Chapter 16 #2
Grace watched her decide, with real reluctance, to use some of the Hollow's limited oral antibiotics on him rather than save them for whatever came next. A hard call, made fast, the way somebody made it when they'd done it enough times to trust their own judgment.
"Karen better bring back half that rail yard," Rebecca muttered, half to herself.
Grace didn't know yet what David and Karen had found, gone days now with no way to send word either direction. "I'd settle for them coming back," she said.
Rebecca's expression told Grace she agreed.
Harlan found Grace a while later, keeping his voice low. "She staying with you?"
"That's up to her."
He looked toward Rebecca, working over another patient across the room, and Grace watched him understand exactly what a doctor meant to a place like his.
"No," Grace said, before he'd finished the thought.
"I didn't ask anything."
"You were about to."
He didn't push it. Whatever arrangement he'd been about to propose — splitting Rebecca's time, some claim on her attention — he had the sense to leave it for another day. Grace gave him credit for that much.
Once the wounded were settled enough to leave for a moment, Rebecca washed her hands in a basin somebody had set out and sat on an overturned crate, quiet for the first time in an hour.
Grace brought her water, and Rebecca drank it slow, hands not quite steady in a way she hadn't shown all afternoon while she was working.
Then she looked up. "Where are they?"
Grace knew exactly who she meant.
"You sure you want to see that?"
"I'm sure."
Grace walked with her, just the two of them, though Luke and Billy Jean drifted close enough to matter without crowding, and Harlan followed a short distance behind, silent, because these were the men who'd attacked what was his.
The light had started going long by then, the field beyond the barricade cast half in shadow. The bodies lay where the fighting had ended, several of them, more than Grace wanted to count carefully. Rebecca walked the line slowly, checking each face, her steps careful.
First. No.
Second. No.
Third, she stopped.
No gasp. No collapse. She simply stood there, and Grace saw something shift behind her eyes — not shock exactly, more like a door closing on a question she'd been carrying since the day Daniel died.
"Rebecca?"
Rebecca kept looking, silent another moment.
"That's him."
Grace already knew, but asked anyway. "The one who killed Daniel?"
"Yes."
Grace gave her room rather than filling the silence.
Rebecca named what made her certain — the coat, a scar along one side of his jaw, the shape of his face she'd carried in her mind every night since the woods. She'd seen him clearly enough that day that identifying him now cost her nothing in doubt, only in the fact of standing over him.
She wasn't glad, not in any simple way. She'd spent days wondering whether this man was somewhere behind her. Now he was dead at her feet.
"You're sure?" Harlan asked, from a few steps back.
"I'm sure."
"Was he the leader?" Grace asked.
"I don't know," Rebecca said, and Grace was glad she didn't pretend to more certainty than she had. One dead man wasn't the end of whatever this group amounted to.
Rebecca didn't touch the body. Didn't spit on him or say anything dramatic.
"Daniel should've been the one standing here," she said, eventually.
"Maybe," Grace said. "But you're here."
Rebecca looked back toward the building where the wounded waited. She straightened, then turned away from the body.
The confirmation mattered beyond Rebecca alone.
If this was Daniel's killer, then these were the same men Rebecca and Daniel had encountered. Grace's warning to Harlan had been right.
Harlan absorbed it. Grace had warned him that an armed, organized group was moving through the region. He'd been attacked anyway.
"So, you were right," he said to Grace.
"Rebecca was right," Grace said.
That distinction mattered to her more than she let show.
Harlan looked toward the tree line where the two survivors had disappeared, understanding settling in that whatever remained of this group remained out there, unaccounted for.
Rebecca added only what she knew for certain — eight to ten men originally, by her count, some of them likely dead here today, others somewhere she couldn't guess.
No headquarters. No total number. Just a group that had already cost two communities blood.
The joke found its way back into the evening's work more than once.
"Madam Mayor, you want these rifles stacked here?" one of Harlan's men asked.
"Madam Mayor, Russ says we're short two horses," said another.
Grace answered both without any fuss, and Harlan's patience wore thinner each time.
"Would everybody stop calling her that?" he finally said, loud enough to carry.
A resident nearby looked genuinely confused. "Calling her what?"
