Chapter 8
BELLA
The town square smelled like hay dust and funnel cake grease, and I had three hours before I needed to be anywhere.
I told myself that was why I'd come. The Father's Day decorations were going up along Main Street, hand-painted banners stretched between lamp posts, someone's teenage kid fighting with a ladder near the hardware store.
It would have been good material. Clean, documentary stuff that didn't require me to be personally involved in anything.
That was the plan.
Ruby handed me a coffee from behind the counter at the Mercantile before I'd settled my butt onto a stool.
“Black, one sugar,” she said. “You look like you slept on a thought too hard.”
I took the cup. “I always look like this.”
“Mm.” Her glasses caught the light. “Jace looks like that too this week. Funny coincidence.”
I didn't bite, just thanked her for the coffee, tossed a couple of dollars onto the counter, and headed back toward the front door before she could try again.
Morgan, the town planner I’d met during my first visit to Mustang Mountain, was wrestling a folding display board on a table outside of City Hall, her hair escaping its clip, and a rolled poster tucked under each arm.
“You look like you’ve got time on your hands to lend a hand,” she said.
“Depends on what for.”
“Visual hierarchy.” She propped the board against the wall and unrolled one of the posters. It was a map of the rodeo grounds with sponsor logos arranged around the edges. “Ruby wants the Kincaid and Hollister names sized the same because she doesn't want a political incident before lunch.”
I looked at the layout. The Kincaid block was bolder by about four points, and the Hollister text sat lower on the page, visually smaller whether Ruby intended that or not.
“Swap the Hollister block to the upper left,” I said. “And bring both fonts down a size. Make them the same weight, so neither one looks bigger.”
Morgan looked at it, then looked at me. “You're useful.”
“I try.”
She laughed, I set down my coffee, and we worked through the display setup for forty minutes.
She talked while she worked, mentioned the regional press interest Rachel's article had stirred up, a comment thread somewhere about the rodeo's history that had gotten testy, and a blogger who'd started asking questions about land records.
“Is there anything to it?” I asked.
“Maybe.” Morgan pinned the corner of a banner flat. “People are paying attention to this town in a way they weren't a few months ago.”
I photographed the displays as we talked, adjusting angles, catching the light on the painted text.
Around us, Mustang Mountain moved through its morning.
Locals nodded to each other, stopping on the sidewalk to debate bunting colors.
Two older men argued about parking logistics in a way that suggested they'd been having the same argument for years.
Three separate people said good morning to me by name.
I hadn't introduced myself to any of them.
When we were done, Morgan asked if I wanted to visit the archives at the library with her. I didn’t have anything else to do for a while, so I followed her down the street.
Claire Hollister was already there when I came in, a cardigan over her shoulders despite the heat, a box of her aunt's papers open on the table next to her. We'd met briefly, in passing and both times she'd struck me as a person who noticed more than she acknowledged.
“Bella.” She didn't look up from the page she was reading. “Come look at this.”
She had two photographs laid side by side.
One was a formal portrait, stiff and over lit the way studio photos from the thirties went.
A woman in her twenties faced the camera, a baby in her arms. The other was a candid, grainy and slightly blurred, of two men standing at the edge of a field with their backs to the camera.
“My aunt believed these were taken the same season,” Claire said. “Based on the field condition and the dress. But I can't prove it, and the portrait has no date stamp on the reverse.”
I picked up the candid. The grain pattern had a particular quality. It was finer in the shadows, blown slightly in the lighter areas. Whoever had taken the picture hadn’t used a flash. It was natural light, probably late afternoon.
“I’m guessing this was shot west-facing,” I said. “See the shadow direction. Long shadows, so late in the day, but the light source is behind them. Late summer, maybe early fall. Look at the field. It appears it was cut recently but it's still green underneath.”
Claire watched me. Morgan stood next to her, doing the same.
“The portrait,” I continued, setting the candid down, “is indoor lighting, but there's window light contaminating the left side. Same season would match. The woman's dress is lightweight cotton, no layering.”
“So it could be the same year,” Claire said, like I'd confirmed something she'd already suspected.
