by James Scott
The sudden freedom of the trail fed his legs and his lungs. He heard shouting and the report of the rifle. But with the thickness of the trees and the uphill angle, the pair had slim chance of a clean shot. It was their luck against his own. He slipped and fell and shoved himself upright again. The trail sloped downward, and as he rounded a bend he heard the sizzle of a bullet and then heard the solid thunk of it nestling into a birch tree. Thin as paper, the bark slid to the ground and rustled as he sprinted past. Their voices suddenly got louder; they must’ve known of a shortcut up the hill. He hugged the tree line, stayed tight to it when the path curved. Friendly with the close air of the Elm Inn, he’d gotten used to the indoors, and the sting of the bitter cold rattled like shards of glass in his lungs. He didn’t know how close the men were behind him, but he didn’t dare lose his concentration and his footing to check. Besides, he’d heard Amos and his father discuss taking aim and killing deer and squirrels by nothing more than the wetness of their eyes and the shine they took from the moonlight.
His feet settled into a steadier rhythm as the path leveled. He hadn’t heard the whistling or dull thud of a bullet in a long time. The snow continued to fall, and he hoped that if the men had gone back to fetch a horse that his tracks would be obscured.
He neared town—the lamps shone over the trees and the noise of the inn echoed through the forest—and he pictured becoming a man like London White’s twin, living in the woods, alone. He would get a dog and a horse and on cold nights he’d sleep beside them. He didn’t think he’d miss people much at all. His breath raspy and ragged, he stopped running. In the sky, the rising moon excused itself behind the snow clouds again. Flakes continued their lazy descent. The path widened. He walked in the ruts of wagon wheels, where uneven rocks had long since been kicked away or ground into the dirt and he thought his trail would be harder to see. The noise intensified, sharpening into laughs and screams, the inn at its peak. He listened. Something else traveled on the air. He stopped. A low thunder rumbled beneath the sounds emanating from the inn. He jumped as far as he could, to the edge of the woods, then hopped again, and slid beneath a broken pine. His lungs burned and he suppressed an urge to cough as the hooves beat louder. The thin, dark-haired man from the Shane house stood in the stirrups—the horse steady enough in the snow and that he could trust its movements and scan the ground for prints. Caleb scooted farther beneath the branch, the cold there deep and invasive. The hoofbeats receded and then approached, slower. Caleb raised the Colt, his hands moving slowly, but they were numb from the cold and sweaty from the terrified run and the gun slipped from his grasp. The unmistakable sound of a man dropping from his mount turned Caleb’s search more frantic. His fingers sifted through the snow. The man struck a match and Caleb saw the brief explosion followed by a dull illumination. It lasted a few long seconds before he heard the hiss of the spent match being thrown away. The man lit another. Caleb held his breath and knew the man did, too.
Somehow he found the gun. The barrel, however, had caught on a section of needles, and a thick icicle cracked and struck a branch on the way down, the din incredible to Caleb’s fearful ears. “Come on out,” the man said.
Caleb tried to see through the underbrush to line up a shot. Before he could, the man fired and snow dropped from the branches with a thump. Caleb could try to blast his way out, but from the trees he’d have to hope beyond hope to get lucky enough to hit something critical before the man could pinpoint his hiding spot and pepper it with bullets.
“I’m coming out,” Caleb said. “Please don’t shoot. I’m just a boy.” It was a fact he’d forgotten over the last few weeks and it came as a relief. He wished he’d carried his mother’s gift with him as evidence. He wanted to say it again, I’m just a boy. Let’s stop now.
“Toss your gun out first.”
Caleb slid the gun on the snow, and the man kicked it away. He pulled his hat down low; he couldn’t let the man see his face, see the woman in it. The man trained a pistol on him as Caleb crawled out. He had a scar between his nose and his lip that interrupted his stubble. “Why are you spying on us?”
Caleb picked at some sap affixed to his coat.
“I don’t care if you are a boy, I’ll put a bullet between your eyes. Now, tell me, why were you spying on us?” Caleb said nothing and the man struck him with the back of his hand, knocking Caleb to the ground and his hat from his head. When he looked up, though, the man’s expression changed. He sank down, his legs crossed, and he sat in the snow in front of Caleb, who pushed himself up onto his elbows. “You’re him.”
The horse, spooked by the shots, worried at the ground with a hoof and tugged at his bridle, which the man had in one hand. He dropped the reins, but rather than flee, the horse backed up a few steps, struck the ground anxiously a few more times, shook his mane, and calmed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He didn’t want to be the Shane boy. He hadn’t had time to understand what that meant, or how he’d come to have two mothers.
The man’s eyebrows furrowed and rose up in worry, the dark hair undulating in a dance. “But why would you shoot at us?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t want to admit to being scared.
“I’m Paul.” He helped Caleb to his feet, then hung on to his wrist, and pulled Caleb closer and Caleb could smell the stew lingering on his breath. “I thought you might miss this,” Paul said, and draped Caleb’s scarf around his neck, cautious of his wounds. “What happened to your face?”
“I’m not who you think I am.”
