“Arthur is kind,” Mama said. “A friend. Without his help, we’d be in a bad way.”
“I’ve seen the soft looks passin’ between you—the way he touches you. What might happen if I told Pa about all that?” Deirdre tossed the words carelessly, not stopping to weigh the harm in them.
Mama’s eyes flickered with something akin to fear. She drew back her hand and struck, her wedding band cutting across Deirdre’s cheek, sharp as a blade. Deirdre put a hand to her face. When she pulled it away, her fingers were wet with blood.
Mama had been plenty mad in the past, but she’d never struck her before. The room spun. Deirdre’s hurt and anger surged hot, leapt like fresh tongues of flame. Away. She had to get away. She flew through the door, ignoring Mama’s tearful call.
Outside, the rain lashed her smarting cheek and soaked through the thin fabric of her homespun dress. It was cold. So cold. But anywhere was better than home.
She rushed toward the shelter of the woods, with no mind to where she was going. When the land finally flattened out, heaving water stood where freshly sown fields should have been. Deirdre stopped to catch her breath. She covered her head as best she could with her shawl and went on. To her left, Ballard Creek was a roaring torrent. Uprooted trees flowed through its muddy current, borne away by the angry, frothy water. The bloated corpse of a deer bobbed around the bend where the bridge used to be, stiff, spindly legs catching on the limbs of an ash tree. Its dead eyes stared at her, dim and baleful.
It wasn’t safe out here. But she couldn’t stand to be in the same house with Mama. Her gut twisted, thinking of the things Mama and Arthur Cash might have done, for months, if not years, right under Deirdre’s nose. She thought of poor unwitting Pa, laboring hard to make a living on the Colorado frontier. Pa, old and plain and spare of word, who looked at Mama like she was drink in the desert. It wasn’t right. None of it.
Suddenly, the bluff she stood on started to crumble and slide, the dirt and rock at her feet winnowing off into the hungry floodwaters. Deirdre grasped the branch of a nearby sapling and used it to claw herself back onto solid ground, just as the sapling and everything next to it slid into the mire. Her heart hammered, loud in her ears. If she’d fallen into the river, she’d have been pulled downstream, at the mercy of nature.
Deirdre shivered. Her clothes were soaked through, and her fingertips numb. The sky had turned a dark and grayish purple. She needed to find shelter before nightfall. She could always go to Ingrid’s. She thought of the Nilssons’ cozy log house with its rock hearth, the long table laden with too much food, and the spiced tea Ma Nilsson always offered up.
But nosy Ing, being Ing, would ask too many questions. Questions Deirdre didn’t want to answer. In the distance, a twig snapped. And then another. Deirdre scanned the dark row of cedars edging Sutter’s holler. A flash of pale corn-silk hair moved through the trees. Only one person she’d ever met had hair like that—Ebba, Ingrid’s little cousin.
What in heaven’s name was the child doing out in this storm? Was she lost? Ebba didn’t know these woods. If she wandered too far, she might end up falling off a bluff. Children didn’t fare well alone in the forests around Tin Mountain.
A few summers ago, little Tessa Ray, who had been born and raised right here, on her daddy’s land, had wandered off after a Sunday school picnic into Sutter’s holler. They’d found her days later, babbling about strange voices and a lady perched in a tree like a bird. Tessa’s mind went soft as grits after that. Eventually her babbling turned into endless screaming. The Rays had done their best by the girl, but as far as Deirdre knew, she still lived in a home for the feebleminded.
She doubted the Nilssons would have half the patience with Ebba.
Deirdre lifted her skirts and ran into the woods, calling Ebba’s name. Within moments, she spotted a flicker of movement to the side of the logging path. She followed, wet branches smacking against her face. The way grew steep and perilous, rocks slipping under her feet as she edged down the lip of the holler. She leaned against a tree to catch her breath. Her shins were lashed to ribbons by the underbrush, blood trickling from the welted cuts.
From the direction of Pa’s old homestead, she heard a shimmer of childlike laughter. “Ebba?”
No one answered her call. Something wasn’t right. Her heart juddered as she scanned the blackened cedars. Fear prickled along her arms and gathered low in her belly. She felt watched. Hunted.
In the middle of the clearing, the lone, gnarled locust rustled its leaves. A shape drifted out from behind the tree, unfurling like white smoke. Deirdre squinted through the driving rain. It wasn’t Ebba, or smoke. It was a woman, tall and slender and dressed only in a billowing white shift, its hem singed black. Her long auburn hair stood out from her head in a wild, messy halo. She lifted her hand and pointed at Deirdre, eyes as blue as the depths of the ocean.
Deirdre . . .
The woman’s voice, though soft and beseeching, reverberated through Deirdre. She fell to her knees and howled as a searing pain lanced her temple and thrummed behind her eyes. A horrific vision rushed into her head, unbidden. In it, the woman was being dragged from Pa’s old homestead by a man in black whose face was hidden in shadow. Outside the cabin, a jeering crowd stood, wielding torches and shouting. Though the woman had a proud expression, Deirdre felt her pain, her worry for her child, and the sting of her lover’s betrayal.
The man forced the woman to the locust tree and lashed her to its thorny trunk as the mob looked on. He took the same wickedly curved knife Deirdre had seen in the cabin from the folds of his cassock. With it, he carved a cross onto the woman’s forehead, and it was wrong. It was wrong because the knife was the woman’s—and it was never meant to do harm. Her blood trickled down her face and neck, painting her bosom red. The man grasped a hank of the woman’s hair and lifted her head.
Promise the child to me. Promise her to me and I will let you live.
The woman had made peace with her death, had known for some time that she must die, yet she gathered enough strength to speak:
Never, Nathaniel Walker. You will never claim what is mine. The land and my blood will remember what you’ve done. One day, there will come a reckoning and you will reap your own folly.
The man laughed. He took up a torch and held it to the woman’s hem. Fire licked at her feet, making her dance. A cry of pain broke free from her throat. Deirdre cried out with her—felt the biting tongues of flame as if she were being burned, too. But along with the burning pain, something else rushed through her, borne on a fast-moving current that lit up her bones with light. Her flesh sang with knowing. With power.
The vision faded along with the woman’s cries, leaving Deirdre spent and shaking. She lifted her pounding head from the ground. The woman was gone. Rain pelted Deirdre’s back, chilling her skin where moments before it had blazed with an unearthly fire. She crawled beneath the locust tree, taking what little shelter she could beneath its branches, and touched her hand to the rough bark. A voice flowed through her mind, like a soft whisper of shadow.
Remember, Deirdre. For her sake and your own, you must remember. Guard your heart from treachery, and beware the one who burns.