Chapter 11
One Of Us
~
The property line walk turned up nothing conclusive, which was its own kind of frustrating — a fence in decent repair, grazing land that looked exactly like grazing land, no fresh tracks, no locked doors that shouldn't have been locked.
Whatever had used the Petrakis lot to stage that truck's real cargo had done it once, carefully, and hadn't come back since, which told Briar more about how organized the operation was than an actual piece of evidence would have.
Silas had gone quiet walking it, the quiet of a man doing math he didn't like the answer to, and by the time they'd circled back to the yard he'd disappeared into the shop office with Marcus and pulled the door mostly shut, the kind of closed-door conversation that told her clearly enough she wasn't invited to this part of it yet.
She didn't push. She'd learned, three weeks in, that pushing on a closed door with Silas Vaughn usually got her less than waiting did.
She was still turning the fence line over, standing in the yard with her boots dusty and her patience thin, when Birdie appeared at her elbow with the brisk certainty of a woman who'd decided a person needed feeding and wasn't going to be argued out of it.
"You look like you've been chewing on something all morning and haven't managed to swallow it," Birdie said. "Come sit. I made too much cornbread again, the way I do every Tuesday, and somebody around here's got to eat it before Preacher does and I have to start over."
Briar hadn't planned on staying. She found herself sitting at the clubhouse's long kitchen table anyway, a plate of cornbread and greens in front of her that she hadn't asked for and was grateful for the second she tasted it, while Birdie moved around the kitchen with the unhurried efficiency of someone who'd been feeding this exact room of men for longer than Briar had been alive.
"You've been out here most days for a month now," Birdie said, not quite a question.
"Work requires it."
"Mm." Birdie didn't argue, which somehow made the observation land harder than if she had.
She set a second plate down across from Briar and sat, wiping her hands on the towel over her shoulder.
"You know, the first time I met Silas Vaughn, he was maybe twenty-two, skinny as a fence post, scared out of his mind and doing everything he could not to show it.
My husband patched him in that spring. Told me afterward the kid had more sense than half the room twice his age, which coming from my husband was about the highest compliment a man could get. "
"Hard to picture him scared of anything now."
"Everybody's scared of something. Man's just gotten very good at making sure nobody sees it.
" Birdie broke off a piece of cornbread, considering something.
"I'll tell you a story, if you want one.
Don't repeat it to him — he'd be embarrassed I told you, and he doesn't embarrass easy, so that tells you something. "
"I want one."
"About six years back, we had a bad winter, worst in a decade.
Power out three days running, half the county without heat, and there was a family out past the Miller place — not club, not connected to us at all, just an old woman and her two grandkids the county services had more or less forgotten about.
Silas heard about it from somebody at the feed store, didn't say a word to anybody, just loaded his truck with firewood and propane and drove out there himself in a whiteout that had every sane person off the road.
" Birdie's eyes had gone soft with the memory, the fondness of someone recounting a thing they were proud of on somebody else's behalf.
"Spent two days out there making sure that family didn't freeze, came back frostbit on two fingers, and when I asked him about it he told me he'd just been checking on a supply run gone sideways.
Like I was going to believe a supply run needed him personally hauling firewood in a blizzard for two days. "
Briar found herself smiling before she'd decided to, the first real, unguarded laugh she'd let out in longer than she could easily place — surprised into it, warm all the way through in a way that had nothing to do with the cornbread. "That does not sound like the man my father's file described."
"Your father's file described the version of him this whole town needed him to be." Birdie said it gently, no edge in it at all. "Doesn't mean the file was lying, exactly. Just means it was only ever telling one part of a much longer story."
Preacher wandered through partway into the second story — something about Wire, twenty-three years old and convinced he could out-drink a man twice his size, ending the night facedown in the koi pond of a wedding reception none of them had been invited to — and stayed long enough to argue with Birdie over whether the pond had actually had koi in it or whether that detail had grown in the retelling over the years, the two of them bickering with the easy familiarity of people who'd had the same argument a dozen times before and enjoyed it more each time.
Briar found herself laughing again, freely, at the image of Wire — grim, guarded, arms-crossed Wire — soaked to the waist and swearing at a garden ornament, and it struck her, watching Preacher finally concede the koi point under protest, how much this kitchen ran on exactly the kind of teasing, unhurried affection she hadn't realized she'd been missing from her own life until she was sitting in the middle of somebody else's.
They sat a while longer, Birdie filling in pieces of club history that had nothing to do with the investigation at all — old rivalries settled, prospects who'd washed out, a running joke about Preacher's cooking that apparently went back a decade — and Briar found herself relaxing in a way she hadn't let herself relax anywhere in this county in longer than she wanted to think about.
It wasn't the case. It wasn't Silas, not directly.
It was just this — a warm kitchen, a woman who fed people because feeding people was its own kind of love language, a found family that had built itself out of exactly the kind of belonging her own life had been missing since her father died and left her alone in a house full of his unfinished business.
She was still smiling, scraping the last of the greens off her plate, when Birdie said the thing that stopped her cold.
"He used to visit your father's grave, you know.
Not often. Once every few months, maybe, always alone, always early enough that nobody else was usually out there to see him do it.
" Birdie said it lightly, like an afterthought, the way she'd clearly intended it, though something in her eyes suggested she'd known exactly what the words would do before she let them out.
"Never told me why. I just noticed his boots muddy the same way twice a year for going on three years now, and eventually I put it together. "
Briar set her fork down very carefully, because her hands had started to feel unsteady in a way she didn't want Birdie to see.
"He never told me that," she said.
"No," Birdie agreed. "I don't imagine he would."
The kitchen had gone quiet around them, Preacher having wandered back out to whatever he'd been doing before, and for a moment it was just the two of them and the last of the afternoon light coming through a window that needed cleaning, and the weight of three years' worth of muddy boots that Briar hadn't known about until thirty seconds ago.
"Why are you telling me now?" she asked, once she trusted her voice again.
"Because you're sitting in my kitchen eating my cornbread and laughing at stories about a man you spent three weeks deciding you were allowed to still be suspicious of, and I think some part of you needed to hear that he was already grieving your father before he ever got the chance to grieve him with you.
" Birdie reached across the table and covered Briar's hand with her own, brief and warm, the same unhurried certainty she brought to everything else in that kitchen.
"Whatever's between you two, and don't think this old woman hasn't noticed there's something, it's not going to make sense until you let yourself believe that part.
He didn't just survive your father's hatred all these years, honey.
He mourned him right alongside you. Just never had anywhere to put it. "
Briar didn't trust herself to answer that out loud. She sat with it instead, the cornbread gone cold on her plate, and let the kitchen's quiet hold her the way it seemed to hold everyone who sat long enough in it.