Chapter 14
Fourteen
There was no two ways about it.
She’d felt more alive in the last two weeks than she had since before her father died.
She’d never been more exhausted.
Worried that Beau might banish her from the ledgers, she kept up with her chores.
Did a little extra to try and curry favor with him.
But that meant being up before the sun rose, and rationing their oil well past darkness.
But poring over those columns brought about a satisfactory usefulness to her whole fiber that cooking a stew or cleaning out the chicken coop never could.
Beau's ledgers could not be trusted to be complete: she had established that in the first two evenings, so there was no use whatever in reading them and looking for a mistake.
That would only tell her what the books said.
She wanted to know what had happened, if there was indeed a leak, which was a different question.
The only honest answer to it lay in the papers on the floor.
She started them again in a separate way, using the only method she knew: the Warner method.
Every receipt. Every invoice. Every bill of lading. Every account rendered. Date. Amount. What had been bought or sold. Who it had come from. Who it had gone to.
There was no quick way through it. One after the other, as night pressed against the window, she worked in that small pool of lamplight until her eyes blurred, and she had a record she trusted.
She pulled the first ledger towards her and began to set the two against each other.
The first discrepancy was small enough to mean nothing at all.
Cottonseed cake, September 1883.
The invoice read one hundred and eighteen dollars. The ledger said one hundred and eighty-one. Anyone who kept books long enough turned a number around eventually. The second one made her stop writing. The third made her go back to the top of the column and start again.
Past midnight, she reached the bottom of the column. She laid her pen down and frowned at the side-by-side ledgers.
He was in the kitchen when she came down. Eyes gritty, she raced about the kitchen, only to see he’d set the water to heat himself.
“Oh,” she whirled to him. “I’m sorry. I…”
He gentled her with hands on her shoulders, speaking softly in the voice she’d heard him use on horses. “Easy. It’s fine.”
Tremors curled through her middle under his touch, and his blue gaze settled on hers. “You look shattered.”
Worried in case he took away the books, she pasted on a bright smile. Pulled back from his touch, ignoring the lingering awareness where his fingertips had been. “I’m fine. Just slept on a little, is all.”
“You’re doing too much,” he said.
She bustled and fussed, and didn’t want to share the growing suspicion that was sitting like a cold stone in her gut.
She could be wrong. She was tired, that was true.
She needed to be sure. She made him his breakfast and asked about the herd, which seemed to be enough to avoid the pity she’d seen in his face.
That night, she started again. Using the backs of old papers that had been John Hawkins’.
She made an abstract, right at the point where the figures seemed to drift.
And went to bed frustrated. The next morning, she was waiting in the kitchen for him.
Tired, yes, but smiling brightly when she asked him for his tally book.
He paused, and she smiled. And he pulled it out of the kitchen drawer. She flicked it open, and her stomach guttered. He sat down to his breakfast and started to eat.
“What do you need it for?” he asked around the eggs and dried beef. “Have you found anything?”
She swallowed and shook her head. “Dotting i’s and crossing t’s, that’s all.”
He chewed slowly, and she tried not to fidget under his gaze. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
She joined him at the table and forced herself to eat. “Just fine. There’s Jed. He's up early. Where are you heading today?”
That night, she didn’t go to bed at all.
The tally book in front of her, she painstakingly went through the ledgers, made marks in the correlating columns, line by line, by line.
She fell asleep with her head on the table and woke to the soft morning light brushing the tabletop.
She sat up slowly, wiping her cheek, and the horse blanket that hadn’t been there before slipped off her shoulders.
She caught the edges of it, bringing it to her cheek. Beau must have put it there, found her sleeping. That soft pink light illuminated the truth that she’d spent the last two nights praying not to be true.
Because if it was true, there were only so many people it could be.
Beau must have gone out early. The house was empty, and so was the cookhouse.
She stood in the quiet space and felt awful that his men had readied their own meal.
To make up for her shortcomings, she pushed her tired, aching body.
She cleaned the bunkhouse and prepared a roast for the ranch hands, keeping some back for Beau.
She kept herself busy until she heard the horses. Through the window, she watched Beau and his men riding into the yard. Silhouetted against a magnificent sunset, he was laughing with them. Although the day had dragged, waiting for him to bed down his horses felt interminable.
Then she heard his boots on the porch and wished for more time.
He stepped into the kitchen, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes, and her heart skipped. Smiling. He’d had a good day out there on the range with his cowhands. And she wondered if now was the right time, when he had something to be happy about.
He stopped in the doorway with the smile still on his face, and it faded off him by degrees as his eyes swept over her. She stood in the center, wringing her hands. He frowned, his attention moving to the table. The endless paperwork, his green ledger, with the bootlace curled on top.
"What's all this?"
"Please sit down."
He came the rest of the way in slowly and put his hat on the hook. His sigh spoke volumes, and his deep voice went gravelly with emotion. “Well, now you know my shame.”
"Beau—"
"I ain't the man my father was. I've known it two years, and now you know it, and I'd sooner have told you myself but I never—" He stopped and started again. "I've tried to keep this place going. That's all I've done since I came home. And I've failed at it."
"Will you stop talking," said Della, "and just sit down?"
He sank, his eyes on the stacks.
First things first, she thought. “Would you like something to drink?”
Beau shook his head. He was still looking at the papers. “I suppose I had high hopes.”
Della's heart hurt at the crestfallen look.
“I hoped, some, that maybe you'd turn up a thing me and Duke had missed. Something as'd make it all come right." Beau huffed out a harsh laugh. "Silly, I know it."
Della put her hand on the back of the chair beside him. She leaned in and opened the ledger, jabbing at the figures. "Do you know what these books actually say?"
He lifted his eyes to hers. "That I'm broke?"
"No," said Della in exasperation, "that someone has been stealing from you for nearly two years."