Chapter 9
Francis found Ruth alone at the windmill the next morning.
She was standing at the base of it, watching the blades turn, one hand resting on the pump handle, the water running cold and clear into the trough. She did this some mornings, Francis had noticed. Came out early and stood at the windmill by herself before the day started.
He didn't say anything at first. He came and stood beside her and watched the water too.
"You've got a question," Ruth said, not looking at him. "You've had it since the other night. Since I said the name and shut the door on it. You've been carrying it around behind your teeth ever since, being polite about it, waiting for a chance."
"I have," Francis admitted.
"Dale Crotinger," Ruth said.
"Dale Crotinger."
Ruth was quiet a moment. The blades turned. The water ran.
"I said it was a story for another night," she said. "Or no night."
"You did. And I told you I wouldn't climb it. And I meant it. I'm not here to make you tell me anything." Francis kept his eyes on the water. "I just came to stand here. If the door opens on its own, it opens. If it doesn't, I'll go help plant. Either way's fine."
Ruth almost smiled. He could hear it in her voice, though he didn't look.
"You're a clever one," she said. "You learned that from the old man too, I'd bet. The trick of standing next to a person quiet till they talk. Not asking. Just being there with the space open. Harder to hold a thing back from somebody who isn't reaching for it than from somebody who is."
"Earl did that to me," Francis said. "In a dark house. Made me honest just by being honest first and not pushing. I've been trying to learn it ever since."
Ruth was quiet a long moment.
Then she let out a breath, an old woman's breath, and her hand tightened on the pump handle, and the door opened.
"Dale was mine," she said. "That's the short of it. For a long time. Longer than most marriages last, though we never married, which was its own thing between us, a thing we fought about and made up about and fought about again for twenty years."
Francis kept still. Kept the space open.
"He wasn't a good man," Ruth said. "I want to say that plain, first, so you don't build him up in your head into something he wasn't. He was hard, and he was stubborn, and he had a mean streak when he drank, which he did, and he was the kind of man who was right too often and made sure you knew it.
He was difficult. God, he was difficult."
Her voice softened despite itself. "But he was mine. And I was his. For twenty years. And there's a thing that happens when you're somebody's for twenty years, good man or not, that doesn't come apart clean. You grow into each other like two trees planted too close.
You can't pull one out without tearing roots off the other."
"He's the one who taught you the Glock," Francis said quietly.
"He's the one who taught me the Glock. Sold it to me, off his own hip, and taught me to run it out behind his place, summer evenings, a hundred rounds a week."
A small sound, almost a laugh, gone quick.
"That was Dale loving somebody. He didn't say the soft words. He put a good gun in your hand and made sure you could keep yourself alive with it. That was his I love you. A forty caliber and a summer of a hundred rounds a week. I've still got both. The gun and the summer.
The summer's the better of the two, but I can't wear it on my hip."
The water ran. The blades turned.
"So what happened," Francis said. Gentle. Not pushing. Just holding the door.
And Ruth's face changed. The softness went out of it. Something harder came into the pale eyes, something old and bitter that had not faded in whatever years it had been.
"Sarah happened," Ruth said.
She said the name the way she'd said Macklemore. Like a thing you'd scrape off your boot.
"Sarah." Francis waited.
"Dale started sleeping with her," Ruth said flatly.
"Toward the end. After twenty years. A woman named Sarah, twenty years younger than me, twenty years, a girl practically, next to me. And I found out the way you always find out, slow at first and then all at once, and that was the end of Dale and me. Twenty years, and it came apart over Sarah."
Her jaw worked. "I left. I didn't scream and throw things, though God knows I wanted to. I just packed what was mine, and I took the Glock he'd given me, because it was mine and I'd earned it round by round, and I walked out, and I never went back. Twenty years,
and I walked out over a girl half my age."
Francis was quiet a moment.
"That's a hard thing," he said. "I'm sorry. I know a little about a marriage coming apart over somebody else. Not the same. But a little."
"It's not the affair," Ruth said sharply.
"That's the thing. You'd think it'd be the affair. The betrayal, the younger woman, the whole tired ugly story of it. And it hurt, don't mistake me, it hurt like a burn. But that's not the part that stuck. That's not the part I still can't let go of, all these years later,
standing out here at a windmill at the end of the world."
