by Alma Katsu
Which meant that whatever his indiscretions had been, they’d been reckless—and there’d been many of them.
Stanton sighed. “I knew Donner was an old friend and business associate of Knox’s. He was, in fact, most likely one of Knox’s primary informants. But when I heard the Donners were heading west, I sold everything to join them. I hated George Donner, but I hated Knox more. I needed a way out.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But I’ve learned better now, Mary. I see now that there’s never a way out from the past.”
Mary sucked in a breath. She had no idea what to say to him, what could take away this kind of pain—the grief and shame he had carried for so many years. She’d thought she’d understood what had plagued him but was beginning to see that the secrets of Charles Stanton’s past were layered over one another, folded in on themselves, and unfolding still, into the future.
He lifted his gaze to her: sorrowful, but did she see the slightest glimmer of hope? “That’s why I’ve been trying to avoid you, Mary. It’s for your own good. I don’t deserve your trust. You deserve someone better than me.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe she shouldn’t trust him. Maybe he didn’t deserve her help after all. But then, didn’t all men deserve a second chance?
“How can I help you, Charles?” she asked quietly, unable to meet his eyes, but feeling the boldness of his first name on her tongue.
His voice came to her, low and crushing. “You can’t. Don’t you see, Mary? My heart died long ago, frozen over in that river. There is nothing of me left to save.”
But Mary was not one to be so easily swayed by melancholy words. She took his hand again, and even though he wouldn’t look at her, she kissed his knuckles. “I don’t believe that,” she said.
And her words were a promise.
She had thought she wanted to love Stanton, not to save him—but now she saw that the two might be one and the same.
Still, as she walked away from him, she remembered that there was one person who would never be saved. So that night, Mary said a quick and silent prayer for Lydia, the poor beauty frozen forever, and the unborn child within her, who was never to be known.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The early fall heat had finally broken, releasing refreshing winds from the north, blowing clean the sheets and wagon covers, breathing renewed energy into the party. Stanton had found them and supplies had been distributed. Tamsen should have felt better. The others only met her gaze fleetingly these days, with a kind of heat and disgust in their eyes, but she could live with that. She didn’t mind being ostracized or hated, so long as she had her children.
The haunting nightmares full of men with caked, chapped, inhuman skin, burning alive—of sweet Halloran turned ugly and foul, grasping at her, hungering for her—should have subsided. They hadn’t, though. She didn’t know what to believe, whether the threat she had witnessed—the creeping, dancing shadows—had been real or the mad invention of a mind corrupted by a terrible secret, something almost as hideous as the creatures she thought she’d seen.
Certainly she couldn’t trust Elitha, who babbled about the voices of the dead to anyone who would listen, or the younger girls, to support her claims. They didn’t know what they’d seen, either—it had all been a cloud of movement and panic that ended in an eruption of smoke and flame.
There was a giddiness in the air now, but it unsettled her—it was the high of a drunk gambler down to his last coin. Hope, Tamsen realized, could be a very dangerous thing, especially when dealt to desperate hands.
The Sierra Nevada, already holding open their arms to the first temptations of winter, were yet before them, looming in evergreen and rich purple, topped in white. She was continually shocked by the fact that the others seemed to forget the obvious: that the mountains, like most beautiful things in this world, were deadly.
Tonight she strained to listen for every stray noise. She was tossing fretfully under her wedding quilt, lying on the hard ground, in a tense half sleep when she heard raised voices near the tent. She jostled George’s shoulder—how did the man manage to sleep so soundly?—as she reached for her dressing gown. George stumbled on her heels as she exited the tent.
To her surprise, she saw Charlie Burger, the teamster who’d been guarding their tent, on the ground wrestling with William Pike, Lavinah Murphy’s son-in-law. Tamsen had been nervous about traveling with Mormons, having read newspaper accounts of the fighting for control of townships in Missouri and even in Nauvoo, Illinois, not that far from Springfield. But Murphy’s brood was friendly and well behaved and hadn’t tried to convert anyone. William Pike, the riverboat engineer married to one of Lavinah’s daughters, was one of the last people Tamsen would suspect of thievery. But how else to explain him being restrained outside their tent in the middle of the night? Did it have to do with supplies? Everyone’d been paranoid about their rations.
