Chapter 4
Grace had exactly eleven minutes alone with the seed potatoes before somebody needed her for something.
She was on her knees in the dirt near the fence line, sorting the good eyes from the soft ones, when Ben trotted up from the direction of the barn.
"Russ wants to know which field you want first."
"North of the well house. Tell him to leave the low corner alone until it drains."
Ben was gone before she'd finished the sentence, and she'd barely turned back to the potatoes when somebody else — one of the Bennett girls — appeared at her elbow asking whether the greens went in the shaded bed or the sunny one.
"Sunny," Grace said. "Shaded bed's for the lettuce once it's warm enough."
The girl nodded and ran off, and Grace got maybe four more potatoes sorted before Luke found her, standing quietly the way he did when he had a question and knew better than to blurt it out while she was mid-task.
"What."
"Watch rotation. Curtis had Danny and Cody paired up, but Danny's got a sick kid and can't do the dawn shift."
"Swap him with Mark. Mark's been asking for more hours anyway."
Luke nodded and started to go, then stopped. "Does nobody around here know anything when Dad leaves?"
Grace looked up at him, dirt on her knees, seed potato still in one hand. "Apparently not."
Luke almost smiled and went to find Mark.
She got through maybe six more potatoes before Russ came past leading one of the mules, and he didn't even slow down.
"Morning, Madam Mayor."
"Don't start."
"Wasn't me that started it."
"I know exactly who started it," Grace said, "and he's miles down the road by now, which is the only reason he's not eating this shovel."
Russ laughed and kept walking, mule clopping along behind him, and Grace went back to the potatoes with the distinct sense that she wasn't going to finish them before lunch.
She managed two more before Carol Hendricks came around the corner of the shed with a question about the hoe, and after Carol it was somebody asking whether the chickens could go back out to range yet, and after that a question about whether the well house door still latched right after the frost had swollen the wood.
Grace answered every one of them without standing up, the seed potatoes going slower and slower until she finally gave up pretending she'd finish them before noon and simply worked at whatever pace the questions allowed.
It wasn't that she minded helping. She'd never minded that, not once since the whole thing started. What wore on her was the shape of it — never quite finishing one thing before three more people needed her attention on something else, the day breaking into fragments before she'd had coffee.
She found Rebecca on the porch a little later, working her way through a stretch and wince the doctor clearly hoped nobody was watching.
The foot was better than it had been when Rebecca came through the gate — Grace could see that much just from the way she stood — but better wasn't the same as healed.
Watching her reminded Grace of something that had been sitting at the back of her mind since the horses disappeared down the road that morning.
She found Russ by the harness shed, going over a strap with an awl.
"Has anybody told Harlan?"
Russ didn't need her to explain further. "About the people that killed Rebecca's husband?"
"Yeah."
He thought about it, running the awl along the leather without looking up. "No. Been too busy getting David out the door."
Grace had already known the answer. She'd just needed somebody else to say it out loud so it stopped being only a thought.
"I'm going to ride over there," she said.
Russ looked up at that. "By yourself?"
"I'm going to tell a man something. I'm not invading him."
"Harlan's occasionally had trouble telling the difference."
"Then today will be educational."
Russ didn't try to talk her out of it. He set the strap down and asked the only question that mattered. "When?"
"Now. Before I find twelve more reasons I can't leave."
She found Rebecca before she saddled up, sitting in the chair by the window where she did most of her recovering these days, sorting through what remained of Daniel's records with the careful patience of someone who had nothing but time and one working foot.
"You look like you're about to tell me something I won't like," Rebecca said, without looking up.
"I'm going to warn Harlan," Grace said. "The man who runs the settlement south of here."
Rebecca's hands stilled on the papers. "About the Ravagers?"
"About the Ravagers."
"What are you going to tell him?"
"That there's a group out there. Armed. That they killed a man. That they may be moving through the area." Grace kept her voice even, the way she'd have talked through a recipe. "Nothing more than that."
"My name?"
"No."
"Daniel?"
Grace thought about it a second. "Only that somebody's husband was killed. Nothing that leads back here."
"The records?"
"No."
"That I'm a doctor?"
