Page 71

"She won't come back in," Raven says. "She never says goodbye. Don't take it personally."

I go to the window and watch Torres walk to Raven's truck without looking back at the house. Raven stops beside Knox on the porch long enough to say something to him, and then they're gone down the drive.

Knox punches in the code and comes back in. He doesn't ask what I told her. He looks me over like he's checking for blood.

He crosses the kitchen and crouches beside my chair, so his eyes are level with mine. My right cuff has ridden up while I wasn't watching it. He takes the edge of the flannel between two fingers and draws it down over my wrist, slow, without his skin ever touching the scar. His hand settles over mine on my knee and stays there, heavy and warm, like it belongs there and he'd like to see somebody argue.

"Torres says if anybody climbs Coleman's gate, anything they find gives his lawyer a year of arguments," I tell him. "She needs a plate off a stock trailer on that service road."

"Nobody sets a boot on his side of the fence. We watch from the public ranch road and nowhere else." He thumbs a text to Jesse while he talks. "Half the stock haulers in this county have stood in my barn on a Saturday night. A trailer comes down that road, I'll know whose paint it is before anybody reads the plate."

He finishes the text and puts the phone away. "Beckett had nothing at the back gate last night either. No trailer. Jesse and Beckett are on his gates again tonight. Audrey Treadmore still hasn't brought me the file she kept from Whitlock's lawyer."

He lays out tomorrow for me, where and who and when, like he promised. The beef goes to Whitlock's kitchen in the morning. Knox called the kitchen manager and Whitlock questioned who’d be bringing it. Knox confirmed he would and told her he wouldn't miss it. Hector will drive with Knox riding along. They'll unload at the kitchen dock behind the winery restaurant.

"Be back before noon," I say.

"Hector drives like a deacon on his way to church, slow and righteous. I'll still make it."

That night he sleeps with his phone on the pillow beside my head. Before dawn it buzzes, and he holds the screen where I can read Beckett's text in the dark.

Nothing on the back road. Nothing at either gate.

He sets the phone face down and pulls me back against his chest. Neither of us sleeps much after that.

At first light Friday, he's dressed and out the door with Hector and a truckload of beef for Whitlock's kitchen. I spend the morning in the horse barn with one ear on the drive, listening for his truck.

It comes up the drive well before noon. Knox finds me at the back door long enough to tell me they unloaded and nobody laid a hand on them. His phone's already ringing in his pocket, and he says he'll tell me the rest when he's done.

He shuts himself in his office. When I knock and open the door, he holds up a hand and keeps talking. I shut it again. Through the door, I hear him calling men by name and asking if they can fight Saturday.

He went to Coleman's kitchen dock this morning, and he's decided I can wait to hear what happened there. He's got a card to fill by tomorrow night, and I know it. It's still one more thing Knox decides I can wait for, and I'm sick of waiting.

He doesn't come to find me until the sun is going down. By then I'm in Sadie's pen with a curry comb, brushing the same clean patch of her shoulder over and over, because I can't sit still.

He leans on the rail outside the pen.

"You had me waiting all afternoon to hear this," I tell him before he can open his mouth.

"I had a card to fill and men to call before Whitlock's people heard my barn was open from somebody besides me." He doesn't look away from me. "You're hearing it now. All of it."

"Start with Coleman."

"Whitlock came down to the kitchen dock himself," he says. "He watched us unload every box, and he wrote the check standing right there."

I keep the curry comb moving. "What did he say?"

"He said, 'Reverend King came to see me Wednesday.' Then he told me your daddy's worried sick. He said, 'Delilah's been through a terrible ordeal, and she's saying confused things about my cellar.' He finished up with the whole congregation praying you get the help you need."

My hand stops on Sadie's shoulder. My father went straight to Coleman, the same day I told Daddy on the church walk. Judas at least got silver for it. Torres guessed it, and I wouldn't believe her. Now I have to.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. I let him talk till he ran out, and then I looked at him till he quit smiling." Knox's hands close on the top rail. "He's getting his story out first. By Sunday, everybody in that church will have heard the preacher's girl isn't right in the head, so whatever you say about his cellar will sound like a sick girl talking. He told me so I'd know he's already started."

"What else did you see?"

"From the kitchen dock you can see past the west end of the building, down to where the service road curls in below it. There's a steel roll-up door set into the limestone there."