Chapter 10 - The House That Burned
Calder hit Crowe before he could fire again.
The pistol slid beneath the table.
Ingrid ran for it.
Crowe kicked Calder away.
Flames climbed the wall.
Smoke filled the room.
Ingrid reached the weapon.
Crowe saw her.
For a moment everything stopped.
She pointed the gun at him.
“Don't.”
Crowe laughed.
“You won't shoot.”
He stepped toward her.
Ingrid cocked the hammer.
His smile disappeared.
Calder rose behind him.
Crowe turned.
That was his mistake.
Calder struck him.
Crowe fell.
A burning beam crashed between them.
“Out!” Calder shouted.
They dragged Crowe through the front door.
Tom and the ranch hands came running.
Water buckets formed a line.
But the house was already lost.
Ingrid stood beside Calder watching flames consume the upstairs.
Her room.
The kitchen.
The portrait.
“Clara's room,” Calder whispered.
He moved toward the house.
Ingrid caught him.
“No.”
“The portrait.”
“No.”
“Ingrid—”
She held his face between her hands.
“You cannot save the dead by joining them.”
Calder stopped.
The words broke something inside him.
He turned back toward the fire.
For years that locked room had been a shrine to everything he'd lost.
Now the flames took it.
Calder cried.
Quietly.
Ingrid held him.
By sunrise, the house was gone.
But they were alive.
Crowe was arrested.
The documents Ingrid had hidden in the barn survived.
Weeks later Crowe was formally charged with fraud, attempted murder, arson, cattle theft, and conspiracy.
The bank corrected Calder's accounts.
Most of the debt disappeared.
The gold claim was investigated.
Ironically, the supposed fortune beneath the creek proved greatly exaggerated.
There was gold.
Just not enough to justify what Crowe had done.
Men had nearly died for a treasure that barely existed.
Ingrid found that fitting.
The ranch house had to be rebuilt.
Calder wanted to reproduce the old one.
Ingrid disagreed.
“No locked room.”
He looked at her.
“No.”
“Clara can still have a place.”
“How?”
“A shelf.”
“For what?”
“Her books.”
Calder's eyes filled.
“And the rocking horse.”
He nodded.
“But not a locked room.”
“No.”
They built something new.
Not over the past.
Around it.
And as the walls rose, Calder asked Ingrid another question.
“Will you still marry me?”
She looked at the half-built house.
“After all this?”
“Especially after all this.”
Ingrid smiled.
“Yes.”
But the morning before their wedding, a letter arrived.
It was addressed to Ingrid.
The handwriting belonged to someone she had hoped never to hear from again.
Her mother.
May you like
And the message inside threatened to reopen every wound Ingrid had traveled west to escape.
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