Chapter 9 #2
"Then what's the problem?"
"We're not taking anybody in."
He argued that they clearly had land, food, room enough to spare a little. Grace didn't confirm any of it.
"Kid said there wasn't anybody in charge," he said.
Grace glanced toward Luke. "He was right."
"Then who makes the decision?"
"I just did."
The man's jaw tightened. He said he wasn't walking another twenty miles today, like that changed anything about the answer he'd already gotten.
"Then I'd start with the first one," Grace said.
He stared at her a moment. Grace held the rifle easy, muzzle down, and didn't raise it.
She didn't need to. Around her, without any visible signal, the others had shifted closer together — Luke steady where he stood, Bennett a few feet off with his own rifle in hand, Billy Jean holding her ground rather than retreating further.
The stranger saw all of it at once, the way a man does when he finally does the math on a situation instead of just talking through it.
"There's nothing down this road for you," Grace said.
"Maybe I'll decide that myself."
"No," Grace said. "You won't."
He looked at the rifle in her hands, then at her face, and whatever he saw there settled the question for him.
"You came here asking," Grace said. "I answered. Now I'm suggesting you move on while we're all still being polite about it."
He shouldered his pack, muttering something about people like them needing help someday and not having anybody willing to give it.
"Probably," Grace said, unmoved.
He tried once more to make it land as guilt. It didn't. He turned and walked back the way he'd come, and nobody at the barricade relaxed until he'd shrunk to a speck on the road and finally disappeared past the bend.
Grace turned to Luke. "How close did he get?"
Luke told her — the distance he'd held the man to, the moment he'd shifted the rifle, the wait for Billy Jean to bring word.
"Did he ever touch the barricade?"
"No."
"Try going around?"
"No."
"Reach for his weapon?"
"No."
"Good," Grace said, and Luke wasn't entirely sure whether she meant him or the man who'd just left. Then she added, "You handled it right," and that answered the question well enough.
Billy Jean looked prouder of that than Luke did himself. Grace noticed how close the two of them stood, closer than they used to, and decided this wasn't the moment to say anything about it. David was going to have opinions when he got home. That could wait too.
The next day passed ordinary enough — planting, repairs, the usual noise of a place trying to grow its own food fast enough to matter.
Grace caught herself wondering, once, whether she'd been too hard on yesterday's stranger. She let the thought go almost as fast as it arrived. Better to turn away one decent man than let one dangerous one through a gate meant to protect families who hadn't asked for either kind of visitor.
Luke had taken his shift more seriously since the encounter, which Billy Jean found endlessly funny.
"You know you're unbearable now," she told him, walking past the barricade that afternoon.
"I defended the gate."
"You sat in a chair and told a man no."
"Heroically."
She was still laughing when a rider appeared on the road from the south.
Grace recognized him before anybody needed to say the name.
Harlan brought one man with him, enough to make a point about who he was without making it look like an approach. He rode at an easy pace, the way a man rides when he expects to be received rather than questioned, and reined up a few yards short of the gate like he'd done it a hundred times before.
The watcher at the gate — Cody, this time — didn't open it.
"You know who I am," Harlan said, already impatient.
"Yep."
"Then open it."
"Nope."
Harlan's jaw worked. "I need to see David."
Cody didn't answer that.
"He's not here anyway," Harlan said, and something in his tone made that land less like a question than a fact he already possessed.
Cody's expression didn't change, but his posture tightened a fraction. Harlan had said it like a fact, not a guess.
Cody sent a runner for Grace and made Harlan wait outside the gate the same as anybody else, which visibly cost the man something.
He wasn't used to standing on the wrong side of a barricade waiting for permission.
His companion stayed mounted a few yards back, saying nothing, clearly used to letting Harlan do the talking.
The runner reached Grace at a jog. "Harlan's at the gate."
"What does he want?"
"David."
"David isn't there."
"He knows."
That stopped her mid-motion. "He said that?"
"Said David wasn't here anyway."
Grace went for the rifle again, moving faster this time. Russ caught sight of her from the equipment shed.
"Harlan?"
"Harlan."
He fell in beside her without being asked, and by the time they reached the barricade Walter had joined them too — not because Grace needed protecting, but because the Hollow had a way of showing up behind her without anybody organizing it.
"Madam Mayor," Harlan said, when Grace reached the gate.
"Harlan."
She didn't rise to it.
"I came to talk to David," he said.
"He's not here."
"I know."
"How?"
Harlan didn't answer that directly. "People notice things."
"Which people?"
"Does it matter?"
"To me."
He gave her nothing further, and Grace didn't like what that suggested.
"With David gone, I thought I'd come check on things," Harlan said.
"Check on what?"
He listed it out, reasonable-sounding on the surface — security, food situation, how spring was treating them, whether the Hollow's defenses held up with David away.
"I'm not trying to cause trouble, Grace," he said.
"Then you're doing it badly."
He argued the threats outside were only getting worse. She reminded him that was exactly why the gate stayed closed.
"I'm not a threat," he said.
"Then staying on that side of it shouldn't bother you."
Harlan leaned on what he knew — eighteen years wearing a badge, a settlement of over a hundred people he'd kept running through a winter that had broken plenty of others. He'd seen things Grace hadn't. David understood that.
"I policed a county for eighteen years, Grace. I've seen what happens to places that get careless because somebody in charge stepped away for a good while."
"Nobody stepped away from anything. He's on a trip."
"A long one, from what I hear."
"From what you hear," Grace repeated, letting the words sit there for him to notice on his own.
Harlan didn't rise to it. "David understood that experience counts for something. That's why we've always been able to talk, him and me."
"David understood you weren't coming through either," Grace said.
"David and I could talk man to man."
"Then you'll have something to look forward to when he gets home."
He told her she was taking this too personally.
"You're standing outside my home asking to inspect it because my husband isn't here," Grace said, even and clear. "I'm taking it exactly as personally as I should."
Harlan looked past her, toward the others. Russ. Walter. Luke, off to one side, rifle in hand.
"Russ," Harlan said, "you think this makes sense?"
"Yep," Russ said, and didn't elaborate.