Fred was frowning at her. He and Sophia exchanged a bemused look.

Margery appeared to snap out of whatever weird funk she was in. “You’re right. You’re right. Don’t know what I was thinking.” She raised an unconvincing smile.

But here was the thing, Sophia told William, as they sat at the little table eating supper. Two days later when Margery returned, Sophia picked up her saddlebag to unpack it while Margery stepped out to use the water closet. The days were cold and hard and she liked to help the girls whichever way she could. She took out the last of the books, then nearly dropped the canvas bag in fright. At the bottom, neatly wrapped in a red handkerchief, she could just make out the bone grip of a Colt .45 pistol.

* * *

• • •

Bob told me you were waiting out here. I wondered why you canceled on me last night.” Sven Gustavsson emerged from the gates of the mine still in his work overalls but with his thick flannel jacket over the top and his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He walked up to the mule and stroked his neck, letting Charley’s soft nose nuzzle his pockets for treats. “Get a better offer, did you?” He smiled and placed his hand on Margery’s leg. She flinched.

He removed it, his smile vanishing. “You okay?”

“Can you come to mine when you’re done?”

He studied her face. “Sure. But I thought we weren’t seeing each other till Friday.”

“Please.”

She never said please.

* * *

• • •

Despite the freezing temperatures he found her on the rocking chair on the stoop, her rifle across her legs in the dark, the light of the little oil lamp flickering across her face. She was rigid, her eyes trained on the horizon, her jaw set. Bluey sat at her feet, glancing up at her from minute to minute, as if her anxiety had rubbed off on him, and shaking in short bursts from the cold.

“What’s going on, Marge?”

“I think Clem McCullough is coming after me.”

Sven walked up to her. There was something absent and watchful in the way she spoke, as if she barely registered him being there. Her teeth chattered.

“Marge?” He went to place his hand on her knee, but remembering her reaction of earlier, he touched the back of her hand lightly instead. She was frozen. “Marge? It’s too cold to sit out here. You got to come inside.”

“I need to be ready for him.”

“The dog will let us know if anyone’s coming. C’mon. What happened?”

She stood finally and allowed him to steer her in. The cabin was freezing, and he wondered if she’d been inside at all. He lit the stove and brought in some more logs as she stood by the window looking out. Then he fed Bluey and boiled some water. “You stayed up all last night like that?”

“Didn’t sleep a wink.”

Finally he sat down beside her and handed her a bowl of soup. She looked at it as if she didn’t want it, but then drank it in short, greedy bursts. And when she’d finished, she told him the story of her ride to Red Lick, her voice uncharacteristically halting, her knuckles white and trembling, as if even now she could feel McCullough’s grip still on her, his hot breath on her skin. And Sven Gustavsson, a man renowned for his unusually level temperament in a town full of hotheads, a man who would break up a bar fight nineteen times out of twenty where another would be unable to resist the satisfaction of the hurled punch, found that he was possessed of an uncharacteristic rage, a red mist that descended and made him want to seek out McCullough and deliver some of his own brand of vengeance, a vengeance that involved blood and fists and busted teeth.

None of this showed in his face, or in the calm of his voice when he spoke again. “You’re exhausted. Go to bed.”

She looked up at him. “You not coming?”

“Nope. I’ll be out here while you sleep.”

Margery O’Hare was not a woman who liked to depend on anyone. It was a measure of how shaken she was, he realized, that she thanked him quietly, and took herself to bed without a word of protest.

ELEVEN

   Fair Oaks was built about 1845 by Dr. Guildford D. Runyon, a Shaker who renounced his vow of celibacy and erected the house in anticipation of his marriage to Miss Kate Ferrel, who died before the house was completed. Dr. Runyon remained a bachelor until his death in 1873.

• WPA, The WPA Guide to Kentucky

There were fifteen dolls on the dresser. They sat shoulder to shoulder, like a mismatched family, their porcelain faces pale and rosy and their real hair (where had it come from? Alice shuddered) curled into immaculate glossy ringlets. They were the first thing Alice saw when she woke up in the morning on the little daybed, their blank faces watching her impassively, their cherry-colored lips curled into faint, disdainful smiles, frothy white pantalettes peeking out from under full Victorian skirts. Mrs. Van Cleve had loved her dolls. Like she had loved her little stuffed bears and her tiny china ornaments and her porcelain snuff boxes and her carefully embroidered psalms that hung around the house, each the result of hours of intricate needlecraft.

Every day Alice was reminded of a life that had been almost solely focused on the inside of these walls, on tiny, meaningless tasks, tasks Alice felt increasingly strongly that no adult woman should view as the sum total of her day’s activities: dolls, embroidery, the dusting and precise rearranging of totems that no man noticed anyway. Until she had gone, after which they had become a shrine to a woman they now insisted they idolized.

She hated those dolls. Like she hated the heavy silence in the air, the endless stasis of a house in which nothing could move forward and nothing could change. She might as well be one of those dolls, she thought, as she walked through the bedroom. Smiling, immobile, decorative and silent.

She glanced down at the picture of Dolores Van Cleve that sat in a large gilt frame on Bennett’s bedside table. The woman held a small wooden cross between two plump hands and an expression of pained disapproval, which to Alice seemed to settle on the two of them whenever they were alone together. “Perhaps we could move your mother a little further away? Just . . . at night?” she had ventured when she had first been shown their room. But Bennett had frowned, as disbelieving as if she had cheerfully suggested digging up his mother’s grave.

She snapped out of her thoughts, gasping quietly as she splashed the icy water on her face and hurried into her many layers. The librarians were riding a half-day today, to allow them all some time for Christmas shopping, and a small part of her had to fight her disappointment at the prospect of time away from her routes.

She would see Jim Horner’s girls this morning. That helped. The way they would wait at the window for the sight of Spirit making her way up the track, then bolt through the wooden door, bouncing on tiptoe until she climbed off the horse, their voices bubbling over each other as they clamored to find out what she had with her, where she had been, whether she would stay for a little while longer than the last time. The way they would hang casually around her neck while she read to them, little fingers stroking her hair or planting kisses on her cheeks as if, despite the slow recovery of the little family, they were both desperate for feminine contact in some way they could barely understand. And Jim, his expression no longer hard and suspicious, would place a mug of coffee at her side, then use the time she was there to chop wood or sometimes, now, just sit and watch, as if he took pleasure in the sight of his girls’ happiness as they showed off what they had learned to read that week (and they were smart; their reading was way ahead of other children’s, thanks to lessons with Mrs. Beidecker). No, the Horner girls were consolation indeed. It was just a shame that girls like them would have so little in the way of Christmas gifts.