Chapter Twenty-Two
The morning after somebody broke into your house while your baby slept twenty feet away, you still had to do laundry.
That struck Grace as deeply and profoundly unfair.
The world ought to stop for something like that.
Oughta just hold still for a day or two while a person got her bearings back and figured out how to walk through her own kitchen without checking every shadow twice.
But laundry piled up regardless, and if she let it go another day, Mason’s shirts alone would qualify as a public menace.
She hauled the washtub off its hook on the back porch and set it in the yard. The iron scraped the dirt, and Miriam—propped in her usual spot on a blanket in the grass—startled at the sound, then went right back to gumming the wooden rattle Logan had carved for her.
Logan crossed the yard from the barn with Thomas. Both of them carried locks, latches, and iron brackets from yesterday’s supply run.
Logan stopped when he reached the porch steps. “Mornin’.”
“Mornin’.” She wrung out a dishrag. “You eat?”
“Biscuit.”
“One biscuit ain’t breakfast, Logan.”
“It’s a biscuit. That’s breakfast by definition.”
“It’s a biscuit by definition. Breakfast requires at least two food groups.”
“Bread’s a food group.”
“Bread ain’t a group, it’s a member of a group, and one member don’t make a—” She caught herself. “We’re arguin’ about bread.”
“You started it.”
“I asked if you’d eaten!”
The corner of his mouth pulled.
“I’ll eat proper at lunch.” He shifted the hardware to his other arm. “Thomas and I are gonna fit the new locks. Should take most of the mornin’.”
“Good.”
“You need anythin’ before we start?”
You, standing here another thirty seconds, so I can pretend the world makes sense.
“I’m fine. Got the wash to do. Gonna collect the rest from the bunkhouse.”
He nodded.
Thomas grunted. “Logan, these brackets ain’t gonna install themselves, and I’d like to finish before I die of old age.”
Logan turned. “You’re twenty-two.”
“And every minute I spend watchin’ you two make eyes at each other ages me another year.”
Grace threw the dishrag at Thomas’s head.
***
The bunkhouse smelled like leather, sweat, and the pine shavings Jonah stuffed under his mattress because he claimed it kept the bugs away. Whether it did remained debatable, but what it definitely did was make the whole room smell like the inside of a lumber mill.
Grace pulled Jonah’s shirt off the hook. Checked the pockets, because men put things in there and forgot about them.
Left pocket. Empty. Right pocket.
Paper.
She pulled it out. Jonah had folded it twice, and it had gone soft at the creases the way paper got when it’d been handled a lot. This had clearly been carried around and opened and refolded until the fibers gave up and turned into something closer to cloth.
Not her business. Jonah’s pockets held Jonah’s things, and she’d just put the paper back and—
J,
The Greenwich job went south. Mickey got nabbed.
Keep your head down and stay out of the 4th Ward until I say otherwise.
The take from the harbor job is in the usual spot.
Your cut is 12. Don’t spend it stupid. Burns saw you talking to that girl outside Reilly’s.
Knock it off. You get sloppy, you get us all pinched.
A
Grace read it twice.
Three times.
The paper shook in her hand. No. Her hand shook. The paper just went along with it.
The Greenwich job. Mickey got nabbed. The take from the harbor job. Your cut. You get sloppy, you get us all pinched.
A.
Ace.
She knew the name the way you knew the name of a storm you’d only heard about secondhand. Jonah’s boss. The one he mentioned sometimes. Just Ace says this or Ace needs me for that, and she’d always assumed—
What? What had she assumed? That Ace ran a construction outfit? That Jonah hauled lumber and mixed mortar and came home late because the work ran long?
The truth sat in her hand. Creased, soft, and spelled out in cramped letters on cheap paper.
Her brother ran with thieves.
All those years, all those nights he’d come home late with money he couldn’t explain, all those friends with hard eyes and their hands in their coat pockets…
She stuffed the letter back in the trouser pocket, piled Jonah’s things on top of Mason’s, and walked out of the bunkhouse into the sun.
Where would Jonah be right now?
The stable. He’d said something at breakfast about trimming hooves today. Something about how one of the draft horses had a crack starting, and Logan wanted it dealt with before it split.
