Chapter 27 #3
Neither of them said his name.
“I'll come look,” Martha said.
Eliza immediately stepped away from the table. “So will I.”
“You need to stay here.”
“Martha, we just had an entire conversation about this.”
“I remember.” Martha reached for her apron ties and pulled them loose, suddenly desperate to be free of the flour-streaked cloth.
“I'm not hiding anything from you. I'm asking you to stay downstairs because we have guests and because if this is Silas, I don't want both of us walking blindly into whatever game he's playing.”
Eliza's jaw tightened. “Then don't go alone.”
“Mr. Talbot is taking me upstairs. I'll look at the stain and come straight back. Then I'm going to Crane.”
Eliza studied her for several seconds before giving a reluctant nod. “Straight back.”
“Straight back.”
Martha followed Mr. Talbot into the corridor.
Away from the stove, the inn felt cooler.
Afternoon shadows had begun to gather beneath the staircase, and two oil lamps had already been lit in the common room against the dimness of the overcast day.
The familiar smell of wood smoke mingled with damp wool and the faint trace of mud tracked in from the road.
Somewhere near the front desk, Percy was speaking to a guest about his horse, his young voice carrying clearly through the otherwise subdued room.
The sound steadied her.
She climbed the stairs behind Mr. Talbot, one hand sliding along the polished banister. Each step creaked in its usual place. She had walked this staircase thousands of times, often carrying linens or pitchers of hot water, yet today the upper hall seemed unnaturally narrow.
Mr. Talbot stopped outside his room. “There, beside the bed.”
Martha entered.
The bed remained neatly made, the patchwork coverlet undisturbed. A traveling case sat near the washstand, and cold gray light entered through the small window. Nothing appeared overturned or broken.
Then she saw the stain.
A dark patch, no larger than her palm, marked the braided rug beside the bed.
Martha crouched and touched one finger carefully to its edge.
Blood.
It had begun to dry.
“When did you notice this?”
“Just before I came downstairs.”
“Has anyone been in the room?”
“Not that I know of. I stepped out for perhaps an hour.”
Martha's pulse quickened. “Did you see the stableman, Silas Mercer, his name is, anywhere upstairs?”
Mr. Talbot frowned. “Can't say that I did.”
Of course not.
Silas had spent years learning how to do things without being seen.
“Thank you for telling me,” Martha said, rising. “I'll take care of it.”
Once the guest left, she stood alone in the center of the room.
Eliza was right.
She should go to Crane now.
Martha retrieved a bucket from the linen closet and carried it downstairs long enough to fill it with warm water.
She added soap, gathered several old cloths, and returned upstairs.
The task was unnecessary; the stain could have waited.
She knew that even as she lowered herself to her knees beside it.
But some habits were harder to abandon than others.
There was blood on the floor of her inn, and Martha Bellamy did not like to let things lie, not fixable things at least.
She dipped a cloth into the water and wrung it hard between both hands. Brownish-red seeped into the fabric as she pressed it against the rug. The smell of lye soap rose sharply from the bucket.
Silas knew she intended to confess.
That changed the stain from something strange into something threatening.
Perhaps he had left it deliberately. Perhaps it belonged to someone else. Perhaps he wanted her wondering which was true.
Martha scrubbed harder.
For weeks, Silas had been able to frighten her because he possessed the one thing she could not afford to lose: her secret.
Every threat worked because she had helped build the weapon he held against her.
She had hidden what she had done, and Silas had simply wrapped his hand around that silence and squeezed.
No more.
She had spent years thinking that telling the truth would destroy her life. Yesterday, she had finally told Jonas, and in some ways she had been right. He had left.
The memory still hurt enough to make her hand falter against the rug.
She saw his expression again when she said robberies. She remembered the way he had looked at her when he realized she had known what the Voss Gang meant to him and had let him keep talking anyway. She could not blame Silas for that. She could not blame Amos.
That belonged to her.
Martha sat back on her heels and pressed the damp cloth between her palms.
She loved Jonas.
There was no use avoiding the word now.
She loved him, and she might have lost him because she had been too frightened to let him know whom he was loving.
The realization should have made her want to hide again. Instead, it hardened something inside her.
If Jonas never returned, she would still go to Crane.
If Eliza had chosen to walk out of the kitchen, Martha would still go.
If the whole town learned what she had done and never looked at her the same way again, she would still tell the truth.
She could not undo the woman she had been by pretending that woman had never existed.
Martha bent over the rug again.
The stain had faded around the edges, but its center remained stubbornly dark. She rinsed the cloth, watching cloudy red spiral through the water.
She would finish this, find Eliza, and leave immediately. No waiting for evening. No more excuses about supper or guests or work that could be done by someone else.
She would walk into Sheriff Crane's office while there was still daylight and tell him everything.
Silas.
Amos.
The train.
Her part in it.
Whatever happened afterward would at least be something she had chosen with the truth in front of her.
A floorboard creaked behind her.
Martha's hand stopped in the bucket.
The room had been silent long enough that the sound seemed unnaturally loud. Not one of the ordinary settling groans of the old inn, but the slow complaint of wood beneath someone's weight.
Her skin prickled.
She had left the door partly open.
“Eliza?”
No answer came.
Martha slowly withdrew her hand from the water. Drops slid from her fingers onto the rug.
She started to turn.
A faint movement stirred the air behind her, followed by the scrape of a boot against the floor.
Martha twisted toward the sound, one hand reaching instinctively for the edge of the bed to pull herself upright.
She saw only the blur of a figure.
Something heavy struck the back of her head.
Pain burst white across her vision. The force drove her forward, her shoulder catching the bedframe before she collapsed against the floor.
Somewhere beside her, the bucket overturned with a hollow clatter.
Warm water rushed across the boards and soaked through the knee of her dress, carrying soap and diluted blood in a thin stream toward the wall.
Martha tried to push herself up.
Her arm would not hold her.
The room tilted sickeningly, bed and window sliding out of alignment as darkness crowded the edges of her sight. She heard a bootstep close behind her and tried to call for Eliza, for Percy, for anyone downstairs, but her tongue felt thick and useless.
Her fingers dragged once across the wet floorboards.
Then the darkness closed over her.