The Hunger

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

James Reed could almost think that the worst was behind them.

They emerged from the Wasatch Mountain range at last, trudging out of the cottonwood-choked canyons with bloodied, blistered hands and aching backs. The descent was their reward, gentle and long, an easy stroll for exhausted animals and men alike. Relief among the travelers was palpable; people spoke optimistically of the worst being behind them.

Until they came upon the first patch of dry, white land.

It began as a glare in the distance, so pale, so singed of growth, that it looked as if a mantle of snow had covered the land horizon to horizon. It stank. Puddles of stagnant white water lay like open wounds across the otherwise parched landscape. The water was unpotable—they learned that after a cow tried to drink it and took ill.

There had been a fluke hot spell during Reed’s first year in America. He had been ten years old at the time but he still remembered it vividly. He had been living on a tobacco plantation in Virginia where his mother worked as a laundress. He earned money working in the fields with the slaves, topping the tobacco plants in the spring, picking mature leaves in the summer.

It was backbreaking work, and that summer it was unbearable. Having grown up in the cold, wet Irish countryside, James had never known heat like that. The fields shimmered. Rows of green undulated in phantom vapor. At least one slave died before the weather broke. Because Reed’s mother had asked the field boss to keep an eye on her son, he was sent home every day after the noon meal. He felt guilty resting in the cool of the servants’ quarters in the big house while the slaves, he knew, would work until the sun went down.

Now, decades later, he dreamed of the cool tiles of those shaded hallways. Of water poured from clay pitchers. Of shadows and porcelain and ice.

Here, there was nowhere to escape.

THEY HAD CALCULATED, from reports and accounts they had heard from the few travelers who’d taken the Truckee route before, that they would cross the desert in a day.

But a second day came and went. Then a third. The Murphys’ cattle, starved and mad with thirst, wandered off in the middle of the night. The party did not have the strength to go after them. They moved in silence, like a long parade of the dead. No one had the spit even to argue.

On the fourth day, the wind picked up, creating small dancing funnels of dirt and salt crystals. The children, roused for the first time in days, clapped. But the wind kept blowing and the little funnels swelled and grew and became whipping, snakelike things, pegging them with stones that split their canopies, blinding them and roughing their skin, and they began to cry.

Most of the wagons had just enough water for the humans. The cattle panicked. They bellowed as they went insane, and the sound was like nothing Reed had ever heard.

It was on the fifth day that Noah James, one of Reed’s teamsters, came to tell him his own oxen were dying. They doubled back, heading into the blowing wind. Half a mile later, they came on the Reed family wagons. Two of the three teams were floundering, thrashing in the sand. At least one of them was already dead. The rest danced spookily in the confines of the harness.

“Do we have water?” Reed asked, though he already knew the answer.

James shook his head. “Not enough to make a difference.”

“Unhitch that animal, then. And that one as well.” Reed pointed with his whip at another dying animal, and, when he saw that his whip was trembling, quickly dropped it. “We’ll just have to pull with the animals we’ve got left.”

“With respect, Mr. Reed, you’ll wear the others out faster if you do that,” James said. “They won’t make it another day.”

“What do you propose we do, then?” Reed’s mouth was full of dirt. His eyes were full of dirt. He knew James was right, but he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear the idea of leaving their wagon. If he did, he would no longer be able to pretend.

It wasn’t about California anymore. It wasn’t about where they were going at all. It was simply about survival.

George Donner’s wagon pulled up. Donner had been a shadow of himself ever since Hastings’s betrayal, and Reed had been glad of it—the party had become more efficient without his blustering tendency to make light of Reed’s concerns.

Donner looked at Reed and then away. “You can store some of your things with me,” he said. “You don’t have to thank me,” he added, and Reed felt his chest hollow with sudden gratitude; he would not have been able to bear to say thank you, and he felt that Donner knew it. Anyway, both men understood that Donner owed Reed for taking over after the Hastings incident.

Margaret wept when they unloaded their wagons and sorted through their things for the valuables to keep. The children were silent and uncomplaining, and dutifully piled their toys on the ground to be abandoned. At the very bottom of the pile was a saddle he’d had made special for Virginia when she got her first pony. The buttery leather was tooled with flowers and vines on the skirts. It had nickel conchos on the latigos like a fine adult’s saddle. It had once made him proud. It proved that he’d been a good father, capable of bringing his children joy.

Now, staring at it, he could hardly make sense of its shape or the life it had belonged to.

“Even Addie?” Patty Reed asked, holding her doll up for her father to see. It was a rag doll with a bisque head, dressed in fabric scraps and a bit of lace tied around its waist as a sash. The doll might only weigh ounces, but ounces added up. Eight ounces of cornmeal versus eight ounces of calico snippets and bisque. Ounces, grains of sand, seconds falling through an hourglass: Life was all accounting, and at the end of it, the same tab for all.

“I’m afraid so,” Reed told her. He was surprised to feel a sudden tightness in his chest, watching his child place her doll in the dirt, carefully, as if it were a true burial.

