The Hunger

CHAPTER ONE

To Charles Stanton, there was nothing like a good, close shave.

He stood that morning in front of the big mirror strapped to the side of James Reed’s wagon. In every direction, the prairie unfurled like a blanket, occasionally rippled by wind: mile after uninterrupted mile of buffalo grass, disrupted only by the red spire of Chimney Rock, standing like a sentry in the distance. If he squinted, the wagon train looked like children’s toys scattered in the vast, unending brush—flimsy, meaningless, inconsequential.

He turned to the mirror and steadied the blade under his jaw, remembering one of his grandfather’s favorite expressions: A wicked man hides behind a beard, like Lucifer. Stanton knew plenty of men who were happy enough with a well-honed knife, even some who used a hatchet, but for him nothing would do but a straight razor. He didn’t shrink from the feel of cold metal against his throat. In fact, he kind of liked it.

“I didn’t think you were a vain man, Charles Stanton”—a voice came from behind him—“but if I didn’t know any better, I might wonder if you weren’t admiring yourself.” Edwin Bryant came toward him with a tin cup of coffee in his hand. The smile faded quickly. “You’re bleeding.”

Stanton looked down at the razor. It was streaked with red. In the mirror he saw a line of crimson at his throat, a gaping three-inch slash where the tip of his blade had been. The razor was so sharp that he hadn’t felt a thing. Stanton jerked the towel from his shoulder and pressed it to the wound. “My hand must have slipped,” he said.

“Sit down,” Bryant said. “Let me take a look at it. I have a little medical training, you know.”

Stanton sidestepped Bryant’s outstretched hand. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. A mishap.” That was this damnable journey, in a nutshell. One unexpected “mishap” after another.

Bryant shrugged. “If you say so. Wolves can smell blood from two miles away.”

“What can I do for you?” Stanton asked. He knew that Bryant hadn’t come down the wagon train just to talk, not when they were supposed to be yoking up. Around them, the regular morning chaos whirled. Teamsters herded the oxen, the ground rumbling beneath the animals’ weight. Men dismantled their tents and loaded them into their wagons, or smothered out fires beneath sand. The air was filled with the sound of children shouting as they carried buckets of water for the day’s drinking and washing.

Stanton and Bryant hadn’t known each other long but had quickly developed a friendship. The party Stanton had been traveling with prior—a small wagon train out of Illinois, consisting mostly of the Donner and Reed families—had recently joined up with a much larger group led by a retired military man, William Russell, outside Independence, Missouri. Edwin Bryant had been one of the first members from the Russell party to introduce himself and seemed to gravitate to Stanton, perhaps because they were both single men in a wagon train full of families.

In appearance, Edwin Bryant was Stanton’s opposite. Stanton was tall, strong without trying to be. He had been complimented on his good looks his entire life. It had all come from his mother, as far as he could tell. He had her thick, wavy dark brown hair and soulful eyes.

Thy looks are a gift from the devil, boy, so you might tempt others to sin. Another of his grandfather’s pronouncements. Once he’d smashed Stanton’s face with a belt buckle, maybe hoping to chase out the devil he saw there. It hadn’t worked. Stanton had kept all his teeth, and his nose had healed. The scar on his forehead had faded. The devil, as far as he knew, had stayed.

Bryant was probably a decade older. Years as a newspaperman had left him softer than most of the men on the journey, who were farmers or carpenters or blacksmiths, men who made a living through hard physical labor. He had weak eyes and needed a pair of spectacles almost constantly. He had a perpetually disheveled air, as though his thoughts were always elsewhere. There was no denying that he was sharp, though, probably the smartest man in the party. He’d admitted to having spent a few years as a doctor’s apprentice when he was very young, though he didn’t want to be pressed into service as the camp physician.

“Take a look at this.” Bryant kicked a tuft of vegetation at their feet, sending up a puff of dust. “Have you noticed? The grass is dry for this time of year.”

They had been traveling on a flat plain for days now, the horizon a long stretch of tall prairie grass and scrub. Flanking the trail on either side in the distance, sand hills of gold and coral rose and fell, some craggy as fingers, pointing directly to heaven. Stanton crouched low and pulled a few strands of grass. The blades were short, no more than nine or ten inches long, and were already faded to a dull brownish-green. “Looks like there was a drought not too long ago,” Stanton said. He stood, smacking the dirt off his palms, looking toward the far-off hazy purple scrim. The land seemed to stretch on forever.

“And we’re just entering the plain,” Bryant pointed out.

His meaning was clear: There might not be enough grass for their oxen and livestock to eat. Grass, water, wood: the three things a wagon train needed. “Conditions are worse than we thought they’d be, and we’ve got a long way to go. See that mountain range off in the distance? That’s just the beginning, Charles. There are more mountains behind those—and desert and prairie, and rivers wider and deeper than any we’ve crossed so far. All between us and the Pacific Ocean.”

Stanton had heard this litany before. Bryant had said little else ever since they had come across the trapper’s shack at Ash Hollow two days ago. The empty shack had been turned into a frontier outpost of sorts for the pioneers crossing the plains, who had taken to leaving letters behind for the next eastbound traveler to carry to a real post office for delivery onward. Many of these letters were simply folded pieces of paper left under a rock in the hope that they would eventually reach the intended recipient back home.

Stanton had been strangely comforted by the sight of all those letters. They had seemed a testament to the travelers’ love of freedom and desire for greater opportunity, no matter the risk. But Bryant had gotten agitated. Look at all these letters. Must be dozens of them, maybe a hundred. The settlers who wrote them are ahead of us on the trail. We’re among the last to head out this season and you know what that means, don’t you? he’d asked Stanton. We might be too late. The mountain passes will be closed off by snow come winter, and winter comes early in higher elevations.

“Patience, Edwin,” Stanton said now. “We’ve barely put Independence behind us—”

“Yet here it is the middle of June. We’re moving too slowly.”

Slinging the towel back over his shoulder, Stanton looked around him: The sun had been up for hours and yet they hadn’t broken camp. All around him, families were still finishing their breakfasts over the remains of their campfires. Mothers stood dandling babies in their arms as they swapped gossip. A boy was out playing with a dog instead of herding the family’s oxen in from the field.

“Can you blame them on such a fine morning?” he asked lightly. After weeks on the trail, no one was anxious to face another day. Half the men were only in a hurry when it came time to break out the jug of mash. Bryant only frowned. Stanton rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyway, Russell is the man to talk to.”

Bryant grimaced as he stooped to retrieve his coffee cup. “I’ve talked to Russell about it and he agrees, and yet does nothing about it. The man can’t say no to anyone. Earlier in the week—you remember—he let those men go off on a buffalo hunt, and the train sat idle for two days to smoke and dry the meat.”

