Alice had started riding again, her bruises luminous yellow echoes of the injuries she had endured. She had taken the long route up to Patchett’s Creek that day, supposedly to stretch Spirit out a little, but Margery knew it was so she, Margery, could have some time with Sven alone at the house. The families on the creek route liked Alice, made her speak English place names to them—Beaulieu and Piccadilly and Leicester Square—and fell about laughing at her accent. She never minded. She was slow to offend, that girl. It was one of the things Margery liked about her, she thought. While enough people round here would find a slight in the mildest of words, every compliment a secret barb aimed just at them, Alice still seemed primed to see the best in everyone she came across. Probably why she’d married that human beefsteak Bennett.

She yawned, wondering how long it was going to take Sven to come home. “What do you think, Charley boy? Have I got time to boil up some hot water and get this grime off me? Do you think he’ll care a whit one way or the other?”

She pulled the mule to a halt at the large gate, dismounting to open it up. “The way I feel, I’ll be lucky if I manage to stay awake long enough for him to get here.”

It took her a minute after replacing the catch to realize what was missing.

“Bluey?”

She walked up the path, calling him, her boots crunching in the snow. She hooked the mule’s reins over the pole by the porch, and lifted her hand to her brow. Where had the darn dog shot off to now? Two weeks ago he had made his way three miles across the creek to Henscher’s place, just to play with the young dog there. Came home sheepish with his ears down, like he knew he’d done wrong, his face so full of guilt that she didn’t have the heart to tell him off. Her voice echoed back across the holler. “Bluey?”

She took the porch steps two at a time. And then she saw him, at the far end by the rocker. A pale limp body, his ice-colored eyes staring blankly at the roof, his tongue lolling and his legs splayed, as if he had been stopped directly in the act of running. A clean dark red bullet hole ran straight through his skull.

“Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Margery ran to him and dropped to her knees and a wail emerged from somewhere she hadn’t known she possessed. “Oh, not my boy. No. No.”

She cradled the dog’s head, feeling the velvet-soft fur of his cheeks, stroking his muzzle, knowing even as she did that there was nothing to be done. “Oh, Bluey. My sweet baby.” She pressed her face to his—I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry—her hands clutching him to her, her whole body mourning a stupid young hound that would never bounce onto her bed again.

It was like this that Alice found her, as she rode up on Spirit half an hour later, her legs aching and her feet numb with cold.

Margery O’Hare, a woman who had remained dry-eyed throughout her own father’s funeral, who had bitten her lip until it bled as she buried her sister, a woman who had taken the best part of four years to confess her feelings to the man she loved most in the world, and still swore she had not a sentimental bone in her body, sat keening like a child on the porch, her back doubled over with grief and her dead dog’s head cradled tenderly in her lap.

* * *

• • •

Alice saw Van Cleve’s Ford before she saw him. For weeks she had backed into the shadows when he passed, had turned her face, her heart in her mouth, braced for another puce-faced demand that she come home right now and stop all this nonsense or she might just find herself regretting it. Even in company the sight of him made her tremble a little, as if some residual memory was lodged in her cells that still felt the impact of that blunt fist.

But now, propelled by a long night of grief that had been somehow so much more painful to witness than her own, she dug in her heels as she saw the burgundy car heading down the hill, sending Spirit wheeling hard across the road so that she was directly in front of him and he had to stamp on the brakes, screeching to a halt in front of the store, causing all passersby—a fair number, given that the store had a special deal on flour—to stop and observe the commotion. Van Cleve blinked at the girl on the horse through his windshield, unsure at first who it was. He wound down his window. “You properly lost your mind now, Alice?”

Alice glared at him. She dropped her reins and her voice carried, clear as cut glass, through the still air, glittering with anger. “You shot her dog?”

There was a brief silence.

“You shot Margery’s dog?”

“I shot nothing.”

She lifted her chin and looked steadily at him. “No, of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t get your own hands dirty, would you? You probably got your men to come out here just to shoot that puppy.” She shook her head. “My God. What kind of man are you?”

She saw then from the questioning way Bennett swiveled to look at his father that he hadn’t known, and some small part of her was glad.

Van Cleve, who had been open-mouthed, swiftly recovered his composure. “You’re crazy. Living with that O’Hare girl has turned you crazy!” He glanced out of his window, noting the neighbors who had stopped to listen, murmuring to each other. This was rich meat indeed for a quiet town. Van Cleve shot Margery O’Hare’s dog. “She’s crazy! Look at her, riding her horse straight into my car! As if I’d shoot a dog!” He slapped his hands on the steering wheel. Alice didn’t move. His voice rose a register. “Me! Shoot a damn dog!”

And finally, when nobody moved, and nobody spoke: “Come on, Bennett. We got work to do.” He wrestled the wheel so that the car spun around her and accelerated briskly up the road, leaving Spirit to prance and shy as the gravel sprayed at her feet.

* * *

• • •

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Sven leaned over the rough wooden table with Fred and the two women and relayed the tales coming out of Harlan County, of men dynamited clean out of their beds because of the escalating union disputes, of thugs with machine-guns, of sheriffs turning the blindest of eyes. In the light of all this a dead dog shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. But it seemed to knock the fight right out of Margery. She’d been sick twice with the shock of it, and she cast around for her hound reflexively when they were home, her palm pressed to her cheek, as if even now she half expected him to come bounding around the corner.

“Van Cleve’s canny,” muttered Sven, as she left the room to check on Charley, as she did repeatedly through each evening. “He knew Margery wouldn’t bat an eyelid if someone looked at her down the barrel of a gun. But if he picked off the things she loves . . .”

Alice considered this. “Are . . . you worried, Sven?”

“For me? No. I’m a company man. And he needs a fire captain. I’m not unionized, but anything happens to me, all my boys go out. We’re agreed on that. And if we walk, the mine shuts down. The sheriff might be in Van Cleve’s pocket but there are limits to what the state will tolerate.” He sniffed. “Besides, this one’s about him and you two girls. And he won’t want attention drawn to the fact that he’s engaged in a fight with a pair of women. Oh, no.”