Page 34 of October’s Cowboy Beau

I looked at the entry. There it was. Jordan, right there between a Hollister lease and a Hale property. My granddad never talked much about the past beyond the stories that mattered to him, and he sure as hell never mentioned Cedar Draw or Daniel Hale. If he’d known what was in here, he’d never said a word.

Once Rachel saw the files, it wouldn’t be Granddad’s box anymore. It would belong to the whole town, and everyone would have a say about what it meant to have my family’s name mixed up with the Kincaids and Hollisters.

“I want to know what we’re looking at before anybody else does.”

“Okay.” She turned her phone facedown on the desk. “Then nobody will hear about it from me.” She glanced at the ledger. “And it’s definitely not going next to the wagon with a cute little card.”

I kept reading. There was another entry six months later for three horses moved from Cedar Draw to the same Hale property. Same brand. Same pattern.

Caroline moved closer and ran her finger down the right-hand column. “Freight charge. Boarding fee. Delivery fee.” She looked up. “I’ve read a thousand invoices, Beau. Where’s the price for the animals?”

I checked the line. Then the next one. There wasn’t one. I went back to the first Cedar Draw entry and followed the brand forward. The animals hadn’t changed hands the way a sale would show. They’d been moved and held and split between properties, then moved again. Whoever arranged it had been careful.

“That’s not a sale,” I said.

“Then what is it?”

I tapped the line beside Daniel Hale’s name. “A transfer.”

CHAPTER 8

CAROLINE

The first thing Kaycee Harper did with Beau’s great-grandfather’s ledger was ask permission to take a picture. She stood next to the old desk with her phone in her hand and waited while Beau thought about it. She’d arrived with Rachel and Roman about twenty minutes ago, carrying enough folders to make the cramped office feel even smaller.

I’d spent the morning wondering whether Beau would regret inviting them out to the ranch. Instead, he’d set the ledger on the desk himself, opened it to the Cedar Draw entries, and explained what we’d found.

“You can photograph these pages,” Beau said. “Not the rest of the ledger.”

Kaycee nodded. “That’s all I need.”

His shoulders eased, letting go of some of the tension he’d been holding there for days. Over forty-eight hours had passed since we found the first Cedar Draw entry. Beau had spent every spare hour since then in that office, and he’d found the same pattern repeating itself through the years.

This morning, he’d finally called Rachel.

Now Kaycee photographed the pages while Roman sat on the edge of the desk with copies of old livestock records spread across his knees.

Roman pointed to the small brand drawn beside one of the Jordan entries. “This is the same mark that shows up in the registry material we pulled from Boone Whitaker’s records.”

Beau leaned forward. “Do you think it’s the same animals?”

“There’s not enough here to identify individual cattle, but the brands and dates line up with the group we’ve been tracing.” Roman tapped another copy. “This is the part that matters. The stock didn’t disappear.”

Rachel looked up from her notes. “Which has been one of the big questions since we found the altered records.”

“So nobody stole them,” I said.

“Not in the way people have assumed,” Kaycee said. She turned her laptop toward us. “Every boarding payment out of the Cedar Draw account lands within a few days of a Jordan hauling charge. But there’s no stock sale. Not one.”

Rachel held up the picture of Margaret and Daniel Hale that she’d brought with her. “And then we have this.”

The handwritten label still bothered her. I could tell by the way she handled the photo, as if staring at it long enough might make whoever wrote the names come back and offer an explanation.

“We still can’t prove this boy is Margaret’s son from a photograph,” Rachel said. “But now we have a D. Hale connected to livestock that came through Cedar Draw.”

“So we’ve got two separate questions,” I said. “Who Daniel was, and what was happening with the livestock.”

“Exactly.” Rachel pointed at me with her pen. “You’ve been paying attention.”