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“That’s My Wife,” Said the Mountain Man—But the Obese Stranger Was Hiding a Deadly Secret

by dttkcanh•

We’ll be checking your claims, he said. To Thorne, not to Evelyn. This isn’t finished. Never said it was, Thorne replied. Hol and his partner left. The bell above the door made its small sound. Through the window, Harlon watched them mount up and ride toward the dustpan. And he stood there behind his counter, not sure whether he’d just done something decent or something extremely stupid, or whether there was a difference.

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The woman, Evelyn, let out a breath that she’d been holding for what looked like at least 3 minutes. Thorne looked at her. “Come on,” he said. He didn’t take her to his house. He took her to the forge. It was the building he knew best, the one place in Silver Hollow where he felt like the walls belonged to him rather than the other way around.

The fire in the forge was banked down to Kohl’s. He’d been in the middle of cooling a set of wagon fittings when he’d looked up and seen two men with federal badges riding into town from the north, and the heat it gave off was a steady, deep warmth that pressed against your skin from three feet away. The woman came in and looked around with the automatic assessment of someone mapping a new space.

She looked at the tools on the wall, the cold iron of the anvil, the trough of water, the single window high up near the roof that let in a column of afternoon light and didn’t give a view to anyone outside. Pitcher came out from under the anvil and sniffed her boots. She looked down at the dog with an expression that cracked something open in her face.

Not softness exactly, but something human and exhausted underneath the calculation. What’s his name? She asked. Pitcher. She crouched down and let the dog smell her hand. Pitcher’s tail moved twice. She stood back up. Evelyn Cross, she said. Not Maddox. I know. You don’t know anything about me. I know.

Hol Thorne said. He moved past her to check the forge fittings, not looking at her. his hands going to familiar work. Saw him 6 years back in Kansas. He wasn’t a federal marshall then. He was a hired man doing a land boss’s dirty work. She was quiet for a moment. You were a law man, she said. He didn’t answer right away.

He picked up a file and turned the nearest wagon fitting over in his hand, checking the work he’d done before she arrived. “A long time ago,” he said. “That’s why you knew how to do that. The way you talk to him, the way you She stopped. Seemed to be deciding how much to say. You bought me some time. That’s all it is. He’s going to come back.

Probably. You understand what you’ve done? What that means for you? He set the fitting down and looked at her for the first time since they’d come into the forge. You going to tell me what’s actually happening, or are we going to stand here talking around it until Holt comes through that door? She looked at him for a long moment.

She had, he noticed, the kind of face that was difficult to read, not because it was blank, but because too much was happening behind it at once. She wasn’t simple. She wasn’t easy to categorize. She was tired in a way that went down past the physical, and she was angry in a way that had been burning for a long time. And there was something else in there, too.

Something that looked like it hadn’t had anywhere to land in a while. “Sit down,” she said. He raised an eyebrow. She was in his forge. “Please,” she added, like the word cost her something. He sat on the edge of the workt. She stayed standing like she needed to be able to move. And she started to talk.

“It had started,” she told him, 3 years ago. Her father, Tobias Cross, had been a surveyor, a good one, take meticulous, methodical, the kind of man who took his work personally because he understood that a survey line drawn wrong was a family’s livelihood drawn wrong, and he couldn’t stomach that kind of mistake. He’d worked out of Laramie for most of his adult life, mapping property boundaries for settlers, homesteaders, the territorial government.

Her uncle, Gideon Cross, was her father’s younger brother. And where Tobias was meticulous, Gideon was ambitious. Gideon had done well for himself in ways that people generally knew were a little loose around the edges, but didn’t examine too closely. Land brokering, property speculation, the sort of dealings that required a man to be comfortable in rooms where the truth was flexible.

He’d cultivated relationships with territorial officials, with certain federal appointments, with the kind of men who had power and needed someone willing to do the specific work that power required. 3 years ago, Tobias Cross had come home from a survey job in the Wind River region and told his daughter that something was wrong. Not the ordinary kind of wrong, the kind that sat in a man’s chest and wouldn’t move.

He’d been hired to reservey a section of land that had already been mapped. Standard enough. Boundaries shifted sometimes. Old surveys were challenged. New eyes were put on old lines. But when he’d compared his findings to the original survey records, the numbers didn’t match. Not close, not within normal margin. They were off in ways that were specific and consistent.

The same direction, the same magnitude across multiple parcels. Someone had moved the lines, not the physical markers, the records. Someone had gotten into the official survey documents and altered them. And the alterations had the effect of shifting the legal boundaries of dozens of properties in ways that made certain parcels, some of them settled by homesteaders who’d put years of work into the ground, suddenly fall within the legal ownership of a land trust that had been registered 3 years prior. A land trust that, when

Tobias Cross had dug into it carefully, had Gideon Cross’s name nested three layers deep in the ownership structure. Tobias had brought his findings to the territorial land office. The territorial land office had thanked him and done nothing. He’d brought them to the federal surveyor general’s office. The federal surveyor general had thanked him and done nothing. He’d written letters.

He’d filed formal complaints. He’d documented everything. 6 months later, Tobias Cross had his surveying license revoked on grounds of professional misconduct. The stated reason was falsification of survey records. The records cited were the ones he had altered, or rather the records that had been altered before his arrival and that he had correctly identified as altered and which someone in the federal system had then quietly realtered back again, this time with Tobias Cross’s surveyor mark on them. Her father had died 8

months after losing his license. Not dramatically, not murdered in his bed, nothing that clean. He’d caught a chest infection that a man in better circumstances would have recovered from. But a man with no income and no standing and no fight left had not. He died in a rented room in Laramie with his daughter beside him and everything he’d spent his life building in a pile of ash around him.

After that, Evelyn had picked up where her father had put the work down. The difference, she said, was that I didn’t go through official channels. She’d been quieter about it, smaller. She hadn’t filed complaints or written letters or asked anyone in power for anything. She’d gone to the settlers, the families whose properties had been swallowed by the shifted boundaries.

She’d listened to them. She’d documented their testimony, names, dates, what they’d been told, who they’d spoken to, what had happened when they’d tried to resist. And she’d found through one of those families a man named Corbin Vale, a former land office clerk who had left the position under pressure and was living quietly on his sister’s farm outside Casper, who had personal knowledge of how the records falsification had been carried out.

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