She looked at him over her shoulder with an expression that was not quite a smile and not quite something harder than a smile, but somewhere in between. Then you come get me, she said. And I'll remind Sheriff Calhoun that I have been keeping his account books for 12 years and I know every purchase he has ever made in this store. And some of those purchases would make for very interesting conversation at the next town council meeting. Sam looked at her.
Go, she said, and went into the back room. He was back at the cabin by half past nine. Three knocks, then one. Martha opened the door before he had his hand down, rifle in her other hand. Lily standing behind her knee with the button clutched in her fist.
She read his face the same way Agnes had, quickly, completely. He filed a missing person's report this morning, Sam said, coming inside. Calhoun will be here before noon with a guardianship petition for Lily. Martha's face didn't change. She set the rifle back on the table, moved Lily to the hearth rug, and stood with her arms crossed and her eyes on the middle distance, thinking.
Lily looked between them. Is the bad man coming? Lily asked. A man is coming, Martha said carefully. Sam and I are going to talk to him.
Wade says Sheriff Calhoun does what he's told. The particular matter-of-factness of it, a three-year-old reporting institutional corruption as a simple fact about the world she had been born into, hit Sam somewhere low in the chest. He crouched down in front of the little girl. "What else does Wade say?" Lily considered this with genuine seriousness as though reviewing a list.
"He says Mama doesn't know what's good for her. He says the house belongs to the Briggses and always will. He says" She paused, turned the button over in her fingers. "He says I'm a Briggs even if Mama isn't. He says that matters more than anything."
"He's wrong about that," Sam said. Lily looked at him. "Which part?" "All of it." She thought about this for a moment, then she nodded once, put the button in her pocket, and went back to the hearth rug with the gravity of someone who has closed a matter.
Martha was watching him from across the room. He stood and met her eyes, and she said quietly, "She likes you." "She's a good judge of character." "She is." Something moved in Martha's expression, briefly, carefully.
Harold used to frighten her. She'd go very quiet when he was in the room. She was only a year old when he died, but she'd already learned She stopped. "Children know." Sam said nothing.
Let the silence do its work. "Agnes," Martha said after a moment, "what did she say?" "He told her everything. He told her everything: the telegram, Thomas Garrett in Denver, the three-day window, Calhoun and the petition, and the instruction to speak for herself and let the law see her clearly. Martha listened without interrupting, her arms still crossed, her face composed and working.