Chapter 24
Marielle came up on Nash’s house on foot through the rain, the rifle held in her two hands, the rifle she had pressed into David’s hands on the rise above the burning town and taken back off the gray’s saddle in her own yard, because David had no further use in this world for a rifle and she had every use for one that there was.
The fine house stood dark at the north end of the ruined town. Not a lamp lit in any window of the whole two stories of it. No man on the door, no outlaw leaned in the lee of the wall with a pipe the way one had stood the morning Abe walked up this same walk, no rider waiting in the yard.
The storm had driven every soul to ground, or the burning had, or the two together, and the great house that had run the whole of this county for a generation sat dark and shuttered in the downpour like a thing already given up and walked away from.
The wrongness of that told her as much as a lit window ever could have.
A man with a clear conscience and nothing to fear left a light burning against the dark.
A man crouched somewhere inside his own black house had made up his mind there were things out in the night he would very much sooner not draw to his door with a lamp.
She went around the side of the house to the back, to the kitchen door, and she broke the pane nearest the latch with a short hard jab of the rifle butt, the small bright sound of the glass going lost entirely under the steady roar of the rain on the roofs, and she put her hand through the broken pane and found the latch and let herself in.
And then she stood a moment dripping on the floor of the dark kitchen of Mayor Nash’s house with the rifle up at her shoulder and listened with her whole body the way she’d been taught to listen.
Nothing came to her. The slow tick of a clock somewhere ahead in the house. The rain. Her own breathing and the water running off her onto his floor.
She went through the house room by dark room.
She had told herself the thing to tell herself, that if the man wasn’t in it she would find papers instead, a letter, a thing left out on a desk in the haste of running, some scrap that said where he had gone, and she would take that and follow it the way she had followed every thin thread of this for two years.
She went through the heavy dark parlor, where the portrait of the old man Nash, the father, the one who had built the wool trade and the church and the street of stores, glared down out of the gloom at the wet woman crossing his son’s floor with a rifle.
She went through a dining room where a long table stood laid with care for a dinner that no one had come down to eat, the good china set out and the candles unlit in their sticks, some last ordinary evening interrupted and abandoned.
And she came at the last up the stairs to the study at the top of the house, the room she had sat in twice across the breadth of that desk while the man behind it had folded his hands and lied to her face with the practiced ease of a man reading lines he had written himself a long time before she ever knocked.
The desk stood there in the dark. The tall chair behind it empty. The room, so far as the dark would show her, empty.
And then, from the far side of it, against the inner wall, a sound. Small, and quickly stifled, and the worse for the stifling. A board taking a shifted weight, behind the door of a closet set into the study wall.
She crossed to it slow and put the muzzle of the rifle on the door and took the handle of it in her free hand and pulled it open.
Nash was in the closet. And his wife was in it with him.
The two of them were crowded back among the hanging coats in the dark of it, pressed into the corner of it as far back as the small space would take them, Charlotte Nash’s hand white at every knuckle where it gripped her husband’s arm, and the two of them looked out at the rifle and at the wet woman holding it with the wide, flat, unblinking eyes of people who had been crouched in the dark a long while waiting for exactly this to come and had let themselves go on hoping right up to the end that somehow it would not.
“Out,” Marielle said. “The both of you. Out of there, and over to that couch, and you keep your hands out where I can see every finger of them. And you do all of it slow.”
They came out. Nash first, in his shirtsleeves, his collar open, the careful smooth face she had sat across from twice gone slack and gray and slick with the sweat of the closet, the face that had thought three full conversations ahead of her each time across that desk now plainly thinking nothing she could read in it but fear.
His wife came out after him. Marielle backed the two of them across the dark study to the couch with the rifle, and they sat, close together, shoulder against shoulder, and she stood over them with the rain still running off her clothes onto his fine carpet and the muzzle of the rifle moving slow from the one face to the other and back again.
“Two years,” Marielle said. “Two years I sat in this room across that desk from you and asked you what became of my father, and two years you handed me your sympathy and your trouble and your hope for a good outcome, and not one true word in any of it.
There’s no desk between us tonight. There’s no Captain Hollis to sit there and find you cooperative and thank you for your trouble and ride on home to Austin satisfied. There’s no town left out that window for you to be the mayor of. So I am going to ask you once. What happened to Emmett Vaughn?”
“Miss Vaughn.” Nash wet his lips and reached after the old smoothness, she watched him reach for it, watched his face go hunting for the easy reasonable mask it had worn so well so long, and watched it come up short, the mask not there to be found.
“Whatever you may have heard tonight. Whatever has been said to you, in all this confusion, by men with their own reasons to—you have to understand that the situation is a great deal more complicated than—”
“What happened to my father?”
“I don’t know.” He spread his soft hands, palms up, the gesture he’d used across the desk. “Before God, Miss Vaughn, I have told you, and I have told you again, the man simply never arrived at this house that—”
She took one step in and laid the muzzle of the rifle against his forehead, against the careful gray hair at the front of it, and she drew the hammer back with her thumb. The click of it cocking was a very large sound in the dark, quiet room with only the rain behind it.
“Charlotte.” She didn’t take her eyes off the man. She spoke to the wife and watched the husband.
“Your husband is about to get the inside of his head on the back of his own couch over a thing the two of you have known for two years and that I am going to know before I leave this room, one way or another. I have buried the better part of this town tonight with these two hands. I am well past the place where the killing of one more lying man is going to cost me a minute’s sleep.
So one of you tells me, now, this breath, or I stop asking and start cleaning the carpet. ”
It broke out of Charlotte Nash all at once, the way a thing held back too long and under too much pressure breaks when it finally goes—not a trickle but the whole of it at once.
“He’s behind the house.” The words came fast and shaking and tumbling over one another in her hurry to be rid of them.
“Out the back. At the edge of the woods, where the trees start. There’s a tree, a trunk, just a trunk, the lightning took it years ago and it stands there by itself, burned black—” Her voice climbed and cracked and kept on.
“He’s buried there. Your father. Emmett.
He’s been there the whole time, the whole two years, right there the whole time, behind this house—”
The room went very still around her words, but for the rain.
Marielle didn’t move the rifle off the man’s head.
She had believed herself ready to hear it, had rehearsed the hearing of it a thousand nights, and she found in the event that she wasn’t ready, that no one was ever made ready, that two years of imagining the worst of a thing did not ready a person one particle for the plain flat fact of it spoken aloud in a dark room by a shaking woman: he’s been there the whole time, behind this house.
She held the rifle steady against Nash’s forehead by some discipline that ran below thought, some hard thing her father had put in her, and she made herself stay upright in the room and in the moment and not go where the words wanted to take her.
“Why?” she said. Her own voice came out low and strange and far off to her own ear. “Why my father? Of all the men in this county you could squeeze from the side and wait out, why did you have to have him killed?”
And Nash, with the cold ring of the muzzle pressed to his head and his wife’s confession already loose and unrecallable in the room and no thread left anywhere for his clever mind to take hold of and pull, broke the rest of the way that his wife had already broken.
The truth that came up out of him was a worse and an uglier thing than any of the truths she had built for herself across two years of imagining.
“Because of her.” He didn’t look at his wife when he said it. He looked at the rifle. “Because your father and my wife. There was a thing between them. The two of them. An affair.”
The word came out of him thick. “Months of it. Under my own roof and behind my own back, the great Emmett Vaughn, the county’s own hero, and my own wife, and the whole of this county that fell over itself to worship the man would have laughed itself sick in the street if it had ever once—”
Even here, even now, with the gun on him, the old vanity surfaced through the fear and showed itself, and Marielle understood the man entire in that instant.