Chapter Nine
The knock came mid-morning, while Evelyn had her hands in the wash basin scrubbing the breakfast dishes.
She dried off on her apron and crossed to the door. Sam had ridden for town an hour ago.
"I got business with the sheriff," had been the full scope of his explanation, delivered into his coffee cup—so whoever stood on that porch had come calling on their own account.
A small, white-haired woman waited at the top step, clutching a handkerchief in both hands and twisting it between her fingers the way people did when they needed help but hated the needing.
Evelyn recognized the gesture because she'd done it herself plenty.
The woman's homespun dress hung loose on a frame that had probably carried more weight once, years ago, before whatever had happened to her happened.
"Mornin', miss. I'm Charlotte Montgomery.
I keep the homestead 'bout a mile east through the pines.
" She twisted the handkerchief tighter. "I come to ask, well, I hate somethin' terrible to impose on a body I ain't met, but Miss Cooper used to lend me a hand now and again.
I seen your chimney smoke these past few days and reckoned somebody must be home. "
Evelyn wiped her hands on her apron one more time—a habit; she did it when she needed a second to think—and stepped onto the porch.
"I'm Evelyn Granger, ma'am. I'm mindin’ the place while Sarah's away. What do you need?"
The relief that moved through Mrs. Montgomery's face did a whole journey in about two seconds.
"I got a cedar chest in my back room that needs movin'.
My late husband's things. I been meanin' to shift it nearer the stove on account of the damp gettin' into the wood, but it weighs more'n I do by a fair margin.
I'd have asked one of the men in town, but the ride takes most of a mornin', and my hip don't care for the saddle no more. "
"I'll come now, if that suits you."
"Oh, bless you, child. I'd be right grateful."
They walked together through the pines along a trail that Mrs. Montgomery clearly traveled often, because her feet found the path even where the snow covered it.
The woman moved slowly, favoring her left hip, stopping twice to catch her breath and apologizing for it, and Evelyn told her each time that the walk did her good, which happened to be true.
Her ankle had stiffened overnight, and the movement loosened it, and Evelyn Granger had never met a stretch of outdoors she could resist once the sun came out.
Mrs. Montgomery's homestead sat in a small clearing surrounded by pines.
A one-room cabin, smaller than the Cooper place, with a porch that sagged at one end and a chimney leaking thin smoke.
The fence around the chicken yard had tipped in two places.
The garden plot—empty now, buried under snow—showed stakes and string from the previous season's layout.
Evelyn saw careful rows planned by someone who took growing seriously.
The whole place had that particular quality of a home maintained by hands running out of strength. Clean, because Mrs. Montgomery clearly cared, but fraying at every edge, because caring only got you so far when you carried it alone.
The furniture amounted to a bed, a table, two chairs, a cookstove older than Evelyn, and the cedar chest in the back corner, a handsome piece, dovetailed at the joints, heavy as a church pew when they got hold of it.
"If we angle it toward the wall there, right by the stove, the heat'll keep the damp out.
" Mrs. Montgomery pointed. "Mr. Montgomery built it the year we married.
Fifty-three years ago come April. White oak and red cedar.
The man could build anything—a chest, a barn, a life—out of raw lumber and stubbornness. "
They wrestled the chest across the floor, Evelyn taking the heavy end because Mrs. Montgomery's arms shook when she lifted, and got it settled against the wall near the stove. The wood had a good smell to it when Evelyn brushed the dust off, cedar and age, the kind of smell that held time in it.
"There." Mrs. Montgomery pressed her hand flat against the lid. "That's where it belongs. Close to the warmth."
Her hand stayed on the wood a beat longer than the task required.
"He's been gone fourteen years now. Took sick one winter. The fever carried him off before the doctor could get through the snow." She paused. "Our daughter—our Mary—she passed three years after. Typhoid, down in Helena. She'd gone to work at a boardinghouse there. Twenty years old."
Evelyn's hands found the back of a chair and gripped it.
"Since then it's just me and this house and the chickens.
The Lord provides, I suppose, though some days His provisions run a mite thin.
" Mrs. Montgomery smiled the kind of smile that did the job without reaching the rest of her face.
"I get lonely, is the truth of it. Folk don't come by much.
I reckon they figure I'm managin' well enough, and I reckon I let 'em figure that because askin' for company feels too close to askin' for pity, and I ain't got the stomach for pity. "
Evelyn's grip on the chair tightened. Fourteen years alone.
Fourteen years in a one-room cabin after burying a husband, then a daughter, then every expectation of a life that included another person at the table.
The orphanage came back to her in a rush—the long dormitory with its rows of narrow beds, the sound of twenty girls breathing at night, surrounded by people every hour of every day and lonely through every last one of them, because proximity required a body, but company required someone who gave a damn.
She let go of the chair.
"Well, Mrs. Montgomery, you've got a friend now whether you asked for one or not.
" Evelyn straightened the shawl on the older woman's shoulders.
"I'll come by tomorrow. I'll bring you a pie that'll make you forget your own name, and you can tell me all about Mr. Montgomery and that chest, because a man who could build a piece that fine deserves to be talked about. "
Mrs. Montgomery's whole face changed. The tired smile broke apart and rebuilt itself into a real one, the kind that reached her eyes and put light behind them.
"Lord, child, you mean that?"
"I don't say things I don't mean, ma'am. Ask anyone. Well, don't ask Sam Cooper; he'll tell you I say too many things. But I mean every one of 'em."
Mrs. Montgomery laughed. She took Evelyn's hands in both of hers—papery skin over knuckles swollen from decades of work—and squeezed.