She turned and looked at Francis full on.
"It's her. It's Sarah herself. It's what she is."
"What is she," Francis said.
And Ruth's face did a thing Francis had not seen it do before. It closed and hardened and something almost like fear moved behind it, an old superstitious dread that sat strangely on a practical old farmer.
"She's an energy vampire," Ruth said.
Francis blinked. "A what?"
"I know how it sounds." Ruth's voice was flat and certain.
"I know exactly how it sounds. A crazy old woman talking about vampires. But I don't mean it like a story. I don't mean fangs and blood and coffins. I mean the real thing, the true thing, the thing that's realer than any of that. There are people in this world, Francis, and you've met them,
everybody's met them, who suck the life right out of a room. Who walk in, and the warmth goes out of it. Who take, and take, and take, and never give, and you don't even see it happening, you just notice that after an hour with them you're exhausted, you're grey, you're wrung out,
and you don't know why. That's Sarah. That's exactly Sarah. She sucks the life out of everyone around her. The energy just drains out of a room when she's in it. It's spiritual. I don't have a better word for it. It's a spiritual thing. She feeds on the light in other people,
and she leaves them dimmer, and she never once notices or cares, because that's just what she is."
Francis said nothing. He'd expected a lot of answers. He hadn't expected this.
"You think I'm a bitter old woman making her rival into a monster," Ruth said.
"Go on. Say it. Everybody thinks it. That's what makes it so perfect, so evil. Nobody believes you about a person like Sarah, because a person like Sarah always seems fine on the surface. Pleasant, even. Pretty. Soft-spoken. And so when you say she drains the life out of you, you sound insane,
you sound jealous, you sound like exactly the scorned older woman everyone expects you to be. That's her armor. That she's undetectable. That saying the true thing about her makes you the crazy one."
"I don't think you're crazy," Francis said slowly.
And he didn't. Because he'd known people like that.
Everyone had. He thought of a few, from the old world, from the office, people you dreaded being cornered by, people who left you flat and drained and couldn't say why.
Ruth wasn't wrong that they existed. He'd just never heard anyone name it so bluntly.
"I hated her," Ruth said. "I want to be honest with you, since we're being honest. I didn't just dislike her. I hated her, in a way I've never hated another living soul, not even Macklemore, and Macklemore killed my people. I hated Sarah more than the man who did that, if you can believe it,
and I've had years to be ashamed of it and I'm not, because he's just a wolf, a wolf does what a wolf does, but Sarah, Sarah is a thing that pretends to be a person and drains you dry with a smile, and there's no forgiving a thing that pretends. She took Dale.
She took twenty years of my life and she took Dale and she drained him too, I watched it, I watched that hard difficult stubborn man go grey and dim and small under her, watched the life go out of him a little at a time, and he never even knew, he thought he was happy, that's the worst of it,
they never let you know while they're doing it."
The windmill turned. The water ran cold and clear. And Francis stood very still, because something had begun, faintly, to prickle at the back of his neck.
"What did she look like," Francis said. "Sarah."
"Why," Ruth said, sharp again.
"Just tell me. Humor an old habit. I read people. I remember faces. What did she look like."
Ruth frowned, but she answered.
"Pretty, in that draining way," she said.
"The kind of pretty that takes. Dark hair, long, always perfect, even when the world went to hell, I heard she kept it perfect somehow. Little. Slight. Big eyes, the kind that look right at you and make you feel like the only person in the room while she quietly drinks you dry. A soft voice.
A little laugh she used like a tool. Younger than her years even, always seemed younger than she was."
Ruth's mouth twisted. "And a way about her. A way of getting people to do for her. To carry her, to feed her, to give her things, and to feel grateful for the privilege while they did it. She never lifted a hand for herself in her life. She got other people to lift it for her, and thank her,
and never once notice they were being bled."
The prickle at the back of Francis's neck had become something colder.
"Where," Francis said. His voice had gone quiet and careful. "Where was this. Where did Dale and Sarah live. What part of the country."
"East of here," Ruth said. "Well east. Out past where the plain rises toward the mountains. Little town out that way. Why? Francis. Why are you asking me this. You've got that look. The claims look. The one where you've found a number that doesn't add up."
Francis was quiet.