“Who arranged the match?”
“A woman named Mrs. Adelaide Crane.”
“Where?”
“Fort Worth.”
“Did you meet her?”
“No. We exchanged letters.”
“Who contacted whom?”
He paused.
“She contacted me.”
My heartbeat quickened.
“Why?”
“She said someone had recommended my name.”
“Who?”
Nathaniel slowly stood.
“She never told me.”
The room became very quiet.
We looked at each other.
Suddenly the arrangement that had brought Victoria to him did not look romantic.
It looked deliberate.
We searched Nathaniel’s correspondence that night.
Most letters were ordinary.
Until we found the first one from Adelaide Crane.
At the bottom was a sentence Nathaniel had apparently forgotten.
The Whitmore family possesses qualities that I believe would be especially suitable for Silver Creek.
Suitable for Silver Creek.
Not for Nathaniel.
For the ranch.
“Does that sound strange to you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Before I could say more, something crashed downstairs.
We rushed into the hall.
The front door was open.
A shadow ran across the yard.
Nathaniel shouted and followed.
I reached the porch in time to see a rider disappear beyond the cottonwoods.
Nathaniel returned several minutes later holding something he had found beside the fence.
A torn envelope.
Addressed to me.
Someone had stolen the outgoing mail.
Including my second letter home.
The next morning, Nathaniel saddled two horses.
“We’re going into Red Valley.”
“Why?”
“To send a telegram Father cannot intercept.”
I stared at him.
“You think my father knows something?”
“I think someone does.”
We sent a message to the county records office in Missouri, where my family had lived before I was born.
Then Nathaniel insisted we visit the Red Valley bank.
Margaret had maintained a private deposit box there.
Nathaniel had never opened it.
The manager recognized him.
“I wondered when you would come.”
Nathaniel frowned.
“What do you mean?”
The elderly banker disappeared into the vault.
When he returned, he carried a narrow wooden box.
“There were instructions.”
“What instructions?”
The banker looked at me.
“That the box should be released only if Nathaniel Walker entered this bank accompanied by a woman named Clara Whitmore.”
I stopped breathing.
Nathaniel turned toward me.
“What did you say?”
The banker repeated it.
My knees nearly weakened.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered.
Margaret died three years before Nathaniel had ever heard of my family.
Yet inside her bank box waited an envelope.
Across the front, in faded black ink, were four words.
For Clara Whitmore only.
Nathaniel sat down.
I opened it.
Inside was a letter.
My hands trembled so violently the paper rattled.
Clara,
If you are reading this, then Adelaide succeeded.
I pray you will forgive me for setting events into motion without your knowledge.
You do not know me.
But I knew your mother.
And I know what your father did.
I stopped.
Nathaniel leaned closer.
I continued.
Margaret wrote that before marrying Nathaniel, she had lived for several years in Missouri.
There she met my mother, Eleanor.
They became close friends.
Then Margaret discovered something terrifying.
My father, Charles Whitmore, had not inherited our family property honestly.
Years earlier, Eleanor’s father had owned valuable land containing newly discovered silver deposits.
When he died unexpectedly, Charles produced a new will transferring nearly everything to himself through marriage.
Margaret believed the will had been forged.
My mother discovered it too.
She planned to leave Charles.
Then she became ill.
She died when I was fourteen.
Everyone told me it was pneumonia.
Margaret believed otherwise.
She believed my father had poisoned her.
I dropped the letter.
“No.”
Nathaniel touched my shoulder.
I recoiled.
“No.”
The banker looked away.
“She was sick,” I whispered. “Mother was sick for weeks.”
But memories were already returning.
Father preparing her medicine himself.
Father refusing another doctor.
Mother trying to tell me something one night before he entered the room.
