Chapter 12
Twelve
The office door swung open with a faint squeak.
Della stood at the threshold with her heart going in her ears and her father's voice in her head, as clear as if he had been standing at her shoulder in the hall.
Knowledge is power, Adele. If you know a thing, you can see it. Then you can plan to meet it. It's the thing you don't know that ruins you.
"Yes, Daddy," she whispered, and stepped in.
Dust lifted and turned slowly in the bands of light coming through the shutters. The room felt chilly, smelled of must and disuse.
It was, unmistakably, a man's room. Heavier and darker than anything else in the house.
A great oak desk with a green leather top gone white at the edges, a wooden chair that had lost its paint in places from wear.
Nothing in here matched the rest of the house at all, and she understood immediately that this was because John Hawkins had chosen it himself and his wife had never been consulted.
And boxes.
Boxes, crates and wooden cases stacked three and four high against every wall, some with lids and some without, and papers poking out of them at all angles. Papers on the floor, littered on the windowsill. A drift of them across the desk with the four ledgers sitting on top like a paperweight.
Thirty years of Hawkins, shut in a room and left.
She could ask him outright. Not skirt around the issue, like she had been doing.
But she had the suspicion that asking him about the meeting with Hollis, and the cash-only accounts, would set him off again.
She had tried Duke, the day after, out by the pump.
Lightly, asking whether Mr. Hollis was often out this way.
His obvious loyalty to Beau meant the man had been silent as a steel trap. That's between Beau and the bank, ma'am. And then he'd asked after her chickens.
Her father had been a fair man and a kind one, and there had still been a line drawn round the counting-house at Pearl Street that she had crossed only because he let her, and only ever on his invitation.
She had understood from a young age that the invitation could be withdrawn.
Peter had done so the week after the funeral, with a hand on the office door, barring her entry.
Men did not care to be helped with money, least of all by women.
A stack of ledgers on top of the assortment of paperwork looked like the same ledgers Duke had handed Beau. Her husband was clever and wily and had asked another to update his books. Was he looking for something?
Her fingers went to her bare ears.
She was the housekeeper. She had been engaged by advertisement to keep this house, and this room was in this house. Sweeping a floor was hardly an impertinence.
The ledgers were his. She would not touch them.
She went and got her bucket, rags and a broom. She tied her hair up in the blue scarf, and she began.
The shutters had not been opened in years. She swept dead flies from the sill, wrestled to get them open. When the light came in, it made everything a great deal more alarming.
The floor could not be swept until the boxes came off it.
The boxes could not be moved because half of them had no lids and everything in them slid. She shuffled and sorted, and because she couldn't help it, she read a few of the papers.
A bill of lading for a wagon-load of lumber, dated 1871.
A receipt from a firm in St. Louis for a windmill.
Several letters from a man in Sheridan about a bull.
A tally sheet in a small, square, absolutely regular writing. Della sat back on her heels holding it, and wondered about her father-in-law. Who he was. What he thought about his only son leaving the land John loved so much to go and fight in a war.
An old cigar box, though the papers in here were more recent.
Received of Beau Hawkins, on account. A date. A sum. A signature. Dated last year.
Stockmen's Bank of Grand Springs.
Another cigar box, and a tea caddy. A flour tin. She shook her head. Had Beau run out of crates for his receipts?
Loan receipts. Feed invoices. Freight bills. Shipping accounts from a commission house in Chicago, still in their envelopes, three of them unopened. These ought to be placed in order and filed properly, like the office on Pearl Street.
She began to order them chronologically, for ease. Della sat on the floor of that room with her skirt spread round her and her hands black to the wrist, surrounded by separate piles of her husband's business, and felt something she had not felt since her father's office.
She felt useful.
She had a system going within the hour. Chronological, by year, and within the year by whether it was money in or money out. It was not sophisticated. It was the same thing she had done at Pearl Street while her father talked to men about coffee.
She was on her knees with an invoice in each hand and three more in her teeth when the voice came from the doorway.
"What in the heck are you doing?"