“I know.”
“I don’t remember her.”
Nathaniel sat beside her.
“Samuel wrote that Abigail knew a secret.”
Clara picked grass between her fingers.
Then suddenly said, “The song.”
Nathaniel looked at her.
“What?”
“Mama Miriam said the song came from my first mama.”
“The lullaby?”
Clara nodded.
“She said there were words, but she never sang them because Papa Samuel told her not to.”
Nathaniel’s heart began beating faster.
“Do you know the words?”
Clara thought.
“One part.”
She sang softly.
Where silver sleeps beneath the stone,
Follow the creek that runs alone.
Where three white aspens face the west,
The poorest ground conceals the best.
Nathaniel went still.
Silver.
Creek.
Claims.
He stood.
“Clara, where did you hear that?”
“Mama Miriam sang it once when she thought I was asleep.”
Nathaniel saddled his horse before sunrise.
Crowe rode with him.
They followed the northern fork of Silver Creek.
Three miles into the mountains, they found them.
Three white aspens.
Facing west.
Beyond them stretched worthless-looking rocky ground nobody had bothered claiming.
Nathaniel dismounted.
Crowe laughed softly.
“You have got to be kidding.”
They dug.
Not far.
There was silver.
A vein so rich Crowe stared at it for nearly a minute without speaking.
The original mine.
The one Mercer had spent years trying to locate.
The fortune everyone assumed Samuel had buried was never inside the iron box.
It was beneath the mountain.
Nathaniel returned home that night.
Clara ran outside.
“Did you find the secret?”
Nathaniel lifted her into his arms.
“Yes.”
“Treasure?”
He smiled.
“Something like that.”
“Are we rich?”
Nathaniel looked toward the house.
Eli was chasing a chicken.
Jonah had fallen asleep on the porch.
Micah was trying to repair a wagon wheel with a spoon.
Daniel was laughing in his cradle beside the open door.
Nathaniel looked at Clara.
“We already were.”
She rolled her eyes.
“That sounds like something old people say.”
Nathaniel laughed.
A real laugh.
The sound startled even him.
But there was one more thing.
One final truth nobody in Silver Creek ever learned.
Not Crowe.
Not the judge.
Not even Nathaniel.
It waited until Clara was eighty-three years old.
Until Nathaniel, her brothers, and nearly everyone who had stood in that courthouse square had long since returned to the earth.
In 1943, Clara Boone’s granddaughter opened an old cedar chest while preparing the family ranch house for repairs.
Inside she found Clara’s childhood coat.
Samuel Whitmore’s notebook.
The tiny red shoe.
And an envelope.
Across the front, in Clara’s handwriting, were the words:
For my children, after I am gone.
Inside was a confession.
Clara had remembered more than she ever told Nathaniel.
She remembered the night Samuel and Miriam died.
