“Where is he now?” I asked.
“He drove out ten minutes before you got back,” Elena said, pointing toward the main road. “He didn’t take the highway.”
I walked past her, up the wooden steps of the porch, and straight into the ranch office. The quiet of the house was different now, hollow and wrong.
The drawer of the oak filing cabinet was hanging open, completely empty of the blue ledger and the tax folders. My desk was bare, the dust showing the clean, square outline where my computer monitor had rested for the last five years.
Only one thing remained on the dark wood.
A silver Mercedes key fob lay right in the center of the desk, catching the small bit of light from the window.
The empty space where my computer had been sat like an open grave.
I pulled open the bottom drawer of the small filing cabinet beside the kitchen pantry, where I kept our household receipts and the utility statements.
Elena stood by the screen door, her wooden clipboard held tight against her chest.
“The utility bills are still here,” I said, flipping through the green hanging folders. “The truck maintenance records, the veterinary invoices for the last three years. Everything is exactly where I left it.”
“He didn’t touch those?” Elena asked.
“No,” I said, my fingers stopping on a blank tab. “Just the land documents. The deed copies, the property tax receipts, the soil survey from when we cleared the north pasture. He left the household bills and took only the ranch paper.”
It was not a random sweep of the office. He knew exactly which files held the history of this dirt.
“We need to check on Midnight Star,” Elena said, stepping back toward the porch.
The barn was quiet except for the heavy, uneven rhythm of Midnight Star hoofing the dirt in his stall. He was our best stallion, usually calm enough for a child to lead, but today he kept his head high, his ears twitching back toward the empty alleyway.
I reached over the wooden gate to stroke his neck, but he shied away, his hide slick with a thin coat of sweat.
