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“Everyone had their eye on her, but no, I don’t get a sense that anyone was wary of him. He’s still here in the village. Nobody knows th
at he’s a rapist and a murderer. He only did it the once.”
Ram Odin covered his face with his hands.
“I didn’t expect you to be so moved,” said Rigg.
“I’m hiding my eyes from the future. I don’t have to have any time-shifting ability to know what you’re planning to do.”
“I have no plan yet, so you can’t possibly know.”
“I do know,” said Ram Odin, “even if you don’t know it yet yourself.”
“Oh,” said Rigg. “What am I planning, then?”
“There are two courses of action you could follow,” said Ram Odin. “The first is to find her body, wherever it’s buried—I assume it’s buried, and that you know where.”
“Yes and yes,” said Rigg.
“You find it—tomorrow, say—and then the family has an answer to the mystery. She’s dead, and here in the village, not in some other town. But you won’t like that plan because it leaves more questions than it answers.”
“And also, if I go finding the body, people will think I put it there.”
“I suppose they might,” said Ram Odin. “Though you’d have to have been no older than five at the time.”
“They can’t read my age through this mask,” said Rigg. “Finding the body is just too hard to explain.”
“I wish you’d do it that way, though, compared to the other thing.”
“You think I’ll go back in time and prevent it,” said Rigg. “And you have a powerful argument against it, yes?”
“I think saving the life of a young girl, keeping her from being raped and murdered—I’m always for that. Even if she’s not extraordinarily pretty. Is she, by the way? Or is that just fond memory that has made her flawless?”
“She’s more beautiful than I imagined. Extraordinary. Unforgettable.”
“Now you’re teasing,” said Ram Odin.
“I’m not,” said Rigg. “The man had built a house for her. She was kind and gentle but she said no. Maybe he took her attitude for coyness, but he tried to kiss her and she was still too young and small to put up much of a fight. When he was done with the rape, she was crying and her clothing was torn. There was no way that people wouldn’t know what he had done. I haven’t actually gone back and listened, by the way. I’m just telling you what I saw. He actually tried to comfort her. Maybe he was apologizing. But she turned away from him and at one point tried to get out of the shell of the house he had built for her. I wish I could say that he killed her accidentally, in the heat of the moment. But no. He dragged her back into the house and she was sitting on the floor, crying again. It took him a while—several minutes—to make up his mind, but then he dragged her to her feet and strangled her. It was brutal. He held her up and she flailed and kicked but her arms weren’t long enough to reach his eyes and her kicking him did no good. When she stopped struggling, he kissed her. Then he pulled away stones from the wall under a window, put her into the earth behind them, and piled the stones back in place. There was already a space there for the body. He didn’t have to dig. I think he planned to kill her if she said no to him. I think he had already decided that if he couldn’t have her, no one would.”
“It’s a bitter story.”
“The man built another house years later, and he has five children now.”
“Is it someone we know? Not our host, I hope.”
“You’ve talked with him some in the Cave,” said Rigg. “He’s never said a word to me, but he has friends, a normal life. She was his one obsession, and he never did such a thing again.”
“So much for having no anonymity here in these villages,” said Ram Odin.
“This house-building thing,” said Rigg. “If they all pretend not to know who’s a-building, that means they don’t cast their eyes toward a house under construction. The first floor of these houses is always half buried, so once a man has dug the hole, he’s out of sight. But they know who’s gathering stones from old abandoned houses and reusing them. If I even said, ‘It was a man who had built a house for her,’ I’ll bet they’d figure out who it was, pretty quick.”
“They just wouldn’t be able to figure out how you knew,” said Ram Odin.
“Exactly. But if I go back in time, I can prevent it.”
“Really? How?”
Rigg knew Ram Odin was taunting him. “There are plenty of ways. Distract her and keep her from going after the ewe that day.”