“We might be happy for that meat farther down the trail.”

“I guarantee you that we’ll see more buffalo. But we’ll never get those days back.”

Stanton saw the sense in what Bryant said, and didn’t want to argue. “Look. I’ll go with you tonight and we’ll speak to Russell together. We’ll make him see that we’re serious.”

Bryant shook his head. “I’m tired of waiting. That’s what I’ve come to tell you: I’m leaving the wagon train. A few of us men are going ahead on horseback. It’s too slow by wagon. The family men, I understand why they need their wagons. They have young children, the old and sick to carry. They have their goods to worry about. I don’t begrudge them, but I won’t be held hostage by them, either.”

Stanton thought of his own wagon, his pair of oxen. The outfit had cost nearly all the money he made from the sale of his store. “I see.”

Bryant’s eyes were bright behind his glasses. “That rider who joined up with us last night, he told me that the Washoe were still south of their usual grazing territory, about two weeks down the trail. I can’t risk missing them.” Bryant fancied himself to be a bit of an amateur anthropologist and was supposedly writing a book about the various tribes’ spiritual beliefs. He could talk for hours about Indian legends—talking animals, trickster gods, spirits that seemed to live in the earth and wind and water—and was so passionate that some of the settlers had become suspicious of him. As much as Stanton enjoyed Bryant’s stories, he knew they could be terrifying to Christians raised solely on Bible stories, who couldn’t understand that a white man could be deeply fascinated by native beliefs.

“I know these people are your friends. But for God’s sake,” Bryant continued. When he was excited about a subject, it was hard to get him to drop it. “What made them think they could bring their entire households with them to California?”

Stanton couldn’t help but smile. He knew, of course, what Bryant was referring to: George Donner’s great, customized prairie schooner. It had been the talk of Springfield when it was built and had become the talk of the entire wagon train. The wagon bed had been built up an extra few feet so there was room for a bench and a covered storage area. It even had a small stove with its chimney vented through the cloth canopy.

Bryant nodded toward the Donners’ campsite. “I mean, how do they expect to cross the mountains with something like that? It’s a behemoth. Even four yoke of oxen won’t be enough to haul it up the steep grades. And for what? To carry the queen of Sheba in comfort.” In the short time since the Springfield contingent had joined up with the larger Russell party, Edwin Bryant had developed a healthy dislike for Tamsen Donner, that was plain enough. “Have you seen inside that thing? Like Cleopatra’s pleasure barge, with its feather mattress and silks.” Stanton smirked. It wasn’t as though the Donners were sleeping inside; their wagon was packed with household goods—including bedding—like every other wagon. Bryant was a little prone to righteous exaggeration. “I’d thought George Donner was a smart fellow. Apparently not.”

“Can you blame him for wanting to make his wife happy?” Stanton asked. He wanted to think of George Donner as a friend, but he couldn’t. Not knowing of Donner’s connections.

And now, to make matters worse, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes off Donner’s wife. Tamsen Donner was a good twenty years younger than her husband and bewitchingly beautiful, possibly the most beautiful woman Stanton had ever met. She was like one of those porcelain dolls you saw in a dressmaker’s shop, modeling the latest French fashions in miniature. She had a cunning look in her eyes he found himself drawn to, and the tiniest waist, so small that a man could circle it with his two hands. Several times, he’d had to stop himself from thinking about how that waist would feel in his hands. It was a mystery to Stanton how George Donner had won a woman like that in the first place. He assumed Donner’s money had something to do with it.

“A group of us are heading out tomorrow,” Bryant said, more quietly. “Why don’t you join us? You’re your own man, no family to worry about. That way, you could get to… wherever you’re going that much quicker.”

Bryant was obviously fishing again, trying to learn the reason why Stanton was making the trip west. Most people were only too eager to talk about it. Bryant knew Stanton had owned a dry-goods business and a home back in Springfield, but Stanton hadn’t shared with him—hadn’t shared with anybody—why he’d decided to walk away from it all. His partner, the one with the business sense, had died unexpectedly, leaving Stanton to manage the store on his own. He had the head for that kind of thing but not the spirit for it—waiting on the endless stream of customers, haggling with the ones who didn’t like his prices, trying to stock the shelves with products that would appeal to the citizens of Springfield, neighbors he barely knew and certainly didn’t understand (exotic toilet waters? bright satin ribbon?). It had been a lonely time and was certainly one of the reasons he’d left Springfield.

But not the only reason.

Stanton decided to hedge. “What would I do with my wagon and oxen? I can’t just abandon them on the trail.”

“You wouldn’t need to. I’m sure you can find someone in the group to buy them. Or you can hire one of the drivers to see to your wagon and make sure it gets to California.”

“I don’t know,” Stanton said. Unlike Bryant, he didn’t mind traveling with families, the noise of the children, the high-pitched chatter of the women on the trail. But it was more than that.

“Give me time to think about it,” he said.

At that moment, a man on horseback came galloping up, his arrival announced by a swirl of dust. George Donner. One of his jobs was to get the wagon train started on its way in the morning. Normally, he went about it cheerfully, urging the families to pack their campsites and get their oxen hitched up so the great caravan could get under way again. But this morning his expression was dark.

Stanton hailed Donner briefly. It was time to go, then, at last. “I was just about to chain up—” he began, but Donner cut him off.

“We’re not moving just yet,” he said gravely. “There’s been a mishap up the line.”

A tremor of misgiving moved through Stanton, but he swallowed it back.

Bryant squinted up at him. “Should I fetch my medical kit?”

George Donner shifted in his saddle. “Not that kind of mishap. A young boy is missing. Wasn’t in his tent this morning when his parents went to wake him.”

Stanton felt immediately relieved. “Children have been known to wander—”

“When we’re on the move, yes. But not at night. The parents are remaining here to search for their son. Some of the others are staying to help them, too.”

“Are they looking for more volunteers?” Stanton asked.

Donner shook his head again. “They’ve got more than enough. Once they pull their wagons off the trail we’ll get the rest of the train moving. Keep your eyes peeled for any sign of the boy. God willing, he’ll turn up before too long.”

Donner rode off again and a finger of dust lifted behind him. If the child had wandered off in the dark, it was unlikely his parents would ever see him again. A young boy might be swallowed up in all this vastness, in the unrelenting space that stretched in all directions, in the horizons that yoked even the sun down to heel.

Stanton hesitated—maybe he should go after them. A little extra help wouldn’t hurt. He put a hand to his neck, considering mounting his horse. His fingers came away red. He was bleeding again.

