Salt and Chrome (THE IRON HEX MC #4)

Prologue

Wrenlee

Seven years ago

My mother's wedding dress smelled like cedar and old smoke, and I was standing in the back room of the Marrow Bend Methodist church in it, being pinned into place by two women who had known me since I was in diapers and had strong opinions about my posture.

"Stand up straight, Wrenlee Marie."

"I am standing up straight."

"You're standing up like a question mark," Miss Ida said around three pins she was holding in her mouth, which is a thing old women in this parish can do and nobody knows how. "You want to walk down that aisle looking like you're apologizing?"

"A little."

"To who?"

"The dress, mostly. It was thinner when she wore it."

Delphine snorted from the corner where she was sitting on an upturned hymnal crate with her boots up on a folding chair, wearing a bridesmaid dress the color of swamp water in a good light. "Your mama was nineteen and lived on cigarettes and spite."

"She lived on rice."

"She lived on spite. The rice was for show."

Miss Ida pulled a pin out of her mouth and set it into my hip like she was staking a claim on the property. "Your mama would have loved this."

The room got a little quiet the way rooms do.

"She'd have hated the flowers," I said.

"She'd have hated the flowers," Miss Ida agreed. "Who picked lilies?"

"Jonah's aunt."

"Well. God bless her."

"That's not what you mean."

"It's what I said."

There was a mirror on the back of the door with a crack in the corner shaped like a river fork, and I looked at myself in it and thought, with total calm, the way you think about weather: in forty minutes I will be married to Jonah Pike.

I had thought it maybe eleven thousand times in the year we'd been engaged and it had never once gotten old. It was like putting your hand on a stove that gave off cold instead of heat. Something you couldn't stop checking.

Delphine caught my eye in the cracked glass.

"You good?"

"I'm good."

"You look like you're about to bolt."

"I'm not going to bolt."

"I know you're not," she said. "You've been chasing that man since you were fifteen years old and he was too polite to notice. I'm just saying you look like it."

"That's the dress. The dress makes everyone look guilty."

"It's a Thibodeaux dress. Guilt's woven in."

Somebody's kid ran past the door hollering. Organ music started up in the sanctuary, that long groaning warm-up note like a cow being asked a hard question, and Miss Ida stood back and put her hands on her hips and looked at me for a second too long.

"Well," she said. "There."

"There?"

"There. That's all you get. I'm not going to cry in front of you, I'll have to redo my whole face."

Then she went out and it was me and Delphine and about six square feet of my mother's dress and the smell of lilies coming under the door.

That was 10:41 in the morning.

At 10:47 the east line broke.

I want to be careful here, because I've told this story exactly twice in seven years and both times I told it wrong.

It doesn't feel like an alarm. It's not a scream in your head. Nothing dramatic happens. If it were dramatic somebody else might have felt it, and then everything after would have gone different.

What it feels like is this: you're standing on a floor, and then you're standing on a floor with one board pulled up somewhere behind you, and you can't see it, but your whole body knows the room is wrong now.

I was holding my mother's veil when it happened. I remember my hands going open. The veil went down on the floorboards and I didn't pick it up.

Delphine said, "Wren?"

I said, "Something's open."

"What?"

"East boundary. Something's open."

She sat up. She'd known me a long time. "Open how."

"I don't know yet."

"Wrenlee."

"Give me a second."

I put my palm flat on the wall of that church, and the wall of that church is old cypress and it has been listening to this town since 1889, and I asked it a question the way my grandmother taught me, which is without words, and it answered the way old wood answers, which is slowly and with resentment.

Eleven miles of salt around the east half of Marrow Bend. Laid by my great-grandmother in 1931 and re-laid by my grandmother in 1968 and touched up by my mother in the years before she stopped being able to touch anything.

There was a gap in it the width of a truck.

Not scattered. Not scuffed. Gapped, like something had been driven through it, and I could feel the air on the other side moving in — that slow suck you get when you open a door in a house that's been closed all summer.

"Wren, your face is doing something I don't like."

"There's a hole in the east line."

"Okay. So we fix it Monday."

"No."

"Wrenlee—"

"It's Sunday, Delph."

She stopped.

Everybody in Marrow Bend knows what Sunday means, but not everybody knows why, and the why is the part my family carries.

The east line isn't a fence. It's a schedule.

