Chapter 11
Cordelia sat on a hard bench inside Sheriff Tench's office in Fox Hollow and counted, by the sound, the number of men gathered outside on the boardwalk.
Perhaps naively, she hadn’t considered that.
It was somewhere between twelve and twenty.
Their voices came through the front wall in a low restless roll.
Tench had let four of them in to start. Sippy and Drew and a man called Inglis from over the saddlery were there.
A fourth man she did not know stood against the back wall with his arms crossed and a face like a hard apple left to set.
Rufus sat to her right, hat on his knee. Boone sat to her left, between her and the wall. He hadn't moved since they'd come in. He sat so still that for a moment he might have stopped breathing. Then he blinked. His hand at his thigh tightened on the cloth.
Tench stood behind his desk. He had heard Sippy out and Drew out and was about to hear Rufus out.
"Rufus," Tench said. "You came in."
"I did."
Cordelia sat very straight on the bench. Boone, beside her, had stopped breathing again; she could tell by his sleeve.
"You told me yesterday the boy stays."
"I told you he stays unless you have cause. You have a town outside this door with violence in its hand. I won't pretend it isn't there. I’ve brought him in. I have not given him over. There is a difference, and I'm asking you to keep that difference in your head while we sit here."
"All right."
Outside, the boardwalk voices rose and settled like wind working at a door.
"I will say this in front of Sippy and in front of Albert and in front of every man at that door. The boy did not pry that box. He’s hiding why he was in town, but he is not hiding a robbery. I would put my name to that. I would put my hand on the Book to that, Abe."
"Your name is not the question, Rufus."
"I know it."
The office had gone quiet enough that the boardwalk murmur filled it.
"The question is the boy."
"Then ask the boy."
Tench turned. He set his palms on the desk and leaned a little forward and asked Boone, gently, and Cordelia thought that, for all his weariness, Abraham Tench hadn't yet lost the kindness in his voice when he asked a boy a question.
"Boone. I'll ask you the same thing I asked you yesterday. Where were you that night?"
"I was in town, sir."
"For what?"
Boone did not answer.
"Son. I’m not the men outside. I'll give a true answer a fair hearing. Where were you going?"
Boone's mouth opened a fraction. He closed it. He shook his head, once.
"I can't, sir."
A sound went through the room. Sippy looked down. Drew looked at the ceiling. The man against the wall hadn't moved since she'd come in.
Cordelia hadn't meant to take her attention off the conversation, but it drifted anyway. The sound of the men outside was getting harder. Boone's eyes had gone somewhere past Tench's shoulder, past the desk, past the back wall, out the front window into the street.
She turned her head.
Across the street, on the boardwalk outside the milliner's, a girl was standing.
Sixteen, maybe, with a pale dress and a bonnet pushed back at the shoulders and a face turned toward this window.
The girl was looking at Boone. Boone was looking at the girl.
They weren't waving or nodding. They were holding each other in a long stillness that had nothing to do with any other person in any other room.
The back of her neck went hot. She pressed her lips together.
Cordelia did not say anything.
She turned her face back toward the desk, in case the holding broke if she stared at it. In the corner of her eye, the girl across the street pressed one gloved hand against her own mouth and lowered it again, slowly, and then turned her head away, as though she had been called.
Cordelia looked at Boone.
Boone looked at Cordelia.
He had seen her notice. His eyes were wet. He blinked twice, and the wet did not go anywhere. His mouth set in the tight line of a boy who was not going to cry today. She gave him one nod, not in agreement but in acknowledgment. I see you. I haven't said anything. I'm not going to say anything yet.
His shoulders eased a fraction.
She did not look at Rufus. His arm was against hers on the bench. She left it there. His breathing came slow against her arm, the rise and fall of it close enough to count. The press of his arm was the one steady point in the room, and she did not move away.
"Rufus." Tench's voice came back to her.
"I'll be plain. I'm not going to put the boy in a cell today. I have one cell and a town outside the door I'd like to discourage from coming into it. I'll tell you what I told Sippy out there. I’m not satisfied with the boy's story. Mostly because he hasn’t told me one. I’m not satisfied with the witnesses either, because I think their accounts are vague, and they’re all starting to tell what they heard instead of what they saw.
I'm going to keep working. You'll keep the boy on your place, and you and I will be in this room again before the week is out. "
"Yes, Abe."
Boone's hand, flat on his thigh, uncurled by one finger. Cordelia let her own breath go with it.
"Albert."
"Sheriff."
"You and Sippy and Inglis will tell those men outside that I have charge of this. I will not have a ride out to the Barclay place again. The next ride that goes that way will get sent home by me, personally, with my badge in hand and no apology. Are we clear?”
“Sheriff,” Sippy protested, “you didn’t exactly push him.”
“I think he’s holding something inside. But it’s not the whereabouts of your money. He’s holding a secret that’s not entirely his.”
“So he’s got a partner?”
“I’m going to deal with this, and you’re going to let me. That’s why you put me in this job, so let me do it.”
The men made the sound men make when they haven't got everything they wanted. Cordelia, on her bench, did not watch them. Her eyes stayed on the front window, then the boardwalk across the street.
A man with a beard going grey at the chin had come up to the girl. He set a hand on her shoulder and spoke down at her, not gently. The girl bent her head. The man moved off down the boardwalk. The girl followed half a step behind, her bonnet brim down.
Cordelia turned back to her bench. The man at the wall hadn't shifted once. His eyes hadn't gone to the window.
Beside her Boone breathed out, very quietly, the breath he had been holding.
The men left. Rufus stood and put his hat on. Cordelia rose. She kept her face arranged. As they passed out into the noon, she looked back once at the window of the sheriff's office and at the empty stretch of boardwalk where the girl had stood.
She would not say a word, not yet. She had a name to find, and a question for Rufus on the ride home that she hadn't yet figured out how to ask.