The transfer was done in an hour. Already the wagons to be abandoned were no more than ghosts. Reed shot the remaining oxen in the head so they wouldn’t suffer any further, and he imagined, though he was not fanciful, that he saw in their eyes a final flicker of relief.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The sandstorm started innocently enough. White flakes swirled on the air, and Stanton thought they were almost pretty in their delicacy. But by dusk on the sixth day in the desert, the wagon party was forced to stop. Traversing this great emptiness was bad enough under clear skies. Trudging through a blizzard of hard sand was suicide.

The cloud of sand and salt had shaken the wagons like the swells of an angry sea. No one bothered to try to pitch a tent or set up a campsite; everyone bunkered in the wagons. Stanton wrapped a blanket over his shoulders and wedged himself between barrels inside his wagon, where he would have to sleep upright in the tightly packed space, full of household belongings. He hadn’t bothered with a lantern. There was nothing he wanted to see. Outside, bullwhips of sand hissed where they scraped over the canopy. The day had covered him in a fine crust of salt. It was on his skin, his lips, even in his eyelashes. Salt lined the inside of his nose and roughed his throat so that it hurt, even, to swallow.

Suddenly, Stanton heard the crack of a gunshot at the same time the board behind him shuddered. The wood exploded into splinters inches to the left of his head. He dropped to his stomach as best he could in the cramped space, trying to figure out which direction the shot had come from, the front or back of his wagon. From the back, surely. He picked out the sound of rustling, now that he knew to listen for it. Whoever had shot at him was still out there in the dark, cowering by the left rear wheel.

Stanton moved carefully toward the front of the wagon, hoping the sandstorm would conceal the noise of his footsteps. He slipped over the side and dropped, landing in the tangle of empty harness on the ground.

The sandstorm absorbed the moonlight. All Stanton could see was the silhouette of a man headed toward him. He hadn’t made many friends in the party, but this was more than hatred, Stanton knew. This was hunger. He was an easy target, with a wagon of his own and no children. Whoever it was wanted to raid his remaining supplies and didn’t care if he left Stanton for dead in the process. The storm provided the perfect cover.

Before Stanton could pull his gun from its holster, the man tackled him, knocking him to the ground. The whirling sand obscured details and made Stanton feel as though he were wrestling a faceless phantasm—one, however, who reeked of whiskey. Stanton managed to jerk aside when the man plunged a fist toward his face, and heard a knife blade strike loose sand beside him.

They rolled over and over in the sand, scrabbling for advantage, fighting not just each other but the wind, a giant hand hurling them through the dark. The man was insanely strong but slowed by alcohol, and Stanton got two punches in for every one he took. But his sides ached and he felt like he’d swallowed a pound of grit. He caught the man good in the ribs, though, and heard him cry out, and then Stanton was sure he recognized the voice. Lewis Keseberg.

Maybe he knew he was caught, or maybe he’d just had enough. He stumbled backward, reeling, and staggered off into the storm.

Stanton, exhausted, went down on his knees when another gust buffeted him off balance, and his hand hit something hard in the sand. It was a palm-sized gun, too small for a man as big as Keseberg. He struggled to his feet and managed to claw himself back inside the wagon, feeling his way on his animals’ leads.

Once inside, Stanton lit a lantern. He loaded his rifle first in case Keseberg came back and only then looked at the pistol. It had a singular mother-of-pearl inlay he recognized immediately. There was probably not another like it west of the Mississippi.

He felt a stab of disbelief and also disappointment. It was Tamsen Donner’s gun.

IN THE MORNING, Stanton rode up to James Reed. Reed looked as if he hadn’t slept. His clothes were streaked with salt and his fair Irish skin was so red that he looked burnt.

Reed gave him an appraising nod. “Looks like you came through the sandstorm all right.”

“By a hair,” Stanton said, and tried to keep his voice even. “Someone tried to kill me last night.”

He led Reed over to his wagon and showed him the hole made by the bullet.

Reed crouched low to get a clean look. “Did you see who did it?”

Stanton hesitated. He couldn’t see a reason to reveal Tamsen’s and Keseberg’s involvement. Better to keep the particulars secret until he had a better sense of where their scheme was headed. “No. Too dark.”

“It’s gotten that bad, has it, that we’re trying to kill each other?” Reed took off his hat and smoothed his sweat-drenched hair. Stanton remembered how Reed had first looked when they set off, like a big-city boss, still starching his shirt collars and shining his shoes. “What are you going to do?”

“I’d like to volunteer to ride ahead. To Johnson’s Ranch. We need the food, and most of the families are in a bad way. Some are near the end of their supplies. The ones that aren’t won’t share with those in need.”

Reed squinted at the wagons in the lead, far down the flats. They were as small as beetles. “We could take a day or two once we’re out of the desert and slaughter some of the livestock, dry the meat. That would tide us over for a while.”

“No one who still has cattle will part with it, not for love or money,” Stanton pointed out. “A good number of the cattle died in the crossing or ran off. The people close to starving are the ones who started with almost nothing—the Eddys, the McCutcheons, Wolfinger and Keseberg. And don’t forget all the single men. Single men with rifles. Things will get ugly soon.”