She crossed the yard. Miriam stayed on her blanket in the grass, visible from the stable door, happy with her rattle. Grace’s jaw ached—she’d been clenching it since the bunkhouse without realizing—and her hands gripped the basket hard enough to turn her knuckles white.
Twelve years. Twelve years he’s been lyin’ to me. No. Stop. Ask him first. Maybe there’s a—
‘The take from the harbor job. Your cut is 12.’
Explain that, Jonah. Go ahead.
The stable doors hung open. Inside, Jonah crouched by the far stall with one of the big Percherons, the gray one called Captain, propping the horse’s front hoof between his knees. He had a rasp in one hand and worked the hoof.
He looked up when her shadow fell across the stall door. Grinned. “Hey, Gracie. You bring food? ‘cause I could eat a—”
“Who’s Ace?”
The grin died. “What?”
“Ace. A. The man who writes you letters about jobs and takes and keepin’ your head down in the Fourth Ward.” She set the basket on the ground. Hard. “Who is he, Jonah?”
Jonah lowered the hoof. “Where’d you find that?”
“Your trouser pocket. I do your laundry, remember? I check pockets because Mason ruined a whole wash load last week, and I ain’t…” She glowered at him. “Don’t you dare make this about where I found it.”
Jonah leaned the rasp against the stall door. “Gracie—”
“No. No Gracie. You talk to me straight, or I swear, Jonah David Linton, I will—”
“He’s a gang boss.” Jonah’s hands dropped. “In New York. Runs a crew outta the Fourth Ward. Pickpockets, mostly. Small-time stuff. He took me on after Ma and Pa died.”
The stable spun. Just for a second. Just enough that she grabbed the stall door to keep her balance, and the wood bit her palm.
Fourteen. He’d been fourteen, and she’d been ten, and their parents had just died of smallpox, and she’d thought… she’d believed…
“You told me you worked construction.” Her breathing sped up. “You told me you hauled lumber. You told me the odd jobs paid enough to—”
“I know what I told you.”
“So, all of it? Every penny? The food on the table, the rent on that rat-infested hut, the… the chicken breast, Jonah, the one we split that night before I left for Colorado?” Her throat locked up. “That money come from stealin’?”
“Not all of it.”
“How much?”
“Grace—”
“How much of it?!”
Captain tossed his head. Jonah stepped out of the stall and pulled the door shut behind him.
“Most of it.” He barely made a sound. “The honest work paid pennies, Gracie. You know that. You lived—”
“Don’t you tell me how I damn well lived!”
“I tried the docks, the factories, every damn thing a man—”
“Ain’t no doggone way no factory would take you!”
“I ain’t got papers, Gracie! I was fourteen! No schoolin’. I could try, and none of it…” He swallowed. “We were starvin’. You remember? You remember the winter you turned twelve? When the stove broke, and we ate flour paste for—”
“Don’t.”
“I watched you lose weight you didn’t have to lose. I watched you shiver under every blanket we owned and still wake up smilin’ because you didn’t wanna make me feel bad. You were twelve, and you were protectin’ me, and I—”
“Don’t you use me as the reason.” She jabbed a finger at him. “Don’t you dare stand there and make me the excuse for—”
“You ain’t the excuse! You’re the reason I’m still breathin’!” His voice cracked. “I did what I had to do. It wasn’t right. I know it wasn’t right. But I’d do it again, every time, if it meant you ate.”
Something hot pressed behind her eyes. She blinked it back. No. She didn’t get to cry about this. He didn’t get that from her right now.
“The letter mentions a harbor job. Mentions a cut. Twelve dollars.”
“That’s from months ago. Before I came here.”
“And since you came here?”
“Nothin’.” He held both hands up. “I swear on Ma’s grave, Grace. I ain’t done a single job since I set foot on this property. Not one.”
“Ace just let you walk away? A gang boss just said, ‘Sure, Jonah, go work on a ranch in Colorado, no hard feelings?’”
Something flickered across his face. Quick. The kind of thing you’d miss if you blinked, but Grace didn’t blink, and she caught it. A flinch.
“I told him I was done. He didn’t… I mean, he wasn’t happy about it, but I told him I had a fresh start out here and I wasn’t comin’ back.”
