The door opened. Orson came in first, which was unusual. He'd been letting Gideon lead the conversation every time before. He pulled off his hat and held it, which she'd noticed was what he did when he was about to say something he'd been turning over for a while. Gideon came in behind him and closed the door and stood with his back to it."Whitlock will move,"Orson said."No preamble, no warming up to it.
She wants the deed authenticated by an independent recorder before she files anything, but she's willing to do that here. She'll send her own man out rather than ask you to travel. She understood the risk in you traveling. Mara looked at him. She believed you.
She believed the description of the document. She knows Ror's signature on land transfers. She's seen enough of them. And she knows what a surveyor's mark from 1,882 looks like versus what a fraudulent recreation of one looks like. He scratched at his beard.
She also said something else. What? Orson glanced at Gideon briefly. Something in that glance that she couldn't entirely read. She said your deed might not be the only one.
She's had three families come to her in the past 18 months with similar stories, farms they lost, papers that didn't look right, transfers they don't remember agreeing to. She couldn't build anything without a primary document. He looked at Mara directly. Yours might be the piece that holds the whole structure together. The room was very quiet.
Mara had thought about this. Had allowed herself to think about it once briefly. In the way you allow yourself to think about something dangerous quickly, and with a full awareness of what it cost you, if Ror had done this to her, he had done it to others. She had known that abstractly the way you know abstract things. Hearing it stated as fact by someone who had spoken to the district attorney was different.
How long, she said, until her recorder gets here. 2 days if he rides hard. Three if the weather turns. Orson looked at the window at the heavy sky pressing down on everything outside. Weather's going to turn.
3 days, Gideon said. 3 days, Orson confirmed. Mara thought about the tracks on the south ridge. She thought about the two horses that had come close enough to the cabin and turned back and what it meant that they'd turned back, not that they were satisfied, but that whoever sent them was patient. Was letting the information travel back before deciding on the next move.