They always came in the week before Duncan rode to Miles City. And they always came in the same season, year after year, as regular as a train. Sam's book, kept on the ground with the cattle themselves, showed no such pattern. Sam's book showed calves born, cows lame, one old bull lost in a gully in the spring of 1888 and found again, alive, three days later. Real life, Ana thought, is untidy. Only a lie is tidy.
"Three years," Rosalind said at last, and her voice was very quiet. "Three years of it. Sam, how many, all told?"
Sam ran his finger down his own columns, adding in his head the way a man adds who has done it a thousand times, and then he looked up, and his face was gray. "Three hundred and eleven head, Mrs. Carmichael. Recorded as dead of drought. Never found. Never buried. And the money for them — if they were sold at Miles City — would be enough to buy a ranch."
Rosalind did not flinch. She wrote the number down on a clean sheet of paper, in her own hand, and underlined it twice. "Then we have what the brand inspector needs," she said. "Not a suspicion. A sum. Inspector Lind does not deal in suspicions, Sam. He deals in sums."
Ana watched her write, and she thought of the night before, of the torn settlement in the fireplace, of a woman who had refused to be bought and a woman who had refused to buy. This was the same woman, and yet it was not. Yesterday Rosalind had offered money to make a thing go away. Today she was counting, patiently, the money another man had stolen, and she was counting it not to keep it but to prove it. There was a difference, Ana realized, between a woman who uses money as a wall and a woman who uses it as a witness.
"I can copy these," Ana said, before she had quite decided to say it. "My hand is clear, and I am used to copying without error. If you want a second set of books, Mrs. Carmichael — a set that cannot be said to be Sam's word against Duncan's — I will make it."
Rosalind looked at her for a long moment, and Ana saw, in that look, the same calculation she had seen the day before, only turned outward now, toward an enemy instead of toward a debt. "Yes," Rosalind said. "Make two copies. One stays here, in the iron box in my study. One goes to Edith Marlow at the depot tonight, before anyone knows what we have found. Edith keeps the unclaimed goods, Miss Ana. She knows how to keep a thing safe."
So Ana spent the day copying numbers. She sat at the kitchen table with her pen and her ruler, and she copied Sam's tallies and Duncan's ledgers side by side, page after page, in the neat schoolteacher's hand she had practiced since she was a girl, and as she copied, the story of the last three years wrote itself under her pen: the drought that never quite happened, the deaths that never left bones, the trips to Miles City that always followed the losses like a shadow follows a man. Sam brought her more coffee, and then more paper, and then, late in the afternoon, he brought her a second lamp, because the light was going and she would not stop.
Tomas Herrera came in the late afternoon, with a basket from his own kitchen, and he looked at the table and at the three of them, and he did not ask what they were doing. He set the basket down, he put a hand, briefly, on Rosalind's shoulder, and he said, "You will need supper if you mean to finish before dark." It was the kind of thing a man says when he has loved a woman quietly for a long time and has learned that the best way to help her is not to make speeches but to bring food. Rosalind looked up at him, and for a moment her face softened in a way Ana had never seen it soften, and then she went back to her numbers, and Tomas went out to the barn without another word.
By nightfall the copies were done. Ana's hand ached, and her eyes burned, and the two sets of books lay on the table, identical and damning, tied with string. Rosalind took one set herself, locked it in the iron box in the study, and turned the key twice. The other set she gave to Sam, with instructions as plain as orders on a cattle drive: ride to Juniper Creek tonight, give them to Edith Marlow, tell no one else, and come back by the back road.