Chapter 5: The Ledger

On Monday I left Daisy with the widow and drove to the Tillman ranch alone.

The foreman was loading salt blocks onto a flatbed by the barn.

He was sixty, with a gray mustache, and he had taught me to drive a stock trailer the summer I married.

He tipped his hat and didn't say a word, and I understood that he had already heard.

"Is he in the office?" I asked.

"Out with the north herd. Said you'd be by."

He looked at his boots.

"Mrs. Tillman, for what it's worth, he hasn't been right in weeks."

"Thank you."

"He eats standing up. He's down to two beers a night, and he doesn't finish them."

I went into the house without answering.

Daisy's papers were in the filing cabinet in the front hall, where I had kept them since she was born.

I found her birth certificate and her shot records, and I put them in my bag.

Then I stood in the hall and looked at the door to Jesse's father's old office.

I kept the ranch books myself.

Every check and every invoice crossed my desk.

I could have told you the price of a bale in any month for five years.

I walked in.

The office smelled of leather and cold coffee.

I sat down at the big oak desk and opened the bottom drawer, which I had never seen him lock.

It was locked now.

The key was under the stapler, where his father had always kept it.

Inside the drawer was a green cloth ledger I had never seen before.

It was not the ranch's account.

It was an account in Jesse's own name, his mother's old savings, which he had told me he'd let sit.

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