Reed nodded and glanced again at the tear in Stanton’s wagon cover. “They already have.” He sighed. “I suppose it might give whoever took a shot at you some time to cool off.”

That or he’d risk isolating himself further.

But it was still safer than the alternative, for now. He had to get away.

“So it’s settled, then.”

Reed nodded.

Not for the first time, Stanton wondered where Bryant was now and tried not to read the worst into the lack of promised letters. Hopefully, Bryant was nearly to Yerba Buena, enjoying that fabled sunshine.

“I want to take another man with me,” he said slowly, watching Reed’s reaction. He didn’t expect to find many eager men for the job. There were plenty of things that could kill a man between where they stood and Johnson’s Ranch.

“Will McCutcheon,” Reed said. “I think he’s the right man to accompany you.”

Stanton nodded, understanding: Everything the McCutcheons had was strapped to the back of their family mule.

“I can ask Baylis to handle the oxen while you’re gone. Mrs. McCutcheon can look after your wagon.”

Stanton only nodded again.

“We are much obliged to you, Mr. Stanton. Much obliged.” Reed dusted his hands before extending one to shake.

HE FOUND TAMSEN TRUDGING in the shadow cast by the tall canopies of the Donners’ wagons. She had draped a white shawl over her head to protect her from the sun. He dismounted and began to walk beside her.

“Mr. Stanton.” She didn’t seem surprised to see him. He admired her control. “What are you doing here?”

He reached into his saddlebag. “I believe this is yours.”

She froze at the sight of her own revolver. She seemed altered to him suddenly, no less beautiful but smaller somehow, like a flame narrowed by lack of oxygen.

“You might as well take it,” he said. “I know it belongs to you.”

She did, but with a look of distaste, as if it were a snake or a large insect that might bite her. He stared at her hands, wondered briefly if she might aim the weapon at him, and something in him leapt at the uncertainty of it. Then he hated himself, for it was this kind of attraction—to wrong things, to danger, to her—that led to ruin, and he knew it, and the knowing somehow only made it stronger. Her lips were taut and pink. He looked away, suddenly furious with her, with the pinkness of her mouth. She didn’t even have the grace to look guilty.

“Don’t you want to know where I found it?” he asked, pressing.

She looked at him blankly.

“I took it away from Lewis Keseberg,” he said.

“Lewis Keseberg?” She shrugged coolly, pushing the weapon back to him. “Whatever he did, it wasn’t me who told him to do it. I didn’t give him the gun, either. He must have taken it.”

“And when would he have had the opportunity to do that? You like to keep busy, don’t you, Mrs. Donner? I must say that I’m happy you’ve found another plaything.” It was wrong of him to imply such a thing, but the beast, chained inside him, held down for these last few months, had reared its head. Stanton was losing control of himself—or he already had, long ago.

Her whole expression curdled around a look of hatred. “You have no right to speak to me like that. Not after what’s been between us.”

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” he said, hating the growl in his voice, hating her power over him, yet drawn to that power. “I’m reminded every day, when half the train whispers as I pass, and the other half shuns me and rumors spread like a sickness. I’m reminded when Franklin Graves threatens me with hanging if—” He broke off. He hadn’t meant to mention Mary.

But Tamsen just shook her head. “I never told anyone.”

“Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.” He gathered up the reins, ready to swing into the saddle, but Tamsen touched his arm for his attention, as quickly as though she were touching a hot iron.

“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said, in a low voice. “Listen to me, won’t you? I am not as bad as you may think.”

He squinted and turned away. The mountains that had looked like distant hieroglyphs, ragged tears in the sleek shell of blue sky, now seemed far closer. He could make out snow-capped peaks, valleys already frozen over with ice that never melted. He had to hurry.

“No,” he said finally, though he still wouldn’t look at her. He thought of Lewis Keseberg’s hot, whiskey-laden breath, and the reckless way he’d dived after Stanton, almost like an animal. There was no way Tamsen would allow a man like him into her bed, or even, he hoped, conspire with him at all. He let out a sigh. “I suppose you are not.” He knew Tamsen was much like the revolver itself—powerful, deadly even, but only when put in the wrong hands.

He glanced down at his own, then gripped the reins, mounted, and spurred his horse into a gallop.

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Who knew that Eden could be found in the foothills below Pilot Peak? After crossing that godforsaken salt desert, the dry, cracked-brown patch of land looked like the most beautiful place Reed had ever seen.

Hell, it seemed, was behind them.

The livestock tore hungrily at scrub grass and crowded three deep at the tiny watering hole. People tumbled out of their dust-caked wagons into the spring-fed creek, gulping down muddy water, pouring it over their heads. Lavinah Murphy and her family were on their knees, hands joined and eyes closed, thanking God for their deliverance.

