"I would." She could feel her pulse in her throat. "And I want to know why your company was studying land around mine without mentioning it when we discussed the drying contract."
"Because I didn't have anything conclusive to mention." He looked genuinely uncomfortable for the first time she had known him. "I still don't. I'm asking because I heard a rumor, Callie. I am not claiming an interest in your discovery."
"You already claimed an interest in my harvest."
Bragg lowered his eyes. The silence lasted long enough for a red-tailed hawk to call from somewhere beyond the barn. "The contract was enforceable," he said at last.
"That's not the same as saying it was fair." Her answer was quiet, and for a moment he seemed unable to find a response that did not sound like one of his attorneys speaking. When he finally put his hat back on, he told her to be careful with anything old enough to matter and drove away without asking to see a single kernel.
Callie watched his truck vanish past the windbreak. Until that moment, she had thought of Bragg as a powerful neighbor whose timing and paperwork had taken advantage of her financial weakness. Now she saw another possibility: that he had known something about Hollow Bend's history before she did, and that the harvest arrangement had kept her farm within reach while he waited to learn what the land contained. She could not prove that suspicion, and she was too disciplined to call suspicion a fact, but it changed the questions she intended to ask.
That night, she placed the seed crate back in its towels, pulled out her father's farm records, and began tracing the Voss name backward. The crop might be gone, but she still had the land, a younger brother who noticed unusual ground, and the first piece of a history somebody had worked very hard to keep hidden. For the first time since the trucks arrived, she felt curiosity strong enough to compete with fear.
The oldest farm papers occupied three cardboard boxes beneath the bed in her father's former room. They were not arranged in any system that made sense to somebody who had not lived alongside their owner for forty years. Tax receipts lay beside feed invoices, equipment diagrams were folded inside insurance folders, and one envelope held nothing but old grocery lists written in a hand Callie recognized as her grandmother's. She spread the contents across the bedroom floor and worked until the light in the hallway began to turn gray with dawn.
By breakfast she had found two references to a special north field and one letter from a seed merchant dated 1961. The letter addressed Silas Voss respectfully and offered what it called favorable terms for a complete assignment of breeding and distribution rights to a locally developed flint corn line. The terms were not attached, and there was no reply in the file. A small pencil notation at the bottom of the page, however, contained three words Callie read aloud without meaning to: "Not for sale."