Paul located the Colt in the snow, wiped it off, turned it around, and handed it to Caleb, grip first. With it, Caleb regained his confidence and his mind cleared. “I’m going home to my father.”
Paul wrapped the leather of the horse’s bridle around his wrist twice and then let it fall loose again. “You can go if you do me one favor,” he said. Caleb waited for him to continue for almost a full minute. He could feel his heart beating in his fingers where he gripped the gun. “Come to our house and have dinner. Sit and eat with us.”
“How about I leave this town with my father and we never come back?” With that, Caleb put the gun in its familiar place at the small of his back and set off down the path.
The horse’s bridle jangled and the saddle creaked as Paul relaxed back into it. He called after him, “That’s not your father.”
Caleb strode faster. His thoughts spun completely out of control and he couldn’t catch any of them, and he stopped trying.
CHAPTER 11
Behind the church and next to the graveyard, a series of pale gray tarps covered the bodies crushed in the icehouse. Elspeth measured the size and height of the outlines, trying to find the darned socks, the bootless foot of the child who’d carried the message. She had to keep reminding herself that Caleb, too, was a boy, nothing more. His hairless body had been so pale in the bathtub, his arms and legs so thin, ribs showing. He’d burned the bodies of the only family he knew after living in and among their corpses for days, surprised expressions forever locked on their faces. He’d acted bravely in their honor and opened the door of the pantry to find he’d shot her. She couldn’t imagine. What bothered her as she pulled the canvas over a pair of legs was that she hadn’t tried to. Only a few hours prior she’d counted her money, bent on escaping and replacing him. Her anger at his leaving the hotel against her wishes evaporated and settled back upon her own conscience.
Every few feet a rock held the tarp in place, but the wind teased the material, creating a rumble like thunder. Some of the men quaked at the noise, shaken by the accident, their glances gone shifty, unable to quite meet one another’s eyes. “Quite a mess,” one of them said. Elspeth agreed. “All these sons and fathers,” he said. “Tragic.”
Elspeth bent down to move a rock into a firmer position.
“Where are you headed on this bitterly cold night, friend?” The man took a watch from the folds of his expensive-looking furs and wound it.
&
nbsp; “I’m not sure,” Elspeth said. “And you?”
The watch disappeared along with the man’s arms into the bulk of the coat. Elspeth could see the shining eyes of some limp animal staring at her, and the bright gleam of its teeth. “I came to find you, actually.”
Elspeth reached for her pistol.
“No need for that,” he said. “Your boy has been working for me for some time now, which I assume you know.” She said she did, dropping her voice even lower. He grinned, and between the flash of his teeth, the luminous fur, and the glass eyes it stared at her with, he glimmered like quicksilver. “You have different last names, I hear. He’s a Howell, you’re a van Tessel.”
Elspeth considered shooting him and laying his body to rest with the muddy men of the icehouse, their day’s sweat more, she guessed, than this man’s lifetime. But she didn’t know what lay within the confines of his coat, and that worried her. She couldn’t leave Caleb alone. Not after all she’d done. “His mother,” she said, “used to work for some van Tessels down this way, and I thought the name might help. Might open doors.”
The man considered this. He tilted his head back and forth like he could shake loose the truth, but his gaze never left her. “Well,” he said, “we all do what we can to get ahead.” Again he seemed as though he found something amusing. “Caleb is a good boy. And totally unafraid, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Elspeth said. “He’s all that I have now.”
With a stunning quickness, he reached out from his coat and pushed her hat back. Elspeth didn’t have time to react before the hand had returned to the fur. It all happened so fast she questioned whether it had happened at all. The smile vanished from the man’s face. Elspeth could smell him, a warm, exotic scent. “I wished to see you,” he said. “That’s all.” He spoke with disquieting calm. “If ever you’re in need of a game, the Elm’s doors are open to you always, Jorah Howell.” He turned on his heel.
She waited until she could no longer hear any trace of his footsteps, and then she began to run. Everything in her screamed to steal the infant and leave town. The urge was familiar and comfortable—she exalted in it, and it fed her, gave her stamina. The boots and shoes of every man, woman, and child of Watersbridge, drawn to the accident and then home to dinner and bed, had cleared the roads completely of snow. She passed the graveyard and climbed the hill, resting—out of breath, her injuries throbbing—at its apex to look down at the frozen body of the lake, a gray nothing that soaked up the light and gave little back. Twisters of snow blew on its surface. She took several frigid, deep breaths and forced Caleb’s name and then his image into her head. She kicked off her boot, took the money from her pocket, and jammed it into the toes. Once she’d retied the laces she stomped on the ice several times to tamp down the money and the sound echoed over the water.
On the other side of the graveyard, walking north, she turned onto a small street, both sides lined by a knee-high rock wall, one side buried by frozen drifts of snow, but exposed on the other where the wind had stripped it clean. The small lane gave way to an even smaller path that skirted the lake. The chill crept up her legs. Only one house stood on the street Charles had described as his own. A large window was set in the middle of the building, and on either side of that were eighteen others, three on each side, for three stories. Between all the windows and staircases, landings and porches ran back and forth, up and down, in a seemingly nonsensical fashion; the house was surrounded by a skeleton of wood. Someone emerged from the broad front door—head down, collar pulled high, hands jammed deep in his pockets against the wind.
