“The other cowhands would notice,” Hobart said, “but they don’t talk to Hawkins. If you told them you were hired, whether they believed it or not, they probably wouldn’t go to Hawkins. Ralston gave the orders, and Hawkins mostly spent his days in the study with his feet up. I had to dust around the lazy half-wit.”

“I could say I’m not living here anymore,” Wyatt said. “I could claim to be upset about the new brothers, now married to Win and Cheyenne. That I felt forced out of my own home. Just as Molly does. We could say we got tired of living here and came up with the idea of working for him.”

“He made me clean the whole stupid house, except for the third floor, which is kept locked. I felt lucky he didn’t insist I go up there and dust, but I wanted to search it if I could figure out how to get in there without flat-out knocking down the door. I couldn’t pick the lock and never found a key, but near as I could tell, it was pure empty.” Pulling her cup of coffee close, Hobart said, “And he has a safe hidden behind a picture on the wall of his study, but I never got into it. I did sneak down there in the night many times and finally found a combination to the safe. But that was the day you came riding in to accuse Ralston of cattle rustling. I knew when you came that he’d taken off and was probably making a run for it, so I went after him. And that very night, when I should have been opening the safe, I came here to the RHR to question you about what you’d found out about Ralston.”

“You were sneaking in,” Wyatt said. “Admit it. You were going to search our house and sneak right back out.”

Rachel smiled. “Whatever my plans, they were foiled by your sharp-eared brother Falcon.”

Falcon had heard her slipping around in the night, or rather, heard someone. He caught her and dragged her inside because they suspected her of shooting Wyatt.

“Then you found Amelia Bishop for me, and I left Hawkins’s house for good. I ran out of time to search the combination safe.”

“Combination safe?” Molly rested one hand on her chest and looked for all the world like a woman who’d never heard the term. “What is that?”

“Some detective,” Wyatt muttered darkly.

He squared his shoulders. He knew he wasn’t going to stop her. So he’d try his best to make it safe for her. “We have a combination safe here. You can practice opening it, and we can talk about how the numbers Rachel has will work on a different safe.”