CHAPTER TWO

The wagons stretched across the plain in front of Tamsen Donner for as far as she could see. Whoever had first thought to call the pioneers’ wagons “prairie schooners” was quite clever; the canopies did look like the sails of ships, blazing white under the brilliant morning sun. And the thick clouds of dust kicked up by wagon wheels could almost be mistaken for the swell of waves carrying their miniature ships across a desert sea.

Most of the pioneers walked rather than rode to spare the oxen the added weight, taking to the fields on either side of the trail to avoid the worst of the dust. The stock animals—dairy and beef cattle, goats and sheep—were kept on the grassland, too, herded along by switch-wielding boys and girls, the family dog keeping any stragglers in line.

Tamsen liked to walk. It gave her time to look for herbs and plants she needed for her remedies; yarrow for fever, willow bark for headache. She was keeping track of flora she found in a journal, tucking in snippets of the unfamiliar ones for study or experimentation.

Besides, walking gave the men an opportunity to admire her figure. What was the point of looking the way she did and having it go to waste?

And there was something else, too. When she was confined in a wagon all day she began to feel that clawing, discontented restlessness rise up inside her like a trapped animal, the way it used to back home. At least outside, the beast—the unhappiness—could roam and give her space to breathe and think.

That morning, however, she soon regretted her decision. Betsy Donner, who had married George’s younger brother, was barreling toward her. She didn’t dislike Betsy, exactly, but she certainly didn’t like her, either. Betsy was as unsophisticated as a fourteen-year-old girl, not at all like the friends Tamsen had known in Carolina before marrying George: the other schoolteachers, especially Isabel Topp; Isabel’s housemaid Hattie, who taught her which plants to use for healing; the minister’s wife, who could read Latin. Tamsen missed them all.

That was the biggest problem. They’d been on the trail for a month and a half and Tamsen was agitated. She’d imagined the farther they moved west, the freer she would feel—she hadn’t anticipated this trapped sensation. There’d been distractions for the first few weeks: The novelty of living out of a wagon and camping under the stars at night. Keeping the children engaged day after day on the endless trail, inventing games, turning games into lessons. It had started out as an adventure, but now all she could think about was how tiresome it had become, and how much they’d left behind.

How much she’d left behind.

How the dark nag of want only grew with distance, instead of subsiding.

Tamsen had been against the move west from the start. But George had made it clear that he would make all the decisions about the family’s livelihood. He’d come to her the owner of a large farming concern, hundreds of acres under cultivation and a herd of cattle. I was born to be prosperous. You leave it to me to manage our family business and you’ll never know want, he’d promised. His confidence was appealing; she’d been alone and tired of fending for herself after her first husband died of smallpox. She told herself that she’d come to love him in time. She had to.

It was the only way to blot out the wrongness in her heart, the brokenness.

And besides, whatever else she felt, she knew she could always trust Jory. Her brother had thought George was right for her; she’d been inclined to believe it. Had willed herself to.

Then George came to her with the idea to move to California. It’s the land of opportunity, he’d said after reading books written by settlers who’d made the journey. We’ll be rich beyond our wildest dreams. We can acquire thousands of acres there, far more than we’d ever be able to buy in Illinois. We’ll start our own empire and pass it on to our children. He talked his brother Jacob into going in with him on a huge spread. When she asked about the rumors she’d heard about trouble in California—weren’t there already Mexicans living there? They weren’t going to just hand over their land. And what about this talk of a coming war with Mexico, the way it had been in Texas?—he dismissed her questions. Americans are moving to California in droves, he’d argued. The government wouldn’t let them go there if it were dangerous. He had even pulled out his favorite book, The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, written by Lansford Warren Hastings, a lawyer who had made the journey, to prove it. And though she’d still had many more questions, part of her wanted to feel the same hope he did… that maybe things would be better in California.

But so far she was just stuck on an endless journey surrounded only by the people she cared for least. Her husband’s family.

“Good morning, Betsy,” she said as her sister-in-law approached, forcing a smile. Women were always forced to smile. Tamsen had mastered it so well it sometimes frightened her.

“Good morning, Tamsen.” Betsy was a square woman, broad in the shoulders and hips with a doughy middle that a corset couldn’t control. “Did you hear the news? A boy farther up the line went missing.”

Tamsen was not surprised. The wagon train had already suffered misfortune after misfortune: signs, all of them, if you knew how to interpret them. Just last week, she opened a barrel of flour to find it infested with weevils. It had to be thrown out, of course, an expensive loss. The following night, a woman—Philippine Keseberg, young wife to one of the less savory men on the wagon train—had delivered stillborn. Tamsen grimaced, remembering how the darkness of the prairie seemed to enfold the woman’s wailing, trapping it in the air around them.

Then there were the wolves following them; one family lost its entire supply of dried meat to them, and the wolves had even carried off a squealing newborn calf.

And now, a boy was missing.

“The wolves,” Tamsen said. She hadn’t meant to connect the two incidents, but she couldn’t help it.

Betsy’s hand went to her mouth, one of her many affected habits. “But there were other children asleep in the tent,” she said. “Wouldn’t they have woken up…?”

“Who knows?”

Betsy shook her head. “It might have been Indians, of course. I’ve heard stories of Indians taking white children after they’ve attacked settlements…”

“Goodness, Betsy, have you even seen an Indian these last twenty miles?”

“Then what happened to that boy?”

Tamsen just shook her head. Terrible things happened to children—and women—all the time, in their own homes, by people you knew, people you thought you could trust. If that wasn’t bad enough, here they were living in close quarters with hundreds of strangers. Odds were that at least one of them was guilty of terrible sin.

But she herself would not fall victim to tragedy, not if she could help it. She had means, limited though they were: charms, talismans, ways to persuade evil to pass by your door.

Unfortunately, however, these were not capable of easing the evil within.

Nearby, a man Tamsen recognized as Charles Stanton was herding cattle with a switch. Younger than George, Stanton had the look of a man who spent his days working hard in the field, not in a shop somewhere. He glanced up and caught Tamsen staring. She looked quickly away.

“The truth is apt to be far worse than we could imagine,” Tamsen said, somewhat enjoying the way Betsy looked at her in shock.

“Where are your girls this morning? I only see three,” Betsy said. Her voice was filled with sudden agitation.

Usually Tamsen had her daughters walk the first half of the day, hoping it would keep them fit and slender. Beauty could be a problem for a girl, but it was one of the few weapons a grown woman had, and she wanted them to preserve theirs if they could. The older girls, Elitha and Leanne, George’s daughters by his second wife, would watch after the younger ones: Frances, Georgia, and Eliza. Today, however, only the teenagers walked ahead, with Frances weaving around them like a frisky calf, full of energy and happy to have both girls’ attention to herself. Betsy’s seven boys and girls were a distance in front of them, heads down, trudging together as mindlessly as oxen.

