Trail's End

by E. L. Ripley

  Once she had been installed in Friendly Field, committing a murder without being caught would have been almost too easy—indeed, the theatrics with the feathers likely hadn’t even been necessary, though they’d had the desired effect of confusing and frightening people. Frightened people never thought clearly; that was why that woman had been hanged in the first place. Fear. For a bunch of people who said they could trust God to protect them from anything, they certainly seemed to spook easy. If they actually believed that nonsense or had a shred of faith, they’d have been a bit more easygoing.

  Saul had been the easiest target imaginable. His wife was gone, and the young woman in his house really had been there to cook and clean. All Holly had to do was make sure she wasn’t seen, and that was simple enough to do in the night.

  Then why had she waited to strike at the next man? Likely to see how the people would react and where their suspicion would fall. Holly was smart and worldly, but she wasn’t like Tom. Compared to him, she had no blood on her hands at all. She was angry, but it seemed she could also be cautious. She was taking her time and thinking ahead, just as Tom liked to do.

  In fact, it was as though she were doing it all just the way he’d have taught her.

  Well, no. Tom would’ve told her to just shoot them dead, but Tom wasn’t living with the anger that had brought her here. The one time he had tasted that anger, back on the Missouri—well, he’d taken care of that problem right away. He could only imagine what it would have been like to live with that rage and resentment, letting it fester.

  To carry it through the years.

  He was fairly sure that, in Holly’s shoes, he’d have been ready to pick up a knife as well and use it.

  For just a moment, the wind had risen up outside, strong enough to make the entire house creak, but then it had gone. The stillness came back, even thicker now.

  There wasn’t a sound, and in the dark Tom waited.

  He would always be waiting; he knew that now. He had waited until he was good enough at cards to sit with the real players. He had waited for his leg to heal, or waited to die. He’d waited for the troubles of Friendly Field to be over so he could propose to Mary. If he didn’t do something about it, he’d just go on waiting instead of living. His eye was always turned forward, and only now was he beginning to see how it was wearing him down. It was his hurry to get there that made him impatient, and his impatience made him seek the most efficient solution.

  At the end of the day, he suspected that was why he was always reaching for his gun.

  Why had Holly gone after Saul and Jeremiah? They were the two who had run the place. It was that simple. She couldn’t very well kill every Quaker in Friendly Field, so she would kill the ones who’d been in charge when the deed was done.

  Maybe they’d been the ones to propose hanging that woman who’d been taken by the devil. Or maybe they’d just stepped out of the way when someone else wanted to do it. Either decision was more than enough to buy them tickets down, at least in Tom’s reckoning. That was what made it difficult to be the one who had to end it. If someone had tried to stop him from killing Jeff Shafer that night on the Missouri, Tom wouldn’t have taken kindly to it.

  At least not at the time. Now—now, as he thought about it, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. There were ways he might have sorted that business out without bullets. Probably. Tom couldn’t be certain, because that particular gambler had had a powerful man for an ally. Would a courtroom have gone against a rich man? That didn’t happen often. Maybe killing Shafer had been the only way.

  And maybe Holly thought the same. Maybe she thought there was no other justice, and there was a good chance she was right. Would the Quakers take the word of a prostitute over their own revered leaders? Even knowing their vices? Could they have ever been convinced that they had made a mistake?

  Tom still didn’t know much about Quakers, but he knew people. It wasn’t easy to make them understand that they were wrong, let alone to get them to admit it. Holly couldn’t have ridden into Friendly Field with a story about injustice from years ago. What would that have gotten her?

  There was some business you just had to handle yourself. Holly understood that, just as Tom knew that every time he took things into his own hands, there was a good chance that not everyone would take kindly to it. Did Holly know that? Of course she did; one woman had already been hanged.

  She was risking her neck anyway.

  The creak was ever so slight. In the dark, Holly was just a shadow.

  She’d barely made a sound when she crept into Thaddeus’ house. Friendly Field had three leaders, after all—or it had, back when they’d hanged Holly’s mother, the supposed witch.

  One was still alive, so the job wasn’t done.

  Of course, Thaddeus should have been the easiest of the three for Holly to get to, but he couldn’t very well be murdered in his bed if everyone knew she was also in that bed. That would bring suspicion on her right away.

  Luckily, the whole community had seen her flee. Now, when Thaddeus turned up dead, no one would think she had had anything to do with it.

  Holly had planned all this out and planned it well. Would she bother with the feathers? Tom still wasn’t sure what their purpose was. Had they been intended to confuse the Quakers? Scare them? Or make a point? Had Holly used them to draw the Quakers’ attention to that witch they’d hanged so they would know why they were being punished?

  Of course, that thing that Tom and the kid had found in the woods—they’d found that before Holly had arrived in town. How had Holly swung that? Had she scouted Friendly Field in advance? How had she known someone would find it?

  She was almost to the stairs and just a pace away from Tom’s chair in the corner. Thaddeus was up there, fast asleep. He didn’t even realize Tom was in his house, so he certainly wasn’t expecting Holly.

