Then Clem, from where he'd been standing near the fence, said quietly, "Well, that settled then." It should have been, but Margaret Caldwell was not a woman who settled. She was a woman who recalculated and by the following week things had started going wrong. First it was the supplies. Ethan had arranged delivery of lumber and feed through the general store a standing order he'd held for 3 years.
The delivery didn't come. When Clem wrote into town to check the storekeeper, a man named Pratt, who had worked that counter for a decade and had always been reliable, told him the order had been cancelled. Cancelled by who? Clem said. Pratt looked at the counter.
There was some question about the account, he said. I'm sure it'll get sorted. It didn't get sorted. 2 days later, one of the Callahan cattle turned up dead in the far pasture, and there was no explanation any of them could find. Not illness, not predator marks, just dead in the way of something that went quickly.
Then one of the other ranchers in the valley, a man named Gruber, who had been on good terms with Ethan for years, stopped him in town and wouldn't meet his eyes. "Got some business considerations changing up," Gruber said. "Might have to pull back from the co-op arrangement." "What business considerations?" Ethan said.
Gruber looked somewhere to the left of Ethan's ear. "Just considerations," he said. Said, "I'm sure you understand." Ethan rode home and came in and stood in the kitchen and Clara looked at him and knew immediately that something had changed. "Tell me," she said.
He told her. She listened without interrupting. And when he was done, she was quiet for a moment. "Margaret Caldwell," she said. She's the only person in this valley with the connections to pull supply chains and turn neighbors quiet inside a week.
"Can you prove it?" Not yet. Clara looked at her hands on the table. She thought about it carefully, the way she thought about everything steadily without panic, looking for the shape of it. "She's not coming after you," she said.
He looked at her. "She's coming after me," Clara said. She wants you to send me away. She thinks if the ranch starts failing, you'll decide I'm not worth the cost. She met his eyes.
She's trying to make me the problem. The muscle in Ethan's jaw worked. Are you telling me to send you away? He said, "I'm telling you what she's doing." Clara said, "I'm not telling you anything about what you should do."
He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "I'm not sending you away." Clara held his gaze. "Then we need to figure out what's actually going on," she said. "Because I don't think this is just about me."
She was right. But she didn't know yet how right. The truth of it was larger and darker and more complicated than one woman's wounded pride. And it was going to take all of them, every last Callahan and Clara Whitfield standing among them to dig it out into the light where it could be dealt with. But that night, none of that was visible yet.