Bell Weather (40 page)

“Everyone’s preoccupied with deadfall,” he said. “Maybe Pitt will turn back. We’ll have to wait and see.”

He softened his expression, held her hand and gave it a squeeze, and then he turned to cut another length of board to cover the hole.

They spent the morning and much of midday securing the tavern, going about their work as ordinarily as possible while Nabby, Bess, and Ichabod pondered and observed, knowing there was something unusual between them. Molly stayed at Tom’s side as much as she was able. They spoke but didn’t laugh, traded weary glances, and behaved like a couple who’d been married so long that everything they did had a private implication.

In the late afternoon, they were putting away glasses in the taproom when Benjamin and a stranger walked through the door.

Benjamin wore a beaver cap and lightly frosted glasses, his slender frame lost inside a fur-collared coat. Behind him was a tall, slender man of roughly thirty who was handsome but for nostrils that were permanently flared.

“Tom,” the man said, shaking hands and smiling broadly. He was as spirited and loose as Benjamin was grave.

Tom smiled back. “Davey Mun. It’s been a year.”

“Last September.” Davey entered with an exaggerated sigh, no less genuine for being done with flair. He tugged off his gloves, approached the hearth, and looked at Molly. She was flattered—it was that kind of look. He said, “You’re new.”

“I’m Molly Smith,” she said and shook his hand. His skin was snowy cold.

“The Orange’s latest attraction,” Tom said. “You should hear the way I found her. Davey here’s a horse trader, one of the best in Floria. He tried to buy Bones last summer.”

“Fairly offered.”

“That’s what Pitt keeps saying when he tries to buy the Orange.”

Davey smiled once more except his heart wasn’t in it. He turned to warm his hands, standing next to Molly. “Pitt’s the man I came for. I’m told he’s ridden off. Figures he would do it in the wrong damn direction.”

“What’s the need?” Tom asked.

“A man has been shot,” Benjamin told him.

It was the first that he and Tom had acknowledged each other. Molly had been told about the prior day’s tension—tension over her and finding Mr. Bole—and she had never known Benjamin to speak with such frigidity, nor Tom to view his friend with so little warmth.

“Who?” Tom said.

“We left Shepherd’s Inn this morning,” Davey said. “Me and four other men who rode together out of Grayport the day before. We didn’t fear the Maimers, ’cause to hell with them, and all of us together gave us better odds. A little ways along, we heard a shot up the road and galloped off to see. We came around a bend and there were four of them on horseback. They’d shot a man and one of them was searching through his bags. We missed our own shots but chased the bastards off, and then the man they’d tried to kill was in the road, still alive. Two of our party took him back to Shepherd’s Inn while me and the others rode here to get the doctor. They’ll be coming along soon. I rode ahead the last few miles, straight for Benjamin.”

“You’re sure it was Maimers?” Tom asked.

“Black cloaks and masks.”

“They’ve never shot a man before.”

“The fellow they shot was frantic,” Davey said. “Said he knew them. Said they chased him out of Grayport to kill him. Then he clammed up tight and wouldn’t say more.”

Molly watched Tom make fists at his sides. She suspected he was picturing a rifle in his hands. It made her ill, and made the cold seem deadlier and darker.

“I’m riding back to Shepherd’s with the doctor,” Davey told him.

“What about your friends?”

“Craven louts,” Davey said. “The two who went back spoke of tucking tail for Grayport. The ones who came with me are heading straight for Liberty. They claim it’s too cold, riding back and forth, and that the fellow must be dead by now. Scared to stick their necks out.”

Benjamin removed his cap. He hadn’t left the door and looked at Tom across the room. “I said that you would come.”

“You said wrong,” Tom replied.

The doctor opened his mouth and shriveled in his coat. Davey laughed and looked at Benjamin to understand the joke, then studied both men with questioning sincerity.

“I got a hole in my wall needs proper mending,” Tom said, “a storeroom blown to smithereens, and firewood to cut before Nabby has my head. You’ll have to find someone else.”

“Everyone else is fastening their homes against deadfall,” Benjamin said.

“So am I. We’d have a sheriff on hand, ready to assist, if you and Abigail hadn’t sent him off chasing rumors.”