Reed watched all this with satisfaction but also with a bruised ego. He’d taken over as leader, had gotten them through the worst trial of the journey, but did anyone think to thank him? Of course not. Instead, many found ways to blame him. The group’s loyalties, he’d come to realize, had little to do with fact and all to do with feeling. And once again, Reed was forced to accept that he did not inspire people to like him—hadn’t and perhaps never would. For many people did not like the truth, it seemed—thought it was a dirty and distasteful thing, impolite and complicated. They didn’t have the patience for it—for numbers, liters, rations, portions, reasons. Many simply preferred the sweet, momentary pleasure of hearing whatever they wanted to hear. Which was Donner’s skill in spades, or had been, before the once-jovial man had caved in on himself.

But whether the others appreciated him or not, it had been Reed’s careful eye on rations and his urging to start out earlier each morning than the morning before that had gotten them here mostly intact. Under Donner’s waffling supervision, they’d all have been dead long ago.

Now Reed had yet another unpleasant but necessary task in front of him: It was time to ask the families if there had been any deaths and tally their losses. He sighed and took up the reins. Leading the train were the Breen and Graves families, the ones who hated him the most, who irrationally blamed him for the route they’d taken because he was their leader at the time, because they were the kind of people who always needed someone to blame for their misfortunes.

Next came the families whose allegiances were shifting, or who chose not to take a side. This included Keseberg, the crafty German Wolfinger and his ragtag band of German emigrants, plus Lavinah Murphy’s sprawling clan. Will Eddy and his family rode with them, as did the McCutcheons.

At the end of the line were the families everyone eyed resentfully because they were wealthy, a fact that Reed acknowledged with perverse satisfaction because his family still counted among them. The two Donner families were surrounded by a small army of hired help and nearly a dozen teamsters between them, which made Reed feel a bit more secure. Too often now, he caught Franklin Graves and Patrick Breen muttering together, eyeing the Reeds’ store of food when it was unloaded.

But they would not break him, not the way they’d broken George Donner. Reed didn’t hide in his wagon. He stubbornly rode up and down the line, enduring their bitter stares, refusing to give them the satisfaction of letting them know he was afraid. These days he and Tamsen Donner had one thing in common: They were easily the most hated people in the party.

All in all, he tallied that they’d left a third of the wagons behind in the desert. No one had died. However, an awful lot of possessions had been abandoned and livestock lost.

But looking back, he knew, was a trap. They’d come this far. There would be no going back, not now, not ever.

THEY WERE MAKING THEIR WAY from Pilot Peak when they came on the Indian corpses. The two fragile-looking scaffolds were easy to spot given the dearth of trees. Reed and a few others went over for a closer look. The scaffolds stood about the height of an average man. The shrouded bodies were surrounded by objects that must have been left in tribute to them: an old knife with a dull edge and braided leather grip; necklaces made of carved bone and feathers striped black, white, and blue; a buffalo robe, the fur dulled by the sun.

William Eddy swiped his face with a forearm. “What do you think—Paiute?”

Reed shook his head. “Probably Shoshone,” he answered. “We’re passing through their territory.”

John Snyder was deliberately standing too close. Reed felt his presence like a slick of sweat on the skin. “What—you an Indian expert all of a sudden?”

“It was in a book I read about the Indian Territory.” Back in Springfield, after what had happened with Edward McGee, and the shame he’d narrowly avoided, Reed had for a time thought about becoming an Indian agent for the government. But appointments were hard to get. He now felt foolish about it, as though he’d been stubbornly pursuing some childish dream. Too late, he saw that this escape to California was a childish dream, too. He hadn’t learned his lesson with McGee. Snyder might have been big and mean, where McGee was slight and charming, but both were actors in a vision that had come crashing down.

Reed’s life was full of broken fantasies.

Keseberg stooped to pick up one of the necklaces. “Seems like a waste, leaving all this stuff for the dead.”

Reed tried to picture Keseberg’s pale wife wearing such a thing, but his imagination failed him. “It’s for the dead man to use in the next world,” he said. “Probably best to leave it alone.” The bodies bothered Reed. They seemed exceptionally thin for adults but too tall for children.

“I don’t see any Indians here to stop us,” Keseberg said.

“You shouldn’t mess with Indian graves,” Franklin Graves said. “The redskins are touchy about that.”

Keseberg ignored him, stepping forward to flip back a corner of the deerskin shroud. Now Reed understood why the bodies were small: They had been burned. All that were left were charred remains. Patches of cooked flesh still clung to blackened bone. The skulls were papered with bits of scorched flesh; empty eye sockets seemed to stare at them reproachfully. Several of the men quickly backed away. Eddy turned, coughing into his sleeve.

“Savages,” Keseberg said. “What am I always saying? They’re all savages.”

Reed had no love for the Indians, per se, but he hated Keseberg and his ignorance more.

Still, at the moment he was most bothered by the corpses, more than he could say. It didn’t make any sense. He had heard how the Indians cared for their dead during the Black Hawk War from one of the scouts.

“Something must have happened,” he said. Under the blazing sun, the blackened faces appeared to grin horribly. “I never heard of a tribe burning bodies like this.”

“Maybe they were sick,” Franklin Graves said. “Had some kind of disease and didn’t want it to spread.”

