CHAPTER 23
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Twenty past nine on a Monday morning, and I had made three mugs of coffee and not one of them was mine.
Luke's was black with four sugars and going cold on the kitchen table because he had been on the porch forty minutes giving Deputy Kittredge the tenth version of the same statement.
The sheriff's was cream and no sugar, sitting on the porch rail two inches from his elbow.
Kittredge's was black with one sugar, on the far end of the rail where she liked to pace while she wrote, going cold too.
Mine was in the kettle because I was not going to drink coffee today. I had been up since half past five in the morning, and my hands were doing a thing they do not do — a slow steady tremor at the meat of the thumb — and coffee was not going to help.
The gauze on my left palm was fresh. Kittredge had come in at seven, taken one look at me, said sit down, girl, and rewrapped the burn after cooling it under clean running water.
A thin layer of burn gel. Non-stick pad.
A figure-eight around the meat under the thumb.
Blister-white rosette at the center. No exposed tissue.
It would scar, she said in her Marine voice, and it would not stop me using the hand for anything I wanted.
Marta was still in the safe room off the bathroom.
She had entered a little after eight yesterday morning with a Motorola, the hardline, the vent fan, twelve gallons of water, food, sanitation liners, and the wool blanket.
She used the hardline once, at eight-twelve, to give dispatch the coordinate without a wobble.
When I put my hand on the door at six this morning and said it was over, she answered through the steel: I will hear his boot on the plank floor first.
She was still waiting, a little over twenty-five hours into an eight-by-ten concrete room, safe by design and terrified by choice, with a rosary in her apron pocket and a hardline she had not needed after the first dial.
The mother's crucifix is still in the safe, I thought.
The safe was five feet from the safe room, under a rug I had walked over eight hundred times in seven weeks.
Luke had taken the evidence file out at eleven last night and put it in Beau's canvas bag, and Beau had walked out of the cabin at eleven-oh-four in the dark with the bag over his shoulder and the sat phone in his hand and a promise to call at first light.
First light had come and gone. No call yet.
The crucifix I had lifted out of the safe on the night I confronted him — cool, cool silver worn thin, a leather cord black at the loop from six years of nothing — was still in the safe.
I meant to put it back in his hand, I thought. I will do that today.
Beneath the tremor at the meat of my thumb I noticed another thing.
I have not cried yet.
My thumb pressed once into my palm and stopped.
A quarter past noon. A black Suburban came up the ranch road slow.
Two federal agents. The man was one of Beau's — Luke had said that's Beau's Bozeman through the screen door and gone out to meet him.
The woman was in her forties, ash-blonde in a pulled-back braid, a jacket that fit like it had been fitted, a plain silver band on her right hand and none on her left.
She looked at me twice as she came up the steps. She did not say a word.
They took Boyd's body in a black bag. They took the burned phosphorus casing out of the study over at the main house — the sheriff had bagged it at nine and left it on the porch for them.
They took a signed statement from Luke and one from me.
The woman was the one who took mine. She sat across from me at the kitchen table and slid a legal pad across and said from the beginning, in your own words, and did not interrupt me once in twenty-three minutes.
When I got to the part about running from the mudroom to the study with Marta pressed into the line of my back and the fire extinguisher pin ring coming off in my hand, she wrote a single word down and underlined it. I did not lean over to read the word. I did not want to know which one it was.
At a little before one in the afternoon, after nearly twenty-nine hours inside, Luke crossed to the utility hall doorframe and called Marta's name once through six inches of steel, and she came out.
She did not look at any of us for a full ten count. She stood in the doorway of the safe room with the rosary loose in her fist and the apron still tied and one of the wool blanket's threads still on her sleeve. Then she looked at me. Then she looked at Luke.
Then she looked at the woman agent, who had stood up when Luke called Marta's name, and Marta walked past all of us to the woman and held out the rosary and said hold this for me in the tone she uses for a thing that is not a question.
The woman took the rosary. Held it a moment. Handed it back. Said thank you, se?ora. Marta put the rosary in the apron pocket and then Marta took over the propane range.
Fried potatoes. Eggs. Coffee refilled. She did not speak to any of us while she cooked, and none of us spoke either.
