Chapter 15
Florence had been up since before the light, and the first thing she had decided was that she was not going to be a coward.
She had put her hair up and put on her second dress, the dark wool.
She ate a piece of bread from her travel case and drank a cup of water from the jug.
She took the long way across the yard so she would pass the wood and see, by daylight, that her stone and her smaller stone sat as she had left them.
They sat. A thin layer of dust had blown across the disturbed spot.
A person who didn't know wouldn't see it.
She walked up the path to the ranch house. She had her shawl over her arm and her hands free, and her hands were not shaking, and the very absence of the canvas bag at her shoulder was a kind of lightness she had not felt since Chicago.
Two horses stood at the rail by the porch.
Two men stood on the porch. A thin one in the dark coat, with his hat on his head and his case under his arm.
A broader one with a tin star. They turned and came down the porch steps unhurriedly, and they didn't look at her, and they unhitched their horses and mounted.
The thin one looked once at the porch as he gathered his reins, and lifted a hand at the figure of Beau standing in the open doorway.
Beau didn't lift a hand back.
The two riders nudged their horses past her without looking at her. The horses' hooves kicked dust at her hem. She turned her head and watched them go. The dust settled. The lane went quiet.
On the porch, Beau watched her arrive.
She climbed the steps. He stepped back into the doorway to let her through. He didn't say good morning. She didn't say it either. The hallway smelled of coffee and of a stove that had been kept burning. Lydia was not in the kitchen, in fact, the kitchen was empty.
"Who were those men?" Florence said.
Beau didn't answer.
She turned. He was a step behind her, in the kitchen doorway, with his hand on the frame. The morning sun fell through the back window and made the brown of his eyes a different color than she had seen yesterday. He was looking at her, and the looking was not gentle.
"Beau?"
"Were you in the wood last night, Florence?"
The kitchen went small around her.
He had not said good morning, and he had not said I'm glad to see you, and he had not said let me pour you a cup of that coffee. He had said were you in the wood last night. Her face shifted before she could stop it, and she was already turned to him, and there was nothing to be done about either.
She breathed in.
"I couldn't sleep."
“Huh?"
"I couldn't sleep. The bed was strange and the wind was loud and there was a — there was a quail. I walked. I'm not used to being still in a place I don't know. I walked along the edge of the wood. It calmed me."
"You took a bag."
"My shawl."
“I heard it was a bag."
"My shawl, Beau. It was cold."
The lie sat where the bag had sat against her hip for two days. She had not understood, until that morning, that the bag would make her into a person who lied. She listened to her own mouth answer him. He didn't believe her. She didn't, in turn, blame him.
He drew one slow breath. His jaw went tight. He looked at the far wall, and then back at her.
"Sit down," he said.
She sat. He put a cup of coffee in front of her without asking, and one in front of himself, and he sat across the table, then he set his hands flat on the wood the way her father had done at breakfast in Worcester.
"There's a great deal to do today," he said. "I'd be grateful if you'd help in the house. Lydia is on her way to school. Quint will be in the south yard. Mrs. Letts won't be in until the afternoon. The kitchen needs the floor scrubbed. The pantry needs sorting. There's bread to be made."
"Yes."
"Eat your breakfast first."
"Yes."
"I'll be back at dark. I have business in Prosperity."
"With those men?”
"With those men. Yes."
He stood, took his hat off the peg, and didn't look at her again. He went out through the back door, and a minute later she heard the wagon move off down the lane, the bay's hooves on the dust, and the ring of the harness brass.
She sat at the table with her hands around the cup and her shoulders very straight, because if she didn't hold her shoulders straight they wouldn't hold themselves.
The kitchen was honest somehow, with a yellow oilcloth and a row of plates on a shelf and a small jar of last summer's preserves on the dresser. It reminded her that she wasn’t honest. Not anymore.
She had been a fool to come here. She let herself think it for a count of five seconds. Then she stood up and found a brush and a bucket, because if she was a fool she was not going to be one who wept in a man's kitchen on the morning he had asked her to scrub his floor.
She filled the bucket from the kettle, set it on the boards, knelt, and scrubbed.
She kept her ears open for the dust of horses coming up the lane.
What she most feared today was not Beau Ferris.
It was two men on two strange horses, who had ridden out of his porch without looking at her, and who had not, she was now perfectly sure, finished with this house.
Had they been there for her? For the money?
Was she going to be arrested?