Chapter Thirty
The gate hung open.
Logan had definitely, one hundred percent closed it.
But, here it stood, open, flat against the post, with one hinge bent back at an angle that made Logan’s stomach clench.
He’d set that hinge himself. Measured twice, drilled once, and seated the pin flush.
A man didn’t bend forged iron like that by accident.
That took a pry bar, or a boot, or somebody who didn’t give a damn.
Grace’s hand found his knee on the wagon bench. “Logan.”
“I see it.”
The front yard looked like someone had taken a plow to it, drunk and blindfolded.
Trenches cut through the ground in jagged lines—three, four feet deep in places—dirt thrown in heaps on both sides.
Grace’s garden—her garden, the one she’d spent two months coaxing out of rocks and gopher holes and stubborn Colorado clay, the one she talked to every morning like the tomatoes had ears—gone.
Just gone. Torn open, trellises snapped, bean poles scattered like matchsticks.
The roses, too.
Ma’s roses. The bushes Grace had knelt in the dirt and pulled weeds from—the ones with roots deep enough to survive two years of neglect, the ones his mother ordered special from Denver and fought three seasons to establish at altitude.
Ripped out by the base and tossed aside, root balls drying in the sun like something dead and discarded.
“Mason, Thomas, check the barn and the stock pens. Pa, stay with Grace and Miriam.”
“Son—”
“Stay. With. Grace.”
He jumped off the wagon before Grace could grab his arm again. His heel caught the lip of a trench, and he stumbled forward two steps before he caught himself on the porch rail.
The front door stood open.
Inside looked worse. Someone had turned the office—his office, where he kept the ledgers, the deed, the strongbox, and every piece of paper that proved the Foster ranch existed—inside out.
Pulled and dumped drawers. Scattered papers on the floor.
The strongbox sat open with the lid bent, same as the gate hinge, and whatever they’d used on the lock had left gouges in the metal deep enough to catch a fingernail.
The deed sat untouched. Forty-two dollars still in the cash tin.
They hadn’t come for money.
Of course, they hadn’t. The silver nugget, the heifer in the dug-out hole, the man on the south fenceline Grace had chased and fallen off her horse for, every damn sign had pointed here, and every time he’d told himself it’s just drifters, it’s just bad luck, it’s a coincidence, his gut had called him a liar—
Didn’t matter. Never mind what he’d told himself. What mattered stood in the front yard in trenches.
“Logan!”
Mason’s voice came from around the side of the house.
Logan came around the corner at a run and found Jonah.
He lay half-propped against the chicken coop wall with his legs splayed out in front of him, and his head tipped back against the boards.
Blood caked the left side of his face from a gash above his eyebrow, already going dark and tacky in the sun.
His lip had split open and swelled to twice its size, and one eye had puffed shut.
Gerald sat three feet away on his perch, watching Jonah with one beady eye, and for once in that rooster’s miserable life, he kept his beak shut.
Mason crouched beside him. “He’s breathin’. Took a hell of a beatin’.”
“Jonah.” Logan dropped to one knee. “Jonah, who did this?”
Jonah’s good eye rolled toward him, unfocused, then it sharpened. His split lip moved, and the word came out wet and mangled.
“Ace.”
“Who the hell is Ace?”
“Don’t…” Jonah tried to sit up straighter and sucked air through his teeth. “Don’t let Grace—”
Too late. Boots on the porch, then running footsteps, and Grace came around the corner with Miriam still strapped to her chest and dropped to her knees in the dirt.
“Jonah. Jonah, oh Lord, oh—”
“I’m all right, Gracie.”
“You are not all right, you’re bleedin’ from your head—”
“It looks worse than—”
“Shut up.”
Grace pressed the heel of her hand against the gash. Jonah flinched and grabbed her wrist. Between them, Miriam started fussing.
“Jonah,” Logan frowned. “Who’s Ace?”