It only has to hold on the days the church is full, because the church being full is the thing that draws attention, and attention is the thing that finds holes.

Two hundred people were sitting in that sanctuary in their good clothes with their hair done. The largest gathering in this town in nine years.

Behind them, eleven miles out, a door standing open the width of a truck.

"How long to lay it," Delphine said. Not can it wait. She'd read the same books I had, half of them anyway.

"Depends how much is gone."

"Ballpark."

"If it's a clean gap and I've got the salt and nothing goes wrong — ten hours. Twelve."

"And if you don't lay it."

I looked at her.

"Say it out loud," she said. "So I know I'm hearing you right."

"If I don't lay it, then somewhere around noon two hundred people find out what my family does for a living."

Here's the part I've never been able to say cleanly, so I'll just put it down flat.

I thought about telling him.

I thought about it for about ninety seconds, standing there in that dress with my hands shaking, and I want it in the record that I did think about it, because everyone in this town has spent seven years assuming I didn't think at all.

I could see it happening. I could see myself pushing open that door, walking down the side aisle past the Pikes and the Boudreauxs and Miss Ida's whole church-fan operation, up to the front, to Jonah, standing there in a suit that had been let out at the shoulders twice because the man is built like a load-bearing wall, and saying: I have to go do something and I can't tell you what it is and I need you to wait.

And here is the thing. He would have waited.

That's not the tragedy. Everyone thinks the tragedy is that he wouldn't have understood.

He would have waited, and he would have gotten in the truck with me, and he would have carried salt for eleven hours in his wedding suit and never once asked me a question I didn't want to answer, and around hour six the thing on the other side of that gap would have gotten a good long look at him.

Jonah Pike's family gave three men to the club and two of them are in the ground on the wrong side of the fence, and the thing out past the east line has a very specific appetite for a Pike.

I didn't know that at 10:52 in the morning. I want to be honest. I've had seven years to build the version of me who knew it, and she's a lot more noble than the woman who was actually standing in that room.

What I actually thought was: if I go up that aisle I will not be able to leave.

That's all. That's the whole calculation. I knew that if I looked at his face I would stay, and if I stayed, two hundred people would find out what walks in on the Sunday side of this town, and about eleven of them would be dead by Wednesday.

So I didn't look at his face.

"Delph."

"Don't."

"I need the truck."

"Wrenlee, I swear to God—"

"I need you to go tell him."

She stood up so fast the folding chair went over. "No. You go tell him. You walk out there and you tell that man to his face, he deserves—"

"He deserves better than a woman who can't finish a sentence," I said. "I can't explain it, Delph. Not without explaining all of it. And I'm not allowed."

"Says who?"

"Says my grandmother, says her mother, says every woman whose name is in that book. You don't tell the town. The whole point is they don't know."

"He's not the town. He's Jonah."

"He's a patched member of the Iron Hex MC, and if he knows, then Preacher knows by supper, and then it's a club matter, and then it's not mine anymore.

" I was pulling my boots on under my mother's dress and my hands were doing fine, which I hated.

"And the second it's a club matter, men ride out there.

And the east line doesn't take men well, Delph. It never has."

She stood there in the swamp-water dress with her fists closed.

"Ten hours," she said.

"Twelve."

"They'll wait an hour. Maybe two. Then they'll start talking."

"I know."

"By tonight this town will have decided something about you."

"I know."

"And you're not going to correct it."

I got the truck keys out of the drawer where Miss Ida had put my purse.

There was a note in the purse. I'd forgotten about it until I put my hand on it.

Wrenlee — you look like her. Don't let anybody tell you it's a sad thing. It isn't. — Mama

I read it standing up with the keys already in my hand and about ninety seconds left of being the woman I'd been that morning, and then I folded it and put it in my boot, where it stayed for eleven hours and where the salt got into it and where, seven years later, in a drawer in a rented room over a laundromat, it was still legible if you knew what it said.

I looked at my friend, who had her chin up and her eyes wet and her jaw set exactly like her grandmother's.

"I can't correct it without explaining it," I said. "That's the whole trap. It's a good trap. It's been holding for a hundred years."

"Then let me tell him something. Let me tell him anything."

"Tell him I'm sorry."

"That's the worst thing you could possibly tell him."

"I know," I said. "It's also true."