Chapter 14: The Study

Mara's POV

We saw the smoke from the highway, a black column standing over the ranch.

Jonas drove with both hands tight on the wheel and did not say a word.

Janet's car stayed on our bumper the whole way.

The old barn was already a shell when we came through the gate.

The roof had gone, and the ranch hands were running hoses from the trough, and the horses were screaming in the corral.

Jonas stopped the truck in the yard and looked at me.

"Stay in the cab."

"Go," I said. "Get the horses."

He went at a run, and the hands closed around him.

I watched the fire eat the hayloft, and I understood that nobody burns a barn at noon on the day of a hearing without a reason.

The barn was not the point.

Something else was.

"The study," I said aloud.

Janet pulled up beside me, got out of her car and slammed the door.

I was already climbing down, with the cane, and she saw my face.

"Mara. Wait for him."

"The ledger is in the study, Janet. Everybody's looking at the barn."

She understood in a second, and she was faster than me.

She ran for the house, a sixty-three-year-old woman in her church shoes, and I went after her one slow step at a time.

The kitchen door was standing open.

Janet stopped in the hall.

I heard something heavy hit the floor in the study, and then a drawer ripped from its track.

"Get out of my kitchen," Janet called, in a voice I had never heard her use.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Sold Me, Then My Dead Mother Came to Take Me Home from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.