Grace’s hand stopped moving on Jonah’s forehead.
She looked away.
Jonah wiped blood off his chin with the back of his hand. “I gotta tell you somethin’, Logan.”
“Then tell me.”
“You ain’t gonna like any of it, and I need you to let me finish before you—”
“Talk.”
Jonah talked.
Ace Pike. Gang boss out of New York’s Fourth Ward, ran thirty pickpockets with the kind of precision most bank presidents envied. Jonah had worked for him since he’d been fourteen, right after his and Grace’s parents died from the pox, and the money had run out.
Logan’s jaw tightened. “Fine. Sad story. Keep going.”
Ace had done time. Met a man named Dawson in prison—the same Dawson who’d done six jobs across three territories and buried the take somewhere on a ranch in Pitkin, Colorado, and murdered the woman who caught him doing it. Shot her on the porch of her own home.
The yard went quiet.
Dawson. The man who killed Logan’s mother had a name, and it had been sitting in a prison cell trading stories with a five-foot-five pickpocket boss wearing a greasy bowler hat.
“Ace ratted Dawson out for the murder. Got his sentence cut.” Jonah panted. “And the first thing he did, the first thing—”
“He came after the loot.”
“He needed somebody inside. Somebody on the property. And he had me.” Jonah’s good eye dropped to the dirt. “The mail-order bride ad came through the papers, and Ace... Ace handed it to me and said, ‘Get your sister there/’”
Logan’s chest locked up.
“I stole the silver,” Jonah said. “The nugget Grace found on the cattle drive. Ace told me to bring proof there was somethin’ worth findin’, or he’d… He said he’d hurt her.”
“This was them, then?” Logan glared at him. “The ranch?”
“Today was my idea.” Jonah’s voice cracked. “I told Ace I’d stay behind, let him in, let him dig. I figured if he found the loot, he’d leave and nobody’d—”
“Get hurt?” Logan sneered. “Are you really that stupid?”
Jonah gestured at his own broken face. “Apparently.”
Grace had gone still. Her hand rested on Jonah’s shoulder, and she stared at the dirt between her knees, not at Logan, not anywhere near Logan, and that told him everything the confession hadn’t.
“Grace.” His voice came out flat. “Tell me you didn’t know.”
Her chin came up.
“Tell me you didn’t know!”
“I found out here, Logan. At the ranch. I found a letter in his trouser pocket when I did laundry, weeks ago, and I confronted him, and he swore he—”
“Weeks ago?”
“—swore he’d left that life behind, that the letter—”
“Weeks ago! You knew for weeks that the man sleepin’ in my bunkhouse, eatin’ at my table, holdin’ my daughter—” He gritted his teeth. “You knew, and you looked me in the eye every single day and said nothin’.”
“I didn’t know about the ad.” She pressed her lips together. “Lord as my witness, I had no idea. I thought the idea was his. I thought it was genuine, I swear to—”
“But you knew about the gang.”
“Yes.” Her jaw set hard. “I knew about the gang.”
Every morning. Every supper. Every time she’d pressed against him on the porch and kissed him, laughed at his stupid jokes, and called him cowboy… She’d known. Carried it around like a second sling alongside Miriam, and he’d never—
He’d trusted her.
That simple, that stupid. He’d handed her a horse and a garden and a nursery with a blue cushion and his dead mother’s name on a baby’s birth record, and she’d held a secret between them the whole time, like a rock in a shoe she’d decided to just live with.
“Logan, she’s innocent in all this.” Jonah tried to push himself up the wall. “I swear on our mother’s grave, Grace had nothin’ to do with—”
“Your mother’s grave.” Logan stood up. “Huh?”
“Please.” Jonah’s eyes watered. “She’s not guilty for my mistakes.”
Logan looked away from him.
His knees ached from the kneeling, his head pounded behind his right eye, and Grace’s face blurred at the edges, which meant—
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter what it means.
