Chapter 13
Thirteen
"You're brooding."
Beau didn't move, though he brought his attention to the man on his right. "Am not," he murmured, his lips barely moving.
The others were a little behind them, their chatter and raucous laughter a backdrop to his ruminating.
Duke snorted. "Like a hen on a clutch of eggs."
Beau turned then. The top half of Duke's face was probably a mirror of his own — dusty where the bandana hadn't covered. They'd been out in the hot, dry sun all day, and what had started out as a bad day had gone downhill from there.
The fence. Four hundred yards of it, wire he'd paid cash for in April, flattened under a cottonwood that had come down in the night. Rotten right through the heart of it after the dry months, and nobody could have known.
"We'll get to fixin' it," Duke had said.
That wasn't the issue. Fixing it took posts and staples and wire, and wire took money, and there wasn't any. They’d moved the herd up near the Cutbank, where the water had returned, only to find it dry as a bone once more.
The one good thing about that year had gone again. And that after finding some of his youngsters with black leg, losing calves he’d already counted, and nothing to be done about it.
Not even John Hawkins could have predicted it. Would his father have foreseen it all?
He’d been thinking about the look that had sat on Della's face over that card of buttons. A small kindness, and she smiled so sweetly at him. Hopeful, almost. His father’s pocket watch had covered what he owed to Pruitt for feed over the winter.
That and the last bit of livery to Marsh.
He’d traded it in with Ketchum, feeling the ghost of his father chasing him out of that shop.
The watch that his father had carried up the Bozeman trail, left behind to cover the bills.
With the forty cents he had left over, he’d bought her the buttons.
The watch wasn't nearly enough. The freight owing to Denny, who gossiped like a fishwife, and behind all of it, the payment at the bank sitting there like a stone in his boot.
He had to tell her. It wasn't fair. He'd been trying to put the words in some kind of order, and he carried them back to the ranch, holding them as he handed off to Colt.
He came in through the kitchen, mindful to wipe his feet, though Della wasn’t in the kitchen. The stove was cold. There was no supper on the ready, no pans out, nothing on the table but a brown parcel.
For a moment a little tremor of fear kicked at him. Was she hurt?
"Della?"
Nothing.
He ducked into the hallway, heading for the stairs, and then he saw that the office door was standing wide open.
His father's room.
Daylight flooded across the floorboards, where those shutters had been shut up since before John Hawkins passed.
He got to the doorway and stopped.
Every crate and case and carton that had stood against those walls since the funeral had been hauled out.
The whole floor was covered in papers, laid out flat in rows.
Ranks of it. His father's papers and his own papers; the entire business of Silver Sage spread across the boards like a hand of cards.
His wife was kneeling in the middle of it.
Every scrap of what Beau had been carrying up that hall went out of him in one breath, chased by shame and anger.
"What in the heck are you doing?"
She jolted, blinking up at him. "I— I—" She stammered, looking about her guiltily.
"I told you not to come in here!" he shouted. “I asked you what you’re doing!”
She rose to her feet, and by the time she'd straightened up she had a temper of her own snapping in her face. "What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks to me like you’re poking your nose in somewhere it ain't got any business!” He came in two steps and nudged one of the stacks with his boot, and the whole thing swayed.
"Don't do that!” She waved. “I have not been through that year yet."
"You won't be doing no more of it, neither. Come on. Out." He reached for her arm. "I didn't want a busybody under my roof."
She yanked her arm out of his way. "You asked for a housekeeper," she said, meeting his fire with her own. "And that is what I was doing. Cleaning. Wiping off years of cobwebs."
"How about you perfect your cooking before you move on?"
He knew it was wrong before it finished coming out.
He watched her go very still, her chin come up, her eyes light with something a long way past temper. And, so help him, she was even more attractive when she was annoyed.
"That was unworthy of you, Mr. Hawkins."
Beau's hands went to his hips. The disdain that dripped from her words added to his chagrin. He knew fine and rightly that his mother would have taken a broom to him for speaking that way to a woman in her house.
He took a breath. "I just… you shouldn't be in here."
Della's brows climbed. "I'd say this is the room I might prove most useful in."
"It's not your concern?—"
"You keep saying that!" She fired it straight back at him. "Yet it became my concern when I visited Mrs. Vance today and could not place a single thing on account."
His brow crashed down. "You did what?"
Della's mouth worked. She had the good grace to look ashen.
"Mrs. Vance," she said, in a smaller voice. "I settled the account. With my earrings."
