by James Scott
The heat of the church left Caleb’s body, and he imagined it peeling away, like a snake shedding its skin, layer after layer. “Are my mother and father buried here?” he asked.
Though Martin’s face had gone slack, his expression destroyed, Caleb’s question deepened the injury. “We buried them on the highest point on the property,” he said. He chewed on his lip. “You probably passed right by them.”
Caleb considered why he couldn’t sense their presence or know that his flesh and blood had been so close to him. The concept was familiar but as he tried to lash it down to understand why, to remember it clearly, it, too, drifted off into the relentless snow.
Martin kicked at the ground and sent pebbles and packed ice into the grave. “Come here,” he said to Elspeth. With a blackened stick, he drew a map in the snow to the home of the Millard brothers. He spoke slowly and clearly, and Caleb was reminded of how practiced Martin was at giving directions through the passes and forests. He only paused to blow his nose. Elspeth clutched each word, and pictured the map in her mind. The lines didn’t last long in the blizzard.
“O ho,” a voice came from the gray depths. “The whole family.” London White, Ethan, and Owen Trachte walked out of the murk. “For such pious people to run so quickly from church, we were worried something was amiss.” White wore a black overcoat accented with mink’s fur and a matching hat, while Ethan had rolled his shirtsleeves to his elbows, his skin raw in the cold. Owen’s hands remained in his pockets, and he refused to look at any of them. “Isn’t this happy,” White said. Elspeth watched his glance sink to the quickly disappearing map, and before she could take one last look, Martin scuffed it out with his toe. “And what are we planning on this day of mourning?”
Ethan unbuckled his vest, revealing two large pistols at his waist.
“Mr. Trachte here has spun me some fascinating tales,” White said. “Children gone missing, men changing into women, murder, betrayal, greed . . . quite a yarn, indeed.”
Martin and Elspeth both edged in front of Caleb.
“Protecting the boy?” White said. The snow collected on the brim of his hat. He clucked his tongue. “It’s not him I’d worry about.”
“Just take the kid,” Owen said, and White whirled around and stared at him until he mumbled an apology. It was strange, Elspeth thought, to see someone so powerful so cowed.
Somewhere close by, a small group sang a dirge. Elspeth thought she heard—through the snow, wind, and distant cries of the stricken—the harsh racket of gravel and ice hitting a coffin. She wondered if she could get to one of Ethan’s pistols in time. He slid his hand from the grips, as if daring her to try.
“Allow me to explain your futures to you,” White said. “My town—my lovely home—has no need for kidnappers. It’s up to Mr. Trachte’s discretion what punishment best fits that crime. Caleb”—he bent down—“son, we have room for you in the stables. That position has been recently vacated.” He smiled. “Doesn’t that sound delightful?”
Caleb was going to tell him he’d never take Gerry’s job, that he’d only stayed at the inn long enough to find the killers and that he would never, ever return. Before he could speak, however, White signaled to Ethan, and the big man surged forward to grab Caleb. Shane got between them and the two men tussled before Ethan grew weary of it and flung Shane aside. Elspeth, too, tried to stop Ethan, but Owen pressed a hand to her midsection. Ethan grabbed hold of Caleb’s wrists, turned, and heaved the boy across his shoulder as one would a string of fish. Elspeth elbowed her way around Owen and reached out for her son, but Owen tackled her and put his knee to her back.
Caleb screamed, but in the snow, thick as wool, the sound didn’t extend far, and if it had it wouldn’t have been thought of as anything but the empty sorrow of one of the bereft. He could feel his mother being ripped from him, each step Ethan took like a stitch of his soul breaking. “Mama,” he yelled. His hand strained for hers, but Ethan’s powerful strides carried him away and Elspeth could not get out from under Owen’s weight. Soon, in the mist and the falling snow, he lost her. It was as if he’d been torn in half.
Over all of it, he heard a gunshot. He cried out again. He screamed until he went hoarse. He tried to wriggle out of Ethan’s grasp, but the giant arm clamped down tighter with his every movement. Ethan shifted Caleb and said to White, “My pistol. Shane must have grabbed it when he came at me.”