“There’s nothing to worry about. Georgia and Eliza are in the wagon,” Tamsen said. “They woke with fevers this morning and were fussy. I thought it best to let them rest.”

“Just so, yes. Little ones tire out so easily.”

Sometimes Tamsen was amazed to think that she was a mother. It didn’t feel possible that she and George had been married long enough to produce three children together. Their babies were lovely, the spitting image of herself as a child, thank heavens. Elitha and Leanne, on the other hand, took after their father: big-boned and a little horse-faced.

But she didn’t regret motherhood. Maybe it was one of the only things she didn’t regret. She was proud of her girls, in fact: had placed honey on their tongues when they were babies, as the Indian servant in Tamsen’s childhood home had taught her, so they would grow up sweet; had braided ropes of balsam fir and tucked it in their blankets so they would grow up strong.

They would always have options; they’d never be yoked into marriage, as she had been not once, but twice.

But Tamsen had her way of getting even, as some might call it.

Stanton met Tamsen’s eyes again. Betsy had gone ahead to catch up with her children, and so this time Tamsen didn’t look away, not until he did.

She reached out and let her fingertips dance over the wildflower blossoms. For a moment, she thought of the yellow coneflowers that dotted her brother Jory’s vast wheat fields, untamable and abundant. She knew home was ahead of her and not behind, that she should banish memories of Jory’s farm—and all thoughts of her life before—from her mind, but she couldn’t just now.

The blossoms bent and swayed at her touch, so delicate they almost tickled.

CHAPTER THREE

Mary Graves knelt in the grass and set down her metal tub beside the river. It was a peaceable stretch of the North Platte, slow and gentle, but maybe that was because summer had taken a bite out of it already. The land had all the earmarks of a coming drought.

Doing the washing for the large Graves family was one of Mary’s many responsibilities. Twelve people—her mother and father, five sisters and three brothers, not to mention her older sister Sarah’s husband—meant a lot of dirty clothes and linens, and Mary preferred to do a little every night rather than let it pile up. It was one of the few times she could be by herself. Her entire day, it seemed, was spent in the company of her family: minding her younger siblings, preparing meals alongside her mother, sitting with her sister by the fire in the evenings to mend clothes. From the minute she rose in the morning until she took to her bedroll, she was surrounded by a clutter of other people, assailed by voices and needs, stories and complaints. Sometimes it made her feel as if she were constantly standing in the middle of a hard wind, blown in every direction. Even from this distance the sound of raucous laughter and shouting carried to her from the encampment.

Normally she escaped just for the sheer pleasure of standing in silence, listening to nothing but the soft rustling of tall weeds in the breeze. Tonight, however, the reminder of the wagon line nearby didn’t bother her so much. The missing boy had left everyone spooked, even her. Poor Willem Nystrom. His family was part of the original wagon party and because there was little mixing with the newcomers, Mary had only ever seen him from a distance. But he seemed like a sweet boy, always playing and laughing, six years old and hair so blond it was almost white. Her brothers Jonathan and Franklin Junior were right around that age, and her heart jumped up in her throat at the thought of one of them simply vanishing from the middle of the camp. It was like one of those old fairy tales, of children suddenly whisked away into a netherworld, taken by angry spirits.

She took comfort in the campfires visible in the distance. The men were driving the cattle out to the taller grass to graze for the evening, hobbling horses so they wouldn’t wander off. They inspected axles and wheels for signs of wear and checked over the harnesses so all would be ready for the next day’s march. Children were returning to camp with armloads of firewood and kindling. She’d left her little brothers drawing the figure of a wheel in the dirt for a game of Fox and Geese. As much as possible, everyone was keeping to routine.

Mary had just started scrubbing the first item of clothing—her brother William’s shirt, stiff with dried sweat—when she saw two young women, Harriet Pike and Elitha Donner, coming toward her through the high grass, carrying washtubs. With a sense of relief that surprised her, Mary waved to them.

“Good evening, Mary,” Harriet said stiffly. She and Harriet were close in age but barely knew each other. Mary thought Harriet acted far older than her twenty years, which she attributed to the fact that Harriet was already married with children. It was strange to see her with Elitha Donner, who was not only seven or eight years her junior but, most people said, acted even younger.

“You came just in time,” Mary said, trying to sound cheerful. “The light’s going fast.”

Harriet gave Elitha a long sideways look as she sorted through clothing. “Well, it’s not of my choosing. I wasn’t planning to do my washing tonight, but Elitha begged me to come with her. She was too afraid to come down by herself.”

Elitha said nothing as she worked in the shallow water, but her shoulders were hunched high about her ears. Elitha Donner was fidgety and nervous, like a spooky horse. “Is that so, Elitha?” Mary asked. “Is it because of that boy? There’s no shame in that. I think it’s put everyone on edge.”

The girl only shook her head, so Mary tried again. “Is it the Indians, then?” Mary was actually excited by the idea of finally getting to meet an Indian. They’d seen a few in the distance the first day they’d entered Indian Territory, a group of Pawnee coolly watching from horseback as the wagon train meandered through a valley. But they hadn’t come any closer.

Most of the people in the party were scared of Indians, always telling stories of raids on livestock and white children being taken captive, but Mary wasn’t. One of the settlers on the Little Blue River had told her that among the Pawnee, the women were in charge. The men did the hunting and went to war, but it was the women who made the decisions.

The idea had amazed her.

“It isn’t the Indians I’m afraid of,” Elitha said. She was working quickly and kept her eyes trained on her hands, refusing to look up. She obviously didn’t intend to be there a second longer than she had to.

“She’s afraid of ghosts,” Harriet said with a sigh. “She thinks this place is haunted.”

“I never said that,” Elitha shot back. “I never said they were ghosts.” She hesitated, looking from Harriet to Mary. “Mr. Bryant says—”

Harriet snorted. “Is that what’s bothering you? One of Mr. Bryant’s stories? Honestly, you should know better than to listen to the man.”

“That’s not fair,” Elitha said. “He’s smart. You said so yourself. He came out here to write a book about the Indians. Says they told him there are spirits out here, spirits of the forests and the hills and the rivers.”

“Oh, Elitha, don’t mind Mr. Bryant and his talk,” Mary said. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Mr. Bryant. He was very knowledgeable. That was obvious. And he’d proven himself capable enough when he set Billy Murphy’s leg after he broke it getting bucked off his horse. But there was something disconcerting about the way he seemed to wander around with his attention fixated elsewhere, as though he were always listening to a voice only he could hear.

“But I’ve heard them.” Elitha’s brow furrowed. “At night, I’ve heard them calling to me. Haven’t you?”

“Calling you?” Mary asked.

“She’s highly suggestible. Her stepmother lets her read novels. All those stories have left her giddy,” Harriet said to Mary over Elitha’s head.