“And he just accepted that.”
“Yeah.”
“Jonah.”
“Yeah, Grace. He accepted it. It’s done.”
She stared at him. Her brother. Same dark hair, same jaw, same crooked front tooth from the time he’d fallen off the fire escape when he turned nine. Same face she’d looked at across a kitchen table every day for twenty-one years.
And underneath all of it, a stranger. A whole person she’d never met, living inside the brother she loved, doing things in the dark she couldn’t even…
“Does Logan know?”
“No.”
“If he finds out—”
“He won’t.”
“If he finds out, Jonah, he’ll throw you off this property so fast your boots won’t touch the ground. And this time I won’t fight him on it. You understand me? This time he’d be right.”
Jonah’s face crumpled.
“I’m done with it, Gracie. I swear. This ranch… these people… Logan gave me a chance nobody else would’ve. I ain’t gonna throw that away.” He stepped closer. “I left that life behind. The letter’s old. I shoulda burned it, I just…”
“You just what?”
“I kept it as a reminder. Of what I ain’t goin’ back to.”
She looked at him for a long time. The stable smelled like hay dust and pine shavings, and somewhere outside, Miriam’s rattle jingled faintly in the grass.
“You burn it today.”
“I will.”
“And you tell me everything. All of it. Every job, every take, every person you ran with. I deserve to know what I’ve been livin’ next to for twelve years.”
“Grace, some of it ain’t—”
“I don’t care if it ain’t pretty! I’ve been eatin’ stolen food since I was ten years old without knowin’ it. You owe me the truth.”
He nodded.
***
The wash took an hour and a half.
Grace scrubbed each piece on the board, wrung them, and scrubbed again.
Her knuckles went red, then raw, and the lye soap stung the tiny cracks in her skin.
Miriam babbled on her blanket. Kicked her feet.
Chewed the rattle and dropped it and squawked until Grace picked it up and handed it back, which happened roughly every four minutes.
She hung Jonah’s shirt on the line. Pinned it at the shoulders. The fabric flapped once in the breeze, sleeves spreading wide like arms reaching for something.
A gang boss. Pickpockets. The take from the harbor job.
And now the silver. The break-in. The strongbox was picked open in the night while she and Miriam slept down the—
No.
She jammed the clothespin down so hard it cracked.
No. Jonah wouldn’t. He’d never steal from them. He’d never sneak into the house—the house where she and the baby slept, the house that had taken him in—and rifle through Logan’s desk like some common—
But he knows the house. Where the office sat. How the locks worked. He’d lived here for weeks now, eating at their table, laughing at their jokes, playing with Miriam on the porch while Rafe rocked in his chair and—
Stop it.
She grabbed another shirt from the basket. Plunged it into the tub. The water sloshed over the rim and darkened the dirt at her feet.
Jonah talked about the culvert at the fence line.
Yesterday, after the break-in, standing right there with the rest of the men, pointing out how a person could crawl through.
He’d been the one to check the back door.
He’d found the picked lock. Reported it back to Logan with the right amount of alarm in his voice.
Stop it, Grace.
Her hands twisted the shirt so hard the seams groaned.
This line of thinking made her sick. Physically sick.
A sourness in her stomach, a taste like pennies on her tongue.
Her own brother. The boy who’d starved himself so she could eat.
Who’d slept on the floor so she could have the bed.
Who’d kept her laughing through winters that should’ve broken them both.
No. Not Jonah.
Somebody else broke in. Somebody who knew the property, as Rafe had said. Somebody who’d been watching. The culvert, the back door, and the strongbox all pointed to planning. A person who’d taken the time to study the ranch from the outside.
Her brother slept in the bunkhouse and tripped over chickens. He couldn’t sneak past a rooster named Gerald without ending up on his back in the dirt. The idea of him creeping through a dark house, picking a lock, searching a desk without making a sound…
Ridiculous.
She wrung the shirt out and hung it next to the first one. Two sleeves dripping in the sun. Water running off the cuffs and leaving dark spots on the grass below.
Tonight. He’d tell her everything tonight, and she’d listen, and she’d decide then how much of her brother she could still trust.