Chapter 15
Fifteen
"What?"
She tempered her tone, unsure where to begin. But she’d checked and cross-checked to be certain. As kindly as she could, she laid a hand on his arm and nodded. “These books tell me that someone has been stealing from you and yet you’ve still somehow managed to hang onto this ranch.”
“No,” he shook his head. “Nobody works these books but me. Me and Duke, when I ask him. That can't be true, Della.” Another head shake. “There ain't the room for it to be true."
“I’ve tracked everything,” Della said, drawing out the corresponding papers and ledgers, knowing that she didn’t want to have to show him what she suspected. "How many cattle did you lose last winter?"
Beau frowned. "Thirty-one."
"You're certain of the number?"
"’Course I'm certain,” he said snippily. "Worse loss we’ve ever had. It was down at Cutbank. Weather come in ahead of Duke and the boys. There was no getting across to shift them out of the wind. Nothing we could've done." He rubbed his face. "Winter caught us out."
Della put her finger on the ledger page. "There are no hides in here."
"What?"
"We sell the hides, yes. Good money, you told me when we lost that heifer last month.” He nodded, and she tapped a nail to the paper.
“Thirty-one hides at three dollars is ninety-three dollars.” She flicked back the pages to John Hawkins’ days.
“I have the buyer's name in Grand Springs on two other receipts from other years, so we know where they go, and we know what they fetch.
" She met his gaze. "There is no entry. Not in the ledger, not in the daybook, not on any receipt in any box in that room. "
"It'll be in one of those boxes somewhere."
"Beau, I have been through every box in that room. Twice."
"Then it's misfiled?—"
"It is not there," she said gently. "I am not saying the hides were not sold. I am saying that if they were sold, the money did not arrive here."
His jaw slid sideways, disbelief sitting plainly on his face.
She swallowed, pressed on. “Here. Thirteen cattle lost just after roundup last year,” she tapped a nail. “Three hides recorded.”
His eyes moved between the books he’d been studying and her neatly printed copies. With a low growl, he pressed to his feet and steered her into the chair he’d been sitting in. “Show me.”
She tried to steady her racing heart as he leaned over her shoulder, wrapping her mind in him; dust and leather and sweat. She cleared her throat.
Speaking plainly, she explained what he’d not been able to see because the figures had all been tangled up; some appeared to have been altered, proven when she pulled out the corresponding record.
The tally. The branding records. What went to market and when. What the ledger said it fetched.
He followed it better than she'd expected. He was not slow. He had simply never once in his life been shown how a set of books actually fitted together, and by the third page he had stopped saying where and started saying and then?, which was rather more painful to hear.
She got to the end. It was like the wind dropping out of a sail when he sank heavily into the kitchen chair. His mouth worked as he stared at the paperwork strewn across the table in front of her.
She broke the silence. "Did you see them?"
"See what?"
"The thirty-one cattle that died?"
"No." It came out short. "I was out on the east pastures the whole of that fortnight, fixing fences from the weather. Duke and Boyd dealt with them."
Della let a moment go by.
"Do you trust them?"
"They worked for my father." He straightened up off the table. "For years, and Boyd's father before him. They're good hands, Della, and I'll not sit here and?—"
"That is not what I asked."
"Yes." He said it hard. "Yes, I dang well trust them. With my life. I have trusted them with it."
"Good," said Della.
“Perhaps I didn’t record them,” he speared his hands through his hair. “It’s hard to remember it all, and that was a…” his eyes lifted to hers. “A big loss.”
She could see the knowledge at war behind his eyes.
She heard the click of his swallow. Tried again. She pulled the ledger out, the one that had John Hawkins’ neatly stubby print in. "Your first summer. You sold fifteen steers at the market in June."
"That's right."
"And that entry is correct." She tapped it. "I have the sale receipt, I have the freight, I have the commission and it is all present and it all agrees. Fifteen head, and the money that came back is exactly the money that ought to have come back."
"So?"
"So, in October you sold forty."
"I had to." His jaw was tight. "Feed went through the roof after that winter, and I had nothing to carry them on. Every outfit in the county sold that fall."
"I know. And forty went." She slid a paper out from under her elbow, and it was an account rendered, printed and ruled, with a Chicago address at the head of it.
"This is the account sales from the commission house.
It is one of the three envelopes you had never opened.
It states the number of head received, the weight, the price they made in the yards, the commission, the freight and the yardage, and it is signed. "
Beau looked at it.
"Forty head," said Della. "That is what they had. That is what they sold." She laid her finger on the ledger line beside it. "And that is what was entered here as received."
He did not say anything for a while. "That ain't the same figure.”
"No. You got paid for twenty-five, not forty."
Beau yanked the ledger across the table towards him and turned it to the lamp. She watched his eyes go down the column. She watched him calculate the difference between the two numbers.
"Beau," she said quietly. "Whose writing is that?"
His head came up. "What?"
"That entry. And the one above it, and here, on the following page." She kept her voice level. "It is not your hand. Nor is it your father’s."
Beau looked down at the page.
Della watched his face, and her heart cracked a little.
"It's a mistake," he said.
"It might be."
"Duke wrote it down wrong. He can count, course, but he can't hardly write, Della. It takes him a minute, so it ain't?—"
He stopped.
And there it was, sitting on the kitchen table between them, in the middle of the lamplight, and neither of them had put it there.
"Duke wouldn't steal from me."
"I didn’t say?—"
"Duke wrote to me." He shoved the chair back, and it barked on the floor.
"When I was gone, I sent three letters home. It was Duke who answered every one of them, not my father. Said it took him an age to do so, because he wasn’t a natural writer.
When the old man died, it was Duke who sent the wire that found me. "
She sat still as he paced, prowling like a wild animal.
“Duke is a good man. I trust him.” He pushed, swiveled back to look at her. “The last two round-ups. I trusted his count.”
The round ups he hadn’t been on. Her mouth lifted.
No, her husband wasn’t slow at all. “The simplest thing is to count them.” She spread her hands over the table.
"All of this is paper. The cattle are there, or they are not.
If the number on the ground agrees with the tally book, then we can burn these and keep on looking for why your columns are not adding up the way I expect them to. "
Beau stared at her, his fists on the wood, glaring at the table. For one moment, he looked so completely lost that she almost went round to him.
Then his face closed.
"It's a mistake," he said. "You're wrong."
And he took his hat off the hook and went out into the dark.