Chapter 13 #2
Her throat worked. “He kissed the top of my head. He hadn’t done that since I was a girl.”
“He didn’t know what Nash knew he’d found,” Abe said, quiet.
She looked at him.
“If your father had been turning over that stable,” Abe said, “even quiet, even careful, Nash may well have got word that he was turning it. A man like Nash buys ears all over a town. And if he had that word, then the whole color of that dinner invitation changes underneath it. Your father thought he was walking up the road to sit through an evening of a small man’s posturing.
Nash had laid the table for something altogether else, and your father came to it easy because he never saw the shape of what was waiting. ”
The kitchen held quiet a moment. The stove ticked as it cooled. Out past the window the yard stood bright and still under the climbed sun and the clay pots turned slow on their ropes, the water long since dripped out of them.
“Samson knew,” Marielle said. “Elizabeth said so plain. Samson told my father he’d got hold of a thing that would get him killed, and tried to warn him off it.
” She looked at the table. “Samson was still wearing the Ranger badge when my father started in quiet on Nash. He’d have known whatever Emmett dug out of that stable.
He’d have known it as it was being dug.”
“And then Samson quit the badge and went to ground,” Abe said.
“The day after my father didn’t come home.”
Abe was quiet a moment. He turned his coffee cup one slow half turn on the wood of the table and stilled it under his hand.
“I have to find him,” he said. Not to her in particular, nor to her mother. A man saying a thing out into a room to make it solid by the saying.
“You said this morning he was close.” She kept her voice level. “How close.”
“He was close this morning.” Abe looked up at her. “After the stable went I climbed up a post oak at the field’s edge, to watch who came to the fire and how they came. Nash came.
The sheriff came, and his deputies. And there was a man down in the brush, off alone, watching that fire burn with the same care I was watching it, and not drifting in toward the crowd at the fence the way a curious man would.
” He paused. “I came down out of the tree and worked round behind him, south, out of his sightline. I got close enough to be dead sure of his face.”
He let it sit one beat.
“It was Samson Jennings,” he said.
Her mother set her spoon down on the rim of the bowl with a small click in the quiet.
Marielle looked at Abe, and at the table, and out the window at the turning pots, and she let it move through her.
Two years she had hunted a single thread back toward Samson Jennings, two years of dead ends and cold trails and Hollis’s careful nothing.
And the whole while the man had been here, or had come back here, standing in a field outside Nash’s burning stable and watching it burn with the same eyes the stranger hired to hunt him watched it.
Which meant Samson was watching Nash. Which meant Samson was afraid of Nash, or hunting Nash, or both at the once.
Which meant Nash sat at the center of the thing, the very weight she had felt pressing down on the whole of it for two years and never once been able to lay her hand on flat enough to prove.
She had known it. She had known it in her bones for two years and not been able to make one soul with power believe her. And a stranger had ridden in off the road four days ago and in four days come nearer the heart of it than she had come in two years of giving her life to it.
She didn’t know yet what to do with how that sat in her. It sat in her hard and complicated, gratitude and something close to grief and an old anger that had no fair place to land. She set it aside for later, the way she’d learned to set things aside, and kept on.
“Where did he go,” she said. “From the field.”
“North, into the woods off the back of the field. I followed him in.” He looked at her steadily. “I’ll tell you what I found in those woods, but I want you to understand before I do that it’s a thing I’d ordinarily keep behind my own teeth, for the reasons of the work.
A man in my trade doesn’t lay his hand out on the table.
I’m laying it out because of what your mother just told us about that stable, and because of what the Reyes woman told us about the warning Samson carried your father.
The two of those, set down beside what I saw in the woods, change what I think is happening in this town.
And the three of you have earned the right to think it through with me. ”
“Tell it,” Marielle said.
“He’s living in a hole in the ground,” Abe said.
“Up in the deep timber north of the field. A space dug out of the earth and roofed over, and the lid of it built up with sod and leaf and branch to look like the floor of the woods laid back down over it. I’d have walked past it but for the wrongness of how the ground lay. Inside, bedding. A lamp. A bucket.”