Disease. The word lingered in the air like a hiss. The group stared at the scaffolds in silence. He knew they were all thinking of Luke Halloran. Had he gotten some kind of disease—the same one that might have struck these two Indians?

“What are these?” It wasn’t until Mary Graves spoke up that anyone realized she had arrived behind them. Elitha Donner, too. Reed had heard she was plucky. Reed thought, however, there might have been something wrong with her; he sometimes saw her walking by herself, murmuring, seeming to argue with the air.

Franklin Graves’s face darkened with anger. “Go on,” he told his daughter. “Get back. This is no sight for a woman.”

But she sidestepped him when he looked as if he might grab her. Reed had to credit her: The girl had spirit.

“There are carvings here,” she said, and brought her hand to the bark of a nearby tree. There were squares within squares, slashes that looked like lightning bolts. Stick figures of men but with strange, heavy heads. “Perhaps there’s a story here as well.”

“It isn’t a story.” Thomas, the boy from Fort Bridger, spoke up. Reed had almost forgotten him. He was always hiding under one of George Donner’s wagons in the evenings, and who knew where he got to during the day. He’d been no help at all during the desert crossing; Reed had half expected that he would run off, as he had done with Bryant.

“These are charms against bad spirits.” Thomas spoke as though he were surrendering each word against his will. “Protection from the hungry ones.”

“For the dead?” Breen moved a hand almost unconsciously to his rifle. “Hell, why do the dead need protection?”

Reed thought back to what Hastings had said when they’d found him cowering in the wagon. Something’s out there eating every living thing.

“So is it spirits that been clearing out all the game from the woods, is that the idea?” Snyder asked. Thomas looked away. A muscle twitched in his jaw.

To Reed’s shock, it was Elitha Donner who answered. “They don’t just eat animals,” she said, in a soft singsong. Her eyes were clear and blue and troubled. “They eat men.”

Reed felt a current of unease travel across his skin. “You’ve been filling her head with tall tales,” he said to Thomas.

“He’s trying to help us,” Elitha barked back, spinning away from Reed. “He’s been trying to help us all along but you won’t listen to him.”

Snyder leaned over Elitha, sneering at her. “You don’t understand, girl—he’s not one of us. He ain’t trying to help you, he’s just trying to get under your skirts.”

“They burned the bodies so the hungry ones wouldn’t get them.” Thomas’s voice was even, but he was obviously struggling to maintain control. He pointed to the basin opening before them and to the mountain in the distance. “We’ve entered the place where the evil spirits live.” He tapped the trunk of one of the trees, pointing to the symbols carved into the bark, then gestured to the bodies. “You may not want to believe me, but the proof is right before your eyes.”

“Proof?” Patrick Breen rolled his eyes. “I don’t see no proof, just a lot of ignorant heathen nonsense. I trust in the Lord—you hear that, boy, the Lord—to guide and protect me.”

At that, the young man stepped back from the crowd, arms raised in surrender. He shook his head slowly as he backed away, a sad smile creeping across his face. “Then the Lord must be mightily displeased with you, because he has led you into the valley of death. Make peace with your Lord before it is too late, because the hungry ones are coming for you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tamsen felt herself changing, hardening. They’d left the great white desert only to descend into an endless sagebrush plain of the Great Basin. The sun had eaten away at her beauty, ruined her skin and her hair, melted away her graceful curves, leaving her bony and sinewy. Beauty had been her armor. Without it, she’d grown afraid.

Why hadn’t she gotten George to take some of the Nystrom boy’s hair, the boy killed at the beginning of their journey? That would’ve made powerful talismans to protect her children, but she’d been afraid of anyone finding out. She worked secretly because even George didn’t like her dabbling in what he called “heathen practices.” Now there was nothing she could do to help her children, and she was taken aback by her own dread for their well-being. She’d never thought of herself as maternal, exactly, but maybe she’d been wrong.

Perhaps she’d been wrong about everything.

LATE SEPTEMBER AND the mountains were closer still, white-fleeced and rutted with shadows. But down on the plains, it was hot. She was more grateful than usual that evening as they made camp. She had walked the entire day to spare the oxen and couldn’t wait to take off her boots, though she dreaded it, too, because the first moments of relief were always followed by an ache so deep she might never stand again.

Tamsen felt ill as she sat down on a rock and took a bit of willow bark powder to ease her pain. She knew she wouldn’t eat her dinner tonight. Over the past few weeks, she had taken to skipping meals whenever possible so there was more for the children. The two families were top-heavy with men. Nearly as many teamsters as family members, plus Betsy’s teenaged sons from her previous marriage. Men had big appetites and Tamsen was afraid the girls would be edged out. It was easier, in a way, to put her girls first. Sometimes she thought her own hunger was too much, that if she were to eat a full meal again it would kill her. The wanting of it was so bad it erased her completely—she no longer knew herself.

Sometimes she forgot to respond to her own name.

And then there was Keseberg. She was doing her best to avoid him after he did a strange thing shortly before Stanton left. He had found her in a rare moment alone, one of the few times she was away from the wagon, where George now spent most of his days, as well as from all of her children. “I know you want him gone,” he’d hissed at her, speaking not of Stanton at all but of her own husband. Somehow he had been able to tell she was tired of the tedious discontent of her marriage. “And I can make it so we’re both happy.”