Sheriff Hollister ate one plate and stood and put the plate in the sink himself and touched the brim of his hat to Luke and then he crossed the kitchen and put his hand on my shoulder for one full second.
“Girl. You did all right.”
I did not know what to do with that. I set it beside the underlined word in the mental memo I would read later.
Just after two in the afternoon. The last vehicle rolled down the ranch road.
I watched the dust rise and settle by the switchback.
I stood at the porch rail with my bandaged left hand at my side and my right hand curled around the porch post and the pink rosette blister under my thumb throbbing in time with a pulse that would not slow.
Marta was going down with the sheriff. She insisted. She said she had laundry, in the voice that meant I need to walk through my own house alone. She had kissed my forehead in the corridor and said one line in a voice I had never heard from her before.
“He is a good one. He was always a good one.”
I did not ask which he.
I stood at the rail until the dust settled at the switchback and then I turned, and Luke was standing in the doorway of the utility hall with the plank up at his feet and the safe open below it and the small silver crucifix flat in his palm.
He looked at me across the front room. Bandaged right forearm, one pale wrap covering the six-suture knife wound and the suppressor burn Kittredge had dressed at eleven.
Left shoulder wrapped clean over the graze.
Gray T-shirt with a coffee stain from breakfast. Barefoot.
The L. C. W. signet on his pinky catching the west light from the porch behind me.
“I want to put this on today,” he said.
He did not say why.
I gave him one nod.
He put the leather cord over his head. The small silver crucifix settled at the hollow of his throat between the collar of the T-shirt and the wrapped edge of the shoulder graze.
He looked down at it once. He closed the safe.
He set the plank flush. He rolled the red-and-cream Navajo rug back over it with the toe of his bare foot.
Then he walked to me across the front room and stopped one step short. He let out a long breath and left the last of the load between us.
“Sweetheart.”
“Take me to bed.”
The bedroom faced west, and the sun at a quarter to four in the afternoon on a Monday in August at eight thousand feet came through the double-pane ballistic glass in a slab of gold that lay across the wool blanket at the foot of the bed and turned the gray-with-red-edge to a color the blanket did not have any other time of day.
My forearm went into that slab of gold when I stepped into it, and the fine hairs at the crook of my elbow lit up as if they were something a bee would come to.
The wool smelled the way clean wool smells when the sun has been in it for an hour.
There was no other smell like it, and I had not known that fact was in me until it was.
He was behind me.
His hand at the small of my back. Barefoot, still.
The belt already off; I had not felt him take it off.
His right forearm was pale under the tape and his left ribs were carrying the color under his T-shirt of a boot that had gone in hard the day before, and I had not touched either yet.
I did not want to touch them yet. I wanted to be undressed.
I wanted my clothes off my body and his body up against mine and the sun on the blanket and the vow that we had not spoken yet, in that order.
I took my own shirt off. Right hand only, slow, because the left was gauze. The last button was on the sleeve I could not reach one-handed and he came around and did it for me without saying a word and slid the shirt off my shoulders and laid it on the chair.
Then he knelt.
He knelt the way a man kneels who ties his boot laces on a slope every morning.
Not clumsy. Steady, one knee, both hands at the button of my jeans.
He looked up at me once as he opened the fly.
His face at the height my father's face used to be at, when I was six and my father knelt on the mudroom floor to tie my shoes for me on winter mornings, back before he took a curve on I-70 wrong in the year I was twenty-two.
I do not have to be too much here, I thought. I do not have to be less.
My right hand went into his hair. Ash-brown, uncut, warm under my palm. I said his name in a voice I did not recognize.
His gaze lifted to mine.
“Yes.”
He took the jeans down slow. Panties with them. He kissed the crease at my hip once, and then he stood up in the one clean motion of a tall man who does not waste movement, and he laid me back on the bed with the sun-heat gold on my forearm and the wool blanket smelling of an hour of afternoon.
His mouth at my collarbone. My sternum. The dip below my ribs. My navel.
“Can I,” he said, low.
“Yes.”
“Tell me what hurts.”
“I will.”
He put his mouth on me.