He paused. “He’s been down in it a good while. The bedding was packed flat from the weight of him, and the oil in the lamp was burned near to nothing.”
“He’s been hiding,” David said.
“Hiding from Nuestra Tierra. Or from Nash. Or, I’d say most likely, from the both of them at the once, which is a thin space to try and live in.”
Abe looked at her. “He’s been down in that hole watching Nash’s stable and not moving against it, not for weeks, which is exactly how a man behaves when he’s come to know a thing that makes him worth the killing to the people who know he knows it.
He can’t go forward and he can’t go home, so he digs a hole and watches and waits. ”
“The way it went for my father,” Marielle said.
“The way it went for your father. Yes.”
Her mother had both her hands flat on the table now, the spoon abandoned, her eyes gone off to the middle distance the way they went when she was holding something heavy and holding it with great care so as not to spill it.
“Then we get to him first,” she said. “Before Nash gets to him. Before those men do.”
“Yes,” Abe said. “We do. That’s the whole of why I told it.”
“Did he see you?” Marielle said. “In the woods? Does he know he’s been found out?”
“I came up over the hole with my gun drawn,” Abe said.
“Couldn’t be helped, the way the ground lay.
He saw me plain. So yes, he knows a man found his hole.
What he doesn’t know is who I am, or that I sat at this table last night, or that there’s anybody in this house who ever loved Emmett Vaughn.
” He paused. “He was ready to come with me. Said the words.
“Said if I’d get him out of that hole and clear of this place he’d come along peaceable and thank me for it.
And then we both of us heard Nuestra Tierra working the timber with dogs, off to the west, and he changed.
Told me to run, told me to get clear while I could.
Said if those men so much as took him for a man who’d turned, who’d thrown in against them, they’d send word south and kill his brother.
Said the brother was the only blood he had left in the world. ”
Marielle started to say a thing and stopped herself and said nothing.
Abe looked at her, and read what she’d swallowed. “I didn’t tell him about Jeremiah,” he said. “Standing over a hole in the ground with dogs coming through the trees was not the moment to tell a man his brother’s dead and the dying of him was for nothing.”
“No,” she said, low. “I don’t suppose it was.”
David was watching Abe with a look she couldn’t fully read across the table. He picked up his coffee and drank from it and set it back down, careful, on the same ring it had left.
“So he’s still in the hole,” David said.
“Still in it, or moved off it by now. If he’s got any sense left under all that fear he’s moved.
” Abe turned the cup again under his hand.
“But he hasn’t left the county, and he hasn’t gone in to Nash, and he hasn’t gone over to Flores, because if he’d done a one of those three things the ground in this town would lie different this morning than it does, and it doesn’t.
It lies exactly the same.” He looked at the table.
“He’s still here. Still watching. Still waiting on a thing he hasn’t got yet. ”
“A way out,” Marielle said.
“A way out that doesn’t get his brother killed. That’s the only door he’s looking for. The only one he can let himself walk through.”
She thought about that, and about the dead brother Abe carried in his silence, and about the man in the hole waiting on a door that had already quietly closed behind him without his knowing it.
David shifted forward in his chair, his arms coming uncrossed. He’d been quiet a long while, and when he spoke it was slow, a man laying down a thing he’d been turning over.
“He ran, though. The day after Emmett didn’t come home off that road. Got clear, got all the way to wherever the letter to the Reyes woman was sent from.”
He looked around the table. “And then he turned around and came back to the one place in the world surest to get him killed, and dug himself a grave to live in. A man doesn’t run for his life and then crawl back to the thing he ran from.
Not without a reason that outweighs his own neck. ” He paused. “So what outweighed it?”
No one answered him straight off. The fire ticked in the stove.
“He didn’t run because he was guilty of anything,” Marielle said.
“He ran because he was next, and knew it, and the one man who might have stood between him and it was already gone off that road. What did my father’s dying teach him, except that the people he was up against could reach a Ranger of twenty-eight years and make the whole town believe he’d simply failed to arrive somewhere? ”
“And then he came back,” her mother said. She said it plain and certain, as thought it was already settled in her own mind.