She had recoiled from him—his reeking breath, his leering smile, and worst of all, the look of knowing in his eyes. “You don’t know me,” she’d replied, as calmly as possible. “You don’t know what I want. If you did, you’d know that I don’t want you.”

It was enough to send him slinking away, muttering, “This ain’t the end of it,” over his shoulder. It seemed she’d made another enemy without meaning to.

She’d been racked with nerves to find her pistol missing the next day, and further confused when Stanton accused her of conspiring against him. It was only later that she figured it out: Keseberg had meant to kill Stanton and pin his death on her, as some sort of petty vindication for her dismissal.

She had been disappointed, yet relieved, to have Stanton gone for a time. He had insinuated, even briefly, that she had made Lewis Keseberg her latest lover, which was outrageous on many counts. Keseberg revolted her, for one thing—physically, morally, in every way imaginable. But what sickened her nearly as much was the readiness with which Stanton had leapt to the conclusion. It only proved to her that Stanton couldn’t and never would understand her at all.

No, none of these men could, and it was a fact Tamsen was coming to grasp more clearly by the day; even as hunger ravaged her from within, it seemed to carve out space for her to see things plainly.

She took more of the willow bark, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath, listening to the evening routine: Samuel Shoemaker and Walt Herron unhitching the oxen and driving them to the riverbank; George and Jacob setting up the tents; Betsy getting ready to make dinner. Through it all floated her daughters’ high-pitched voices. Frances, Georgia, Eliza, Leanne—she ticked off the names in her head as she heard them speak.

She opened her eyes. Where was Elitha? She jumped up, nearly crying out at the pain in her feet, and rushed over to where the girls were playing beside the cookfire and Betsy was starting to set up the tripod. As always, they’d set up at a distance from the rest of the wagon train, far away enough to pretend the others didn’t exist, close enough for safety. The four girls were playing cat’s cradle with a bit of string, but there was no Elitha.

“Where’s your sister? Why isn’t she with you?” Tamsen demanded. She hated the worry that had wormed into her heart.

Their innocent little faces tightened suddenly. “She went to look for something,” Leanne said, cowering in anticipation of her mother’s wrath.

“You’re coming with me. We’re going together to look for Elitha, do you hear me? Hurry along now.” They had to come with her, there was no alternative. She didn’t trust anyone to keep them safe, not even Betsy. No one else understood that evil was only an arm’s length away, waiting to swoop down on them, whether animal or spirit—or man.

They swept through the camp. Anyone she asked about Elitha only shrugged or gave her a blank look. They wanted nothing to do with her and, besides, were anxious to put the long dusty day behind them.

Keseberg: She saw him from a distance, swaggering like he always did, and leering at her with a look of narrow dislike. A sudden certainty coiled in the bottom of her stomach: Keseberg knew where Elitha was. Hadn’t she caught him staring in her daughter’s direction on other occasions? And he wanted to hurt Tamsen, he’d made that clear.

“Go back to the wagons,” she told her children. “Quick, now.”

“I thought we weren’t to leave your side,” said Leanne.

“Don’t backtalk me. Just do it.” She had to push Leanne in the direction of the wagon, but still she merely ducked away under the Breens’ baseboard, hanging back with her three sisters.

Keseberg loped casually toward her, hitching up his belt, smiling with long, gray teeth. He had a colorful shawl yoked around his shoulders. She had never seen it before, but dimly it registered some association.

“Mrs. Donner.” Keseberg tipped his hat. The name sounded like an insult in his mouth. “What a surprise.”

“I’m looking for my daughter Elitha,” she said.

“The girl done run off, did she?” Keseberg barely turned his head to spit. “Can’t help you, I’m afraid. I ain’t seen her. And believe me”—he turned to grin at her again—“I been lookin’.”

A black revulsion moved through her, like a serpent uncoiling deep in her blood. Then she realized where she had seen the shawl before. “You stole that,” she said. “You stole it from an Indian grave.”

He only shrugged. “So what? I take what I want—just like you. You act like we’re different, Tamsen. But we’re exactly the same. We are two of a kind, you and me.”

Without warning, he grabbed her wrists and pulled her to him. Her daughter Leanne shouted and started to run to her. But she yelled at her to stay back.

She had put out of her mind how disgusting he was, but it was impossible to ignore up close. He smelled rancid, as though he never bathed or washed his clothes. The skin under his scraggly beard was inflamed and scabby, his teeth gray from neglect. He might have been thin but he was strong and used his height to his advantage. “You’re not thinking, Tamsen. A man like me could be useful. You have enemies. You need someone to be your friend.”

“Is that why you went after Charles Stanton? You wanted to make it look like I killed him to punish me?” She tried to push away from him. “Let go of me.”

“It don’t pay to refuse me. It’s better to be my friend. Besides, I know what you did with Stanton.” Keseberg spat the words at her. “I heard what you did in Springfield, too, all those men you been with, so don’t pretend that you don’t like it.”

