Prescott's jaw shifted slightly. She did. At length, he looked out at the paddic where December had just put her nose against Eddie's shoulder. The board will want a final file review before formalizing the placement papers. When two weeks, same as always, Calder said.
Yes. Prescott paused. He had the look of a man who came prepared to find fault and has found the landscape less cooperative than expected. Your household log is thorough. The twins did it.
Prescott looked at him. The 8-year-olds. Yes. Another pause. Prescott put his hat back on.
Two weeks, mister. Boon. He left. And this time, Calder did not watch him all the way down the road because he had a fence section to check, and the morning was getting away from him. Margaret's withdrawal of the observation report did something to Red Hollow's public opinion that Prescott's official position could not have done because Margaret Vale was not a county functionary.
She was the woman who had organized the harvest fund for three drought years running who had quietly kept the school operating when the county pulled its money, who had, as Calder was still discovering in pieces, done more practical work in Red Hollow than anyone who had ever held an official title there. When Margaret Vale changed her position on something, people noticed. And when she told three women at the dry goods store on a Thursday morning, not as an announcement, just as a fact she happened to mention while examining Ribbon that the Boon placement was sound, and the county's ongoing scrutiny was becoming an obstacle rather than an oversight. Those three women told six others, and those six told everyone they encountered by sundown. The shift in Red Hollow was not dramatic.
Small towns don't do dramatic shifts. They do incremental ones, each small enough to maintain dignity. But it was real, and Calder felt it in the nods that had started appearing, and that became slightly more solid now. In the conversations at the feed store that stopped going quiet when he walked in, Hector Garza stopping him outside the blacksmiths to say that Wesley had done good work on his fence and he had more if the boy was willing. Calder told Wesley about the offer that evening.
Wesley was quiet for a moment. Jonah could come again. Garza said, "Yes, and we'd keep the trade arrangement. That's what he's offering. " Wesley thought about it with the focused assessment he brought to everything practical. "All right," he said.
"I'll talk to Jonah. " He started to go, then stopped. Garza said, "Good work. " His exact words were that the corner post was set better than his own son-in-law would have done it. Something moved across Wesley's face that wasn't quite a smile, but was in the vicinity of one. He went to find Jonah. Clara's bread business had by December grown beyond the trial run she'd started in November.