HOWBUTKER, TEXAS, AUGUST 1985

At his desk, Amos Hines turned over the last sheet of the two-page legal document he’d been instructed to read. His mouth had gone dry as wheat chaff, and for a moment he could only blink in dazed disbelief at his client and longtime friend seated before his desk, a woman he had admired—revered—for forty years and had thought he knew. He searched her expression for indications that age had finally affected her faculties, but she stared back with all the clear-eyed acuity for which she was renowned. Working saliva into his mouth, he asked, “Is this codicil for real, Mary? You’ve sold the farms and changed your will?”

Mary Toliver DuMont nodded, the waves of her coiffed white head catching the light from the French windows. “Yes to both, Amos. I know you’re shocked, and this isn’t a nice way to repay all your years of service and devotion, but you’d have been deeply hurt if I’d put this business in the hands of another attorney.”

“Indeed I would have,” he said. “Another attorney would not have tried to talk you into rethinking this codicil—at least the part that can be revised.” There was no rescuing Toliver Farms, Mary’s enormous cotton holdings that she’d sold in secret negotiations the past month, a fact concealed from her great-niece sitting in ignorance out in Lubbock, Texas, as manager of Toliver Farms West.