Benjamin’s eyebrow twitched three times in quick succession. He put his cap back on slightly cocked above his ear and looked at Molly, who was flustered by the shame that lit his cheeks. They’d shared a garden, and a home, and pieces by Gorelli. Benjamin fumbled for a handkerchief and cleaned his blurry glasses.

Davey knew something unspoken was afoot and looked relieved, or else intrigued, when Molly grabbed Tom’s arm and tugged him into the rear of the taproom to speak with him in private. Tom allowed it, seeming eager to explain. She didn’t let him.

“You’re going to let your best friend risk his life?”

“He won’t—”

“He
had
to side with Abigail. I can’t believe he meant me any harm.”

Tom tried to speak.

“Either way,” Molly said, “they need you if they’re riding out with the Maimers on the road. Someone’s dying; he’s a doctor. Can’t you see he has to go?”

“The Maimers won’t be there,” Tom said. “They never stay in place after an attack.”

“They never shoot people, either.”

Tom hesitated, sneaking a look at Benjamin and Davey. Molly pinched her wrist to strengthen her resolve, wishing all of them could stay and share a pot of smoak.

“I can’t go,” Tom said.

“Ichabod can chop the wood, and Bess and I—”

“I won’t leave
you,
not with Abigail and Lem vulturing about and Pitt riding back knowing God knows what.”

“We have to leave,” Benjamin said across the room. He opened the door. “A man is dying.”

“I can go, too,” Molly told Tom. “I’m not afraid.”

Except she was and couldn’t hide it when he frowned, and cupped her cheek, and said, “We have enough danger right here, you and me. I didn’t get a man shot or make Benjamin a doctor. This ain’t my concern and it ain’t yours, either.”

She was his concern. What was hers? Molly wondered.

*   *   *

A busy day, a dying day. Davey Mun’s two companions arrived shortly after he and Benjamin departed for Shepherd’s Inn. Tom told her to be civil—they couldn’t be blamed for not riding back—but he said it with contempt and didn’t greet them when they entered. Molly seated them at the table farthest from the fire. They were portly, gray, and loud, unremarkably identical. They ate and left quickly, eager to reach the next cozy inn and get away.

Very few townspeople visited the tavern: most were busy at home, feeding hearths, tending livestock, and cooking until the air, despite the windless chill, smelled of woodsmoke and meat and hard, defiant cheer. It frightened Molly—all the desperate ritual and defense only seemed to emphasize the depth of their beleaguerment. Leaves fell lifeless in the sunset red. She watched candles disappear as people locked their shutters. When the sky bruised purple and the tables had been cleared, Nabby and Bess cleaned the kitchen, Tom went to work in the stables, and Molly swept the taproom floor, pausing frequently to marvel at the smoakwood fire. Such little black logs, such consoling orange flames. She hoped that Benjamin and Davey had reached a fire of their own.

The front door opened and the cold rushed in. It was Pitt, his face as scarlet as his customary clothes, which were covered by a coat snugly buttoned to his chin. He’d tied a scarf around his ears, underneath his hat. He came inside and closed the door and walked up to Molly, giving her a look of untold doom.

She had an impulse to hit him with a poker from the hearth. Then he sniffled at the fire and appeared to lose his confidence. She saw in him the boy whose father had been hanged; there was more to him tonight—a neediness or doubt.

“Go get Tom.”

“Sheriff Pitt—”

“Please,” Pitt said.

He tucked his gloves under his arm and held his fingers to the hearth. Molly backed away, hesitant to turn and walk through the kitchen, thinking about the cold dark distance to the barn. But Tom had heard the horse and come directly in. He walked through the kitchen, met them in the taproom, and stood at Molly’s side with an ice-cut scowl.

Pitt spoke first. “Benjamin was maimed.”

Molly slumped against Tom. They propped each other up.

Ichabod entered through the front looking winded, presumably to warn them that the sheriff had returned. Pitt surprised them once again and said, “Ethel’s home safe?”

Ichabod nodded, looked at Tom without a sign, and then retreated outside to care for Pitt’s horse.

“I stepped off the ferry and Ethel Kale was running up the street,” Pitt explained, referring to a girl who lived near the Knoxes. “Abigail sent her up here to bring word. I sent her home with Ichabod, said to keep it quiet.”

Pitt crossed the room and went to the unlocked bar, where he poured himself a gin and drank it down quick. Molly took a chair, changed her mind, and wobbled up again.