"You're a good soul, Miss Granger. A capable one, too. I can tell by your hands. Workin' hands. Sarah Cooper picked a fine friend."
The walk back to the Cooper homestead took Evelyn through the pines alone.
She breathed the cold air in deep. Her chest ached in a place that had nothing to do with the walk, the cold, or the altitude.
It ached in the place where loneliness lived, the place she'd boarded up years ago and stopped checking on because checking on it only reminded her what sat behind the boards.
But Mrs. Montgomery had a worse version of it.
Mrs. Montgomery had buried the two people she loved most and then gone on living in a cabin by herself for fourteen years, making jam no one ate and tending a garden no one helped her plant.
She'd done it without complaint, without fuss, and without asking a single soul to notice.
Evelyn would notice. She'd bring the pie tomorrow. She'd come the day after that, too.
***
Sam sat at the kitchen table with a needle in one hand, a torn shirt in the other, and an expression on his face that suggested the shirt had committed a personal betrayal.
Evelyn stood in the doorway for a good ten seconds before he registered her presence, which gave her time to take in the full picture.
He'd managed to thread the needle, a miracle in itself, given the size of his hands relative to the eye of the needle.
He'd poked the needle through the fabric near the tear.
He'd pulled the thread through. So far, reasonable.
But the stitch he'd produced ran diagonally across the tear instead of parallel to it, the thread had knotted twice on the underside, and he appeared to be sewing the front of the shirt to the back, which would make putting it on an interesting proposition.
"That ain't how you do that."
His head came up. "I got it well in hand."
"You sewed the front to the back, Mr. Cooper."
He looked down at the shirt. "I'm fixin' to undo that part."
A sound came out of her, a laugh she tried to hold back because the look on his face did not invite laughing.
She pressed her hand over her mouth. It escaped anyway, through her fingers, bright and sharp in the kitchen, and once it started she lost the fight entirely because Sam Cooper—bounty hunter, marksman, the man who tracked criminals across territorial lines and brought them in without firing a shot—sat defeated at a kitchen table by a piece of cotton and a sewing needle.
His eyes narrowed. His mouth flattened into a line. He looked, frankly, murderous, which only made it worse. She laughed harder. She braced one hand on the door frame because her ribs had started to ache from it.
"You done?"
"I—" She gasped. "I'm sorry, I just—you look so—"
"I look so what?"
"Vexed."
"I ain't vexed."
"You look fit to shoot that needle, Mr. Cooper."
He held the shirt up. The stitching dangled from it in a crooked line that bore no relationship to the tear or to the general principles of sewing. He studied it. Something happened to his mouth—the slightest crack in the fortress—before he shoved the shirt across the table.
"I reckon you'd best show me how it's done, then, seein' as you find my efforts so entertainin'."
She crossed to the table. Pulled the chair around beside him and sat down. Took the shirt from his hands, then took the needle, examining the knot on the underside. Hopeless. She cut the thread with her teeth, rethreaded the needle, and started fresh.
"You go along the edge of the tear. Small stitches, close together. You're mendin', not buildin' a fence." She placed the first stitch, pulling the thread through cleanly. "See? In here, out there. Keep the tension even. You pull too tight, the fabric bunches. Too loose, it don't hold."
She placed the second stitch. The third. Her hands moved through the work the way they always moved, automatically and easily—the one skill she'd carried out of the orphanage that had never let her down. The needle caught the lamplight as it dipped through the fabric.
"You got steady hands for this."
Sam sat close enough for her to catch the cedar soap he'd used that morning, mixed with leather from the gun belt he'd only just taken off.
His attention had dropped to her hands. He tracked the needle as it moved through the fabric, in and out, the thread pulling taut behind each stitch, and his focus narrowed to a point that made the air in the kitchen change.
The room had gotten smaller. Or she'd gotten closer.
Or he had. The space between her right shoulder and his left had collapsed to a distance measurable in inches.
Her own attention drifted. The needle kept moving, but her eyes traveled up from the fabric to his jaw, the stubble he still hadn't shaved, the line of his throat, his mouth.
He had a scar through his left eyebrow, thin and pale, and she'd noticed it before, but up close it—his mouth.
She'd come back to his mouth. It had a shape that—
The needle went into her finger instead of the fabric.
"Ow!"
She yanked her hand back. A bright bead of blood welled up on her index finger, just below the nail. She stuck it in her mouth on instinct, tasting copper, the shirt and needle forgotten on the table between them.
"I—I should go check on the—the stove. I need to tend to the stove." She pushed the chair back. Started to stand.
His hand closed around her wrist. Just enough to stop her from leaving, just enough to hold her there in the space between the chair and the table with her pricked finger still throbbing and her blood rushing in her ears.
"Might want to watch where you're lookin' while you sew, Miss Granger." The corner of his mouth came up. "Needle's liable to take offense."
He let go.
Evelyn walked into the kitchen. She did not run. Running would have suggested a reason for running, and she had no reason. The stove needed checking. That covered it. She checked the stove—the stove that required no checking.
She checked it anyway, adjusting the damper, poking at coals that burned just fine on their own, making herself busy at a task that demanded nothing because every other task—every task that involved sitting at a table next to Sam Cooper while his shoulder nearly touched hers, and his eyes tracked her hands, and his mouth had that shape, and that scar cut through his eyebrow, and he smelled like cedar and leather—every one of those tasks had become temporarily impossible.
She pressed her finger against the cold iron of the stove handle. It stung. Good. The sting gave her a thing to focus on that made sense, because the other thing, the thing happening in her pulse and her chest and the pit of her stomach, did not make any sense at all.