Grace had to turn away to hide a smile. Billy Jean caught Luke's eye, then turned and looked straight at Harlan, saying nothing at all.
"Don't," Harlan said.
"I didn't say anything," Billy Jean said.
"Neither did I," Luke added.
"Both of you are somehow worse when you're quiet," Harlan muttered, and walked off before either of them could prove him wrong.
Later, once the work had slowed enough to breathe, Grace found Harlan standing alone near the barricade, staring at nothing, the field beyond it gone mostly dark now.
"You look like you're about to swallow a nail," Grace said.
"I suppose you're going to enjoy this."
"Probably."
He looked out at the dead in the field a long moment before he spoke again, and Grace let him take his time with it. Eighteen years as sheriff hadn't prepared Harlan for standing in his own battered settlement owing Grace anything.
He was quiet a moment, the kind of quiet that came before something he didn't enjoy saying. "We'd have lost people if you hadn't come." A pause. "More than we did."
Grace didn't make a joke of it. She let him say what he needed to.
"I owe you," Harlan said.
"You owe the Hollow."
"Fine. The Hollow."
"And Rebecca."
"Her too," Harlan said, like the words cost him something physical to produce.
That mattered more than Grace let her face show. Harlan understood relationships as leverage, as debts owed and collected. Now he was the one holding the debt, and he clearly didn't enjoy the position from this side of it.
"You'd have come, if it was us," Grace said.
Harlan didn't answer right away.
"Wade."
"Yeah," he said, finally. "I would've come."
Grace believed him. Not friendship. Not trust without limits. But their relationship had changed today, and both of them knew it.
"Good," Grace said. "Then we're even, when you do."
"That's not how owing somebody works."
"It is now."
Russ joined them as the light started going long, the conversation drifting back to the two men who'd escaped.
Harlan didn't like it. "Unless they come back with twenty."
"Then we'd rather know what we're dealing with," Grace said.
"Two men ride back and tell everybody they lost friends here," Russ said, "that's worth something on its own."
"And if it doesn't scare them off?" Harlan asked.
"Then we'll know that too, and we'll know it before they're standing at a gate instead of after," Grace said.
Nobody pretended the danger had ended with today's fight. But nobody stood there frightened either.
"They came here thinking you were easy," Grace said.
"We're not," Harlan said.
"Now they know."
Rebecca found Grace before the Hollow group readied to leave, explaining plainly that she needed to stay the night. The leg wound needed watching. Others might develop fever or bleeding before morning.
"You sure you're up to it?" Grace asked.
"Yes."
No argument beyond that, and Grace didn't push for one.
"We'll send somebody back in the morning, or bring what you need," Grace said.
Rebecca started to wave that off, and Grace cut it short. "That's not special treatment. That's five miles."
Rebecca accepted it.
Billy Jean checked on Luke before they mounted for home, asking whether he'd eaten anything since morning. He hadn't, not enough, and she handed him food from what remained in her saddlebag without waiting for him to ask.
Harlan watched the two of them with an expression Grace hadn't seen from him before, like he was seeing two ordinary teenagers instead of the annoyances he'd treated them as earlier that day. Luke caught him watching. Harlan looked away first.
Billy Jean noticed the whole exchange and gave Grace a look.
"Billy Jean," Grace said.
"What?"
Grace didn't bother answering. Billy Jean smiled and swung up onto her horse.
As Grace mounted, an older woman from Harlan's settlement called after her. "Safe ride home, Madam Mayor."
"Thank you," Grace said.
Harlan closed his eyes briefly, like a man praying for patience he wasn't going to receive.
"Problem?" Grace asked.
"Go home, Grace."
"Gladly."
Luke and Billy Jean were both fighting not to laugh as they turned their horses north.
Before they rode out of sight, Grace looked back once.
Rebecca was already moving toward the building where the wounded waited, somebody calling her name from inside.
She answered without hesitation, without any of the uncertainty that had marked her first days at the Hollow, and disappeared through the doorway carrying her bag like she'd done this every day of her life instead of only just remembering how.
Harlan stood near the barricade, watching the same thing Grace was.
"She's good," he said.
"Yeah," Grace said.
That was enough from him. Grace turned her horse toward home, Luke and Billy Jean riding close behind her, Russ and the others falling into place around them.