He had to be talking about Dr. Williams. Jeffrey. She thought the story hadn’t gotten out, that George had managed to keep it contained. She’d been lonely and Jeffrey Williams, though he was more than twice her age, was intelligent and far more cultured than George. But, like Charles Stanton, Jeffrey Williams had been a mistake. She had been looking for comfort but all she found in these men was a temporary distraction. It wasn’t the kind of thing a man like Keseberg would understand, however.

She tried to wrench away from him, but he got a hand around her dress and pulled, ripping the fabric. Without thinking, she brought her knee up hard between his legs. He doubled over backward, gasping. All at once, her children darted out from the shelter of the wagons and eddied around her torn skirts like a current, asking if she was okay. The littlest one, Eliza, was crying.

“Come,” was all she could say. There was a tight, airless feeling in her chest, as if he still had his weight against her.

They had turned away from Keseberg when he finally got his breath.

“You’re too old for me anyway. All used up,” he choked out. “But those stepdaughters of yours will do just fine. That Elitha’s been sniffing around.”

She froze. Her blood felt like a sluice of ice in her veins. “You stay away from her.”

He managed to smile, too. A horrible, ragged smile, like something cut by a knife. “I reckon she wants a man to make a woman of her.”

Fear crested to panic. Elitha, Elitha, Elitha. Where could she be? Tamsen turned with her children and ran, plunging back through the camp, ignoring the stares they received. Tamsen swept past the Reeds, hoping to find Elitha with her friend Virginia, but all she got was a sour look from Margaret. Through the trampled path that cut across the middle of the encampment (more grumbles, dark looks, mutters). Past the last cluster of wagons, the sun starting to set behind their weatherworn canopies. The children were starting to whimper, frightened to be so far from the rest of the family, and Tamsen was tempted to turn around but then Keseberg’s leer would rise up before her eyes and she knew she had to go just a little farther… Into the wild sage, the low branches snagging her skirt like a child’s hand. A distance from the camp, not far from the river—she could hear the lowing of oxen and cattle just ahead—when she thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Dragging the little ones nearly off their feet, Tamsen swept into a small clearing to find Elitha kneeling in the dirt, with a lantern set beside her. She was using a stick to dig. Tamsen couldn’t tell why. The sun had set by now and everything was cast in bare and flickering light.

“Elitha!” she called out, half in anger, half in relief. Elitha started. “What are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you”—Tamsen had released her grip on Frances and Eliza and reached down to jerk her stepdaughter to her feet—“you were not to leave my sight, didn’t I tell you that?”

Elitha’s hands were coated in dirt. Her dress was filthy, too. “But I found lambs’ ears. I knew you’d want it. Didn’t you say so?”

Lambs’ ears. Tamsen used it for one of her remedies. But she was still gripped by a fear that rocked her chest like an inner earthquake. Without thinking, she slapped Elitha hard. Before she knew what had happened, her palm was red and stinging and Elitha was holding her cheek, looking up at her in shock.

But not in pain. In fury. She had never seen Elitha like this before, face knitted together, eyes flashing. She wanted to apologize to her and at the same time, shake her for giving her a fright. For the dizzy fear that still consumed her.

“You—you can’t treat me like a child,” Elitha said. “I’m nearly a grown woman.”

A grown woman—Keseberg’s words echoed in her head. Elitha had no idea what a risk it was for a woman to wander away from the wagon train unescorted.

“This is serious, Elitha, and I need you to listen to me and, most importantly, to obey me—”

She broke off. Even with the children shifting around her restlessly and the wind rattling the sage, Tamsen heard something moving. She went very still, as if some inner coil inside her had been wound tight. Was she imagining it?

Her first thought was of Keseberg. Perhaps he’d followed her, thought he would scare her good. Maybe it was only that sounds carried strangely over the hollow, making it seem like something far away was right beside her.

No. There was movement all around them, as though they were being surrounded.

“Get behind me,” Tamsen ordered. “All of you.” She lifted Elitha’s lantern and adjusted the wick to increase the flame. “Who’s there? Whoever it is, you might as well head back to the wagons. I’ll not put up with any nonsense tonight.”

But the man who hobbled out from the sagebrush and rocks was not anyone she knew. She lifted the lantern higher, and the figure squinted and moved back slightly into the shadows, crouched. She blinked in the darkness. She could see that he was lean and rangy and crusted brown all over like a skeleton caked in mud or as if he’d grown an outer coating of bark. Like he was part of the wilderness.

She blinked again, as the dizziness returned. Maybe it was the headache from earlier returning, or that she’d taken too much willow bark powder to make it go away. She couldn’t be sure of what she was seeing.

“Who are you?” she demanded. The thought of the children behind her amplified her fear; her protective duty rose within her like a fire in the wind. “What do you want?”

No answer. She couldn’t quite make out his face but he stared at her with the intensity of a mountain lion, eyes glittering in the lamplight. He was definitely not an Indian. A mountain man, maybe, attracted by the activity of the wagon train. A white man who’d been in the wilderness a long time, maybe lost and on his own. His eyes had an odd, feral quality to them with no glimmer of human intelligence.