  Tom had been holding his breath ever since he heard the doorknob turn. Now he let it out.

  “Don’t move an inch,” he said.

  Holly didn’t listen. A blade glinted, and Tom fired both bullets from the derringer. He liked Holly, and he hadn’t wanted her dead—but he liked Mary more. He couldn’t get married with a knife in him, so this was how it had to be.

  The knife clattered to the floor.

  A light step and a stumble—then Holly thudded to the floorboards. There were a few ragged breaths, then nothing.

  A crash came from overhead as the noise of the shots sent Thaddeus tumbling out of his bed.

  “Stay where you are, Thaddeus,” Tom called out to him, and he hoped the old Quaker would listen better than Holly had.

  For a moment misery took shape, racking his throat with pain. This wasn’t what Tom had wanted. He’d entertained visions of convincing her to stop and spiriting her out of Friendly Field.

  Would anyone have been able to convince him to stop when he’d been after Jeff Shafer? One of his friends had tried, and Tom had hit him so hard, it was a wonder he could still use his right hand.

  But he could still use it, and he had. After a moment, he set the empty pistol aside.

  “Mr. Smith?” Thaddeus asked uncertainly from the top of the stairs.

  “I told you to stay,” Tom replied, and that shut the old man up.

  Maybe it had been wrong to stop her. Maybe Thaddeus had had this coming.

  No—Mary would never have been able to accept that. She wouldn’t even have been able to look at him if he knowingly let Thaddeus be murdered. The truth was it didn’t matter what Tom did. He’d always feel like it had been the wrong move afterward. He’d never stop second-guessing.

  Mary wouldn’t care for him shooting a woman, either.

  Tom rubbed his face, then struck a match. He leaned over and lit the lamp, then got tiredly to his feet and picked it up. He limped over, letting the glow illuminate Holly’s body.

  For a mom
ent, there was nothing; he looked without seeing.

  But he did see, and despite all evidence to the contrary, his mind still worked.

  The lamp shattered on the floor, but Tom didn’t notice. He hadn’t noticed it slip from his fingers, and he didn’t notice the oil and flames spreading across the floor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It wasn’t Holly dead at his feet.

  It was Asher.

  The knife lay beside the boy’s hand, and the feathers were there, protruding from his pocket. His eyes were open, and he wore a look of genuine surprise.

  Tom had a sense of someone there—and someone grabbing him. He didn’t taste the smoke that he choked on as he was dragged out of the house by Phillip. There was Thaddeus, gleaming with sweat in his nightshirt, looking disbelieving.

  “He saved me,” Thaddeus was saying as some of the men futilely tried to throw water on the fire. The pillar of smoke, gray and sooty, stood out against the green and black of the sky. Without any wind, the embers didn’t know what to do, just like Tom.

  He took a step toward the house, then a step back. It was fully aflame now.

  Mary appeared at his side, but he couldn’t hear her over the roaring fire.

  He’d been wrong so many times, but never like this.

  She gripped his hand, wanting to know what was happening, but Tom just pulled free and backed away. All the Quakers were here; the shots had gotten them out of their beds, and the flames had brought them out of their houses.

  They were confused, but they didn’t know what confusion was.

  Tom’s brain raced. It went anywhere it could to push Asher’s shocked face out. Thoughts punched through his skull. How could he have suspected Holly? For her to be the one, she would have been going to bed with one of the very men she meant to kill. How had that escaped him? And that object in the woods—Holly hadn’t arrived yet.

  He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.

  Shaking Mary off a second time, he turned away from the inferno, stumbling across the dry grass in the dark.

  Mrs. McHenry’s door stood open. Mary had rushed out and left it this way.

  Tom climbed onto the porch and went straight in. Mrs. McHenry was there, clearly not as quick to dress as Mary, but intending to come out. She opened her mouth, saw Tom’s face, and got out of the way.

  There’d been a time when Tom hadn’t much cared for stairs on account of his leg, but he didn’t notice them now.

  Mrs. Washburn was in her chair by the window, a blanket covering her lap. Thaddeus’ burning house was clearly visible, but she didn’t appear to be watching it, just gazing at the book of prayers in her hands. Her thumb absently rubbed the leather cover.

  Tom closed the door behind him. “Thaddeus is still alive,” he said, and the words seemed to come out in someone else’s voice.

  She nodded; she must have seen him from the window.

  “Did you really not know the name?” he asked. “The real name?”

  The old woman sighed. She still didn’t meet his eyes, and when she spoke, she sounded even worse than Tom. “She always talked about naming a daughter Ashlyn.”

  Tom saw the kid’s delicate hands holding a needle and sprinkling spices over the camp stove.

  He remembered how the kid had refused to bathe around other people on the trail.

  Now he knew why. That was who Scarf and Ben Garner had seen in the woods. The kid doing as she’d done all along, bathing in private so no one would find out.

  To think how many times Tom hadn’t been able to fathom why the kid wouldn’t want to kiss a pretty girl.

  A part of him wanted to laugh, but he was holding that part back with everything he had. Instead, he put his hand on the dresser and squeezed until his knuckles were white.

