isaiah's voice remained calm.
"Maybe he didn't know."
Clara wanted to believe that.
Then she remembered something.
She had been eleven when her father brought them to the ranch.
Her mother had asked why the kitchen still contained plates.
Why children's clothes remained in an upstairs room.
Her father had said the previous family left quickly.
Clara had never questioned it.
Children rarely questioned the roof above them.
"Is Ortega alive?" she whispered.
Rafael nodded.
"His daughter is."
Clara sat down.
The ledger had stopped being a weapon she could point at Everett Carrow.
Now it pointed backward.
Toward people she loved.
Toward the house where her mother had died.
Toward the orchard where her father was buried.
Toward memories she had believed belonged entirely to her family.
Rafael watched her.
"Truth becomes much more expensive when it asks something from us."
Clara looked at the book.
"What happened to Ortega's daughter?"
"She lives outside Socorro."
"Does she know?"
"She knows what happened."
"Does she know who owns the ranch now?"
Isaiah answered.
"You."
Clara closed her eyes.
Her father had left it to her.
She had leased the property after Thomas died.
Every month, rent arrived from a family working land that might never have belonged to the Bennetts.
For a long time nobody spoke.
Finally Clara asked, "Where would Thomas hide the second ledger?"
Isaiah looked toward the door.
"In your father's grave."
They reached the Bennett ranch just before midnight the following evening.
Clara had not returned in nearly six years.
The farmhouse appeared smaller than she remembered.
The orchard had thinned.
The porch sagged.
Her tenants, the Wilson family, were away visiting relatives.
The house stood empty.
Clara walked toward the family cemetery beneath three cottonwoods.