Sometimes Alice waited until she was alone on the long ride back to the cabin and, shielded by the trees and the silence, cried huge sobs of fear and frustration. Tears she knew Margery would not cry for herself. Nobody spoke of what would happen when the baby came. Nobody spoke of what would happen to Margery afterward. The whole situation was so surreal and the child was still an abstraction, a thing that few of them could imagine into existence.
* * *
• • •
Alice rose at 4:30 a.m. every day, slung herself across Spirit and disappeared into the densely forested mountainside laden with saddlebags so that she’d done the first mile before she’d had a chance to wake fully. She greeted everyone she passed by name, usually with some piece of information that might be pertinent to them—“Did you get that tractor repair book, Jim? And did your wife like the short stories?”—and would place her horse in front of Van Cleve’s car whenever she saw it, so that he was forced to stop, engine idling in the road, while she stared him down. “Sleep well at night, do you?” she would call, her voice piercing the still air. “Feeling pleased with yourself?” His cheeks blown out and purple, he would wrench his car around her.
She was not afraid to be in the cabin alone, but Fred had helped her set more traps to alert her should anyone come close. She was reading one night when she heard the jingle of the bell string they had strung between the trees. With lightning reflexes, she reached back to the fireplace and pulled down the rifle, standing and cocking it on her shoulder in one fluid movement, placing the two barrels against the narrow gap in the door.
She squinted, trying to make out whether there was any movement outside and remained preternaturally still, scanning the darkness a moment or two longer, before she let her shoulders drop.
“Just deer,” she muttered to herself and lowered the rifle.
It was only as she left the next morning that she found the note that had been slipped under the door overnight with its heavy black scrawl.
You do not belong here. Go home.
It wasn’t the first, and she bit down hard on the feelings the notes provoked. Margery would have laughed at them, so that was what she did. She screwed the paper into a ball, threw it into the fire, and cursed under her breath. And tried not to think about where home might be, these days.
* * *
• • •
Fred stood beside the barn in the dimming light chopping wood—one of the few tasks that still defeated Alice. She found the weight and heft of the old ax unnerving, and rarely managed to split the logs along the grain, usually leaving the blade wedged at an awkward angle, stuck fast, until Fred returned. He, in contrast, hit each piece with a clean, rhythmic motion, his arms circling in a great sweep, the ax slicing each into halves and then quarters, pausing each three strikes, to hold it loosely in one hand while with the other he tossed the new logs onto the pile. She watched him for a moment, waiting until he stopped again, drew a forearm across his brow, and looked up at where she stood in the doorway, glass in hand.
“That for me?”
She took a few steps forward and handed it to him.
“Thank you. There’s more here than I thought.”
“Good of you to do it.”
He took a long swig of the water and let out a breath before he handed back the glass. “Well. Can’t have you getting cold in winter. And they dry out quicker if you cut them smaller. Sure you don’t want to have another go?”
Something in her expression seemed to stop him.
“You okay, Alice?”
She smiled and nodded but even as she did so she barely convinced herself. So she told him the thing she had put off telling for a full week. “My parents have written. To say I can come home.”
Fred’s smile evaporated.
“They’re not happy, but they say I can’t stay here alone and they’re prepared to chalk the marriage up to youthful error. My aunt Jean has invited me to stay with her in Lowestoft. She needs help with her children and everyone agrees that this would be a good way of . . . well . . . getting me back to England without making too much of a scene. Apparently we can address all the legal matters from a suitable distance.”
“What’s Lowestoft?”
“A little town on the North Sea coast. Not exactly my first choice, but . . . Well, I suppose I’d have some independence at least.” And be away from my parents, she added silently. She swallowed. “They’re forwarding money for my passage. I told them I needed to stay for the end of Margery’s trial.” She let out a dry laugh. “I’m not sure if my being friends with an accused murderer improved their opinion of me any.”
There was a long silence.
“So you’re really leaving.”
She nodded. She couldn’t say any more. It was as if with that letter she had suddenly been reminded that her whole life here up to this point had been a fever dream. She pictured herself back in Mortlake, or in the fake-Tudor house in Lowestoft, her aunt’s polite inquiries as to her sleep, whether she was ready for a little breakfast, whether she might like to take a walk to the municipal park that afternoon. She looked down at her chapped hands, at her broken nails, at the sweater she had worn for fourteen days straight over the other layers, with its tiny fragments of hay and grass seed embedded in the yarn. She looked at her boots, with the scuffs that told of remote mountain trails, of splashing through creek beds or dismounting to make her way up narrow passes in mud, fierce sunshine or endless, endless rain. What would it be like to be that other girl again? The one with polished shoes, stockings and a tame, orderly existence? With nails that had been carefully filed, and a shampoo-and-set twice a week? No longer dismounting to relieve herself behind trees, picking apples to eat as she worked, her nostrils full of woodsmoke and damp earth, but instead exchanging a few polite words with the bus conductor about whether he was sure the 238 stopped outside the railway station.
Fred was watching her. There was something so pained and raw in his expression that she felt hollowed out by it. He hid it, reaching for the ax. “Well, I guess I might as well do the rest of these while I’m here.”
“Margery will need them. When she comes home.”
He nodded, his eyes on the blade. “Yup.”
Alice waited a moment. “I’ll fix you something to eat . . . If you’re still happy to stay.”
He nodded, his eyes still downcast. “That would be good.”
She waited a moment longer, then turned and walked back into Margery’s cabin with the empty glass, and the sound of each whack of the blade splintering the wood behind her made her flinch, as if it were not just the wood being rent in two.
* * *
• • •