Read Chapter 28: The Evidence

The lantern light played tricks on Maeve’s eyes. For the tenth time in as many minutes, she thought she saw a shadow shift at the far end of the hotel’s back hallway, and for the tenth time, it was nothing but the sway of her own breath on the flame.

She had turned the linen closet into a watch post, leaving the door cracked just enough to see the rear entrance. The stairs creaked with every gust of wind. The back door, which she’d oiled herself two hours ago, would make no sound when it opened. That was the trick. Whoever came through it would think they were being quiet, and Maeve would know better.

Eli would have told her this was reckless. Eli wasn’t here. He was on the road to Sacramento with her letter in his saddlebag, and Gold Creek was hers to defend.

The first night passed with nothing. The second, she told herself she had been a fool. But on the third night—a moonless sky that made the town a black well—the door moved.

Maeve pressed her back against the shelf of folded sheets, heart hammering so hard she swore it must be audible. The door swung inward on silent hinges, and a figure slipped through, pausing to let his eyes adjust. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a duster coat that smelled of coal oil and horse. She knew that build. Knew the way he moved, with the particular swagger of a man who’d never been told no.

Boyd Kinsey. Whitfield’s foreman.

He didn’t head for the stairs. He turned left, toward the small office Maeve used for ledgers and correspondence. Toward the safe she’d had installed after the first warning letter. A man who knew exactly where he was going in a building he had no business being in, at two in the morning.

Maeve counted to five, letting him get to the office door. Then she stepped out of the closet and crossed the hall in four swift strides.

“Looking for something, Mr. Kinsey?”

He froze with his hand on the latch. For a long, terrible moment, neither of them moved. Then he turned, and a grin spread across his face that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Mrs. O’Donnell,” he said, touching the brim of his hat as if he’d been caught at a church social. “I didn’t expect to find you up at this hour.”

“I could say the same. This is a hotel, not a saloon. Guests check in at the front desk during the day.”

“I wasn’t looking for a room.”

“No. I didn’t think you were.” Maeve kept her voice steady, though her palms were slick with sweat. She’d left her revolver in the closet. A stupid mistake. The kind of mistake that got a person killed. “You’re looking for the deed box. Or the guild’s vote tallies. Something you can carry back to your employer to prove this town is too broken to fight him.”

Kinsey’s grin faded. He took a step toward her, and Maeve held her ground, though every instinct screamed to back away.

“Mr. Whitfield doesn’t need proof, ma’am. He’s got all the proof he needs.” Kinsey’s hand went to his belt. “You see, that cave-in at the Lucky Strike cost those six men their livelihoods. Two of ’em won’t walk right again. They’re scared. They’re desperate. And desperate men sell cheap.”

“So you sabotaged them to make them desperate.”

“I didn’t sabotage anybody.” He said it with enough conviction that Maeve almost believed him. “I just took Mr. Whitfield’s money and did what he paid me to do. Delivered a message.”

“The message being a severed support beam in an abandoned crosscut.”

Kinsey’s eyes flickered. A tell. She’d caught him off guard, and he scrambled to recover. “I don’t know anything about no crosscut.”

“You knew how to get into that mine without being seen. You knew the schedule of the night shift. You knew where the crosscut was, and you knew which support to cut.” Maeve took a step forward now, closing the distance. “That takes inside knowledge, Mr. Kinsey. Knowledge of the land. Knowledge of the men. The kind of knowledge a foreman acquires after weeks of studying a mine’s layout for his employer.”

Kinsey laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “You think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

“I think you’re about to tell me the truth, because if you don’t, I’m going to walk out that door, wake Judge Albright, and have you locked up before dawn for attempted murder.”

“Attempted murder?” Kinsey’s brow furrowed.

“Six men were trapped. One support gave way because someone cut it. That’s not vandalism. That’s a deliberate act that could have killed them all.” Maeve’s voice was low and hard. “Judge Albright is a reasonable man. He’ll see it the same way. And when he does, you’ll hang, Mr. Kinsey. They’ll build the scaffold right in the middle of Main Street, and every miner in this town will come to watch.”