"No."
"Charlotte?"
"Definitely not."
Rebecca sat back a little, some of the tension going out of her shoulders. She studied Grace a moment.
"You don't trust him."
"I trust him to be Wade Harlan," Grace said.
Rebecca didn't quite follow that, and Grace didn't explain it further, because there wasn't really a way to explain Wade Harlan to someone who'd never met him. Some things you just had to see.
"He'll want to know who I heard it from," Grace said. "I'm not giving him that. Just the shape of the danger."
Rebecca nodded slowly. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. I haven't gone."
Grace saddled one of the Hollow's steady bay geldings, checked the girth twice out of habit, strapped her rifle into the scabbard, holstered her pistol, and packed a canteen and a little food into the saddle bags.
It wasn't a Charlotte trip. It was thirty minutes of riding to a place she'd been a dozen times before.
The road to Harlan's ran through country Grace knew well enough to read without thinking about it, though she found herself reading it anyway.
A field she remembered fallow last fall had a family working it now, turning soil behind a horse that looked half-starved but willing.
Smoke rose steady from three different chimneys along the way, more than she'd have seen in January.
Somebody had strung laundry between two porch posts at the Hendersons' old place, plain shirts and a child's dress snapping in the breeze, and Grace found that oddly heartening — people hanging out laundry meant people planning to still be there next week.
She passed a house that had been occupied the last time she'd ridden this way and now sat dark, door hanging open, curtains gone. She didn't slow down to guess why. Guessing rarely did anybody any good.
An old woman Grace half recognized was out front of another place, working a small garden bed with a hand trowel, and she lifted a hand as Grace rode past. Grace lifted hers back.
She didn't know the woman's name, but she knew the gesture, and these days that was most of what passed for neighborliness on a road like this one.
Mostly what she saw was people getting back to work.
Winter had kept everyone close and quiet.
Spring was pulling them back out into the open, the same way it always had, collapse or no collapse.
David would have been counting something on this ride — distance, cover, water.
Grace found herself counting differently.
Who was out. Who looked thin. Whose garden was already turned and whose wasn't. It was its own way of reading the road, and she trusted it every bit as much as she trusted David's.
The guard at Harlan's outer gate recognized her before she'd even reined up.
"Grace Turner."
"That's me."
He grinned, and Grace already didn't like where this was going. "Madam Mayor."
She closed her eyes briefly. "Curtis has been talking."
"Everybody's been talking."
"Where's Harlan?"
"Want me to tell him the mayor's here?"
"Only if you want me to remember your face," Grace said, and the guard laughed hard enough that he had to wave her through before he could finish it.
So the nickname had made the trip on its own, without her help and without her permission, the way most good gossip did.
Inside the gate, Harlan's people were about the business of spring same as the Hollow's were — a woman turning compost near a row of raised beds, two men repairing a section of fence that looked like it had taken weather damage over the winter, a handful of children chasing something across a yard that used to belong to somebody's front lawn before a hundred and thirty-odd people needed a place to live.
It was a bigger operation than the Hollow's, tighter packed, more people crowded into less space, and Grace could feel the difference in the air even before she reached the main house.
Harlan came out of the main house walking with the limp that had settled into him since the shooting, better than it had been but not gone, and probably never fully going to be.
He looked older than his years in a way David never quite managed, even after everything.
Eighteen years of wearing a badge had left him with a certain way of crossing a yard, shoulders back, eyes moving over everything at once, even now that there wasn't a badge left to pin it to.
He stopped a few paces off and looked her over like he was deciding whether it needed fixing.
"David with you?"
"No."
"Curtis?"
"No."
He looked past her at the empty road. "You came alone?"
"Looks that way."
Somebody near the porch, one of Harlan's own people, made the mistake of calling out before Harlan could ask his next question. "Madam Mayor came to see you, Wade."
Harlan's whole face changed. Grace watched it happen — a tightening around the jaw, a look that could have curdled fresh milk.
"You're the mayor now?" he said.
"No."
"That's not what I'm hearing."
"I'm hearing it too."
"You letting people call you that?"
"I've tried giving Curtis a look about it. Didn't work."