Bell Weather (29 page)

“You’re sure the people he met in the parlor were respectable?”

“No,” Molly said, glimmeringly honest.

“Private business,” he mumbled, low enough that Molly leaned forward into his words. Tom leaned, too, and they continued up close, the way a couple might converse when they’re surrounded by a crowd. “Now and then,” he said, “backroom talk makes an enemy or two. Or maybe the thief upstairs harbored some resentment. However Nicholas got your locket back, it wasn’t by asking nicely. Once your brother had money and some upper-crust connections, he’d have made a fat target for a criminal with a grudge.”

Molly touched the smoak grounds smeared around her palm. “I’m sure you’re right.”

“You don’t believe it, though.”

She stared at him and sighed. “No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“People didn’t take advantage of Nicholas.”

“Everyone’s vulnerable.”

“You didn’t know my brother.”

“But he’s dead,” Tom said, very bluntly, to disarm her.

Molly looked down, wiping her hand on the table with no apparent notice of the mess she was making. He took her hand in both of his own and didn’t let go when she instinctively recoiled. He smelled the warm smoak. She would taste like it, too—cinnamony and rich—and he had urges that were smudging up his line of proper thinking.

“How did your brother die?” he asked. Her hand spiked a fever. Tom felt it up his arm, through his shoulder, to his chest. “Did the Maimer upstairs kill him?”

“No,” she said.

“Was he after you on purpose in the woods?”

“Not at first.”

“That’s hard to swallow,” Tom said, believing her regardless. “Was he the one who threw you into the river?”

“No,” Molly said.

Then who?
he almost shouted, having come to it again—the ending of the riddle she had started to reveal. He’d known enough bile and desperation to understand violence. He had shot men dead in and out of war, and yearned for vile things in and out of dreams, but what kind of man, crooked providence, or fate could have cast Molly off like rubbish in the flood?

He dropped her hand and filled the emptiness by picking up his cup, and after finishing the drink he clapped the grounds on the tabletop. Elkinaki read the present, not the future, in the dregs. “Everything is present,” he’d been told when he was young, talking with a squaw named Running at the Mouth. He used to disagree, when all his life lay ahead, but found it comforting tonight to read the symbols and the signs. He saw a woman’s open gown, or a house made of mud, and felt his nerves prickle up toward the Maimer in the holding room.

“Come on,” he said, standing up to unhook the lantern. “Let’s see if he’ll talk to us together.”

Tom walked around the table and held her under the armpits. She sagged when he raised her, like a loose sack of corn, shifting in his grip and difficult to lift.

“You have a taste for torture?” he asked.

She stared at him and tensed. It helped him pick her up.

“The town is coming tomorrow, and they won’t come to talk,” he said. “They’ll carve him up and hang him, good people as they are, and others not so good, and some of them—like me and Sheriff Pitt—plain and simple outnumbered. But they might skip torture if he tells us where the rest of them are hiding. And he might just tell us”—Tom pulled her up close—“if we use the facts you told me, any kind of leverage, to convince him that we know a lot more walking in.”

He doubted it would work, but it was doubly worth a shot. Something more of Molly might be learned if they confronted him, and Tom was frankly surprised when she took the lantern from his hand and led the way upstairs, determined, risk be damned, to save the Maimer from unnecessary violence in the morning.

They reached the top of the stairs and stood at the prisoner’s door. Molly pressed beside him, radiating oil-light and swelling as she breathed, and he imagined leading her on toward his own small room. Instead he fitted the key and turned it in the lock.

Something knocked his head as soon as he opened the door.

He fell and grabbed the air and banged against the wall. The key tinked down, Molly shrieked beside him, and the lantern light swooped and made the hall warp and fluctuate.

“Braaah,”
Tom said, fighting to his feet.

He heard a thundering beyond him on the stairs, going down.

They’d left the knife behind—the goddamned knife Molly had dropped. The Maimer must have freed himself and hit him with the chair.

“He’s gone!” Molly said, fallen near the stairs.

