Still, he cleared his throat and dropped his voice under the hum of placed bets and chatter in the room. “I could pay the old chapel a visit.”
“You’re talkin’ like Cricket now, getting into everything.” Safine rolled her eyes. “Speak of the devil, he left early this morning. Said he had business to attend to in Silver Creek. Sure we’ll hear of another stagecoach robbery in a few days,” she said, a note of pride entering her voice.
Nothing would surprise him with Cricket anymore. The law always trailed him here and then became vacant-eyed, like they couldn’t remember why they were in the forgotten part of Ridgewater. The Blessing or part of his damn luck, he supposed.
“I’m just wonderin’ about our new neighbor,” Decker said, knowing damn well it wasn’t his business. “Could be another preacher.”
“Not if he knows what’s good for him. Or maybe it’s not ahim.” Safine suddenly brightened, waggling her eyebrows at him. “Maybe it’s alady, claiming her late husband’s chapel for herself and she’ll need a friendly neighbor like me.”
“Don’t get your hopes too high,” he scoffed.
“My hopes are always high, darling.”
Despite her witching, Safine was indistinguishable from a human woman with all her desires and hopes and veiled longing.
One day Decker would bury their rings with her while he remained unchanged—he only wished Safine could be graced with the kind of love she deserved before she went cold.
“There must have been a landslide upstream last night. River was stained red this morning. Didn’t last more than a few hours but Mr. McKinney was all in a mood because he said it was bad for business—” Safine’s chatter was a pleasant hum as the night waned, catching him up on what he’d missed.
Patrons abandoned the tables before nightfall, one by one, until only he and Safi remained, clearing away cigar stumps and glasses, washing and stacking them in neat rows under the bar, dusting off the bottles and casks along the back counter, and sweeping out the sand and leaves tracked in after the long day.
Sand tracked back in with the arrival of a small grey goose who quacked, wiggled her tail feathers, and craned her neck at Safine.
“Miss Lucy Goosey. Haven’t headed south yet?” She bent down to pet her. Lucy hissed and snapped needle-sharp teeth, as she always did, then retreated under the table to be lured out with strips of dried meat Safine always kept on hand for that exact reason.
Decker blocked out the heartbeat next door with deft fingers remembering a tune across the piano keys even though his self-taught understanding left much to be desired for someone who had a lifetime to learn. But the tune was simple and lively—taught to him from an Irish miner heading to California—and Safine tapped along.
Quiet evenings were rare at theGoose,and she took advantage, bringing her work downstairs to funnel powder into amber bottles and grind teeth with a mortar and pestle, dusting clouds of herbs and bone into the soft breeze trailing through the swinging doors.
She blended the mundane and the arcane in the way she’d been taught back in New Orleans, with her own Western twist. Deckerdidn’t much understand it, but she could conjure up a solution for almost any ailment as long as she had human remnants to give life to her spells—she always said anything from a cough to an unwanted suitor could be fixed. Sometimes she used the unwanted suitor to fix the cough.
Lucy settled under her table, bill tucked under her wing as if the floor was more comfortable than the pool of water they kept filled for her outside.
Over the years he’d been here, strangers became acquaintances, and those became friends, and a road rarely walked became known like a lover.
Ender’s Ridge was the closest he’d felt to home since leaving India.
Safine, too, felt like home, twining inextricably into his heart as if she’d always been there. He’d watched the scared girl who once begged him to take care of her husband grow into a woman who would have inflicted the same bruises and then killed her husband with his own empty whiskey bottle instead of finding comfort in a stranger.
Decker hesitated over the piano keys as he forgot the beginning note of the next song.
In his second of silence, the heartbeat sang in his ear like church bells.
Soft footfalls crossed the threshold and brown eyes holding a pervasive worry met his own.
A pained, hesitant smile fluttered to the stranger’s lips. “I’m sorry, I know it’s late. I couldn’t find a doctor in town.”
The piano bench groaned as Decker stood.
He was from back East. Sounded like it and lookedlike it.
Black polished shoes, Sunday-starched pants, pearl buttons done up on his ironed black shirt. A white collar strangled his delicate throat. The same frantic heartbeat from the chapel rattled in his chest.
His left hand dripped with blood, knotted cloth blooming stark red against his white-collar skin.
Safine sprung into action. “I sure can help with that, come here—”
“I’m sorry about the mess—” he rushed. One brunet curl escaped from his desperately tamed hair and tapped against his forehead. “I haven’t even introduced myself—” he pulled out a chair and Lucy Goosey hissed at him, hackles flaring on her neck, and he shrank back at the advancing bristle of feathers. “My goodness, my apologies—”