“Could be.” I straightened. “What are you looking for?”
She told me about a hidden romance and that she suspected a child had been born who appeared in the birth records her aunt had marked in their old family Bible.
There was more, too. The Walker debt journal entries that Jace had taken to Slade and Tanner suggested someone had been making payments they didn’t want public.
“I don't need a reporter,” she said. “I need someone who can read images the way I read text.”
She put a third photograph on the table. It was a copy, printed from a scan, of a page from the Walker journal, the same one Jace had shared. I'd never seen it, but I'd heard about it.
I looked at the handwriting. The notation style—the way certain figures were grouped, the position of the date stamps relative to the entry text.
“Whoever kept this ledger was meticulous,” I said. “This isn't shorthand, it's a system. He or she meant for someone to read it later.”
“That's what I think.” Claire pulled out a sheet of her aunt's notes. “And this annotation here—” she pointed to a line in the copy, “—this matches a marginal note on one of her land records. Same phrasing. 'Both parties aware.'“
“What do you think it means?” I bent down to take a closer look when the door opened.
Rory came in, her phone clutched against her chest.
“Ruby said you might be here.” She looked at Claire, then the table. “Am I interrupting?”
“No,” Claire shuffled some papers together and offered a smile.
Rory walked around the table to stand next to me. She looked at the photographs for a moment. “Can I show you something?”
Morgan and I moved to the far end of the table while Claire kept working. Rory opened her camera roll.
She'd been shooting for weeks. I could see the span of it immediately—not one session but an ongoing project, consistent framing, a particular quality of attention. All of them were of Jace.
He hadn’t posed. She hadn’t captured the rodeo-coordinator version of him that I'd been photographing for the assignment.
Her pictures included Jace mending fences at six in the morning, his breath fogging.
Jace sitting on the paddock rail reading a vet report, his shoulders low, taking his time.
Jace fixing the loft stairs that Rory used every time she came looking for me, re-setting each nail with particular care.
Jace leaving a glass of water and a granola bar on the step outside the barn apartment door.
I didn't remember seeing him do that, but there it was.
“These are really good, Rory.”
“They're for Father's Day.” She said it quickly, like she wasn’t sure it was a good idea. “I didn't know what else to do and Ruby said a photo book was nice but that seemed—I don't know. Like something you buy.”
“This is better than something you buy.”
She looked at the screen. “I don't know how to make it into something. They're just pictures.”
“They're not just pictures.” I took her phone and scrolled back to the beginning. “They're a story. Same story in every frame.” I handed it back. “The things he does when nobody's looking.”
She stared at the screen for a long moment.
“Can you help me?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I can.”
We sat down at the table. Rory scrolled through her phone. My laptop was open between us. Claire sat across from us with her papers. Morgan had gone back to City Hall, and productive quietness had settled over us. That’s when Jace came in.
I felt him take in the room the way he took in every space—methodical, left to right—and I watched the moment his assessment shifted from professional to something else.
Rory was bent over my screen, completely absorbed.
Claire looked up briefly and nodded toward the journal copy.
I sat in the middle of all of it, no camera raised, just present.
He walked over to Claire first and pulled out the chair across from her. He set an envelope on the table. “Thompson said you wanted to see the original.”
Claire opened it with careful hands.
Jace glanced over at me. “The display boards look good. Morgan said you helped.”
“I have strong opinions about font weights.” I smiled and his lips almost curved up but didn’t quite get there.
“Bella.” Something in the way he said it made me sit up straight and hold my breath. “I was wrong about what I said after Dana brought Rory back.”
He kept his voice level, the way he did when he'd decided to say something from start to finish. “What I said about you leaving before it mattered. That wasn't about you. I said it because—”
He stopped. Started again. “Wanting you to stay is the part that scares me. It’s easier to make it your fault.”
Rory had gone very still, her eyes on the laptop screen with the unconvincing concentration of someone who was absolutely listening.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“I hear you.” I held his gaze. “We can talk about it tonight.”
He nodded once. That was enough for him. I was learning that about Jace—he didn't need the whole conversation to know it was real.