“Sir, This Boy Lived With Me in the Orphanage…” Widow’s Daughter Said — Millionaire Cowboy Went Pale

Chapter 6

Otis Traven had a face like a gift that had been unwrapped too many times — handsome, smooth, worn thin at the edges by years of practiced sympathy. He carried the brandy from his saddlebags himself and set it on the sideboard with the ease of a man who had poured drinks in that room for twenty years, because he had.

“Maggie’s anniversary,” he said, pouring two glasses without being asked. “Ten years, Garrett. Ten years, and here you still stand in the dark. I told you the day we put her in the ground — you have to let it go. You have to close the book.”

“Every year you tell me,” Garrett said, taking the glass, holding it untasted, letting his hand shake a little at the edge. “And every year the book stays open. I am learning, Otis. I am trying.”

“Trying,” Otis repeated warmly, and raised his glass. “To Margaret. And to her boy, wherever he is. To rest.”

Garrett did not drink. He could not. He was watching the other man’s right hand, the glint of turquoise in the lamplight, and the effort of not reaching for the revolver in the desk drawer was a physical pain, like holding a scream.

They talked of cattle and weather and taxes. Otis played his part with the skill of long practice, steering the conversation in gentle circles, wearing concern like a tailored coat. Only once did he pause. His eyes had drifted, as Garrett had known they would — to the desk, where the worn charcoal drawing lay beside the lamp, unfolded, impossible to miss.

“What’s this?” Otis asked lightly, reaching for it.

“Do not touch it.” The words came out before Garrett could soften them, sharp as a pulled trigger.

The room went still. Otis’s hand froze an inch above the paper, and for the space of a heartbeat the mask slipped — a cold, flat flicker behind the eyes, there and gone, like a fish under dark water. He withdrew his hand smoothly.

“An old memory, is it?” he said, the warmth back in his voice, a shade too late. “Sentiment. You always had a sentimental streak, Garrett. It was Maggie who was the practical one.”

“Do you know what the girl in the drawing said to me tonight?” Garrett asked quietly.

Otis’s glass stopped halfway to his lips, and for a moment Garrett saw the truth hang in the man’s stillness — the calculation running behind his eyes like a hunted thing. “What girl?” Otis said.

“Oh, the new cleaning woman’s child,” Garrett said, waving a hand, as if it were nothing. “Lettie, or Nell, or some such. A stray who wandered in off the road before the storm. She told me she liked the painting in the great room. Children say anything. I gave her a biscuit and sent her off with her mother.”

The jig was up and Garrett Traven knew it — he saw the lie catch in Otis’s throat like a hook, because Garrett had never in his life handed a biscuit to a child; his house had been a tomb for a decade and Otis knew it better than anyone. But Otis chose, in that instant, to believe the performance, because the alternative was a truth he could not yet face. He drained his glass and rose.

“Get some rest,” Otis said, clapping him once on the shoulder, hard enough to bruise. “I will call on you in the spring, when you are yourself again.”

The door closed. Hoofbeats receded down the drive into the thickening snow.

Garrett waited for the sound to die, then crossed the room in four strides and threw the study doors open so hard they crashed against the walls. Jonas was already standing in the hall, Winchester in hand, as if summoned by the violence of the slam.

“He knows,” Garrett snarled, and his voice had shed the actor’s tremor entirely. “He saw the drawing. He will not sleep tonight thinking about it. By first light he will be riding to the valley to shut Mrs. Harlow’s mouth permanent.”

“So will his thugs,” Jonas said.

“Then let him go to her.” Garrett was already at the gun cabinet, working the combination, pulling out his heavy coat from the hook. “Let him, Jonas. You take two men and ride straight for the valley, and when you find him at that boarding house, you arrest him and you do not let him speak to anyone until he is in irons.”

“And you?” Jonas asked. “Where is Mr. Traven riding while I am taking the law to the valley?”

Garrett paused with his coat half on, and his eyes went to the wall above the great hearth — to the painting of the four-year-old with the carved wooden horse, and the light in his eyes that had come from his mother.

“Sadie remembered one more thing,” he said, and his voice had gone soft again, soft as the first snow. “When the boy was small, she said, he talked about a house by the river. A little house where they kept the summers. And he told her that from the bedroom window, if you leaned out far enough, you could watch a wooden eagle turn in the wind.”

Jonas’s jaw tightened. “The old hunting camp. On the Silver.”

“I built that house with my own hands before he was born,” Garrett said, and he buckled his gun belt as he spoke, settling it onto his hips with a sound like a verdict. “Do you know who has held the lease on that camp for the last eight years, Jonas? Some ladies’ society from the county seat — a society that pays its rent in gold, through a manager who answers to Otis Traven.”

He moved past Jonas and into the dark of the corridor, and then out into the storm, where the black gelding stood stamping in the head of the lantern light, its breath a plume in the freezing air.

“He hid my son on my own ground,” Garrett said, swung up into the saddle, and looked down at his foreman with eyes that had gone the color of winter iron. “He taught my boy that his name was a dead thing and his father was a ghost. Ride fast, Jonas. When you two are done with the valley, come find me at the river.”

The gelding wheeled and plunged out into the falling snow, and the last thing Jonas Pike saw before the whiteness swallowed them was the big man leaning low over the horse’s neck, riding east into the night.

And somewhere out there, beyond the reach of the lantern, the wooden eagle turned on its rod, turning and turning, waiting for the only man who had ever known how to read the wind.