And in two days, Thomas Garrett would arrive from Denver and none of it was resolved. And all of it was still dangerous. But when Sam jumped down from the wagon and reached up to take Lily from Martha's arms so she could climb down, the little girl stirred without waking and turned her face into the side of his neck and made a small, settled sound. And something in Sam's chest that had been braced for a very long time quietly, carefully, released. He carried her inside.
Martha held the door. And somewhere south of town, in the lit window of a well-appointed house on the Briggs property, Wade was at his desk with a pen and a sheet of paper writing something in the careful, patient hand of a man who has moved on to the next step. Thomas Garrett arrived on the second day, not the third. Agnes had sent a second telegram after the first, apparently with a level of detail that communicated urgency in a way that moved a Denver lawyer to catch an earlier stagecoach. Sam found out because Agnes herself came with him, driving her wagon up the cabin road at just past 8:00 in the morning with a man Sam didn't know sitting beside her.
Mid-40s, compact, with the kind of face that had done a great deal of careful listening and developed the stillness that comes from it. Sam was splitting wood in the yard when they arrived. He set the axe down and waited. "Samuel Cole," Agnes said, climbing down with the efficiency of a woman who has never needed help descending from anything. "Thomas Garrett.
He came in on last night's stage." She looked at Sam with an expression that said there was more, and it wasn't good. And she was going to tell him in a moment. "Is Martha inside?" "Yes."
"Get her." He went inside. Martha was at the table writing. She had been writing for most of two days, her statement expanding as she remembered details, as things she'd filed away for survival reasons and not looked at directly came back with a cold clarity that distance sometimes provides. Lily was asleep in the back room, which was still technically Sam's room, a fact that had quietly ceased to require discussion sometime around the end of the first day.
"Agnes is here," Sam said. "She brought Garrett." "She has a look on her face." Martha set down the pencil and stood. They gathered around the table, Sam, Martha, Agnes, Garrett, and Lily slept in the back room.
And Garrett put his leather case on the table and opened it with the practiced calm of a man who has walked into a great many difficult situations and learned that calm is the only currency that spends reliably in all of them. "I'm going to tell you what I know," he said. "And then I'm going to tell you what we can do about it." "Mrs. Cole," he paused, looked at Sam, looked back at Martha. "I apologize, Mrs. Briggs."
"It's all right," Martha said. Garrett laid two documents on the table. "Wade Briggs filed an emergency guardianship petition yesterday afternoon. Not with Calhoun this time. He went over Calhoun's head to the territorial circuit judge, Judge Alderman.
The hearing is scheduled for tomorrow morning at 10:00 in Coldwater Creek." He paused to let that land. "He also filed a supplementary affidavit signed by a doctor, Ellison of Denver, whom he apparently retained sometime in the last week, attesting that based on Harold Briggs' personal correspondence, correspondence Wade provided, Martha Briggs exhibited ongoing signs of emotional instability and was considered by her late husband to be an unsuitable sole custodian for a minor child." The room was very quiet. "He had Harold's letters," Martha said.