“What about your baby?”
“It might be Alyssa’s. Mine could be thousands of miles away, maybe even in another country.” She looks past me, as if she’s imagining a vast gulf. “They’re doing a DNA test. I’ll know in a few weeks.” Her eyes glisten, then she starts to cry. “Does it make me a bad person if I hope she isn’t mine?”
I take her hand and whisper, “Not at all,” over and over again.
The sheriff said he was sorry for what I had to go through. But he has no idea. He’ll never have any idea. As decent as he’s been today, he’s still the man who thought what happened to Paulette was no big deal. As for Kendrick Pride, maybe he left his job to look for his missing daughter, but he’s why the search was necessary in the first place. Instead of being there for Shelby when she needed him, he did what my own parents did after Fitz died. Too many of us—Shelby, Paulette, me, even Helene—have been failed by people we should have been able to count on.
“You decide what’s best for you, Shelby,” I say when her tears stop. “Don’t let anyone guilt you into doing something you’re not ready for.” She nods and wipes her eyes. Then she eats her desiccated eggs. I suggest she make her aunt take her to the Apple Peddler for a proper breakfast before they leave.
Then I tell her about how she should keep her role in Xavier Meyer’s death to herself. She argues a bit, saying he deserved it, and I don’t disagree. “It’s going to be hard enough for you. Let what happened to him stay between us.” And then I slip the locket into her hands.
She stares at it for a long time. When she speaks at last, her voice is hoarse. “I thought I’d never see this again. Where did you find it?”
“In the desert near the crossroad.” With a ghost as my guide? No, just chance, and a mule deer. “I’m glad it’s back where it belongs.”
EPILOGUE
Crossroad
Died young, somehow got through it.
—Epitaph of Melisende Dulac
I park the hearse next to the bonfire circle and kill the engine. The Stiff won’t be back from the shop for another week, and I miss it. Performing removals in the hearse just seems a little too on the nose. Cooling metal ticks in the desert stillness. Across the road to the north where the tree line begins, I half-expect to see a pale figure. But no, Shelby is gone now.
The scent of sage, sharpened by evening air, drifts in through the open window. I wonder if there will be a party tonight. It’s still early, not yet nine o’clock. The sun is just touching the shoulder of Lost Brother. Soon, it’ll be gone, and the long shadows will melt into an elusive twilight.
My thoughts drift to Jeremy, whose funeral was this morning in Portland. I thought about attending but had a feeling his family—his mother and two sisters—wouldn’t want me. I wouldn’t blame them. Sheriff Turnbull was there to represent Barlow County.
Around the time Jeremy would have been lowered into his grave, Aunt Elodie took me aside in the New Mortuary and asked if I was okay.
As Danae said, no secrets in Samuelton. When I tried to apologize, Aunt Elodie shushed me. “Geoffrey has been gone a long time, and Jeremy was a good man.”
“Is that how Uncle Rémy felt about it?”
“I don’t know how aware of things he was, but I think he’d have understood.” With that, she’d squeezed my hand, then let me get back to work. I had a viewing to set up for; just another day at the funeral home on the range.
Uncle Rémy himself had been interred a few days ago in the Pioneer Cemetery. Helene missed it. She’s in Seattle, hip deep in law tomes—or the digital equivalent, I suppose. Aunt Elodie decided Uncle Rémy’s service would be the Old Mortuary’s last. She says the place is too expensive to maintain, though I know it has more to do with how she just can’t imagine living there without Rémy. I don’t think I can either, even though I’ll miss the Weeping Parlor and looking out my bedroom window at the cemetery. Carrie Dell suggested allowing the county historical society to manage it as a museum. Elodie seemed to like that idea. She plans to find a “nice little place” for the two of us between Samuelton and Wilton, maybe on the river. If we’re lucky, it’ll have a view of the Bluebunch Glen Memory Garden. And a deep bathtub.
My gaze steals to the passenger seat beside me. The box is still there. Sticking out of the open top is an envelope with “Melisende” written in a familiar hand.
Too many people are dead. Jeremy. Kendrick Pride. The boys who drove to the Oregon high desert to rescue a needful girl. The men who tried to stop them. The adopted uncle who was better family than my own flesh and blood. And that may not be all. I could very well be a widow, which sounds exactly like the kind of thing a woman who traveled the modern-day version of the Oregon Trail should be.
“You think Geoffrey died of dysentery?”
“He should be so lucky.”
I’m a girl from another time. Maybe I’m the reincarnation of Molly Claire Maguire.
The sun flashes green, then disappears below the ridge. As ichorous shadows flow through the bunchgrass and sage and over the crossroad, I pull the envelope from the box beside me. It arrived with the day’s mail at the New Mortuary from a Seattle law firm, the address written in cursive script. Helene once said she taught herself cursive when she was a girl so Geoffrey wouldn’t be able to read her journal.