Mary felt a twinge of irritation. She’d known plenty of women like Harriet over the years, women who looked as if their faces had been slowly compressed between the pages of a Bible, all pinched and narrow.

Mary reached over to pat Elitha’s hand. “I’m sure it was nothing. Perhaps you overheard people talking in the next tent over.”

“It didn’t sound like two people talking. It didn’t sound like that at all.” Elitha bit her lower lip. “It sounded like… someone was whispering in a high voice, only it was very weak, like the wind was carrying it in from far away. It was strange, and sad. It was the scariest thing I ever heard.”

A shiver went down Mary’s spine. She, too, had heard strange things at night since they’d started following the North Platte, but each time she’d told herself that it was her imagination. The cry of some animal she’d never seen before or wind whistling down a hollow canyon. Sounds carried differently over wide-open spaces.

“Now you’re just letting your imagination run away with you,” Harriet said. “I think you should be careful going around talking about spirits and the Indians and such. People might start thinking that you have heathen inclinations, like Mr. Bryant.”

“Oh, Harriet, really,” Mary said.

Harriet was undeterred. “Why, there might be a man in this wagon train with his eye on you already—but he won’t want to marry you if he thinks that you’re a silly, scared girl.”

Mary gave her last item an extra-hard twist, imagining instead that it was Harriet’s neck, then dropped it in her washtub to carry back to the wagon. “She’s only thirteen,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “That’s a bit young to be worrying about marriage, don’t you think?”

Harriet looked insulted. “I do not. I was fourteen when I got married.” Then she turned a cold smile on Mary. “And what about you? Have you ever had a sweetheart? It seems strange to me that you’re not married yet.”

“I was engaged not too long ago,” Mary said shortly, rinsing her hands in the water. “But he died unexpectedly before we could be wed.”

“How sad for you,” Elitha murmured.

“Fate can be fickle,” Mary said, as cheerfully as she could. “You never know what life has in store for you.”

Harriet drew herself up again, looking down her long nose at them. “I’m surprised at you, Mary. You’re a good Christian. God decides what happens in our lives, all in accordance with his plan. He must’ve had a reason for taking this man away from you.”

The words didn’t bother Mary, but Elitha gasped. “You can’t mean that, Harriet. God wouldn’t be so cruel to Mary.”

“I’m not saying it’s Mary’s fault,” Harriet said, though her tone seemed to disagree. “I’m saying that these things aren’t random. God was telling Mary that the marriage simply wasn’t meant to be.”

Mary bit her tongue. Harriet was enjoying being cruel, but she was correct in one respect. Mary would never admit it to anyone, certainly not her parents, but she’d known in her heart that she wasn’t ready to be married. Her sister Sarah had been happy to wed Jay Fosdick at nineteen—but Mary wasn’t like her older sister, a fact that became more apparent every passing day. When her father announced that they would be moving to California, she’d secretly been elated. She was tired of the small town she’d lived in since birth, where everyone knew about her family’s humble beginnings, that the family burned cow dung for warmth so that they could sell their firewood for money, until the plantings took hold and the harvests got better. People would always expect her to be exactly as they thought she was and would never let her be anything more. It was like trying to walk forward and finding that your head had been yoked in place.

When her fiancé was killed, her greatest sense was of relief—though she was mightily ashamed for it. She knew her father had pinned everything on her planned marriage and the better circumstances it would have allowed all of them.

Her sister’s marriage had been practical, but it had also been one of love. For Mary, Franklin Graves had always had other plans, she knew. He’d always imagined she’d be the one to make the kind of advantageous match that would save them all. She could hardly count the many times he’d told her she was his only hope.

She could hardly count, either, the many times she’d wished that Sarah had been born the prettier one and not her, the one on whose shoulders others’ happiness rested.

Harriet stood, cradling her washtub on her hip. “God has a special plan for each of us and it’s not for us to question the wisdom of his ways, only to listen and obey. I’m going to head back to camp. Are you coming with me, Elitha?”

Elitha shook her head. “I’m not done yet.”

Mary placed a hand on Elitha’s arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait with you and we can go back together.”

“Very well,” Harriet called over her shoulder as she started back. “Dinner won’t make itself.”

Elitha waited until Harriet was out of earshot before speaking. “You don’t mind me talking to you about this, do you, Mary?” Her eyes were suddenly huge and round. “Because I just have to tell someone. It wasn’t the voices that scared me, not like I said.” She glanced furtively over her shoulder again. “It’s always been like that with me. Tamsen says that I’m sensitive—to the spirit world, she means. She’s interested in all that. She had her palm read by this woman back in Springfield. Had her fortune told with the cards, too. This woman told Tamsen that the spirits liked me. That they found it easy to talk to me.”

Mary hesitated, then took Elitha’s hand, cold from the water. “It’s okay. You can tell me. Did something happen?”

Elitha nodded slowly. “Two days ago, when we came across that abandoned trapper’s cabin…”

“Ash Hollow?” Mary asked. She could still picture the tiny makeshift shack, boards bleached bone-white by the relentless prairie sun. A sad, lonely place, like the abandoned farmhouse she used to pass every Sunday on her way to service. Stripped nearly bare by the elements, dark empty windows like the hollow eye sockets of a skull, a stark reminder of another family’s failure. Let that be a lesson, her father had said to her once as they slowly rolled by it in the wagon, not too many years after they, too, had been on the verge of losing everything. But for the grace of God, that might have been us.

The world was fragile. One day, growth; the next day, kindling.

Elitha squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes. Ash Hollow. Did you go inside?”

Mary shook her head.

“It was filled with letters. Hundreds of them. Stacked on a table, held down with rocks. Mr. Bryant told me that pioneers leave them so that the next traveler heading east can take them to the first post office he sees.” Elitha looked at Mary uncertainly. “Would you think I was bad if I told you I read some?”

“But, Elitha. They weren’t meant for you.”

Elitha blushed. “I figured it wouldn’t harm anyone. It would be like reading stories. Most of the letters weren’t sealed, only folded up and left on the table, so the writer had to know that anybody could read them. Only it turned out they weren’t letters.”

Mary blinked, uncomprehending. She looked at Elitha crouched before her, pale as the rising moon. “What do you mean?”

“They weren’t addressed to anyone,” Elitha said. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “And there wasn’t any news in them… I opened letter after letter, and they all said the same thing, over and over.”

“I still don’t understand.” Mary felt as if a spider were tracking up and down her spine. “If they weren’t letters, what were they?”

Elitha thrust a hand awkwardly in her apron pocket. She drew out a small folded square of paper and handed it to Mary. “I kept one of them. I thought I should show it to someone, but I haven’t yet. I didn’t know who to show it to. Nobody would believe me. Maybe they’d think I wrote it myself, to get attention. But I didn’t, Mary. I didn’t.”