“Can I help you?” he asked. Elspeth recognized him without a second’s hesitation: Owen Trachte. She stood closer than she’d been to him in twelve years, and despite his hat and scarf, she could see how time had hardened his baby fat into something severe and poked through with whiskers.
“Does Charles Heather live here?”
“You a friend of his?”
“I worked with him.”
“Another.” Owen whistled between his teeth. He told her he hadn’t seen Charles all day. He asked if Elspeth had witnessed the accident.
“I saw what happened after.”
“Tragic,” Owen said. “Do I know you from down there?”
Elspeth pulled her scarf higher on her face. “I don’t think so.”
He extended his hand and introduced himself. Elspeth shook, happy that she wore her gloves, for some part of her believed that if Owen could grasp hold of her bare hand, he would recognize something in her touch. “I’m off to the tavern,” Owen said. “You might find Heather there, Jorah.”
“Are you sure he’s not home?”
Owen pointed to a dark window in the upper corner of the building. “If he is, he’s asleep.” He scuffed his feet in the snow and lifted his shoulders, as if to bury himself deeper in his coat. “You coming this way?”
“I think I’ll wait a bit. See if he comes back.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “Don’t wait too long, or I’ll be chipping you out of the ice.”
Elspeth laughed, high at first, then roughing it up as she remembered herself. They both realized the inappropriateness of the joke at the same time. She bid him good night and Owen moved on toward the dim glow of town.
A sign in the window read ROOM FOR LET. A tin box nailed to the wall on the porch contained twelve slots, each labeled by name in tiny, meticulous script. Elspeth stood back and attempted to dissect which staircase led to which room, which landing was available to which resident. After some tracing, she took the stairs up to one landing and then another, before she stood outside what she hoped to be Charles Heather’s darkened window. She lifted chapped knuckles to knock on the glass, and when she saw her hand there, a sense of calm breezed through her. Charles would help. With all of his troubles—his kiss, his moods, his lies—he would be sympathetic to whatever pieces of her story she decided to present him with. He would tell her what to do with Caleb’s boss, who seemed to know everything about her and even more about the child she’d raised as her own. They shared too many secrets for him to turn her away.
The slightest reflection came back at her and she saw how she’d changed her posture, how she stood there with her shoulders lowered, arms bowed, feet apart. How complete her lies had become. She didn’t know whether to be proud or afraid. No response met her insistent knocking.
Back down the stairs, the wood groaning in the cold, she followed in Owen’s wake onto the increasingly well-traveled roads. She needed the assurance of people—thinking how not all that long ago she’d walk into the fields in the evenings to escape the voices of the children—and she arrived at the restaurant, where the heat from the ovens and stoves clouded the windows so that they cried tears of condensation. As she was about to open the door, it flung back at her, and a crowd barreled into the street, their boots rapping on the planks.
She heard Charles’s voice, slurred but careful, emanate from somewhere in the middle of the group. “I meant no harm,” he said. “It’s been a rough day for everyone.”
She lurked on the edge of the mass of bodies as they shuffled out of the restaurant. A flurry of movement and Charles was tossed to the ground for the second time in a matter of hours. He lay curled in the snow. Elspeth circled around the half dozen or so men, trying to get closer to him. While she glanced from one diner to the other, napkins still stuck in their collars, Charles rose to his feet. His left cheek bloomed into a hundred small cuts from the granules of ice. A knot had already formed on his head. “I merely needed to find a partner.”
“We told you about this,” the cook said, and removed his apron.
“I meant no harm,” Charles repeated. His hat had come off, and his shock of orange hair had been decorated with snow.
“Don’t care—don’t let me see you in this place again.”
Charles put a finger to his nose and emptied one nostril and then the other of blood. He smiled, his teeth stained red. “Maybe you’d like to come
and work with me?”
The cook launched himself at Charles, and the other men closed in, too. The speed of it surprised Elspeth, and it took her a second to get her weight off her heels. She reached through and around, her nails tearing at their clothes to get to Charles, grabbing whatever she could hold on to and yanking.
She caught a glimpse of him when he kicked away from the crowd, stuck his chin in the air, and grabbed a napkin from a man’s flannel collar. He took both ends in his hands—each wearing a different glove—looped it around the man’s neck and tightened. Charles leaned back and the man—a fellow of considerable size all the way around—toppled backward, Charles beneath him. The man’s feet pawed at the snow. His face, ruddy before, turned purple. His neck bulged.
One of the men clawed at the napkin. Another lifted his boot over Charles’s face. Before it came down, Charles’s cold stare locked onto Elspeth. A shiver washed down her spine. The heavy sole fell. His mouth went sideways with a sickening crunch and the boot ground into his face. The man who had been strangled rolled away, coughing and gagging. The others grouped around Charles, and everything moved at once—arms, legs, fists, and feet.