Also in the box is a blown-glass hummingbird, the one I’d bought at an arts fair in Provincetown.
There isn’t much light left, but there’s enough. I slide my finger under the flap and pull out a sheet of plain white notepaper.
Mel,
Your father sent me this, believing it to be mine. Given what you’ve told me about your parents, such sentimentality seemed out of character, but perhaps he thought you stole it from me.
I never bothered to tell him you hadn’t, that it never belonged to me. Maybe someday it will. In the meantime, I think you should hold onto it.
I know you need time. We both do. And I also know you’ve been through a lot, more than I can ever understand. But I believe you’ll be okay. I wanted to tell you that.
You’ll be okay.
Love Always, H
I start to crush the note and drop it out my open window, thinking Landry’s friends can use it for kindling at the next bonfire. But then I stop.
“You’ll be okay.”
She’s right. I’m alone, and for perhaps the first time ever I’m okay with it. Fitz may have saved me from Lake Champlain, but I saved myself in Barlow County. I’ve found a place in the desert and claimed it for my own when others tried to take it from me. “I’m Melisende Aubrey Dulac,” I say into the deepening darkness. “Calling me back to myself.” The only response is wind through the grass and the distant bark of a coyote.
I smooth the crinkled paper on my thigh and return it to the passenger seat beside me. A moment later, the hearse’s engine over-revs as I point it at the spine of Shatter Hill and chase my ghosts home.
Author’s Note
Barlow County may be a figment of my imagination, but it’s named for a real figure from Oregon history. During his younger days in Indiana, Sam Barlow did indeed kill a man with an ax, as Uncle Rémy told Melisende. Though convicted of manslaughter, Barlow was pardoned after public outcry arose in his defense. The dead man, it seemed, needed killing. Later, Barlow would emigrate to the Oregon Territory and, with the help of Joel Palmer, build the Barlow Road, an immigrant route from The Dalles to the Willamette Valley. Palmer himself provided the name of the river fished by Quince and which nearly claimed Melisende’s life. The lake and resort in northern Barlow County are named for the first editor of the Oregonian newspaper, Thomas Jefferson Dryer.
Some of the other place names in the story derive from the Chinuk Wawa, or Chinook Jargon, a trade dialect arising from a variety of indigenous language sources in the Pacific Northwest (and distinct from, though related to, the language of the Chinook people). For example, Wayette is a variation on the Chinuk Wawa word for road, way’-hut—making Wayette Highw
ay literally “Road Highway.” Similarly, the name for Tsokapo Gorge would translate loosely as Lost Brother Gorge, from tso’-lo, meaning loss and káhp-ho, meaning brother.
Barlow County itself is a synthesis of several regions in Central Oregon, containing as it does much of the geological, geographical, and historical characteristics of the state east of the Cascades, from roaring trout streams to high desert and rangeland, to the ponderosa forests of the upper elevations. It is a region both dry and austere, yet fertile and eminently beautiful.
I’ve had a lot of help and support telling Melisende’s story. Huge thanks go out to Janet Reid for her confidence and hard work on my behalf. Thank you also to editor Shannon Jamieson Vasquez for taking such wonderful care of Melisende. And finally, thank you to the lovely folks at Crooked Lane Books for helping make Crossroad a reality: Jenny Chen, Ashley Di Dio, Sophie Green, and Melanie Sun.
For their keen insight and kindness I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude to my friends, fellow writers, and critique partners: Andy Fort, Theresa Snyder, Corissa Neufeldt, Candace Clark, Charlie Varani, Suzanne Linquist, Carla Orcutt, Julie Dawn, James Stegall, Heather Petty and Ali Trotta.
And, always, thank you to my wife, Jill, for always being there for me and helping me get out of my own way. I love you.
ALSO AVAILABLE BY W. H. CAMERON
(writing as Bill Cameron)
Legend of Joey series
Property of the State
Skin Kadash series
County Line
Day One
Chasing Smoke
Lost Dog
Author Biography
When he’s not tending his chickens, W. H. Cameron shapes unruly words into captivating people caught in harrowing situations. As Bill Cameron he’s the author of the critically-acclaimed Skin Kadash mysteries. His stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Portland Noir, Lee Child’s First Thrills anthology, and more. His work has been nominated for the Left Coast Crime Rocky Award, the CWA Short Story Dagger, and multiple times for the Spotted Owl, which he won for County Line. His YA mystery Property of the State was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2016: Teen.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Bill Cameron
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-280-5
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-281-2
Cover design by Melanie Sun
Book design by Jennifer Canzone
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books 34 West 27th St., 10th Floor New York, NY 10001
First Edition: December 2019
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