Mary took the paper. It was brittle and fragile from many days in the heat. She unfolded it carefully, afraid it might disintegrate in her hands. The ink was faded, as though it had been written a long time ago, but she didn’t have any problem making out the words.

Turn back, it said in a thin, spidery hand. Turn back or you will all die.

CHAPTER FOUR

They found the Nystrom boy, or what was left of him, later that same night.

A knot of dread clogged Stanton’s throat as he followed George Donner through the circle of wagons and headed into the dark, empty plain.

Two of the teamsters had made the discovery just minutes before, as they were driving the cattle out to graze for the evening. Through the fading light, they’d seen a depression in the tall grass and went to investigate. Both were hardy men, but nonetheless what they found had made one of them heave.

Dots of light floated ahead in the darkness and at first Stanton thought they were an illusion of some kind, but as he got closer the pinpricks became flame, and then torches. A dozen men were already assembled in a circle, the torches like a halo of flame over their heads. Stanton knew most of them—William Eddy, Lewis Keseberg, and Jacob Wolfinger, as well as Edwin Bryant—but there were a few from the original wagon party, friends of the boy’s family, he’d seen only in passing. A strange noise, halfway between a cry and a howl, rose off in the distance, rolling toward them from across the empty plain like a wave.

“Damn wolves,” someone muttered.

As Stanton shoved his way inside the circle, the first thing he saw was Edwin Bryant on his knees. What looked like a red, wet smear in the grass turned out to be a body. He shut his eyes momentarily. He’d faced ugly things before but was hard-pressed to recall ever seeing something as monstrous as this. He opened his eyes again.

The head was intact. In fact, if you only looked at the face you wouldn’t think anything was wrong. The boy’s eyes were closed, long brown lashes stark against chalk-white cheeks. His fine blond hair was plastered against his skull, his tiny mouth closed. He looked peaceful, as though he were sleeping.

But from the neck down…

Next to him, George Donner let out a whimper.

“What happened to him?” Lewis Keseberg asked, prodding the ground by the body with the butt of his rifle, as if it might yield answers. Keseberg and Donner were friends, though Stanton couldn’t imagine why. Keseberg was all black temper and violence, hard lines: your side, my side. Hard to believe he had the patience to be a father but he had a little daughter, Stanton had heard.

“It’s got to be wolves, body torn up like that.” William Eddy rubbed his beard, a nervous habit. Eddy was a carpenter, good at repairing broken axles and busted wheels. For this reason, he was popular among the families on the wagon train. But he was jumpy, too, high-strung. Stanton wasn’t sure he trusted him.

“What do you think, Doc?” Jacob Wolfinger asked, in his mild German accent.

Bryant sat back on his heels. “I’m no doctor,” he reminded them. “And I couldn’t say. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think it was wolves. It seems too neat.”

Stanton shuddered involuntarily. There wasn’t even a body, not really. There was almost nothing left but the skeleton. Tatters of flesh and scattered bones in a flattened, blood-soaked circle in the grass, intestines lying in a heap and already dark with flies. And another thing troubled him: They were six miles up the trail from where the boy had first gone missing. Wolves wouldn’t drag a carcass before devouring it.

“Whatever it was, it was hungry,” Donner commented—his face was leached of color. “We should bury the remains. We don’t want any of the women or children to see this.”

Eddy spat. “What about the parents? Somebody’s got to say whether this is the right boy or not—”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. The next white settlement is days away,” Wolfinger said. “Who else could it be?” Wolfinger had emerged as the leader of the German emigrants in the party, translating for the ones who knew no English. They kept mostly to themselves, and often huddled around their campfires at night, speaking rapid-fire German—though Stanton hadn’t failed to miss Wolfinger’s pretty, young wife, Doris, whose hands looked like they were made for playing a piano, not carrying firewood or tugging on reins.

In the end, a couple of men went for shovels. Others wandered back to check on their families, to wake their sleeping children or simply to look at them, be reassured by their presence.

Stanton rolled up his sleeves and took a turn digging.

They didn’t need a large hole to accommodate the remains—there was so little of the boy—but they wanted it deep so that no animal would go after the bones. Besides, the physical exertion felt good. Stanton wanted to be tired tonight when he went to bed.

Too tired to dream.

Predictably, although George Donner stayed, he did nothing more than heap a few shovelfuls of dirt onto the grave. When at last they were done, Donner said a brief halting prayer over the fresh dirt. The old words sounded thin in the night air.

Donner and Stanton walked back to the wagons together, along with James Reed and Bryant. Stanton didn’t know Reed well and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He’d been well known among business leaders back in Springfield, but not well liked.

Reed held a dying torch overhead, but the flame could do little against the darkness that surrounded them. He and Donner floated in and out of the light, their pale faces bobbing on the periphery like ghosts. The ground was uneven and treacherous underfoot, broken up by prairie dog tunnels and clumps of tall grass. The hot summer air, so oppressive during the day, had cooled but was still dry and dusty.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Reed said at length, breaking the silence. “I agree with your earlier assessment, Mr. Bryant. If it were an animal that attacked, it would have been messier. The answer is obvious. Indians—it had to be Indians.” He raised a hand to stop Bryant from interrupting. “I know you claim to be some kind of expert on Indians, Mr. Bryant. You go live with them and talk to them and take all manner of notes for this book of yours. But you’ve never fought them, never faced them in anger as I have. I know what they’re capable of.” Reed told anyone who would listen that he’d fought in the Black Hawk War, probably so the tough old trail hands would stop treating him like a tenderfoot.

Bryant’s voice was mild. “That’s right, Mr. Reed. Everything I know about Indians I’ve learned from talking to them as opposed to shooting at them from across a field. But arguing won’t resolve anything. Even you must agree that if we let people think the Indians are responsible, things will go bad pretty fast. We’re traveling through Indian territory. The last thing we need is for people to panic. Besides,” he said, as Reed opened his mouth to object, “I’ve never heard of an Indian custom where they slaughter and dress a body like that.”

Donner jerked around to look at him. “Slaughtered and dressed? You make it sound like the boy was butchered.”

Bryant said nothing. He didn’t have to.

“Butchering implies that this was deliberate,” Stanton said. Even the words had a foul taste. “But if not Indians, then who?”

The set of Bryant’s mouth was grim. “We can’t ignore the possibility that whoever killed the boy is part of the wagon train. Someone already among us.”

The silence was tense. “Nonsense,” Reed muttered. The handkerchief came out, as it always seemed to when Reed was nervous. A tell.

“Surely a man like that would stand out, wouldn’t he?” Donner fidgeted with his coat buttons. “His behavior would give him away.”

