And the yard looked exactly as it always had. The water trough, the fence her father had mended two summers ago, the near draw running in its channel below the cottonwoods. Nothing in the view had changed. What had changed was the piece of paper that had just ridden away in a leather case and the word forgery running quiet and cold in the back of her mind. Not panicked.
Just settled there like a stone dropped in still water. She was not a woman given to long moments of standing and feeling. She went to the tin chest. Nora spent the next three days in her father's tin chest. There was no record of any loan from the Crescent V.
Not in the operating ledger, not in the correspondence file, not in the bank book, not in any of the receipts her father had kept with the near religious attention of a man who had been poor enough once to understand what paperwork was worth. Silas Aldridge had borrowed money twice in his 18 years in the valley. Once from the Santa Fe land office for the original survey and purchase and once from the Cimarron bank for a new shearing shed. Both fully repaid and documented in the ledger. There was no $800 loan from the Crescent V.
The signature on the document was wrong in a way she could not have specified but could feel in the way you feel when a familiar handwriting is not quite right. Like a piece of music played a half step off key. She told Caleb that evening. Caleb asked to see the document. She told him Crew had taken it.
He nodded once and said he would look into it. He spent two days at the county courthouse. He was, to anyone watching, a man with minor administrative business, the kind of thing anyone might have, asking about records in the same unhurried way he did everything. The county clerk, a cheerful woman named Mrs. Landers, who had worked the office for 9 years and remembered everything filed in it, answered his questions without suspicion because he asked them without urgency, which is the whole art of that kind of inquiry.
What he found was this. The Crescent V had, in the previous 6 months, acquired water access rights from two other valley families under debt settlement arrangements. Both families had left. Both arrangements had involved Crew and a document the families had not previously seen. One of those families, the Okafor Wells claim on the north draw, had tried to dispute it and had found themselves facing a lawsuit from the Crescent V's lawyers before the dispute was 2 weeks old.
They had sold for 20 cents on the dollar and moved to Albuquerque. The other family had not even tried to dispute it. He also found the filing record for the Aldridge water rights lien. The document had been filed at the county recorder's office in February of 1882, 1 month after Silas Aldridge had died. The document claimed a loan made in June of 1879.