When Pike saw Tamsen, however, he ripped free of Burger and lunged for her. Burger had just managed to restrain him a second time when a warm gob of Pike’s spittle landed on Tamsen’s cheek.
“Where is he? What have you done with him?” Pike shouted at her. If Tamsen didn’t know better, she would’ve thought Pike was drunk. His hair was wild and his face tear-streaked and red. This entire scene didn’t make sense. The Murphys and Pikes had no reason to steal food, she realized; as far as anyone knew they still had a decent supply, all things considered. And he was shouting at her as though she were the one who’d taken something from him.
“What in the world is he talking about?” George asked, rubbing fists in his sleepy eyes. George’s brother Jacob and Jacob’s wife, Betsy, were emerging from their tent, Betsy whispering to an unseen child to go back to bed.
Pike twisted against Burger’s grip as he made for Tamsen a second time, his feet struggling for purchase in the sand. “I know you’ve witched him away, like you’ve done with the others!”
“Not this nonsense again,” Jacob muttered.
“God is punishing us for sheltering you in our midst.” Heaving against Burger, Pike managed to free his right arm. He fumbled for his pocket. “‘You shall not suffer a witch to live,’ that’s what it says in the Bible!”
He grabbed his small snub-nosed pistol and aimed it at Tamsen.
The next thing she knew, she had thudded to the ground, dirt in her mouth. I must be shot, she thought, though she felt no pain. Her husband stood over her. Slowly, it came to her: George had shoved her out of the way to face Pike, unarmed and in his nightshirt. A thrill of feeling alerted her to what was happening. She was under attack. Her husband had come to her defense without hesitation. All of his usual bluster seemed gone.
Tamsen had been attacked before, of course, but only ever verbally. Only with suspicious eyes and cold shoulders and harsh whispers. Nothing had ever gone this far, and she was shaken.
Pike’s gun was still drawn but apparently unfired, Pike confused and blinking at the sudden turn of events. But before anyone could speak, a shot rang out: Charlie Burger put a bullet in William Pike’s back.
A look of pure astonishment bloomed over Pike’s face as he dropped to his knees. A patch of red spread across his white shirt from where the bullet had come through his chest.
Tamsen gasped, scrambling to sit up. The girls were awake now and crying. “Stay inside!” she screamed as a couple of their faces appeared in the flap of the tent.
“What the devil?” Jacob roared at the same time, as both Donner men rushed to Pike, easing him to his back. The young man’s eyes were glassy, staring sightlessly up at the night sky.
Tamsen heard others rushing from their tents in answer to the gunshot. In another moment there would be crowds and angry shouting and more accusations. Meanwhile, William Pike scrabbled spastically with his right hand for the pocket of his trousers. What was he searching for so desperately—another gun? Did he mean to kill her even if it took his last bre
ath?
Tamsen watched, frozen, as he reached into the pocket—and drew out a rosary. Wood beads on string, so well used that the varnish was worn off. So he had remained a Catholic in his heart, even in Lavinah’s strict Mormon household. He breathed a sigh of relief when Tamsen placed it in his palm and closed his fist around it. “I hope Lavinah will forgive me,” he gasped, bringing the rosary to his heart. Then he was still.
Tamsen sat back on her heels, faint. What had driven the man to come after her? Pike seemed the last man in the party to shoot someone in their sleep. She wiped the spittle from her cheek and looked up to see Mary Graves standing in the crowd, staring at her in astonishment.
Harriet Pike, William’s wife, broke through the cluster of onlookers a split second before her mother, Lavinah. Both women dropped to their knees beside the dead man, Harriet shaking him by the front of his shirt, as though that might bring him back to life. “William! What have you done?” she screamed, her voice painfully raw, as though she’d drunk lye.