Stanton knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Seeing the dead boy reminded him of an earlier time in his hometown in Massachusetts, when he’d seen the woman he loved pulled from the ice-capped water and laid out on the snow. Lydia. Fifteen years had passed and he could still barely stand to remember. She’d looked as though she’d just gone to sleep, her expression as peaceful as that boy’s: a lie. He remembered her dark lashes fanned against skin that had turned pale blue from being in the water so long, her lips purple as a bruise. Something terrible had compelled her across the thin frozen ice of the river that winter day, an evil that lived among them that he had failed to see. In this, at least, his grandfather had been correct. Evil was invisible, and it was everywhere.

“Sometimes a crazy man can act normal when he has to,” Bryant said. “He might be able to hide for a while longer. He might be able to hide his true nature indefinitely.”

Reed swiped his forehead. “All I know is, it’s a good thing Colonel Russell quit when he did. It’s time for a new captain.”

Stanton glanced over at Donner, whose usual swagger looked a little off-kilter in the bobbing light of Reed’s torch. Donner was one of Russell’s lieutenants, and he had obviously loved his appointment and all the little duties that came with it. He liked having a say in the way things were run; he certainly liked being looked up to and seemed to crave the admiration of others. Stanton respected him less for it.

“You’re not going to try to blame this on Russell, are you?” Bryant asked.

“He never should have been made captain in the first place. This wouldn’t have happened under a stronger man,” Reed said, clearing his throat. Stanton thought he knew what was coming next. “My reputation, I believe, speaks for itself.”

“I’d be careful not to overestimate your position,” Donner said, his big wide face shiny as he turned toward the light. “You may be a good businessman, but I don’t know that it counts for much out here on the trail.”

“I’m already one of the leaders of this party, in fact, if not in title. You can’t deny it,” Reed said stiffly. Stanton had to agree; whenever an important decision needed to be made, people almost instinctively turned to James Reed.

“You’d have us kill the first Indian we see,” Donner spluttered. “You’d have us go to war, when we have no evidence whatsoever of what or who killed that boy.”

“I see. And I suppose you think that you would make a better party captain than I would?” Reed’s voice was cutting.

Even in the scant light of the dying torch, Stanton saw Donner redden. “As a matter of fact, I do. I have experience leading the wagon train. People know me—and like me. It’s important to be liked, James—you shouldn’t underestimate that.”

Reed scowled at Donner. “I’d rather be respected than liked.”

Donner gave him a thin, insincere smile. “That’s why you won’t be elected captain. You can’t expect to just step in and boss people around. You have to earn people’s respect—and you haven’t earned it, not yet.”

Reed stopped dead. His head seemed to swell so full with rage that it might burst. “And do you think people respect you? Everyone knows you can’t even stand up to your own wife.”

At this, the rest of the group halted, too. Stanton shifted uncomfortably in the dusty air as he watched George Donner’s face go pale in the darkness until he seemed almost bloodless. He was standing perfectly still, his clublike hands hanging at his sides, towering over James Reed. But Reed stood his ground and, in that moment, seemed the stronger.

Bryant broke the silence and stepped between them. “Gentlemen. It’s late. We’ve all had a shock tonight.”

Stanton realized he’d been holding his breath, though it didn’t seem all that likely Reed and Donner would have come to blows. James Reed had a temper, true, but he was prideful and wouldn’t stoop to brawling. Stanton had noticed the care he took with his appearance, his obsessive cleaning of his fingernails and trimming of his beard, the way he endlessly brushed his coat of dust, despite the fact that within minutes it would be dirty again. And Donner was a blusterer but at his core, too soft, almost spongelike, too dependent on others for his opinions and shape. He was the type to get others to do his dirty work for him.

Still, Stanton didn’t like the tension that lingered in the air, even as Reed stalked off without another word.

Donner shook his head. “Madness,” he murmured. Then he bid them good night and turned off toward the camp.

For a second, as Stanton watched him recede into the darkness, he envied Donner his waiting family, the company of a beautiful woman, sleeping children exhaling their sweet night-breath into the summer air.

Bryant exhaled. “I hope to God someone else steps forward to lead us.”

Stanton nodded toward the departed figures, now lost in the darkness. “Would you choose either one, if you had to?”

“I’d go with Reed before I’d go with Donner. The man’s more of a leader. Though if you really want to know the truth, you’d be my first choice.”

“Me?” Stanton almost laughed. “I don’t think you’ll find anyone to second my nomination. The family men don’t trust me, with no wife or children. Besides, I don’t need the headaches—and I like to mind my own business. If you’re so keen on a leader, why don’t you volunteer yourself?”

Bryant smiled wryly. “You’re not going to talk me out of leaving that easily.”

“You still mean to head out, then?” Stanton asked. “Traveling in a small group with whatever got the boy still at large—it could be dangerous.”

“True.” Bryant tilted his head to one side, as if listening to something in the distance. “You know, it all reminds me of something. An old story I heard a long time ago.”

“Something the Indians told you?”

“No.” Bryant’s smile looked more like a squint. “Something odd that happened to me in my doctoring days. Nearly as wild as a fairy story. If I ever make sense of it, I’ll tell you about it,” he said, turning away already and raising a hand in farewell. “Take care, Stanton. I’ll send word when I can.”

As wild as a fairy story. For some reason, Stanton couldn’t shake the words from his mind.

STANTON ALWAYS SET UP his campsite apart from its neighbors; he liked the nighttime solitude. He could see their wagons through a scrim of trees, tents set up for sleeping, fires still smoldering against the night; could smell the remains of their suppers lingering on the air. But every site he passed was deserted. Fathers had driven their families inside the tents. It was like this when things got bad: Circles got smaller. People wanted to protect their own.

He knew the mangled body of that young boy should be bothering him… and it was. But something else was bothering him, too, persisting like the stench of blood in the air. It was the nagging feeling that something vitally important—some invisible thread—was about to unravel. He’d never liked conflict, but what Donner had said tonight sank in with an uncomfortable clarity. Don’t underestimate the value of being liked, he’d said. Stanton hadn’t gone out of his way to make himself liked; Bryant was his only real ally, and he was leaving.

And the implication that the boy’s murderer could be among them had put Stanton on edge. There were plenty of men in the party who might count violence, even perversion, among their qualities. He thought back to what Bryant had said about how dangerous tendencies could be hidden. Keseberg was rumored to beat that young wife of his when he thought no one was looking, and Stanton believed it. The man was a self-taught shark with cards and forgot nothing—the exact type to hold a grudge, and to act on one.