“They let him keep his clothes but the bleeding almost killed him,” Pitt said. “They took his right hand. That’s his operating hand.”

Tom joined him at the bar and raised the bottle for a drink, but it slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor. Molly flinched. Pitt didn’t.

“Davey Mun went, too,” Tom said.

“He isn’t back.”

Molly vomited in the corner. What came up was minimal and thin—she hadn’t eaten since the morning—but she felt as if her stomach had been wrenched to her tonsils. Tom explained to Pitt about the man the Maimers had shot and how Benjamin and Davey had ridden back to Shepherd’s Inn.

“Hell and death,” Pitt said and slapped a glove against his thigh. “No one else went along?”

Tom crunched fragments of the bottle with his shoe. Molly smelled the gin, juniper-sweet and toxic, as the pulverized glass ground between the boards.

“They’ve never stayed put after an attack,” Tom said. “It’s why we’ve never caught ’em.”

“They stayed put today,” Pitt said, thinking hard. “Why the sudden change, and at deadfall to boot?”

“To find the man they shot. They didn’t want a doctor riding out to save him. I’d like to know the reason.”

“So would I. Shepherd’s Inn. Couple hours at a gallop.”

“Less,” Tom said. “Davey and his friends saw four of them together. They ran from greater numbers but they didn’t run from two.”

Molly’s gut sank low like the opposite of sickness, leadening her stance and lightening her head. Tom and Pitt scrutinized each other up close, not with animosity, it seemed, but resolution.

“You and me,” Pitt decided.

“Aye,” Tom said. “We can’t have a crowd riding out with guns and lanterns.”

“No,” Molly said, stepping forward in the glass. “It can’t be just the two of you. They’re waiting in the woods.”

Tom ignored her, seeming desperate not to look her in the eye.

“Have another drink before we go,” he said to Pitt, “and stand near the fire. You’ve been riding all day.”

He went to the closet for his rifle. Molly followed him over, rubbing her wrist bones and trying not to picture Benjamin’s hand, Davey bleeding in the dark, or, worst of all, Tom disfigured.
What would they remove?
she couldn’t help thinking.
Which part of him is best?
She feared to make a list.

They stood before the closet in the hallway off the taproom, where the colder air had cracked a frozen panel in a window. Night looked in, opening its jaw.

Molly told him not to go.

“They took his hand.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You stayed here for me.”

He moved around her, took his ammunition bag and rifle out, and faced her. “I’ve run bloodier gauntlets. These are cowards wearing masks. They won’t expect two of us alone on such a night.”

She hugged around his arms and squeezed with all her might, hoping to make the bullet in his shoulder hit a nerve—hoping to remind him what he really stood to lose. But Tom was already gone, down the forest road without her, and she let her hands drop and felt the draft between their bodies.

“Stay with Bess,” Tom said. “You’ll have Ichabod and Nabby. Keep the door locked until I’m back.”

Molly nodded.

“Promise me,” he said.

“I promise. Don’t get killed. And don’t get maimed.”

“When this is done, whatever is left of me is yours.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Shepherd’s Inn was a small public house, one of several along the road from Grayport to Root, where travelers could spend the night or stop to rest their horses. Tom was midway there and hadn’t seen a single living creature in the forest. Pitt was out of sight—he had yet to make a sound—and Tom whistled like a man in need of consolation. The song was “Jack o’ March,” a tune he knew from childhood. The melody reminded him of Benjamin’s frequent humming, of the doctor’s failed attempts to learn the violin … of how he’d struggle now to dress himself and work without his hand.

They had visited the Knoxes’ house before riding out and Abigail had met them in a damp, gory smock. She fought for self-control, standing firmly at the door, but her high-strung voice and unbound hair gave her the appearance of a very young girl. An extraordinary girl, one of unfeigned grit, and yet afraid and overwrought and willing to be hugged. Tom held her in the cold but the hug didn’t last. She quickly pushed him off to keep herself from needing it.

“So much blood,” Abigail said. “He’s frostbit and feverish. I’ve sewn and dressed the wound but he’s delirious and pale.”

She paused while her thoughts rushed up and overran her, and they waited at the door—Tom in front, Pitt behind him. The street was dark and empty. She would not invite them in.

“He walked for two hours, bleeding all the way, and might have died except he tied his own tourniquet with vine.”