My solicitor is unavailable today." Prewitt looked past him. He looked at Nora. She held his gaze. Her hands were very steady.
Prewitt smiled the smile of a man who has all the time in the world and means to spend it making other people uncomfortable. "Mrs. Voss, I did not expect to find you here." "No," she said. "I imagine you did not."
He looked between her and Eli Callaway, the two of them standing close in the rain, the six boys behind them. And something in his reading of the situation shifted, recalibrated, became less certain. He had expected a struggling man alone. He had not expected this. Wyatt reached Harrow Creek before dark.
The solicitor he found was a woman named Adelaide Marsh, who had been practicing property law out of a back office on the Creek Road for 11 years, and who read Nora's written summary and the counter notation document and the deed, and said flatly that she had seen this exact arrangement from Prewitt three times in 2 years, and had been waiting for someone to bring her the paperwork to undo it. She came back with Wyatt the following morning. What happened in the Callaway front room that afternoon was not dramatic in the way of guns and shouting. It was dramatic in the way of papers and preparation, Adelaide Marsh presenting the counter notation and the unfinished probate and the dual entry evidence from the ledger, Nora sitting at the table with her notes in front of her ready to answer questions, Dunmore's face going through several colors as he realized the position he was in. Prewitt attempted twice to redirect the conversation toward Mrs.
Voss's late husband's debts, and both times Nora answered him with specific figures and specific dates that left no room for the vagueness he preferred to operate in. At one point Prewitt said, with the particular cruelty of a man reaching for what he thinks will hurt, "Your husband did not think you capable of any of this. He said so plainly." The room went very quiet. Colt made a sound that Wyatt cut short with a hand on his arm.
Even Adelaide Marsh went still over her papers for a moment, pen hovering. Eli Callaway, who had been standing at the far wall through most of this, moved away from the wall. He did not move toward Prewitt. He moved to stand beside Nora at the table, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his arm against her shoulder, and he said, without raising his voice, "Mrs. Voss's husband was wrong about a great many things.
That's no longer relevant." Adelaide Marsh looked at them both over the top of her spectacles. She did not comment. She went back to her papers. By late afternoon, Dunmore had agreed to a full account correction and the dismissal of the preliminary inventory notice.
Priel left without ceremony and without what he had come for, and the sound of his wagon wheels on the drive, pulling away in defeat rather than toward conquest, was one of the finer sounds Nora Voss had heard in recent memory. Adelaide Marsh packed her papers and shook Nora's hand before Eli's, which was not customary, but was correct. "Come see me when you want to talk about the probate filing," she said to Nora. "It will take 6 weeks if we move quickly." After she left, the house was very quiet.