Then there was the Graves family’s hired hand John Snyder; he bullied the younger teamsters mercilessly, would often get them to hand over their evening’s ration of beer or take his shift as sentry. Unsavory men all, but all brutal in a common, regular way. Hundreds of men just like them had made their way west; thousands, even. Stanton had a hard time picturing any of them as the kind of monster who would mutilate a small boy. That took a special kind of savagery all its own, and it left a tremor in him, a question with no answer.

He knew he wouldn’t sleep.

All that was left of his neglected campfire were a few dying embers. Too late to cook supper but he wasn’t hungry, not after what he’d seen in the field. He’d rather crawl into his bedroll with the last of his whiskey and try to wipe out the vision that wouldn’t go away. He tried to remember where he had hidden the bottle. As he approached his wagon, however, he heard the sound of movement in the shadows. He wasn’t alone.

His hand went to the revolver on his hip just as a figure stepped out of the shadows. Tamsen Donner lowered a shawl from over her head. The sight of her drove through him like a knife. Tamsen Donner was too pretty for her own good.

For anyone’s good.

He pulled his hand back from his holster. “Is there something I can do for you, Mrs. Donner?” He said her name carefully, with purpose.

Her hair was falling out of its upsweep. When was the last time he’d touched a woman’s hair? Back in Springfield, there had been a young widow who worked at the milliner’s on the same street as his shop, a quiet woman who, twice a week, crept up the back stairs to his room over the dry-goods store. The widow’s hair had been a tangle of curls and she’d kept it carefully pinned as though she’d been ashamed of its coarseness, its wildness. Tamsen Donner’s hair was dark and fell like water.

She looked up at his face. “The news is all over camp. My husband was gone and I didn’t know where he’d disappeared to… I suppose I wasn’t thinking straight. But all I could think was that I needed someone—and I thought of you.”

The Donners had other men in their party, he knew: George’s own brother Jacob and a few hired drovers for the oxen. Enough to protect the women and children. But she had come here, leaving her daughters behind to seek comfort from a man who was practically a stranger.

She came closer to him, her shawl shifting so he could see her collarbone and then the tops of her breasts, flawless and white, pressed tight against the neckline of her dress. “I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you.”

His throat went dry. He had to force himself to look away from her. “Your husband will be back any minute.”

Her mouth quirked to one side. “My husband?” Her voice was easy, like watching a rock bouncing down a hill. “You know George. He’s good at comforting the others. They need him more than I do right now.”

She said it like it was some sort of sacrifice on her part, coming here. Her fingers were cool on his cheek and smelled of a wild perfume he couldn’t name, like crushed flower petals and the wind through the prairie. She collected herbs and, it was said, concocted potions, and people whispered that she was a witch who could make herself irresistible to men. Maybe she was.

He kissed her.

He wasn’t a saint, wasn’t even a good man. He was strong physically but had always suspected that deep down, he was weak. The soft curve of her lips. Weakness. The light touch of her hair grazing against his jaw. Weakness. The smell of her. Weakness.

He felt her cool hands slide under his jacket and seek out his chest, and the heat of realization rose in him. Tamsen Donner had come here with a serious purpose; he saw that now. She knew what she was doing.

Somehow he managed to turn his head away. “You should know better than to tease a man like this, Mrs. Donner.”

She brought her mouth to his ear. “You’re right. I wouldn’t want to cause trouble.” The words tickled his neck.

The invisible thread was unspooling.

They were in his wagon before he knew how they’d gotten there, had somehow climbed over the backboard, slipped under the canopy and hidden in its dim recesses. There was no room in the fully packed wagon, and in the end he pushed her up against a chest of drawers that had been lashed in place, the floor beneath their feet swaying like the deck of a ship as he took her, grasping and gripping, nearly blind in the darkness of the unlit room.

When he finished she let out a sharp cry—practically the only sound she made—and he found in that second not a sense of freedom and release but a sense of falling backward. He had to put his hand through his hair and breathe deeply to steady himself, even as he watched her immediately put herself back together, tuck her breasts into the confines of stays and bodice, smooth her skirts, sweep back stray curls. She was beautiful. Beautiful and remote—she seemed even more a stranger than she had before.

He shook his head. “We shouldn’t have done this.” The weight of it was beginning to sink in. Donner’s wife.

For a second, something flickered across Tamsen’s face, and the closest word he had for it was fear. But the expression was gone so quickly he thought it might have been a trick of the light. She blinked. “There are many things one shouldn’t do, Mr. Stanton.”

He felt stung, struck by the memory of his grandfather telling him, Don’t tempt the devil, boy, as though he could still feel the crack of the old man’s belt buckle in his face after he was caught kissing a neighbor’s daughter out in the churchyard when he was nine years old. How miserable he’d been growing up in his grandfather’s house. And angry at his father, too, for leaving him and his mother there.

He realized now that his head was clearing, that his back was stinging with a high, sharp pain. He reached to the side of his neck and felt blood. “You scratched me?”

She looked at him with eyes so dark they were almost expressionless. Unreadable. She brought a hand to his face almost casually. “I hope there won’t be any trouble.” This time when she said it, it carried a different tone.

“Is that a threat?”

But she didn’t answer him. Instead, she swung gracefully over the backboard. He listened as her light footstep faded away. Too late, he saw that she was one of those temptations better left untried, like a whiskey so potent that it left you blind.

He should try to reason with her. He swung out of the wagon and dropped to the ground, shocked when a teenaged girl startled backward out of the underbrush, looking frightened and lost. Panic seized him. How long had she been standing there?

Before she could bolt, he called out to her. “Wait there. You, girl—who are you? Are you one of the Breens?” There were so many children in the wagon train, it was impossible to keep track.

She stiffened, frozen to the spot as though she’d forgotten how to run away. “No, sir. I’m Elitha Donner.”

Worse and worse. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I—I was sent out to collect firewood. I was just on my way back to my family, I swear it.” Her face was bright red and shiny and the angle of her lip made her look mulish. More telling, however: There was no wood in her arms.

“Tell me what you saw, Elitha,” he said, and took a step toward her. “Go on. No lies.”

He hadn’t meant to frighten her. But Elitha turned and sprinted back into the woods like a spooked deer. His first urge was to run after her, but he checked himself. It wasn’t right for a grown man to chase a child through the woods, especially not after what they’d found out there tonight.

He turned back to the wagon, intent on finding that bottle of whiskey. He knew what was waiting for him tonight: a visit from Lydia. Between the boy and Tamsen, he now knew it was inevitable. Poor Lydia would appear in his dreams, clothes clinging to her blue-tinged body, asking him to save her. I need you, Charles—words she had never said to him in life but were reflected in her eyes every time she appeared in his dreams. How could he have known her so well and not known the terrible truth?

Help me, Lydia. He turned back to his campsite, to the fire leaching smoke. Help me see the monsters this time.

CHAPTER FIVE