White rewrapped his fur around his neck. “Seems as though Mr. Shane has taken himself to the doctor. A fine thing, him being so close.”
ELSPETH STOPPED FIGHTING against Owen. She’d caused Caleb such anguish. Maybe the best thing for the boy was for her to be gone. It wouldn’t be long, she thought, before she grew indistinct and fuzzy in his memories, her features forgotten. Owen let her up and held his arms out, palms toward her, as one would a wild animal, until she reassured him she wasn’t going to run after the boy. “They’re not going to kill him,” she said. Owen said he didn’t think so. “London White doesn’t have much need to lie,” he said. He led her down the row of graves. Martin Shane’s leg stuck out of one like a dead stalk, the snow on the far side—where a marker would stand—decorated with his blood. Owen covered her eyes, an outrageous nicety, and she slapped his hand away. Shane stared at her, jaw askew, one arm under his body, the other along the wall of dirt, like he could claw his way to his feet and out of the grave at any time. She said a prayer for him, and for who he used to be, the polite, straw-haired boy who had been too shy to speak in her presence.
Ethan’s pistol lay nearby and Owen blew the snow from it and checked the cartridge. “I knew I knew you,” he said. “Some kind of far-off dream, a nightmare from childhood. Somehow, I knew your face, but it took a long time to figure. Twelve years passed since I knew you. Then I saw you in the church, dressed like yourself, and it came to me like a lightning bolt—shocked me all the way to my toes.” He pulled her away from Shane’s dead body. “I’d almost forgotten you. Another year, two, who knows? I’d have no idea, a small spark of a memory I could never locate.”
“What do you want from me?”
He let go of her, but tapped her upper arm with the pistol as a reminder. “You taking that baby ruined my father.”
“He’d been crumbling long before I got there,” Elspeth said. Most mornings the sharp clink of empty bottles had sounded as he’d lifted his medical bag to show her to her duties for the day.
“He was never the same,” he said. “Business wasn’t the same. People didn’t blame him, but all the things that they’d been unwilling to say behind his back before they said to his face after.” They had climbed almost to the top of the hill and Owen pushed her not in the direction of his room but toward the small forest that edged the town. “We had to find other means to stay afloat. My father, after all, needed his drink. And I needed my father.” They entered the woods, the thin maples without leaves, the sap frozen on their trunks like tears. He walked with concrete purpose. They pushed through some scrubby pines and in a modest field stood a lonely cabin. “Do you know what I do here?”
“No.” She dragged each breath up and out of her lungs. Her feet had gone numb. Finally she would pay her debt to God.
“This is where my father and I took the victims of Mr. White, and the men who preceded him and those who will come after—Watersbridge has and will always have someone in need of our particular services.” She saw the thick, black soot at the mouth of the chimney, and thought she could smell the metal tang of blood. His grip eased. “The first were difficult. My father showed me what to do, and thereafter he would sit on a stool in the corner, too drunk to do much, but knowing that he had to stay, that he couldn’t hand it all over to me. Not yet.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But why don’t you stop?”
“We had a dog when I was a child. It was nothing more than a starving mutt that my mother found sleeping under our clothesline one day. But I loved it,” he said. “His first year there was a vicious winter—you coul
dn’t see out the windows or use the door the snow was so high. The dog couldn’t go outside, not with all the snow, and so my father and I dug tracks and tunnels so it could at least walk around and relieve itself.” Both of his hands bore scars and burn marks. “When spring came, that old dog just couldn’t leave those tunnels and paths. It stalked that yellowed grass to dirt and wouldn’t stray for anything. And one day, it walked a few small circles and lay down, dead.” He worked a finger down his collar and pulled at it. “Why come to Watersbridge after all these years?”
She could tell the roof of the small shack had been replaced many times, tar paper rolled on top of tar paper, the layers visible and nails shining under the eaves. “It was my punishment,” she said. “For my sins.”