“Mason. Thomas. Saddle up. We’re ridin’ every fence.”
Grace reached for his arm. “Logan, please—”
He stepped back. One step. Just enough to put air between her fingers and his sleeve.
“Pa, get Jonah some water and bandages. Grace, take Miriam inside.”
He turned and walked toward the barn, and behind him, Grace said his name once more, quietly, the way she’d said it at the pond under the stars when she’d told him she’d stopped expecting things to be good.
He walked on.
***
The south pasture gate hung open on one hinge, the same as the yard gate. Ace’s people had cut the wire in three places along the east run. Fourteen head of cattle gone. Only open ground and hoofprints heading downhill toward the creek, and God knew where else.
Fourteen head!
In the current market, seven hundred dollars, plus the heifer from weeks back. Plus the fencing. Plus whatever damage they’d find in the north pasture, which Thomas had ridden ahead to check.
Mason rode up alongside him and sat quietly for a while. The boy had something to say, but hadn’t worked out how to say it yet. Logan counted fence posts while he waited. Seven needed replacing. Eight. The ninth leaned at an angle that’d have it flat by next week.
“She ain’t in on it, Logan.”
“Don’t.”
“I picked her letter, remember? Out of thirty-two. I read every one of ’em. Sat at that kitchen table and—”
“And Ace Pike put her up to writin’ it.”
“Ace put Jonah up to showin’ her the ad. That letter came from Grace. Every word.” Mason pulled his horse closer. “You saw her face. She didn’t know.”
Logan’s hands tightened on the reins. The leather bit into his palms, right along the calluses Grace had traced with her thumb that night at the pond when she’d told him about the blue shawl, the fifteen cents, and the dollar Jonah wouldn’t explain.
The dollar Jonah wouldn’t explain.
Stupid, Logan. Stupid.
Thomas appeared on the ridge and shook his head. More cuts, more open gates. The north herd had scattered.
Seven hundred became a thousand. Became more. Became a number Logan couldn’t put together without the ledger, and the ledger lay on the floor of a ransacked office in a house that had stopped feeling like his about twenty minutes ago.
No. Still his. But the trust—the part that made it more than dirt and fenceposts and a roof—
He turned his horse back toward the house.
***
Grace sat on the porch steps with Miriam asleep in her lap. She’d changed out of her blue dress—the one she’d pressed with his flatiron that morning, the one that still smelled like his starch—and into the plain brown one she wore for chores. The celebration had ended, and she’d dressed for it.
She stood up when he dismounted. Miriam shifted against her chest and made a small sound, and Grace’s hand came up to steady the baby’s head the way she’d done a thousand times, like breathing.
“How bad?”
“Bad.” He leaned against the railing. “Twenty head gone, maybe more. Fences cut in half a dozen places.”
She reached into her dress pocket and held out the money. Fifty dollars, folded tight, the bills she’d won three hours ago with tomatoes she’d grown from seed in a garden that didn’t exist anymore.
“Take it. Please, Logan. It’s all I got and it ain’t enough but—”
“I don’t want your money, Grace.”
“It ain’t about want, it’s about what the ranch—”
“I said I don’t want it.”
He walked past her up the steps. Jonah sat inside at the kitchen table with a rag pressed to his forehead and Rafe’s whiskey at his elbow. He looked up when Logan came through the door with the kind of expression a dog got when it knew the boot had already started swinging.
“Get off my ranch.”
Grace followed him in. “Logan—”
“Don’t ‘Logan’ me. He can’t stay, and you know it.”
“Logan…” She stepped in front of him. “He’s my brother.”
“Jonah?” Logan tilted his head to look past Grace. “You understand that you have to leave, yeah?”
Jonah closed his good eye and nodded. Then he stood up from the table. He put the rag down, pushed the whiskey glass away, and walked toward the back door without a word. At the threshold, he stopped and looked at Grace.
“I’m sorry, Gracie.”
The door closed behind him.