Chapter 30 #3
“He confirmed what Mother already suspected. Apparently she is something of an information broker out here,” Lula says.
“Anyone of consequence in Fort Gibson is a member of the Gemini. Everett uses this place like a meeting room for dealings not suited to Hollister’s company office.
Mother told me he had met with a newspaper man to investigate Dr. Bowering.
His study. The expedition. He learned we would be documenting everything we saw—dated stumps, damaged flora, evidence of cutting. ”
A massacre for cut trees and disputed boundaries? Such claims are carried out every day in these parts. It is certainly no trouble a company as rich as Hollister could not fix.
“And she believes those notes were grounds for murder?” I ask.
Lula shakes her head, a worried wrinkle forming between her brows.
“Not the notes alone. Fraud. Mother read through her ledgers. Two years ago, she put Everett in contact with a mapmaker willing to falsify documents. Boundaries, leases, claims—whatever Hollister required. Mother wrote down enough from their conversations to know he would be meeting with railroad men.”
Boone raises his head and stills.
Lula swallows. “Promising them cleared timber and passage through land Hollister did not own. Millions in contracts. Contracts that would vanish the moment anyone learned their maps were false.”
“No government surveyors,” Boone says.
“No,” Lula replies softly. She picks her chemise off the floor as if this solemn moment demands decency.
She glides it over her head, head and arms reappearing at once, followed by a flip of her long hair.
“Scientists. Women. A professor. Notebooks full of research. Proof they were cutting where they had no right to cut.”
The room seems to tilt. Boone lets out a nasty little chuckle, though there is no humor in it. He drags a hand over his face. “Weren’t ever any surveyors to run off, and they knew it.”
We’ve killed enough men to know there is not a meaningful difference.
Surveyors. Scientists. Were it not for those women around the campfire, we’d have done our part to clear that camp and gladly returned alongside those other bastards to collect the rest of our pay.
Yet somehow it's the dishonesty that feels like the most grievous offense.
Despite what polite society would believe, there is honor among thieves, and if men like us have any code, it's to live and die free.
Asking men to kill under false pretenses? It removes all choice from the matter. Deny my choice, deny my freedom. There came a time in my life when such had become an offense punishable by death, and not a thing has happened since that has changed that policy.
“In the end they burned it all,” Boone says, dark. “Destroyed any chance of the truth comin’ out.”
The flames return. The screams. They said it then, didn’t they?
“Christ,” I realize aloud. “The notebooks. They were shouting ‘Burn the notebooks.’”
A strange look passes over her face.
“What?” I ask.
She rises so fast her chemise slips half off one shoulder.
Boone sits forward.
“My God.” She crosses the room at once, dropping to her knees beside her valise. “My notebook.”
Her fingers shake as she works the latches. Glass clinks inside—vials and tins knocked together in her haste. She throws back the lid, pushes aside folded linen, packets of herbs, a jar wrapped in stockings, until she finds the worn leather book beneath it all.
She pulls it free like it might burn her.
“What is it?” I ask.
She does not answer. She flips through the pages quickly, past pressed stems, rough sketches, careful labels. Her breath grows sharper with every turn.
Then she stops.
“There.” She lays the notebook open on the bed between us. “Look.”
Boone leans over it first, brow furrowed. “I can’t make heads nor tails of that.”
“It’s a stump,” Lula says. “Black walnut. Odd rings. See here?”
Her finger taps the page. The sketch is small but precise enough: a cut trunk, rings marked in tight whorls, notes crowded in the margin.
She reads aloud, voice tightening. “November tenth. The trees along the trail have been made sparse by logging. The flora and fauna the expedition hoped to find along the Verdigris seem to have been disturbed. The abundant harvesting of black walnut has spoiled the soil…”
She looks up at us.
I feel the air leave the room. “That was the day before?” I ask.
“The day of,” she says. “Shortly before the attack.”
Boone’s face has gone slack.
Lula turns another page, then another. I study the page. Dates. Specimen marks. Sketches of stumps. River bends. Notes about soil, missing growth, damaged roots. Little observations that had seemed harmless because the woman writing them had not understood men could kill over trees.
“This. And Mother’s ledgers.” She clicks her tongue and huffs. “If she will give them to us.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Boone asks. “Wouldn’t a mother do anything to help her daughter?”
Her humorless laugh carries a disdain I know too well. I feel it every time anyone is tempted to give Alfred Collins more credit than he is due. Without thinking I push back a wayward strand of her golden hair, tucking it behind her ear in an instinctive moment of comfort.
“Don’t worry. We’ll find a way.”
Lula looks down at the open notebook, then toward the door, as if her mother might already be standing on the other side.
“You don’t know her,” she says.