Chapter 3
His bed hadn’t been slept in.
Marielle stood in the doorway of her parents’ room in the first gray light and looked at it—the coverlet smooth, the pillow undisturbed—and then she turned and went back to the kitchen without saying anything about what she’d seen.
Her mother was already at the stove. She had the coffee on and was cutting bread with the focused attention of a woman who had decided, at least for now, that the morning was going to proceed normally. She didn’t look up when Marielle came in.
Marielle set three bowls on the table.
They ate without talking about it. Her mother refilled the coffee and went to the window and looked at the road and came back.
Marielle washed the bowls. Her mother dried them and put them away in the particular order she always put them away, the large ones stacked behind the small ones, the same as every morning.
“He may have stayed in town,” her mother said.
“He may have.”
“If Nash kept him late and the road was dark.”
“Yes.”
Her mother folded the drying cloth and set it on the counter and looked at her hands.
“I’ll start the bread,” she said.
Marielle went out to the porch. She checked the road south and the road north and the stable, where her father’s saddle hung on its peg exactly where he’d left it two days ago, the leather dry, unbothered. She stood in the stable doorway for a moment looking at it and then went back inside.
By mid-morning she had been to the porch four times.
Her mother had produced a loaf of bread that neither of them ate and had begun on a second.
The kitchen smelled of yeast and the table was set for three and the morning had gone on long past the point where stayed late in town was a thing a man did without sending word.
Marielle went to the bedroom and looked at the bed again. She didn’t know what she expected it to tell her that it hadn’t told her the first time.
She came back to the kitchen. “I’m going into town.”
Her mother looked at her. Whatever she’d been holding back all morning moved across her face and was controlled and set aside, cleanly, the way her mother did things.
“I’ll come with you.”
“Stay here,” Marielle said. “In case he comes back while I’m out.”
Her mother looked at the window.
“Alright,” she said.
***
The walk into town took twenty minutes and Marielle did it faster than that. She went to the marshal’s office first and spoke to Briggs, who had not seen her father and who listened to her with the careful face of a man deciding how seriously to take something.
She went to the Territorial and the hardware and the bakery. She stopped three men she recognized on the main street and asked each of them the same question and got the same answer.
She sent a boy to the Aldecoa livery with a question and a coin and waited on the bench outside the feed store until he came back.
He reported that nobody at the livery had seen Emmett Vaughn come back through town the previous evening. His horse wasn’t there. No one had seen him since before supper.
She sat with that for a moment.
Then she stood up and walked to Nash’s house on the north end of town.
A woman answered the door—Nash’s wife, Charlotte, a small careful woman in a gray dress with her hair pinned back precisely.
She looked at Marielle with an expression that Marielle couldn’t fully read, something between sympathy and unease, and she stood with one hand on the door frame as if she needed the steadiness.
Marielle asked her question.
Charlotte Nash met her eyes and kept them there.
Emmett Vaughn had not come to dinner. They had waited an hour and eaten without him. She was sorry to hear he hadn’t come home. She hoped very much there was a simple explanation.
He never arrived.
Marielle thanked her and walked back down the path to the road.
***
By afternoon Briggs had made inquiries and Marielle had made her own and the shape of it was the same from every direction.
Three men who’d been at Nash’s dinner confirmed her father hadn’t been there.
The boy at the Aldecoa property, twelve years old, gap-toothed and serious, told her he’d seen a tall gray-haired man in a brown jacket arguing with someone at the edge of the property, going on eight o’clock the previous evening.
He said the other man was shorter and wore a black hat. He said the tall man hadn’t looked angry so much as he had looked like a man who was finished with a conversation.
She asked him twice and he told it the same way twice.
She walked back to the house in the long afternoon light and went in without calling out, to hear her mother before her mother heard her.
Her mother was in the kitchen, standing at the window over the sink, not doing anything.
Just standing. When she heard Marielle’s boots, she turned and her face asked the question.
Marielle told her what she had.
Her mother sat down at the table. She put both hands flat on it, the way her father did when he was working out what to say, and she looked at them.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll send to Austin in the morning.”
“Yes.”
“There’ll be an explanation.”
Marielle didn’t answer. She went to the stove and found the coffee still warm enough and poured a cup and stood at the counter and drank it. Through the window the sun was setting and the clay pots on the porch rope were still for once, no air moving.
She put the cup down.
Her father had left this house two evenings ago and walked north up the road to a dinner he never reached. Nash had said so from the first morning, straight out, no hesitation. He never arrived.
The boy at the Aldecoa property had seen him a quarter mile short of Nash’s gate, arguing with a man in a black hat, at eight o’clock. Those two things didn’t fit together and she had known it since Charlotte Nash said the words on her doorstep and Marielle had watched her face while she said them.
She looked at the saddle through the window, just visible in the open stable door.
She looked at the road.
Her father had been a Ranger for twenty-eight years. He knew this country and everyone in it and he had walked out of this house in his good jacket on a Wednesday evening and he wasn’t delayed and he wasn’t resting somewhere and he wasn’t on his way home.
She picked up the cold cup and held it.
Missing, she thought. Not lost. Not late.
Missing.