Chapter 30 #2
He swallows, letting his hand drop, then he reaches for his hat again.
“Well, if that’s the way it is, I’ve said what I could say, sweetheart. I hope you understand now that I tried to help you.”
Then he turns toward the door.
I watch as Stan’s eyes flash with unmistakable anger, and for the first time since he walked into this kitchen, I see the man beneath the gun.
“You’re not leavin’.”
Stan’s voice is so quiet I almost miss it.
Marcus turns back, his forehead creased with a frown. “What was that, son?”
“I said you’re not leavin’.” Stan steps fully into the kitchen, color rising up his neck. The gun comes up for the first time, and it isn’t pointed at me. It’s pointed at Marcus. “You are not walkin’ out of this kitchen and sendin’ me home with another face.”
“Stanley—”
“You want her gone. You stay in this kitchen till she’s gone. No drivin’ off to Mason’s. No more lettin’ me carry the faces home alone. Today you watch.”
Marcus has gone the color of old paper.
“Son, you don’t need me for this—”
“I do.” Stan’s voice cracks on the word, and his whole body is tight with it now, shoulders drawn high, chest heaving. “You’ve never once had to look. Well… today, you look.”
His gun hand is trembling—not with fear, but with the effort of holding it steady against everything else rushing through him.
“You remember Cal Miller?”
Marcus’s head jerks. “Stan—”
“The summer Blackwood decided he wanted that ranch. You sent me out to his place one night and you told me exactly how to do it. Break his hands, you said. A rancher can’t work a ranch with broken hands.
So that’s what I did. I broke every bone in both of ’em while he begged me to stop.
Two weeks later, he was sellin’ his folks’ land for half what it was worth because he couldn’t rope a calf or drive a fence post. Ended up with Blackwood like all the rest of ‘em. I told myself for a whole year I’d just been the muscle.
That I hadn’t been the reason they lost everything. ”
Cal Miller.
My memory shows him to me at twelve, chasing me through the apple trees behind his grandmother’s house with a water pistol, laughing so hard he fell in the creek.
I press my palm flat to the table to keep the room from moving.
“There’s more.” Stan’s eyes haven’t left Marcus. “You tell her the next one.”
“Son, this isn’t—”
“Tell her, Marcus.”
Marcus shakes his head, fingers worrying the brim of his hat, his voice going soft and pleading.
“Stanley, listen. What we did, we did because we had to. There was never any other—”
“What we did.” Stan’s face turns crimson. “What we did? That’s rich, Marcus. Tell me what you did. Tell me one thing you did with your own two hands.”
Marcus’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
“That’s what I thought. Fine. I’ll do the dirty work. Seein’ as that’s all I’m good for.” Stan’s jaw works. “Vince Holburn and the barn fire nobody could figure out. That was me. On your orders. Because he wouldn’t sell and you needed him out.”
Another name. Another family. The Holburn land sale I’d traced through Cutter’s signature.
“Marty Cooper.” Stan’s jaw is iron. “What was it you said? Break his collarbone, break his nerve?”
“Stanley, please—”
“And then you told me there was no other way with Bill and Tom. And I believed you, Marcus, God help me.”
Stan’s face is mottled red as tears spill down his cheeks. “This time, you’re gonna see just how much it costs a man, Marcus. ’Cause I’m sick of bein’ the only one to pay the damn price.”
Marcus can’t hold his nephew’s gaze. He looks at the floor, his own jaw trembling, crumpled hat still clutched in his hands.
Neither of them is looking at me.
Under the table, I tap the screen to end the recording, then slide the phone into my pocket.
I have what I stayed for. Now I just have to live to use it.
I plant my feet against the floorboards.
Tom Monroe didn’t raise a daughter who gives up and dies in a kitchen.
My fingers close around the handle of my coffee mug.
And I stop thinking, and start doing.
My free hand finds the saltshaker on the table. I hurl it past Stan’s back into the hall, where it cracks against the far wall and shatters on the floorboards.
Both their heads snap toward the sound, while I launch from the chair and close the gap between us, driving the mug into Stan’s face with every pound of me behind it.
The coffee is still hot enough to scald, and the mug breaks on impact, ceramic splintering across his cheekbone, carving a deep gash. He’s yelling before the shards finish hitting the floor, his free hand flying to his face as his gun hand swings wide and blind.
I pivot on the ball of my foot, knowing that Marcus is between me and the mud room door.
He sees me coming, and his arms come up, half to grab and half to ward, his face still gray and slack from Stan’s accusations. He’s a man who has never had to use force on a woman in his life, figuring it out in real time.
I don’t give him long enough to work it out. Instead, I break into a sprint, and when I’m a hairsbreadth from him, I drop.
My hip hits the waxed floorboards first, then my shoulder, and I slide hard under the reach of his arms. Marcus grabs at air where my shoulder was a heartbeat ago.
I clear him in a breath, and when my hand finds the mud room doorframe, I haul myself upright against it.
His mouth opens to call to me, but I’m already through the mud room and shouldering the back door open so hard it cracks against the outside wall. The afternoon sun hits me like I’ve been immersed in cold water, and I’m running before my feet remember they’re bare.