Sheriff Cole raised his rifle.
“Don’t make this foolish, Creek.”
Harlan remained still.
Father smiled.
“Josephine, come here.”
For the first time in my life, I didn’t move.
His smile disappeared.
“Now.”
“No.”
The word felt strange.
Small.
Powerful.
Father stared at me as if the furniture had spoken.
“What did you say?”
I stepped beside Harlan.
“I said no.”
Father’s face darkened.
“You ungrateful little—”
“Careful,” Harlan said.
Sheriff Cole aimed at his chest.
Father laughed.
“There.
You see, Josephine?
The savage reveals himself.”
He looked at me.
“Do you know why your mother was running through those mountains?”
My heart stopped.
“Because Harlan Creek was chasing her.”
Harlan went perfectly still.
I looked at him.
Father saw my doubt.
And smiled.
“He hasn’t told you everything, has he?”
“Harlan?”
His silence terrified me.
Father stepped closer.
“Ask him who fired the shot that killed your mother.”
I turned.
Harlan’s face was pale.
“Harlan.”
“I didn’t shoot her.”
“Then who did?”
His eyes moved toward my father.
Father laughed.
“Convenient.”
Sheriff Cole stepped forward.
“Harlan Creek, I am arresting you for the murder of Eleanor Hale.”
By sunrise, Harlan sat in the Coldwater jail.
And I sat alone in the room where I had grown up.
Father had taken Mother’s journal.
The land patent.
The letters.
Everything.
Or so he believed.
Before Sheriff Cole dragged Harlan from the cabin, Harlan had managed to whisper four words as he passed me.
Check the blue dress.
I waited until Father left.
Then I locked my bedroom door.
The blue dress lay around me in soft folds.
I searched the pockets.
Nothing.
The bodice.
Nothing.
Then I noticed the hem.
One section was thicker.
I took the sewing shears from my pocket and carefully opened the seam.
Something fell onto the bed.
A narrow envelope.
On it, in Mother’s handwriting, were the words:
FOR THE DAY GIDEON LIES ABOUT HARLAN.
I stopped breathing.
Mother had known.
Inside was a notarized statement.
Not from Mother.
From Sheriff Cole.
Dated twelve years earlier.
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
And suddenly everything made sense.
Mother had reached Silver Junction before the shooting.
She had told a deputy everything.
She had signed an affidavit.
Sheriff Cole—then only a young deputy—had agreed to escort her home.
But instead,
he sent word to my father.
Gideon intercepted them in the mountains.
Mother was shot.
Harlan found her afterward.
And Sheriff Cole had later signed a private confession admitting exactly what he’d done.
Why?
Because Mother had threatened to expose him.
Harlan must have obtained the confession somehow.
But another page was folded beneath it.
A note from Harlan.
Josephine,
If Gideon accuses me of killing your mother, he has run out of honest lies.
The blue dress belonged to her.
She sewed the hidden pocket herself.
She told me that if you ever had to search it, things had gone very badly.
There is one more thing I have not told you.
I did not know how to tell you without sounding like I expected something in return.
