Page 145 of The Widow and the Wanted

“So tell me, gentlemen. Why shouldn’t I take the road he’s laid out for me?”

Downstairs, the piano stops for the second time that morning.

This time, it does not start again.

Chapter 37

Lula

Morning comes, gray and damp.

I rise and begin making coffee before Hepburn can object. Everett emerges shaved and dressed, collar crisp, a tiny nick beneath his jaw dabbed with alum. He looks like a man who can orchestrate a kidnapping and still begin the day civilized.

“Well,” he says, eyeing the pot. “This is unexpected.”

“Captivity has made me domestic,” I reply.

He accepts the cup with a courteous nod. We stand there a moment—man, woman, deputy pretending not to watch—like some grotesque domestic tableau.

I raise my own cup but do not drink. Everett does. Deep swallows.

I watch the tendon move in his throat and hold my breath.

He lowers the cup with a soft exhale, as if the first taste of coffee has restored him to his usual self. “I wanted to apologize for the unpleasantness last night,” he says.

I look at him over the rim of my untouched cup.

“There is no excuse,” he continues, with the solemn air of a man offering one anyway, “but I have been wound tight as of late. This Bowering expedition matter has lingered far longer than anyone at Hollister ever expected.”

The words pass over me, ordinary as a breeze. Then they settle. Anyone at Hollister.

Not Everett alone. Not one bad man with a private grudge. Not some rash foreman in the dark giving orders that ran loose and bloody beyond his control.

Anyone at Hollister.

How many people know?

The question opens inside me like a trapdoor.

Clerks, perhaps. Men with ink-stained fingers and wives waiting at supper. Men who heard women were dead by the river and lowered their voices, then went back to their sums.

My fingers tighten around the cup.

Good people, I think. Good people who stand still while evil walks past them are not good in any useful sense. They are merely polite. They are clean-aproned. They are careful with their money and fond of their children and willing to let another woman’s child be dragged into the snow so long as their own supper stays warm.

Perhaps that is how every wicked thing grows large enough to swallow towns. Not through monsters alone. Through decent men making one small concession after another until there is not a shred of decency left.

Everett watches me, and I realize I have been silent too long.

“The Bowering expedition matter,” I repeat.

“Yes. But I hope for all of our sakes we can put that matter to rest today. Once and for all.”

Mary’s laugh. Bobby’s jaw harp. Dr. Bowering’s tedious voice. The notebooks. The pressed flowers. The blood going black in snow. All shuffled neatly away into a file.

I look down at his cup.

Half empty.