Lavinah wrapped her arms around Harriet to calm her, but she was still shaking. “Their boy is missing,” Lavinah said to George, her hands clutched tight to Harriet’s arms. Harriet was wailing so loud it was hard to hear her mother speak. “William woke in the middle of the night to find him gone. He got it in his head that your wife was responsible.” She glanced at Tamsen. “We begged him to come to his senses, but he would not be persuaded. When he left, we thought it was to look for the boy. We had no idea he would come here.”
“There’s a child missing . . .” George repeated, seemingly coming out of a stupor.
“Henry, my grandson. He’s only one year old,” Lavinah said, fighting tears.
“I found this.” Harriet withdrew something from her pocket and held it out in her flat palm for all to see. Tamsen recognized it right away; it was one of the charms she’d given her children to carry for protection. A good-luck charm. It seemed ridiculous that a primitive and harmless trinket could cause such fear and suspicion. Besides, its presence didn’t prove her guilt; it easily could’ve fallen out of the pocket of one of her daughters, but Tamsen didn’t dare say so, knowing it could implicate the girls instead.
“Do you deny this is yours?” Harriet thrust the talisman in Tamsen’s direction.
Tamsen remained silent. To speak would be just as damning.
To her surprise, though, Mary Graves pushed her way through the crowd that had gathered, an indignant look on her face. “Why, that’s ridiculous. How is that proof that Mrs. Donner had anything to do with your child’s disappearance? Anyone could’ve put it there. Someone who didn’t like her, for instance.” Tamsen saw how Peggy Breen and Eleanor Eddy shrank back at Mary Graves’s suggestion.
“That’s enough out of you.” Franklin Graves was suddenly at his daughter’s side, the brute giving her a rough jerk to silence her.
But Charles Stanton, tall and strong and determined, put an arm on Mary to steady her. Tamsen felt a violent pang at the sight of him. He was clearly smitten with Mary. She had lost him entirely to the girl now, and though she’d given up on him for herself, the realization still stung.
“With respect, Mr. Graves,” Stanton said, “you shouldn’t speak to your daughter like that. She’s talking sense—more sense than anyone else I’ve heard tonight.”
Franklin Graves glared at him with real hatred in his eyes. “Why, you’ve got a nerve talking to me like that. I ought—”
But before the argument could escalate further, Graves was cut off by George, who stepped in front of Tamsen, sheltering her with his broad body. “Now listen to me, everyone . . . You’re wrong, Mrs. Pike. My wife has been with me all night in our tent, I can assure you. She couldn’t have left that item at your campsite. You have my word on it. We need to turn our focus toward finding the boy.”
“Not you,” Franklin Graves said. “You’ll be doing no such thing. We got rid of Reed when the power had gone too far to his head, and now looks like you’re the next. Can’t have murderers among us and I don’t care the reason.”
George swelled like a tom turkey puffing out its chest. Tamsen had seen that look before when he was ready to reprimand a servant or take the foolish preacher back in Springfield to task. “What utter nonsense!” His voice rose over their heads, sounding more confident than he had in months. “I will not waste my breath defending Tamsen—I have already done so on too many occasions. As for William Pike . . .” George paused, standing over the man’s body, where his wife still wept. He swallowed hard, then looked around at the gathered crowd. “Pike was a good man. But he was acting out of fear. This is what happens when we give in to our fears. I do repent for it, but I will never apologize for protecting my wife.”
Charles Stanton stepped forward. “There is a child missing and we can’t go on shouting and deliberating until he is found.”
But as if in direct response, everyone began talking at once: Peggy Breen sputtering, Patrick Breen rushing to his wife’s defense, Jacob Donner wedging himself between the Breens and his brother, Harriet Pike still wailing over her husband’s prone body. Finally, Franklin Graves broke through the cacophony once more. He wagged a finger at George Donner. “Enough! I daresay I speak for everyone when I say I’m done with you . . . you Donners, with your money and your arrogance, and now this! Going around thinking you’re better than everyone else—and another man dead! Who’ll be next, I ask you?” The crowd had gone quiet, listening to Graves, and a tremor of fear moved through Tamsen. “I’ve had enough! From now on, you keep to yourselves if you know what’s good for you.” He cut a line with his arm in the air as though severing all connection with them.