The silence stretched. Maeve could hear her own pulse in her ears. Then Kinsey’s shoulders sagged, and the fight went out of him.

“He didn’t tell me it would go that far,” he said quietly. “He just wanted a scare. A little tremor to shake loose the nerves of the small claim holders. Said if they thought the mines were unstable, they’d sell cheap. Pacific Consolidated could buy up the whole district for pennies on the dollar.”

“And the collapse brace? The one Whitfield ordered from Sacramento hours before the cave-in?”

Kinsey stared at her. For a moment, he looked genuinely impressed. “You don’t miss much, do you, Mrs. O’Donnell?”

“I learned to read men before I learned to read ledgers. Widow’s education.”

Kinsey shook his head slowly. “That brace was a precaution, he said. If things went wrong, he’d send a rescue team with proper equipment before the county could rustle one up. Make himself the hero. Then the miners would trust him enough to sell.”

“And the severed crosscut support?”

A long pause. Kinsey swallowed, and Maeve saw the calculation happening behind his eyes. He was caught. He knew it. And a caught man only had one currency left.

“There was a third man,” Kinsey said. “Someone inside the mine. Someone who knew its faults, its weaknesses. He’s the one who cut the support. He’s the one who rolled away the cover to make it look abandoned.”

“Who?”

Kinsey’s mouth opened, then closed. Whatever loyalty he had left to Whitfield, it didn’t extend to this third man. “I don’t know his real name. Goes by the name Stokes. Worked the Lucky Strike years ago, before the corporation took over. Whitfield paid him handsomely to get back in and do the dirty work.”

“And the partner? The one Whitfield claims is already in town?”

Kinsey’s face went pale. “I don’t know nothing about that.”

“You’re lying.”

“I swear to you, Mrs. O’Donnell. Whitfield doesn’t share that kind of information with hired hands. I just did what I was paid to do.” He looked at her with something like desperation. “You got what you wanted. I told you the truth. Let me walk out of here, and I’ll be on the next stage out of Gold Creek. You’ll never see me again.”

Maeve studied him for a long moment. He was scared now, genuinely scared, and fear was the most honest thing a man could show.

“No,” she said softly. “You’re going to stay right here. You’re going to tell this story to Judge Albright, and then you’re going to tell it to the whole town at the guild meeting tomorrow night. And if you’re very lucky, Mr. Kinsey, they’ll believe you were just a tool. If you’re not lucky, well.” She gestured toward the window. “There’s a tree out back that’s been looking for a heavy branch to hang from.”

Kinsey’s face crumpled. He dropped to his knees on the hallway floor, and Maeve felt a strange pity rise in her chest. He was a coward, but he was also a man caught between a rock and a hard place, and he’d made the choice to serve the rock.

“Get up,” she said. “You can grovel after you’ve testified.”

She turned to light a lamp, to find paper and pen to draft the affidavit, when something in the hallway caught her eye. A glint of metal on the floor where Kinsey had knelt. She bent to pick it up.

A key. Small, brass, with a distinctive marking on the head—a three-leaf clover stamped into the metal. She’d seen that marking before. On the strongbox in the corner of Harold Whitfield’s office when he’d paid a visit to the hotel dining room and left his coat unattended. She’d never mentioned it to anyone.

Now she held the key in her palm, and she understood.

Whitfield was already in Gold Creek. He’d never left. And tonight, while Maeve was busy catching his foreman, the real prize was sitting unguarded in her own office safe.

The letter she’d written to Eli was still on her desk, sealed and ready to mail.

The deed to her hotel was in her safe. Along with the guild’s charter. Along with every piece of evidence she’d gathered against Pemberton.

“Get up,” she said again, her voice sharp. “And start walking. We have a long night ahead.”

But as she followed Kinsey down the hall toward the front desk, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been played. That catching the foreman was the easy part. That the real game, the one Whitfield was playing, had only just begun.

And she was standing in the middle of the board.