Chapter Ten
When Sam stopped at the post office, a letter for Evelyn sat on the counter in Sarah's handwriting. He tucked it into his coat pocket next to the receipt from Harlow's, because he'd gone to town for fence wire, not mail delivery, though he supposed the two errands could share a trip well enough.
He rode back to the homestead under a sky so blue it looked aggressive about it, the kind of clear cold morning Montana produced after days of punishment, territory's way of apologizing for the blizzard, he supposed, though Montana's apologies always came with a bite in the wind that undercut the sincerity.
The mare moved easily on the packed trail, her breath pluming in the cold, her hooves finding solid ground beneath the crust.
Evelyn stood at the kitchen table when he came through the door, flour on her hands again.
The woman generated flour the way the cookstove generated heat, from a source he couldn't identify.
She'd taken to cooking three meals a day since the stew, proper meals, the kind that required planning.
Sam had stopped pretending he didn't care about eating them because that particular lie had worn through about four days ago when she'd made salt pork and gravy over biscuits and he'd gone back for thirds.
He pulled the letter from his coat and set it on the table beside her flour-dusted hands.
"You got mail come in."
She wiped her hands on her apron before picking it up, turning it over to check the return address.
Her face changed when she read it—a quick brightening, the same look she got when she talked about Sarah, warm and unguarded in a way that made him busy himself with pouring coffee so he'd have a reason to face the counter instead of her.
She broke the seal with her thumb, reading standing up, her lips moving slightly over the words.
He leaned against the counter with his cup because it constituted his normal morning routine. After all, a man poured coffee and leaned against things. The fact that he could watch her read from this particular angle had zero bearing on his position at the counter. He'd have stood here regardless.
"Sarah says she'll begin the journey back in a few days." Evelyn folded the letter against her chest. "The legal business is all settled. She sold the property. She reckons the trip home'll take the better part of a week, dependin' on the trains."
Sam did the arithmetic before he could stop himself.
A few days before Sarah departed, then a week of travel.
Sarah would arrive in ten days, give or take.
Evelyn's two weeks at the homestead—the agreed-upon term, the arrangement, the thing with a defined beginning and a defined end—would close inside seven days.
One week. After that, Evelyn Granger would pack her travel bag, climb onto a stagecoach in town, ride to the nearest rail connection, and take a train back to Springfield, Illinois.
She'd go back to the sewing shop, back to Mr. Ridley, back to the town full of people who'd whispered about her broken engagement.
She'd become ink on paper again, words on a page, a person who existed only in the space between sentences.
He drank his coffee too fast, and it burned his tongue, but he drank more anyway because the cup gave his hands a job.
"Well, that's fine news." He set the cup in the wash basin and turned around, leaning his hip against the counter. "Sarah'll be glad to have her kitchen back. You've about taken it over."
Evelyn smiled at that, a quick flash that faded as she refolded the letter, tucking it into her apron pocket before going back to her dough.
He went back to his coffee. The stove ticked between them.
It was a regular morning. The kind of morning a man could repeat a hundred times without it wearing thin, which struck him as a dangerous observation about a morning with a week-long shelf life.
He tapped the basin.
"You ever laid eyes on a waterfall?"
Evelyn's hands stopped in the dough. She looked up at him with flour on her nose—how she'd gotten flour on her nose baffled him, the dough sat at waist level, the geometry of it defied reason—and her eyebrows went up.
"A waterfall?"
"There's one about four miles north, through the canyon past the ridge.
Snowmelt's got it runnin' heavy this time of year.
You can hear the thing from half a mile off when the wind's right.
" He crossed his arms because his hands needed a place to go that didn't involve reaching across the table to wipe flour off her nose.
"You can't leave Montana without seein' it.
I won't have that on my conscience, no ma'am. "
"You're aimin' to take me to see a waterfall?"
"That's what I'm tellin' you. Go on and fetch your coat."