He reached over and examined the cross at her neck, and while his index finger played over the dent the pellet had made, he pursed his lips and gathered air to speak, then let it escape. He nudged her closer to the house, and she noted the dip in the earth that drew a straight line from the woods to the door. “People like White, they don’t let go of employees easily.”
“And now my son works for him.”
“He’s not your son,” Owen replied. He brushed the snow from what turned out to be a bench in the shadow of the shack. “I’ve spent so many hours—years of my life—on this bench. When I first came here, I could curl up and sleep on it.” He lay down and his legs dangled off the edge, and the bench became lost under his bulk. He sat up and tugged Elspeth onto the seat next to him, though the bench could hardly accommodate them both. “Have you ever smelled a man burn?”
“My son did. He had to burn his brothers and sisters after the men Shane sent killed them all.” Elspeth shuddered at the image of Caleb lighting a match to the bodies of his siblings, his hairless face glowing yellow. “That’s what I came here for. For him. And for them.” She tucked her cross into her shirt. “Or it should have been.”
She could see the pieces click into place in Owen’s brain as the understanding dawned on his face. “White assumes I’ll kill you.” Owen turned the gun this way and that in his hands. He held it out to Elspeth, who waited to be sure he meant it. With a flick of his wrist, he spun the gun toward her, and gestured again. She grasped the cold bone grip.
“Seems like it’s happening all over again,” Owen said. “The Trachte men, doomed to repeat ourselves.” He dug his heels into the snow, back and forth, creating two parallel canyons. “You take care of that boy.”
“That’s all I want now.”
She left him in the clearing, sitting on the frozen bench, digging with his boots, certainly knowing that if she managed to take Caleb, White would find a replacement soon enough, someone who would be more than willing to add Owen to the ashes.
THEY LOCKED CALEB in the room where he’d observed Ellabelle and her snow angels. The serene, holy expression on Alexander Hamilton’s face did little to ease the roiling of his blood. He imagined the death of his uncle over and over, his body tumbling to the snow, the shot appearing as quick as Hamilton’s, the gun flaring like Burr’s. After some time pacing and seething, the lack of rest and the removal of immediate threat dropped him on the floor and he fell asleep on the rug.
When he came to, London White sat on the bed. His legs were crossed. He held a large knife in his hand. The blade had been chipped and bent slightly, but the edge shone from constant sharpening. He held it to the light. “One night, not long after I bought this place, I crept upon my brother’s camp. I held this knife to his neck.” He flipped it on his fingers, grabbed the hilt in his fist, and slammed the blade deep into the footboard. “Do you know why I did this?”
Caleb pushed himself onto his knees. The knife’s vibrations produced a twanging. “I needed to know I could, if I had to,” he said. “I felt nothing, no fear or hesitation.” White drew the knife from the wood, licked his thumb to wipe the dust from the weapon, and slid it into a sheath beneath his coat and vest. He rebuttoned his clothes and adjusted his sleeves so the proper amount of crisp white shirt extended from beneath his jacket. “You have been given a wonderful gift: the gift of no responsibilities, no ties, no attachments.”
“What have you done with my mother?” Caleb asked. He’d been severed from his last attachment, but he needed to know for sure that she was dead.
White’s face hardened. “That thing is not your mother.”
“What’s happened to her?”
White sighed. “Owen Trachte is not the kind of man to take injury kindly. It has been put out of its misery.” He opened the door wide enough for Caleb to see Ethan standing there, and closed it behind him. The clicking of a key sounded through the room. This angered him further. He didn’t care if White saw him out of control; he didn’t care what White thought at all. He screamed for them to let him out until his eyes filled with colorful dots and he got too shaky to continue. He kicked the door once and after the second, Ethan unlocked it and pointed a stubby finger at him, “Kick that door again and you’ll wish you were your uncle.”
WHILE ELSPETH SPED toward Caleb, she tried to repeat the directions, starting with heading north on the line Shane had described. He’d drawn pictures of all the landmarks and the first would be a trio of hills, a rock outcropping. But her mind kept being overrun by Caleb’s hand reaching for her. His fingers were small, his nails purple in the cold. She didn’t know where his gloves had gone; she couldn’t recall if she’d seen them in the graveyard. His screams were so loud to her that she grunted to herself to try to mask the noise, the snow thinning out toward the top of the hill that stood between her and the Elm Inn. A hawk swooped low over the lake, dipped one wing, and circled in increasingly tight patterns, before diving into the trees, where she could track it no longer.