  “When did you know?” he asked.

  “She’s the picture of her mother.”

  Of course. Mrs. Washburn wasn’t the only one who’d known the kid’s mother, but she was the only one who’d sat with her at a table and looked, really looked, night after night as they’d eaten dinner and played cards together.

  She had known, and how could she not? Now that he knew the truth, Tom could only look back and see how poor the kid’s impersonation of a boy had really been. The kid hadn’t been a scrawny fourteen-year-old boy; she’d been a perfectly ordinary seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl. Maybe even older. Why? Because she had known she had a journey ahead of her and that it would be safer to travel alone as a boy? Or because if she was a boy when she walked into Friendly Field, that would make absolutely certain that no one expected the retribution she was bringing, that no one saw it coming?

  The trouble had arrived with Tom; it just hadn’t been Tom, for once.

  The kid had started it all herself, methodically laying the groundwork for what she had to do. Why had she demanded that Tom teach her to kill when they’d been a part of the Fulton wagon train? Because she’d been planning to kill some people, and Tom hadn’t seen it. Friendly Field. From the beginning, this was what the kid had wanted. She had used Tom to get her here, used him to give her the skills and the knowledge she would need to bring her vengeance to these people. If he’d gotten the impression the killer was doing things his way, it was because she had done things his way, just as he’d taught her to.

  They hadn’t found that thing with the feathers by chance. The girl had planted it up there in the hills, then let Tom witness her supposedly finding it, throwing him off the scent before she even made her opening move. It was just a harmless object, ugly to look at, and perfect for stoking fear. Where had the girl learned to make it? Maybe she’d just thought it up; she’d had an active imagination, after all. Now no one would ever know.

  “She’s dead,” Tom said, and though her face didn’t change, some of the light went out of Mrs. Washburn’s eyes. “I shot her in the dark, thinking she was someone else.” His eyes strayed to the window and the fire.

  Horrified, the old woman turned and looked, and she seemed to crumple in her chair.

  She had wanted the kid to see it through. Tom had come up here to get the truth, but he already had it. The devil had been in Friendly Field, and he had a name. It hadn’t been mere ignorance or foolishness that had hanged the kid’s mother.

  Someone had gotten her pregnant, and Tom wagered it was Thaddeus. These pious people hadn’t hanged the kid’s mother to hang the devil; they’d done it to protect him. They’d done it to shut her up and discredit anything she might say about one of their community’s leaders. There had never been any witchcraft; that had just been their excuse to silence her and insurance that no one would believe anything she might have said. What had they done? Waved some feathers around and called it evidence? From what Tom had seen of these Quakers, just the word of the elders probably would’ve been enough.

  The people who took the kid away knew it had all been a farce; that was why they hadn’t been able to stomach Friendly Field any longer. They’d told the kid when she was old enough, and the kid had run away to set things right.

  That was when she met Tom.

  All three of them had to have been a part of it: Saul, Jeremiah, and Thaddeus. Only one of them had been the father, but all three had had a hand in the hanging. If even one of them had stood up for what was right, the kid would have still had a mother. And her life.

  Tom looked at Mrs. Washburn. Men like Thaddeus—there was never just one victim. It probably hadn’t begun with the kid’s mother, and it certainly hadn’t ended with her. There were others. Tom saw now that Mrs. Washburn was probably one of them, and Mary—Thaddeus had even reached out to her when her husband died.

  No wonder Mrs. Washburn hadn’t wanted the kid stopped. The kid had been doing God’s work.

  Mrs. Washburn wasn’t going to say anything else; she couldn’t. Tom couldn’t forgive her. He couldn’t blame her, either. />
  Why hadn’t the kid brought him in on it? Because she hadn’t trusted him. And why would she? All she’d ever seen him do was lie to people and shoot them.

  Because it seemed like that was all he ever did. The Quakers had welcomed him to Friendly Field because of his candor, but even that hadn’t been the whole truth. He couldn’t tell the whole truth because it was ugly, and it was ugly because it was full of bullet holes.

  Right up to the end.

  He could’ve overpowered the kid so easily, or any woman. Taken the knife away, even in the dark. Tom put his face in his hands.

  Mrs. Washburn had been right: he was blind and he was a fool. The kid was gone, and he couldn’t change it. He’d chased the truth as though it mattered, but now that he had it, what good did it do him?

  He had admired Jeremiah’s willingness to do what he had to in order to keep things running smoothly in Friendly Field. Apparently that had included murder, and yet had that really been for Friendly Field? No. That had been for them, those three. Their convenience, their ease of clinging to the very positions of authority that they wanted to claim didn’t exist. They’d done it for themselves and managed to convince their flock it was the right thing.

  The kid had come a long way to pay them back, and she’d gotten two bullets for her trouble.

  Tom staggered out of the McHenry house to find Thaddeus’ house blazing, and everyone gathered around it to watch. There was no putting it out.

  Voices filled the air, but Tom didn’t hear them. Mary was here; she must’ve been afraid to go in after him. That was for the best.

  “Is it true?” she asked from ten paces away.