“I’m bakin’ a pie for—”
“You’ll finish the pie later, the dough ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
She stared at him for about three seconds, her hands still buried in the dough, flour on her nose and her sleeves and probably in her hair because flour migrated to every surface this woman occupied.
Then she pulled her hands free, wiped them on her apron, and disappeared upstairs so fast she forgot to favor her ankle on the stairs.
Sam saddled two horses while she got ready, choosing the mare for himself and the bay gelding for Evelyn because the gelding had a calm disposition and a smooth gait.
He checked the cinches twice, adjusted the stirrup length on the gelding for her shorter legs, then loaded the saddlebags with jerky and a canteen of water because four miles through canyon country took time, and he'd learned from experience that Evelyn Granger's appetite could neither be predicted nor underestimated.
She came out in her coat and bonnet, cheeks already pink from the cold, then stopped at the edge of the porch when she spotted the horses.
"I ought to tell you I ain't much of a horsewoman, Mr. Cooper."
"The geldin's gentle as they come. He'll take care of you right enough.
" He held the stirrup for her while she mounted, which required her to grab the saddle horn and haul herself up with more determination than grace, her skirt bunching around her knees until she smoothed it over the horse's flank.
"There now. That ain't so fearsome, is it? "
"The ground looks a far piece away from up here."
"Then don't go lookin' at it. Keep your eyes on where you're headed."
He swung up on the mare and led them north out of the yard, past the corral, along the tree line where the pines thickened into real timber.
The trail narrowed as it climbed, winding through stands of Douglas fir with snow heavy on their branches, the horses' hooves breaking through crust into softer snow underneath.
Each breath went in sharp at this elevation, coming out in a cloud that dissolved before the next one formed.
Evelyn rode behind him on the gelding, quiet at first, concentrating on her balance in the saddle.
After about a quarter mile she’d loosened up enough to look around, her head turning to follow a hawk circling overhead, then swiveling toward a frozen creek bed cutting through the rocks below the trail.
She kept making these small sounds—half-caught breaths, murmured words he couldn't quite make out—every time the view opened up between the trees to show her another piece of the valley below.
The sound reached them before the falls did, a low roar building through the trees until it drowned out the horses' breathing and the creak of saddle leather.
Sam dismounted at the edge of the clearing, looped the mare's reins over a low branch, then came around to help Evelyn down.
She slid from the saddle, her boots hit the ground, and she turned toward the sound.
The falls dropped fifty feet from a granite ledge into a pool ringed with ice and dark stone.
Snowmelt fed the cascade from above, the water running white over the rock face before crashing into the pool and throwing spray that caught the sunlight in brief, fractured rainbows across the wet stone.
Ice had formed along the edges of the pool in shelves and columns, clear blue where it thickened and white where the spray had frozen in layers.
The noise filled the clearing from edge to edge—a constant thunder humming up through the ground underfoot.
Evelyn made a sound he'd never heard from her.
A laugh, except that word covered too little of it; it came from somewhere deep and unguarded, breaking out of her before she could shape it into the polite version she usually offered.
She pressed both hands over her mouth, dropped them, laughed again louder, then took off toward the water at a pace her ankle should have prevented but apparently couldn't, because whatever lived inside Evelyn Granger that responded to waterfalls outranked her sprain by a considerable margin.
She ran along the edge of the pool, her boots splashing through the shallow overflow where the water spread across the rocks before draining into the creek below.
She held her hands out and let the spray hit her palms, her face, the front of her coat.
She spun once, tilted her head back, and shouted—a wordless sound that went up into the roar of the falls and became part of it.
Sam stood at the edge of the clearing with the mare's reins in his hand.
He'd been to these falls a dozen times over the years, always alone, after long hunts, after bad jobs, after the kind of work that left residue on a man's hands no amount of creek water could address.
The falls had always meant solitude to him, a place loud enough to drown out his own thinking.
He'd never brought another person here, had never considered it, because the falls belonged to the part of his life he kept separate from people—the part where he dealt with what he carried, then moved on.