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She didn’t mention wanting to hand over my records to Rachel or Kaycee to help with their search for Margaret Hale. Caroline could’ve told everybody in town about the boxes as soon as I mentioned them. Looked to me like she hadn’t.

“Come on,” I said.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Seriously?”

“Before I change my mind.”

The office had been my granddad’s before it became the room where paperwork went to die. It sat off the back of the house, behind a door I maybe opened twice a month. Granddad believed every receipt might matter someday, including ones for things nobody remembered buying.

Caroline stopped in the doorway. “This is either going to be incredibly useful or give me hives.”

Boxes lined one wall, and old ledgers filled two shelves beside a broken lamp I’d been meaning to throw away for years.

“Still want to look?”

“Very much.”

I pulled one of the older boxes from the bottom shelf and set it on the desk. A cloud of dust came with it.

Caroline sneezed.

“Bless you,” I said as I opened the lid.

The paperwork in the first box had nothing to do with the wagon. Folders were stuffed with feed bills and handwritten lists of fencing supplies from the 1940s.

Caroline sorted carefully, keeping everything in the order we found it.

“You’re not as scary with old paper as I expected,” I said.

She looked up. “I coordinate events. I understand filing systems.”

“This isn’t a system.”

“It was a system to your grandfather.”

The second box was older. The paper had yellowed around the edges, and several envelopes had become so brittle that I didn’t want to open them. I recognized Granddad’s handwriting on a few notes, but most of the records predated him.

Caroline slid a narrow ledger toward me. “Is this hauling?”

I opened it. Dates ran down one side of each page. Loads and dollar amounts filled the rest. Some entries were short enough to fit on one line. Others had notes crammed into the margins.

“That’s freight.”

“For the wagon?”

“Maybe. My family had more than one.” Most of it meant nothing to me beyond recognizing a few familiar ranch names.

Then Caroline’s finger stopped on one line. “Wait.”

The entry was dated 1911.

Cedar Draw.

I looked at her. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

“Yes.”

She pulled her phone from her pocket and unlocked it. “Cedar Draw keeps turning up in the records everybody’s been digging through. Kaycee found an account under that name. Rachel thinks it was being used to move or hold assets without assigning them to a specific family.”