Chapter 1 #4
He should have answered that quickly, but he hated to admit that he was startled by Miss Selkirk.
Most people adjusted themselves when Victor Rathburn’s name entered the room.
Rathburn owned rail, land, contracts, and the good opinion of men who preferred their fortunes undisturbed.
This woman, on the other hand, seemed to know it all and still declined to care.
Jasper looked at her briefly, measuring the difference.
There was no defiance in her for the sake of display, no reckless boldness that mistook itself for courage.
Only a plain refusal to grant the name any authority over her judgment.
He found, against expectation, that he respected it.
And that, more than the question itself, delayed his answer.
“At present,” he said at last, “it is the trouble I’ve been assigned to attend to.”
Her expression changed by so little, it might have been imagined. “That,” she said, “is the first sensible thing you’ve said.”
At that, Jasper ought to have left. He had his answer, thin though it was, and enough instinctive resistance from her to suggest that any further pressure at the door would yield little besides mutual annoyance.
Yet he lingered half a moment longer than the exchange required.
He gave the slightest nod. “Good day, Miss Selkirk,” he said politely.
“Is it?” she asked. Then she shut the door.
He stood looking at the weathered wood for a beat, feeling faintly as though he’d been weighed and found not quite worth the trouble of further comment. Then he went back to his horse.
***
The road north toward Harrow had taken on another layer of mud with the morning’s thaw. Jasper had gone perhaps half a mile before he saw the shoe.
It lay at the edge of a washed-out patch where the ground fell away toward a stand of low brush, half sunk in the muck, one side scuffed nearly black by water and grit. He drew the reins, dismounted, and bent to pick it up.
It was a woman’s shoe, of fine leather, narrow enough for town wear but plainly made, built for floors and boardwalk rather than mud and stone.
The stitching at the side was delicate work that might have come from a decent shop, not a luxury one though but it was still finer than anything a woman on this stretch of coast would be likely to lose on the road.
He turned it over in his hand, then looked back the way he had come, toward the headland hidden now by the turn of the road and the thickening trees.
You know more than you tend to show, Miss Selkirk.
And my job is to find out what exactly you’re trying to hide.
Eventually, he slipped the shoe into his saddlebag and mounted again.
***
Harrow didn’t come into view until late the next day, with its rough timber buildings and wet streets running downhill toward the harbor, the case no longer felt quite as modest as it had in the agency office.
Jasper went straight to the telegraph office.
The operator knew him by type if not by name, which was to say he knew a man who traveled with a coat too plain for wealth and too well cut for labor and carried the clipped impatience of somebody who got paid for other people’s trouble.
He slid the blank toward Jasper without conversation.
Jasper wrote: NO CONFIRMED TRACE WOMAN OR CHILD STOP CONTINUING INQUIRIES STOP
He looked at the message before handing it across.
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t also the full of what he had.
Miss Selkirk had seen to that. She’d given him nothing, and her questions, few as they were, had cut closer to the matter than his own brief had managed.
It left him with an unease he could not yet justify, only acknowledge.
The operator counted out the cost. Jasper paid it, took the receipt, and stepped back into the street. He told himself he was buying time, enough to see whether the unease in his gut had enough to explain itself or whether he was merely growing fanciful on coastal roads and too little sleep.
But when he reached the small room he’d taken above the saloon and drew the shoe back out into the light, it looked no less out of place than before.
He set it on the table and sat across from it.
For some moments he considered nothing but the case itself, turning over each part of it as though careful handling might make it sit more cleanly in the mind.
Yet taken together, the whole of it resisted the neat explanation he’d been initially given, and that resistance was what unsettled him.
Then, against his better judgment, he found himself thinking again of Elara Selkirk’s face in the doorway.
It was memorable in the worst possible way, because there had been nothing in it that asked anything of him, as though she had already decided exactly how much of herself she meant to give a stranger, and the amount was very nearly nothing.
He looked at the shoe again, then at the window, where the afternoon had begun to turn the harbor water to dull pewter beneath the cloud.