The Unmaking of June Farrow(72)

He was a hired hand at the flower farm, the one I’d seen the day I’d spent at Esther’s. Margaret’s gaze followed him as he passed, and when he looked at her, her cheeks flushed a deeper red.

“And who is that?” I asked, giving her a knowing look.

“Just a boy.”

“Does he have a name?”

She glanced over her shoulder to Esther, as if to be sure she wasn’t listening. “Malachi.”

“Malachi Rhodes?” The name leapt from my mouth.

Margaret’s eyes widened, brows coming together. “How do you know that?”

My lips parted, but it took a moment before I could make myself speak. “I heard someone say his name at the farm.”

I still wasn’t sure about the rules of interference. I was treading lightly, trying to make the fewest ripples possible, like Esther had said, and I had thought less about it with Eamon and Annie because they didn’t exist in my world. But Malachi and Gran had been close friends my entire life, so close that she’d insisted he play fiddle at her burial. I’d always wondered if there had ever been something between them. I’d even gone so far as to wonder if he may have been my mother’s father and my grandfather.

Margaret’s curiosity died with my less-than-interesting answer, and she swayed from side to side, rocking Annie in her arms. The music changed, and the crowd around the stage shifted shape, dispersing long enough for men with glasses of beer and women on their arms to weave along the edge of the dance floor. There were children chasing one another, and a group of a few black women in A-line dresses smoking cigarettes just outside. A table was stacked with homemade desserts on pedestal stands.

My eyes found Eamon across the tent. He stood shoulder to shoulder with two other men, listening as one of them talked, a bottle of beer in one hand. The man’s red face was turned toward the lights, but Eamon’s was still draped in shadow.

“Who is that Eamon’s talking to?” I said, leaning closer to Margaret.

She lifted up onto her toes to see. “Oh, that’s Frank Crawley.”

Crawley. It took me a moment to remember. Frank Crawley was mentioned in the newspaper articles about the murder. That’s where Nathaniel had been headed the night he died.

“He lives at the end of Hayward Gap. Another tobacco farm down the road from you,” Margaret said.

“The Crawley barn,” I murmured, looking at her.

“What?”

Annie slid down from Margaret’s hip, pulling at her hand.

“That’s on our road?” I asked.

Margaret looked confused. “Yeah. Why?”

“No reason,” I lied. “Just trying to place everyone.”

I watched Eamon, studying the way he stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his reserved expression contorted by the dim light. He’d left the Faire early that night when Percy Lyle came to tell him that Callie had gotten out of the paddock. He’d gone home. If the Crawleys lived at the end of our road and Nathaniel was headed there, there was every reason to believe that he and Eamon could have crossed paths.

What had the article said? That there’d been signs of a struggle?

On the tape that Caleb played, I’d said that Eamon left the Faire around 5 P.M. If I’d gone home with Esther, that meant that he hadn’t come back to the Faire when he was finished dealing with Callie.

“Everything okay?” Margaret looked concerned now.

I forced another smile, catching Annie’s attention before I pointed in the direction of the dessert table. “Look what I found.”

Her mouth opened, eyes going wide. She was so beautiful that it didn’t seem like she could be real, much less have come from me, and that look on her face set off a chain reaction inside of me. A feeling of complete and utter euphoria sprung to life, and the smile on my face stretched wider.

“Think we should go get some of that cake?” Margaret tugged one of Annie’s braids playfully.

Annie nodded, and then she was running toward the tower of desserts, Margaret trying to keep up.

The flash of a bulb made me flinch, and I blinked the bright light from my eyes, finding its source across the tent. In one corner, a man in a suit stood behind a wooden tripod set with a large boxlike camera. He leaned over it, checking the settings, before it flashed again.

The pop was followed by a brief fizzing sound, and there was something about it that pulled at the edges of a thought. I focused on that feeling, trying to tug it to the surface. It was that flash. The sound of the bulb. I squinted, trying to remember.

The music cut out, and the bodies on the dance floor stopped whirling, strings of laughter drifting through the air. When the fiddle started up again, it was slow, the notes pulling long before the mandolin joined in with a melancholy tune that made my heart ache. I could hear the river in the distance. The chirp of crickets carried on the wind coming off the mountains. They were the sounds of home, but here I was, in a sea of strangers.

I searched for Eamon again, finding him still standing in the same spot, but now another man had joined them. Eamon looked like he was only half listening, eyes scanning the room until they found me. When they did, a lump rose in my throat.

He murmured something to the others, and then he was stepping through the crowd gathered between us. When he reached me, he took my hand again. This time, it was with a confidence he hadn’t shown earlier. His fingers weaved with mine, and our palms touched before he set down the bottle of beer and pulled me with him.