For a moment, George Donner seemed horror-struck, the color drained from his face, as he realized what this meant, what Tamsen had already realized. The Donners would be pariahs to the rest of the wagon train—would be left to fend for themselves just as Reed had—and it was all Tamsen’s fault. But he recovered quickly, gathering his wife protectively under one arm. “As you say—so be it,” he said as he turned his back on the crowd.
Don’t go—it’s a death sentence. The words rang in Tamsen’s head but she wasn’t sure for whom they were meant, the men about to head into the darkness to look for the missing child, or her own family.
For if the creatures she’d seen before—the men who’d surrounded her in the basin—were real, if they were still out there, they’d be waiting like wolves for the party to do exactly this: divide up into smaller and smaller groups so that it left them all more vulnerable. She and her family weren’t safe among this hateful crowd, but they were no safer without them.
Still, she kept silent. Because maybe she was wrong. Because even if she was right, no one would ever believe her: a witch, speaking of fantastical illusions. Even to herself it sounded absurd, nightmarishly strange, a trick meant simply to scare and manipulate. And what punishment might they devise for her then?
* * *
• • •
AND SO THE WAGON TRAIN CONTINUED, the Donners allowing more and more distance to slide between their wagons and the rest, as promised. It was a relief, at least, to move apart from the Murphys, and Harriet Pike’s unbearable grief. After a few days, they’d let the gap grow until there was no sign of the rest of the wagon train except tracks in the dirt.
Tamsen tried not to let her worry consume her. After the barrenness of the Great Basin, it should have been a blessing to be traveling through the mountain meadows, even in their smaller group. They were surrounded by signs of life; an abundance of alders and pine grew beside a meandering stream. There was enough grass to feed the oxen. But for all the land’s beauty and serenity, Tamsen couldn’t shake the unease that had settled into her chest. She listened hard for a crackle in the underbrush, watched for movement in the trees, became increasingly convinced the creatures she’d seen in the desert were out there and that they were watching.
The D
onners were alone, of course, following a stream they’d started calling Alder Creek for all the alder trees lining its banks, when the axle on one of their wagons broke. The rest of the party was by now unspooling a fine thread of dust several miles down the road.
“Damn it,” George Donner cursed under his breath. He was lying on the ground, looking up at the underside of the wagon.
“It’s too much for the both of us,” his brother Jacob said, squatting down beside George.
“Nonsense,” said George. “We can handle this, you and I, with Burger’s help of course.”
Tamsen eyed her husband and then his brother. George was being stubborn. There was no way he was capable of fixing the wagon axle on his own. It had only been a week ago that they’d had a problem with the brake—the shoes mysteriously engaging with the rear wheels even when the lever wasn’t being applied—and George had been so flummoxed he’d had to have William Eddy effect repairs.
Tamsen knew what her husband’s skills were, and what they were not.
“George,” she said to him quietly. “This is not a time for pride.” She wasn’t sure why she’d said it, though. He’d protected her. It was because of this that they were separated from the others in the first place.
“We could send a couple of the men for help,” said Jacob. “The rest of the group are bound to stop sometime for the night.” He peered up at the darkening sky.
Tamsen knew it was too early for night; the sky meant a storm. It felt like snow, even though it was only the end of October. Once again, panic curled itself inside her gut like a sleeping snake.
“We,” George grunted, trying to adjust something Tamsen couldn’t see, “don’t. Need. Them.”
Jacob sighed, before turning to Charles Burger, who’d remained with them. “Let’s send for Eddy, at least,” he said quietly. “After all our generosity to his family, the man owes us. I think we have to replace that axle and he’ll know best.”