Slade was in the round pen working a young bay with Dallas Miller in the saddle. Dallas was the team roping heeler Slade brought in to start the rougher colts when nobody else had the patience for them, and the bay was halfway between bucking and figuring it out, which meant Dallas was halfway between cussing and laughing, which was where Dallas usually was. Tanner Hollister stood by the rail in the way he always stood — straight, arms folded, reading everything without giving anything back. He'd come for something else, some arrangement with the event stock, but he was here and that was enough.
Dallas walked the bay over to the rail when he saw me, dropped his reins, and tipped his hat back. "Walker."
"Miller."
"You here for the stock paperwork or do you have something more interesting to share?”
"The second one."
"Then I'm staying."
I handed the envelope to Slade. He read it. Then handed it to Tanner without comment. Tanner read it twice. His jaw tightened and he passed it over to Dallas to take a look. Whatever my grandfather had been hiding was out in the open now.
“This is from your grandfather's records.” Slade stared at me, his jaw tight.
“Yeah.”
“How long have you had it?”
“Not long.” I leaned on the post. “There's more. But you needed to see that one first.”
The page was a debt record from the winter of 1943. A payment from a Kincaid to a Hollister, notated in my grandfather's hand as settled through Walker account as agreed. Below it, a second line: both parties aware. Feud for show. Land deal pending.
Tanner set the page on the fence rail. He wasn't a man who got rattled, but something behind his eyes had shifted. “What land deal?”
“I don't know yet.” I picked the page back up and put it in my shirt pocket. “But whatever started between your families, somebody else knew about it. Somebody who wasn't supposed to.”
The four of us stood in the morning heat and didn't say anything useful for a while.
I drove back to the ranch as the day got long, the sun dropping enough to throw the barn into shadow while the loft window above it still held the last of the gold light. Bella's light.
Rory's window in the house was lit too. Two lights. Same property. Same problem in different forms. I stood between them in the yard and started to wonder, maybe for the first time with any real clarity, if the walls I'd built to keep both of them from getting hurt had never been about them at all.
CHAPTER 8
BELLA
The town square smelled like hay dust and funnel cake grease, and I had three hours before I needed to be anywhere. I told myself that was why I'd come. The Father's Day decorations were going up along Main Street, hand-painted banners stretched between lamp posts, someone's teenage kid fighting with a ladder near the hardware store. It would have been good material. Clean, documentary stuff that didn't require me to be personally involved in anything.
That was the plan.
Ruby handed me a coffee from behind the counter at the Mercantile before I'd settled my butt onto a stool.
“Black, one sugar,” she said. “You look like you slept on a thought too hard.”
I took the cup. “I always look like this.”
“Mm.” Her glasses caught the light. “Jace looks like that too this week. Funny coincidence.”
I didn't bite, just thanked her for the coffee, tossed a couple of dollars onto the counter, and headed back toward the front door before she could try again.
Morgan, the town planner I’d met during my first visit to Mustang Mountain, was wrestling a folding display board on a table outside of City Hall, her hair escaping its clip, and a rolled poster tucked under each arm.
“You look like you’ve got time on your hands to lend a hand,” she said.
“Depends on what for.”
“Visual hierarchy.” She propped the board against the wall and unrolled one of the posters. It was a map of the rodeo grounds with sponsor logos arranged around the edges. “Ruby wants the Kincaid and Hollister names sized the same because she doesn't want a political incident before lunch.”
