The room turned to her. She had risen again from her seat, and this time her voice was quiet, almost gentle, which somehow made it carry further than a shout. "They don't have documents," she said. "You made sure of that, didn't you? You never put your threats in writing.
You went to their kitchens, not their lawyers. You made your promises out loud where they couldn't be proven because you've spent your whole life being careful about paper." She took a step forward. "But you made one mistake, Mr. Whitaker.
You put something in writing to us. Charles's eyes narrowed. The letter you sent my husband, the one offering to buy the ranch. Eleanor kept her eyes on his. He burned it.
But I read it twice before he did, and I have a good memory, and there was a line in it I've thought about every day since. You wrote that you'd hate to see the county question whether a hasty marriage was a lawful one. You wrote that two weeks before you filed this petition. She turned to the judge. Your honor, a man who files a petition out of honest concern for a grieving neighbor doesn't threaten that neighbor with the petition first in writing as leverage to make him sell.
That letter is the good faith you asked about or the proof there was never any. Judge Puit leaned forward. You're saying Mr. Whitaker threatened to file this very petition in writing in an attempt to force a land sale before he ever filed it as a matter of concern. I'm saying he did exactly that.
Eleanor didn't look away from Charles, and I'd have brought the letter to prove it, except he was clever enough to word the offer so my husband would burn it in disgust, which Nathaniel did. She let that land. But there was a boy who delivered it, Whitaker's own errand boy. He'd remember carrying it. And a man like Mr.
Whitaker keeps copies of everything, your honor. He's too careful not to. I'd wager there's a duplicate of that letter in his own files right now. It was a gamble. Eleanor knew it even as she said it.
She had no proof. There was a copy, no way to be certain the boy would talk nothing but her read of the man in front of her. And 30 days of studying how his mind worked. But she had learned long ago that the shest way to catch a careful man was to make him believe you already had the thing he'd hidden. And Charles Whitaker's face gave him away.