Page 119 of The Widow and the Wanted

“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.

Chapter 31

Boone

“Want me to talk to her?” I ask.

The room is dark, but it pulses with firelight. Okee shoots me a look for my meddling.

“Oh, you sweet man,” Lula says. Her hair is an untamed swirl of flax. “If you think you could make Goldie Eld do anything other than exactly what she wants to do, then maybe something supernatural is at work after all.”

Now I know where she gets it from, at least. All that fuss. Don’t mean she can't be reasoned with. This is her daughter’s life we’re talking about. Lula came back here with a story already in her head. A decade’s worth of fretting coloring every memory, she’s liable to remember her momma as mean as the Kentucky Cannibal.

“Well,” I say, pushing myself up from the bed, “ain’t no harm in asking.”

“There is considerable harm in asking,” Okee says, getting up after me.

I know what he’s thinking, but Alfred Collins ain’t the same kind of beast. Matter of fact, I can't think of someone more opposite to Goldie. They might both command a room, but the men following old Alfred are ordered by the government. I ain’t known Goldie long, but something tells me every ounce of respect she’s ever got was earned the hard way.

Lula stands at once. “Boone.”

But I am already on my feet, tugging the robe tighter around my middle. I knot the belt once, hard.