Before Caleb had returned from work at night, she’d hovered in an anxious state of half-sleep. Only once she heard the knob turn, the creak of the bedsprings, the sound of his boots hitting the floor, and his clearing breath as his head met the pillow could she truly rest. She didn’t know if she’d ever sleep again. Ethan’s pistol held five bullets and one empty chamber. She reset the cylinder.
CALEB’S FEET DANGLED into nothingness. If he shut his eyes, he could bring himself to the loft door, watching the house, his family readying for bed, the smell of the fire drifting over and connecting them. When his eyes opened, though, he saw the dent in the snow where a corpse had lain that night or even that morning. The blizzard had slowed to the point it could no longer be referred to as such, downgraded to a common lazy lake squall, but the wind had been in his favor, and drifts piled against the inn. The drop would be thirty-five feet to the ground, but the snow made up a good eight of that, and he thought the knotted sheets would lower him ten more. He couldn’t figure the numbers, but he knew in all likelihood he would break a leg if not his neck, and he’d be another body waiting to be collected.
He gripped the sheets. He tested them, and the bed he’d tied them to held firm against the wall. Carefully, he turned around so that he faced inside the room. He leaned back, the sheet in his hand, and flexed his legs outward. The feeling of freedom threatened to choke him. He didn’t dare look down. With one step back, and then another, he walked on the side of the inn. The wind picked up. The bed shifted, and the sheets jerked, and his hands burned briefly with a stinging fire, and he fell. He leapt from the hayloft door. He aimed for the shovel. The lands he’d claimed rushed to meet him.
SHE SAW SOMETHING moving at the window. She took cover, obscured by a tree. By the time she saw her son, it was too late. She watched Caleb slip and stifled her scream by biting down on her scarf, terrified to alert the giant man or his boss. She plowed through the snow. When she reached him, his hair had been plastered back with sweat and his hands bled from the blanket, the skin sloughing off in papery sheets. She leaned her ear close to his mouth. Nothing happened. She willed her heart to stop so she could have complete silence. He breathed. She hugged him to her breast. She brought him closer and closer until her arms
hurt.
“Mama?” he said.
She silenced him with a finger to his lips, pointed at the inn to remind him of the danger, and carried him off, her steps short and heavy. Once they could no longer see the inn through the trees, she put him down.
“I’ll be okay,” he said. “You came for me.” They didn’t have much time, so she pulled him to his feet and they raced side by side, away from the Elm Inn, whose raucous noise could be heard over the cracking of branches and the wheezing of Caleb trying to catch his breath.
BOOK III
CHAPTER 1
At the edge of the forest, they watched the rear of the Brick & Feather, where nothing moved except the odd curtain and one of the cooks dumping dishwater into the snow. They’d traced a wide path through the woods behind the hotel to retrieve their supplies, her pistol, and the boy’s shotgun. Elspeth—fearing White and Ethan might be waiting for her inside—told Caleb to keep to the trees, and to run if anything at all seemed amiss. “Don’t wait,” she said. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, you go.” She didn’t linger long enough for either of them to consider where he would run to, and she stomped through the unbroken snow, her knees high. He watched her carve a straight line across the perfect surface, wind-blown ripples frozen like tiny waves.
Without her, he thought, he would have nothing. He imagined getting up in the Brick & Feather, the sheets on the bed across from his pulled tight, the pillow untouched. After a while, his worries overtook him and he crept out of the forest and followed in her footsteps. He hadn’t gone far when she came around the corner, her church dress exchanged for her old work clothes, his Ithaca protruding from the bottom of her new coat. She waved him back into the woods. She’d brought the linens from their beds and tore them into strips to wrap around his hands. When she finished, she held on to his wrists and pulled him to her, and they leaned against each other, his head almost to the bottom of her chin.