Page 134 of The Frozen River

Moses is back again. “I asked some of the lads about Warren, but they say he isn’t here.”

“I figured as much.”

“That’s a problem?”

“No,” I tell him. “More like a relief.”

Young Ephraim shoves his plate aside and goes to play dice with the youngest Pollard child. Matthew, he’s called. The stable boy. They both have the rangy look of boys who are no longer little but who won’t be men for some time yet. All teeth and elbows and knees, they need haircuts and baths. They are in that grubby, delightful no-man’s-land between those who play and those who work, and I am glad that Young Ephraim’s brothers and sisters brought him tonight. It is hard to be the youngest.

Jonathan pushes through the tavern doors as I tuck in to my dinner. He sees his siblings at their table. Grins. He joins them, giving both Hannah and Dolly a kiss on the cheek. Ruffles his little brother’s hair. Gives Cyrus a jolly slap on the back. It is a rare bit of camaraderie that I never get to see. He’s a bit sterner with Barnabas and Moses, offering only a handshake, but it’s friendly at least. Once he’s found a spot, he looks up to find me watching. It’s been many years since I’ve seen him blush, but his face floods with color at the sight of me. He has been with Sally, apparently. All last night and today if the dark circles beneath his eyes tell the story right.

He nods at me once then turns away.

I finish my dinner and sip my whiskey, marveling as I watch my children. This is a new, bittersweet milestone of motherhood. They have gotten bigger, as have their problems. But they have also grown wiser, and that is a miracle because wisdom is not a thing you can acquire for your children. As I rise from the table, it occurs to me that part of what I feel, watching them, is a sense of betrayal. I carried these children into the world, paid their entrance fee with dues rendered upon my own body, and now they no longer need me.

I bid them all good evening with a kiss to the brow—even Jonathan, and I am glad when he doesn’t turn his face away.

“We need to talk,” I whisper in his ear, then I walk alone into the night.

BALLARD’S MILL

I am almost to Mill Creek Bridge when it clicks. The thought. Loud and clear as though someone has just snapped their fingers beside my ear.

Lace.

Twice Rebecca mentioned Joshua Burgess ripping that strip of lace from her hem. He used it to tie his hair back before he raped her. And I found a piece—just as Rebecca described—at the bottom of Burgess’s saddlebag. It is hers, no doubt. He kept it as some macabre souvenir.

So why does Sam Dawin have a piece of lace in his pocket?

I saw it yesterday, with my own eyes.

Was it only yesterday?

Time has started to play tricks on me. All or nothing. Minutes or years.

I have been at home.

This is the phrase I write most often in my journal. And that is true. Untold hours I’ve spent in my workroom, puttering about with the normal business of domestic life. But I have also lost days at a time with births and deaths and burials. I am in the business of mortality. Its beginning and its end.

Yes, of course, I am tired. That is nothing new. I have spent the better part of the last thirty years tired. Elspeth told me to expect that.

“We are midwives,” she told me once. “We will sleep when we’re dead.”

That was the first thing I thought when she passed. When we buried her in Oxford.

Sleep well, my friend.

None of this has anything to do with Sam, of course. Or the lace. But that is how the mind works late at night, after a good meal and a good cry.

Yes, I cried leaving the tavern. So much has happened in such a short amount of time.

Questions skitter across my mind like shooting stars, all of them possibilities that flare, then burn out quickly for lack of sense. I cannot find any scenario in which Sam fits into the Foster case. But the connection was right there, in his palm. Tied with a knot.

If I only knew what I was seeing.

I let my mind wander, hands loose on the reins. Brutus senses my mood, slows his pace from a trot to a walk, and drifts off the muddy center of the road and onto the edge, where the heavy clop of his hooves is muffled by tufts of old grass peeking through the fading snow. He knows the way home, and for once, I am content to let him lead.

Lace.