His mouth snapped shut.
Fear, swift and real, filled her face. She retreated a step.
He’d never once hit a woman. But he could see that she worried about it. Beau dragged his hands down his face and scrubbed and let the breath go out of him.
Only it wasn't temper that filled him.
It was shame. Hot and searing.
She knew.
"I wish you'd not done that."
"Beau. I'm your wife."
"This ain't your concern because you're my wife," he said hoarsely.
She stepped up to him. Went to reach for him. Stopped.
"I am your wife and I want to know what is going on." Her voice trailed off. "I know that might not be the done thing for women. It certainly isn’t back East, but?—"
"I've tried." His gaze went to the ledgers, sitting on the corner of the desk exactly where he'd left them.
"I'm just not a businessman like my father was. I did the ledgers as I remembered Pa showing me, but trying to run the ranch, do the work. Them books baffle me. I thought it was because I’m too tired but so help me, I can't make them match up. "
“I’m not surprised,” she huffed out a laugh, shook her head in disbelief, drawing a sharp look from him. “I’m not laughing at you, but I’m not surprised they won’t match up. Your ledgers have missing sections.”
“You looked at them?” His gaze darted to the books, but he’d swear they'd not moved.
“No,” she patted the air. “No, I wouldn’t. Not without your say-so.”
"Then how do you know," he said slowly, "that they've got holes in them?"
“Well, I don’t,” she hedged. “I’m just guessing. But there are a lot of things in here that don’t appear to have been touched in a while. There are three envelopes there from a commission house in Chicago that have never been opened. Even your years are all muddled.”
He looked at the wreck. Neat piles. Logos he recognized. Some he didn’t. Laid out in an order he didn’t understand, but she did.
She picked up a small box. “Cigar boxes. Even a tea caddy over there. You have entirely too many receipts in here, all mixed up with invoices. How is anybody supposed to balance a set of books when half the entries are still lying on the floor?"
“I’ll get to it.”
“When?”
“Eventually.”
She sighed then, the fight in her fading, leaving compassion in her gaze. “I’ve got eyes and ears, Beau. I know something is amiss here. I have no money of my own. I’d like to know what is going on.”
She watched him steadily.
He glanced about the floor. “What do you know of keeping accounts?”
"I did them for my father," she said softly. "For many years. Not that my brother ever allowed me to continue after Papa passed away."
"What business was your daddy in?"
"Warner and Company. Commission merchants, on Pearl Street." A small, tired smile. "Coffee, chiefly. Other men's coffee. He sold it on their account and rendered them a statement, and those statements were correct to the cent, because I made certain that they were."
He crouched down, righted the pile that he’d skewed with his boot. "I'd forgotten half this was in here," he admitted quietly. "My father knew the numbers inside out. Duke has been helping me, and I'm trying to learn it as I go."
“I know.”
"I ain't idle over it, Della. I've sat at that desk with a lamp till two in the morning more nights than I'd care to tell you. I just can't make the dang thing come out right,” he looked up. “I think there’s a hole in this outfit. A leak somewhere that if I could plug, everything would be fine. I've been down after it more than once and I can't find the bottom of it. Every time I open them ledgers, it might as well be in a foreign language." He shrugged; his gaze dropped to the papers once more. “Duke says that it’s just ranching. Maybe I’m not cut out for it. My daddy said he wasn’t going to leave it to an idiot - that’s why he sent me to the schoolhouse. Fat lot of good it did me.”
He exhaled loudly, straightening.
"Would you let me try?" she said, standing up.
"Try what?"
"Perhaps you'd permit me to look through them.
Marry up the ledgers against what I have found here.
" She opened her hands, eyes bright. "I could show you how I kept my father’s ledgers. He had a steady way of working. If nothing else, this room has been driving me crazy all afternoon. I would scold my father over his paperwork, but his system was nothing compared to this.”
She was teasing him. He knew that. Standing there, in her dusty dress, strings of cobwebs in her hair, and those pretty eyes bright once more with hope, he forgot for just a moment all the fear and the worry.
His eyes dwelt on her lips, on the curve of them.
The fuller bottom lip. And he could think of nothing else but taking his wife in his arms.
It wasn’t what they’d agreed.
“I won’t let it hinder my other work,” she added, and brought his mind back to the matter at hand. “Please.”
He couldn’t fathom anyone who’d willingly wade into those columns and lines, let alone wade through this detritus that had only added to the last two years.
“I don’t know what use it will do,” he said on a huff. “But fine.”