He shook his battered head and got tangled in her skirts, almost falling over till she stood and helped him up, and after bracing on her arm he stomped downstairs, fighting dizziness and planting every step to keep his balance. The tavern’s front door was open to the night. Bess and Ichabod were coming; he could hear their frantic footsteps pounding overhead. He ran to the closet for his gun and there was Nabby with a candle, standing in a moth-eaten shawl beside the bar. She frowned with disapproval as if she’d caught him getting drunk, and somewhere in his addlepated brain he felt ashamed.

He grabbed his loaded rifle and hurried out the door. His thoughts were coming clearer and his wooziness was gone, but he couldn’t understand the blood upon his hands.

The moon was as bright as the candlelit tavern, and he focused on the houses and the trees. His ears were sharp—he heard the sound of running to the right, and when he turned he saw the small, distant figure in the dark.

The Maimer had a thirty-second lead, maybe more, but had a limp from being dragged by Molly and the horse. He kept along the river’s edge, heading for the woods. Tom ran along the hill and looked toward a clearing where the water swamped in, just before the trees. It would bog the Maimer down or turn him from the bank, leaving him exposed long enough to shoot.

Molly followed out and called Tom’s name.

The Maimer, just a shadow in a blur of silhouettes, hit the marshy ground and floundered with a splash. Tom stopped. He held his breath to steady the rifle on his shoulder. When the Maimer lunged right, Tom would shoot him in the leg, assuming he could still make the shot at such a range. It was at least fifty yards, no wind, high to low.

Instead of going right, the Maimer went left, apparently deciding he would swim across the river. It happened so quickly, Tom shot him in the back.

He didn’t see the impact, owing to the smoke, but he knew it like a well-struck nail beneath a hammer. There was a lightning flash of joy, the shot’s echo in the valley, then a deep, black quiet and the body facedown. The bullet had thrown the Maimer forward off the bank. Now the river took him gently, even sweetly in the flow. The body briefly snagged in a thin patch of reeds, made a slow quarter turn, and floated out of sight.

Perfect shot,
Tom thought, too alive to feel its meaning.

Molly ran up, panting and astonished. Tom leaned against his rifle while she tried to see the body, unsure if she was sorry or relieved that it was gone. Seven miles to the Dunderakwa Falls and then oblivion. He fought the urge to hold her when the night swirled around him.

“You’re cut,” he said, discovering a wound along her forearm and finally understanding how his hands had gotten bloody.

“He slashed me on the stairs,” she said. “I almost dropped the lantern.”

Tom slung the rifle onto his shoulder. Molly slumped. They walked together, with her uninjured arm around his neck. He hugged her waist and kept his other hand pressed on her cut, and there it was again, the heat of her like radiance or fever, more alarmingly direct from the flow of Molly’s blood.

Past the hilly undulations leading to the Orange, houses up the road flickered from within. People had been roused by the midnight shot, and Tom was thankful for the last few minutes of obscurity. Ichabod and Bess, waiting at the tavern, were startled by the blood, wondering who’d been shot. As the situation’s import hammered into Tom, he knew what had to be done and handed Molly off to Bess, and then he left them on the grass and hurried inside.

He went to the kitchen and rinsed his hands in a basin. Nabby materialized beside him, spectral and decrepit with her bristly gray hair, and used a rag to wipe the mess he was leaving on the table.

He found a length of rope in the storeroom and ran upstairs. The holding room door was open as he’d left it. He tied the new rope exactly like the other. Then he dropped it near the chair, hid the rope the Maimer had cut, picked the key off the floor, and locked himself inside.

He stood in the dark and breathed. Muffled voices spoke below. He raised his heel and kicked the door, right beside the knob. He kicked again, and then again, until the wood began to fracture and the bangs shook the room. The fifth and hardest blow cracked the frame and broke the lock. He opened the door and left it hanging crooked off the hinges, walked downstairs, and found them huddled at the bottom—Molly, Bess, Ichabod, and Nabby looking up, seeming to believe that he was dangerous or mad.

His forehead ached and now his foot throbbed, too. It pained him to have broken part of the tavern on purpose and to see Molly’s blood dribbled on the steps. When he reached the group below, Ichabod retreated halfway out the door, Nabby waited with a bucket, and Bess held her ground with tremulous concern.

“Here’s what happened,” Tom said. “Molly and I were talking in the taproom. The prisoner slipped his bonds, broke the door, and ran downstairs. He hit me in the head, grabbed a knife, and cut Molly on the way out. I shot him near the river and his body floated off.”

