He's a careful man, Martha said. He is, Elellanor said. He's also a frightened one in the way that stubborn, self-sufficient people get frightened very quietly where they think no one can see it. Martha looked up. What is he frightened of?
She said, although she thought she knew. The same thing you are, Eleanor said, and picked up her coffee and left it there. Martha sat with that for a while after Elellanor went to bed. The morning of the hearing dawned clear and bitter cold, the kind of November morning that made the mountains look as though they had been cut out of the sky with a sharp knife. Martha wore her good dress which she had mended and pressed the night before, and she wore her coat over it, and she carried out her bag with the documentation, and she did not carry the wrench, which felt strange in the way that leaving behind something you had been carrying for a long time always felt strange, even when you were glad to put it down.
Silas drove her. They did not speak much on the road, but at one point about halfway there, his hand moved from the rains to the bench between their open, palm up, not demanding anything, not performing anything, just available. Martha looked at his hand. She put hers in it. They did not discuss it.
He picked up the rains with his other hand, and they drove the rest of the way to town like that. And Martha looked at the mountains and felt something in her chest that was terrifying and quiet and entirely her own. The hearing room at the county courthouse was a plain room with a long table and a panel of three men, the county clerk, a territorial supply office representative, who had ridden four hours from the capital for this, and a judge named Harmon, who had the weathered patient look of someone who had presided over enough hearings to know that what people said in the first 5 minutes was usually less important than what they couldn't help revealing in the last five. Walter Crane was already there when they arrived. He was with his lawyer, a man from Missoula, whom Martha didn't recognize.
And he looked at her when she came in with the expression he had worn in the yard that day, controlled, respectable from a distance, calculating up close. But there was something different about it today. A tightness around the eyes that hadn't been there before. He looked at Garrett. He looked at Silas.
His eyes went to the bag Martha was carrying and stayed there for half a second too long. He knew she had the notebook back. She could see that he knew it. She sat down and folded her hands on the table and looked at the panel and felt the fear and the steadiness together, the way she always felt them, and she let them both be there. Garrett presented the case with the dry precision of a man who trusted evidence to speak louder than rhetoric, which Martha appreciated because it was how she had always believed things should be argued.
He laid out the 14 repair orders. He laid out the purchasing ledger comparison. He presented Silas's signed statement about the wagon tamperings and the handkerchief. He presented Daniel Marsh's sworn account. And then he laid Henry's notebook open on the table and walked the panel through 11 specific entries.
Each one documenting a job for Crane's company where the notebook record showed what was specified and what was actually installed and the names and dates and the gap between the two. Crane's lawyer objected twice. Both times, Judge Harmon looked at the documents and overruled without significant discussion. Then Harmon looked at Martha. Mrs.