I have bread. Rising, she said. It'll rise without your supervision, he said. She looked at him for a moment, and something moved through her that was tired and warm at the same time. "Good night, Silas," she said.
She went inside. She lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the mountain, and thinking about Crane's hands and Walter Crane's careful voice, and what it meant that he was no longer willing to do this at a distance. He had come himself. He had come with a deputy and a story about a drawing that wasn't there. And when the story failed, he had told her quietly and deliberately that he would make the story true if he needed to.
A man who was not afraid did not need to say that. A man who was not afraid did not say that out loud to someone who was building a case against him. Walter Crane had just told her without meaning to that he was more afraid than he looked. She held that thought and felt it change the shape of everything that had happened since she arrived at this ranch. Then she heard something.
It was small. It was outside. It was the particular sound of someone moving carefully near the barn. The sound of someone who did not want to be heard, which was precisely why she heard it. Because careful movement in the dark had its own rhythm.
And that rhythm was different from everything else that moved in the night. Martha sat up. She was out of bed and had her shoes on and her heavy coat and the wrench from her tool chest before she'd finished thinking about it. She did not go outside. She went to the window and looked.
The barn door was open. It had not been open when she went to bed. And inside the barn, just at the edge of the lantern light that was not supposed to be lit at this hour, someone was standing beside the supply sled that Martha had been repairing. Standing very something. Martha's blood went cold because she had left Henry's notebook under the sled that afternoon, meaning to bring it in before bed, and she had forgotten.
She gripped the wrench. She went to Roberto's door and knocked three times, hard and fast. "Someone is in the barn," she said through the door. And her voice was steady because she was a woman who had learned that steady voices got things done faster than frightened ones. "Get up now." She heard Roberto move.
She went back to the window and looked at the barn. The lantern was gone. The barn door was still open and Henry's notebook was somewhere in there in the dark with whoever had just been reading it. Roberto came out of his room in 30 seconds flat, boots unlaced and rifle in hand, which told Martha everything she needed to know about the kind of man he was when it counted. Barn, she said someone was in there with a lantern.