Before anyone could answer, he led Molly by the hand into the far corner of the taproom, gently as he could but brooking no resistance.

“I haven’t dressed the wound!” Bess said. “She needs stitching.”

“That can wait,” Tom said, hard enough to quell her.

He and Molly stood in private, out of the light and out of earshot. He lowered his face and raised her chin and whispered to her mouth.

“You told me the truth tonight,” he said. “Part of it, at least. My father used to give me a coin for a good piece of honesty.”

She smiled, false and sad. “Are you going to give me a coin?”

“I’ll give you a place to live,” he said. “You can stay upstairs with Bess and help around the tavern. Long as you keep being honest and do whatever you’re told. No more causing trouble or disobeying orders. I can’t have it, not with Pitt breathing down my neck. Especially after this.”

Molly held her cut. She moved her thumb in little circles in the blood that slicked her arm, as if the movement were a comfort, or a symbol of her thoughts. She was a girl who played with injury, and now he meant to keep her.

“I have no reason to do this,” he said.

Molly nodded.

“There’s a world of reasons not to. And as for you recognizing the Maimer, that’s between us. Don’t even tell Benjamin.”

“I trust him,” Molly said.

“It’s Abigail I worry about. Benjamin wouldn’t tell her if we said to keep it secret, but I hate to put a thing between a man and his wife.”

But there was more to it than Abigail. A fear of looking foolish? He would learn whatever he could by way of inquiries to Grayport but hoped that Molly would trust him—him alone—with all the rest, at least until he had a better handle on the facts.

“How’s your arm?” he asked.

“It hurts. How’s your head?”

“Like a ruddy fucking anvil.”

Molly touched the knot, very cautiously and sweetly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was me who left the knife behind.”

“I should have picked it up. But it was him who went and used it.”

Then, with nothing left to do but face the repercussions, Tom was bleary and dejected. It was too late to sleep. Dawn was coming soon, along with Pitt and all the town, and so he clung to this—to Molly and their own private space—aware that Nabby, Bess, and Ichabod were watching them intently as they stood, face-to-face, bound in secrecy and trouble.

Chapter Nineteen

Molly lived and worked in the tavern through spring and into summer, when the farms and woodland flourished around the homes with bright, luxuriant growth. There was so much vegetation even the air felt green. Pumpkins swelled. Apples sagged branches in the orchard. Some of the deadwood boards inside the Orange sprouted twigs, and the taproom’s walls were graced with tiny leaves. Summer in Grayport and Umber had not been so intense, and Molly was daily astonished by the swelter, the heat-fueled storms, the profusion of fruits and berries, and the fact that such abundance would perish overnight, she’d been told, when the valley’s season of deadfall arrived instead of autumn.

One night after the umpteenth squall of the day, Molly opened the windows she had closed against the rain, wishing she could run to Echo Pond and swim the stickiness away. Navigating deftly through the tavern’s packed crowd, she was enveloped in a haze of beer and perspiration. She reached the bar at the rear of the taproom and stood beside Bess. They had become like sisters since Molly moved into the Orange, working together, sharing a room, and gabbing nonstop, much to Tom’s annoyance.

Bess leaned close to speak in Molly’s ear. She smelled of fresh-chewed mint and warm summer honey, and she kept her eyes focused on the fiddler near the hearth. “I can’t stop looking at his fingers when he plays.”

His name was Lucas and his hands looked spidery and strong. He played his jigs with sadness and his ballads with
é
lan, and Bess had all but borne his children in a fortnight of pining.

“You’ve missed your chance,” Molly said. “I’m taking him myself.”

“You wouldn’t!” Bess whispered.

“I’ll tell him that I’m musical and ask for private lessons.”

Bess twisted Molly’s arm, pleasurably hard, where the Maimer’s cut had healed but hadn’t stopped itching. Molly laughed and drew the looks of merry-minded patrons. Lucas kept fiddling “Tom Scarlett,” Bess’s favorite.

“Oh, you’re right,” Bess said. “I’ve waited too long. Except he’s only ever here with everybody watching.”

“Forget what people think.”

“
You’re
one to talk.”