Caleb’s hands began trembling.
“Where did you get this?”
“My daughter.”
“Aayita?”
“She carried it from the burning camp.”
Caleb stared.
Takakota continued.
“She was fourteen.”
Images exploded inside Caleb’s mind.
Flames.
Smoke.
A girl beneath a fallen hide frame.
A child coughing.
Caleb dragging someone through darkness.
He could not see the face.
He remembered only a small hand gripping his sleeve.
“You knew.”
“I suspected.”
“Why the marriage?”
Takakota looked toward the camp.
“Some of my people remember the uniform more clearly than the face of the man inside it.”
“I wasn’t wearing—”
“You traveled with those soldiers.
For some, that is enough.”
Takakota’s voice hardened.
“If I welcomed you as guest, men would demand you leave.
If I held you as prisoner, they would demand judgment.”
Caleb slowly understood.
“So you made me family.”
“For four nights.”
Caleb stared.
“There is no marriage.”
“Not unless both of you choose one.”
Caleb nearly laughed from disbelief.
“You nearly got me killed by your daughter.”
“She has been angry with me before.”
“Not like this.”
Takakota’s mouth twitched.
“Perhaps not.”
Caleb looked again at the paper.
“Why does Vale want me?”
“Because this is not the only page.”
Caleb lifted his gaze.
Takakota said, “There was a ledger.”
Caleb remembered.
God help him, he remembered.
Captain Vale’s field chest.
Payments from ranching companies.
Bounties marked beside names of Apache leaders.
Land parcels promised before attacks had even occurred.
Orders deliberately creating violence so military action could clear valleys for settlement.
Caleb had stolen the ledger the night of Tonto Basin.
Then everything had burned.
“I lost it.”
“No.”
Caleb’s breath stopped.
Takakota looked toward Aayita’s shelter.
“She took that too.”
Aayita was waiting when Caleb entered.
The ledger lay on a blanket between them.
Its leather cover was blackened on one side.
Caleb stared at it as though the dead had risen.
“Where did you find that?”
“You dropped it.”
“Where?”
“When you carried me.”
There it was.
The memory returned completely.
A burning shelter.
A girl trapped beneath timber.
Caleb lifting it.
Dragging her through smoke.
Shoving a leather book inside his shirt.
A soldier calling his name.
Vale shouting that anyone helping prisoners would be shot.
Caleb lifting the girl.
Running.
Aayita watched recognition move across his face.
“You remember.”
“Yes.”
“You left me beneath the black cliff.”
“With three children.”
“Four.”
Caleb closed his eyes.
The smallest child had not been breathing.
“I thought one died.”
“He did.”
Silence.
Then Aayita said something that shattered three years of certainty.
“My mother did not die in the fire.”
Caleb looked up.
“She escaped.”
He could not speak.
“You led her out through the creek bed.”
“No.
There was a woman, but—”
“She was wounded.
You gave her your horse.”
Caleb remembered.
A woman bleeding from the side.
Two children clinging to her skirt.
His horse disappearing into darkness beneath them.
“What happened?”
“She lived another eleven years.”
Caleb stopped breathing.
Aayita’s voice softened.
“She died last spring.”
For three years Caleb had carried a dead woman in his nightmares.
A woman whose face he believed he had abandoned.
A woman who had lived more than a decade after that night.
