Written on the back:
Clara Rose. Three weeks old. My daughter.
Clara made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a sob.
She reached for the photograph.
Her hand stopped before touching it.
“No.”
Mason could barely speak.
“Your mother…”
“She told me she found me at a church.”
“Margaret?”
“She raised me until I was eleven. Then she died.”
Clara finally took the picture.
Her tears fell onto it.
Mason’s entire marriage rearranged itself inside his memory.
Anna’s nightmares.
The way she had cried every year on June ninth but never explained why.
The locked letters.
Her desperate desire for children.
Her distant father, whom Mason had never met.
She had once told him, There are things a person survives by burying.
Mason had thought she meant poverty.
He had never asked.
God help him, he had never asked.
Clara was Anna’s daughter.
His wife had spent years searching for her.
And now, seven years after Anna’s death, Mason had found her beneath a burning Texas sun with a rope around her wrists.
Clara was sobbing openly.
“She knew me?”
“She loved you.”
“How do you know?”
Mason lifted the bundle of letters.
“Because nobody writes this many words for someone they’ve forgotten.”
Clara pressed the photograph against her chest.
“Why didn’t she find me?”
“I don’t know.”
But Mason was beginning to understand why someone might have wanted Anna silent.
He searched deeper into the box.
At the bottom lay a legal document.
Mason unfolded it.
A birth record.
Mother: Anna Louise Vale.
Father:—
Blank.
Witness: Margaret Bell.
There was another paper.
A property trust.
Mason read the first paragraph.
Then the second.
His stomach dropped.
“What?”
Clara looked at him.
Mason handed her the paper.
Anna’s father had been Jeremiah Vale, a land speculator whose estate once included more than forty thousand acres west of Dry Hollow.
Mason remembered the name now.
Vale land had been broken apart after Jeremiah’s death.
Most of it eventually ended up in the hands of one man.
Silas Mercer.
But according to the document, half the estate had been placed into trust.
For Anna’s firstborn child.
For Clara.
Mason whispered, “Mercer doesn’t want Samuel’s ledger because of me.”
Clara stared.
“He wants it because of you.”
The front window shattered.
Mason threw himself over Clara.
A bullet buried itself in the wall.
Then came another.
And another.
“Cellar!” Mason shouted.
Clara crawled toward the kitchen while Mason grabbed his rifle.
Outside, horses thundered around the house.
The attack had begun.
Five men.
Maybe six.
Mason counted muzzle flashes through the darkness.
He fired from the window.
A rider screamed.
Clara reached the cellar door.
Then froze.
“Mason!”
“What?”
“Smoke!”
He smelled it.
The barn.
Mercer’s men had set it on fire.
Mason cursed.
If the flames reached the hay shed, the entire yard would become an inferno.
