Chapter 22
Doctor’s Orders
Decker hissed as a gunshot snapped through the church, and he bounded up the steps. Wood cracked as he burst into the sanctuary.
Willa slumped back against the doors, her flintlock smoking in her hands. “Don’t worry none, I only got his leg.” Pale, cracked lips split into an exhausted smile.
She was stubborn, half-dead, and had alerted the town they were there. Decker still smiled.
“You were supposed to stay back with the others.”
“Resting,” Laurie added, edging away from the fallen form.
“I wasn’t gonna let you have all the fun. Besides,” she walked down the aisle, unsteadily grasping at the pews, “the last time I saw the doctor in church he tried to shoot me, so it was only fitting I return the favor.”
Whitton clutched his leg on the ground as the boards stained a nasty black. He glared up at them. Unveiled, the candlelight revealed his sins.
The doctor’s face contorted in shades of white and brown and black, patched together and drooping at the corners like he’d stood too close to a fire and melted. Sunken eyes, one nearlyblack and one cloudy blue, roved like they wanted to return to who they belonged.
The buckets of entrails smelled better than he did. When his shriveled lips parted, his putrid breath gust out in a slow, graveled taunt. “Every time I found a girl that looked like you I made her beg.”
Willa bared her teeth in a sickly smile and yanked the handkerchief from her throat. “I made Grace beg too.”
Whitton glowered.
Heaving Whitton to his feet, Decker yanked his arms behind him and lashed his wrists with his belt. Willa stuffed her sweat-streaked handkerchief in his mouth and Whitton’s words garbled into sullen silence.
“Don’t think anyone’s going to miss him, but let’s get the hell out of here before Father comes nosing around,” Decker said.
Willa followed them out of the church, bracing herself with Laurie’s help. “Find anything else with the old bastard?”
“We hope,” Laurie murmured. “If I can decipher it when we return.”
“You got a good education. You’ll work it out.” She winced and braced herself against her horse’s side when they reached the alley.
Safine’s mare turned baleful eyes on them and pinned her ears as they lashed Whitton to the saddle. Willa looped the lead rope in her palm and hefted herself into her own saddle, spine bowed and heels jammed low in the stirrups to keep her balance.
Laurie easily swung up behind Decker, adjusting his book-stuffed bag.
“She shouldn’t have come. She’s still recovering,” Laurie murmured as Willa slumped over. She tied herself down likeWhitton, a blanket looped around her waist and knotted to the pommel.
“She’ll make it. All of us will.”
Hail littered the ground on the other side of the snaking river. Sitara’s riders clung to her as she picked her way up the slippery bank through lumps of ice as large as Laurie’s hand. The sun had crested the horizon long ago and the day had been eaten away with finding a shallow place to ford with the three horses.
Exhaustion threatened Decker and he’d let Laurie take the reins, huddled away from the deadly sun under a thick blanket Laurie had procured from his carpetbag.
Should be feeling more poorly than this.
Worry gnawed at him, and when Sitara reached solid ground, Laurie cautiously urged her into a gallop as they raced towards Ender’s Ridge with Willa close behind. Striped hills churned to mud under them, spattering their faces with silty brown.
The steeple split the sunlight at the edge of town, standing proud. The gnarled skeleton of the tree next to it bent raggedly after a lightning strike. Glass and wood crunched under hooves; shingles wrenched away in the storm and hurled across the street.
Ender’s Ridge was quiet.
Deathly so.
The heavy doors of theGoosewere drawn and barred and the veranda sagged heavily. Laurie’s chapel had seen the worst of it,and he made a small, defeated sound as they pulled their horses to a trembling stop. The roof had more holes than not, and the cross lay askew the front steps. Chipped paint aside, the building was in one piece.