“Be calm,” she said, in a low voice, when one of the children whimpered. “It’s all right.” Could they see what she was seeing?

Then there was a second man, and a third, she could swear. The lantern was too dim to show much: only shadows, impressions, movement. A chill lifted on her neck. The way they moved was all wrong. She thought of Luke Halloran, the broken way he’d crawled and lunged. They were like wolves: They circled the way wolves did, they spoke without saying anything out loud.

Wolves separated their prey, isolated them, and picked them off, one by one.

Tamsen turned and saw Elitha, trembling, too far from the others. Isolated.

Before she could shout, one of the shadows lunged in Elitha’s direction.

Tamsen’s heart sounded a rhythm of panic in her chest, in her head, in the back of her throat. She dove toward Elitha.

Another of the shadow figures scuttled to intercept Tamsen, clawing for her throat. He opened his mouth to reveal a nest of teeth, pointed and inhuman. She swung the lantern with all her might at the man, if that was what he was. The glass chimney shattered as it made contact with his jaw. The fount cracked, throwing oil all over his face.

The children began to bolt. “Stay together!” Tamsen screamed. But it was hopeless. They scattered, children darting through the sage like rabbits, eyes wide with fright.

Within a second, the man’s head was engulfed in flames. The sound that came from him was like nothing she’d ever heard, like a renting of the world itself that briefly revealed the pit screams of hell. He clawed at his face, but that only spread the flames to his hands, then his arms. The fire devoured him as though he were made of kindling. The other two men began to scream and retreat from the one that was burning, scattering like dumb animals.

Tamsen got hold of Elitha. “Go after the children, take them to the wagons—now!” Her heart seemed trapped in her throat, choking her.

“The dead…” Elitha muttered, looking stunned and confused.

Tamsen shoved Elitha hard in the back. “Don’t look back, just run.”

The stench from the burning man was overpowering. He flung himself against rocks and scrub as he tried to save himself but only succeeded in setting the whole plain ablaze: sagebrush, reeds, and striplings, all of it caught.

Within seconds the men were lost, as thick billows of smoke funneled toward the sky and made her eyes burn.

She backed away, holding her apron to her mouth, coughing. She wanted to run, but she had no strength left. And she had to try to douse the flames with water from the river, or it would be too late. They would lose everything.

But the fire had taken hold. It raced along the ground, it jumped from bush to bush. Before long, it was a wall of flame in front of her, defying her. Even after dozens of others came sprinting toward her from the camp, the fire spread faster than they could work.

More people came with buckets, and some with shovels, throwing sand onto the fire. Others tried a bucket brigade from the river, tossing bucket after bucket of muddy brown water on the conflagration.

Still, the flames gained.

Samuel Shoemaker wiped his forehead and surveyed the scene. “We’re losing ground. We need to hitch up the oxen and move those wagons.” The men around him began arguing: Could they round up the oxen in time? The animals had already moved away, frightened by the flames. Maybe they could try to push or drag the heavy wagons to safety—though that seemed like a fool’s errand. Some damned the families that had remained back at their campsites, thinking the fire was no threat.

“Let them burn,” Baylis Williams said, his face streaked with soot. “If they’re too shortsighted to see the danger…” Tamsen was shocked; he was normally a gentle soul.

Tamsen cleared her throat. She had to warn them of the danger that was stalking them—something far worse than these rabid flames. “I was attacked,” she shouted. “That’s how the fire started. Some men came out of nowhere and went after the children.”

The others stopped their arguing. “What men?” Graves narrowed his eyes. “White men, or Indians?”

“White men, I think.” But not men. Not quite. How could she explain, without playing into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit her?

Keseberg’s laugh was like the hollow echo of metal on bone. “There ain’t no white men besides us around here,” he said.

A murmur rippled through the crowd. Her throat was still raw from smoke, still raw from screaming. She put her hand to her head, trying to think clearly. She hated doubting herself, but suddenly she felt another swerve of dizziness. It wasn’t possible this had all been a kind of hallucination brought on by willow bark—was it? Most of the time, Tamsen kept a clear head, but there were times when she wondered if the strange, twisted, tortured part of her had taken over, occluding everything else.

Now, everyone was staring at her, but their looks were not ones of sympathy.

“Funny how you’re always in the middle of it whenever things go wrong,” Keseberg said loudly. “I think you like the attention, Mrs. Donner.”

The wind shifted, blowing the smoke away from them, and as the smoke lifted, the whole camp seemed to disappear before her eyes, dissolving into the darkness.

She broke out in a cold sweat.

But the impression was over just as quickly.

Now, she looked around at the rest of the gathered group and realized: Even if what she thought had happened had, there was no way she’d ever get them to listen to her.

And in fact, it didn’t matter. Because if what she’d seen had been real, then they were all as good as dead anyway. She saw that now, the memory of the feral men’s eyes still hovering in her mind, hardening into a certainty.

“We’re not going to stop this fire,” Eddy said, turning his back on the flames. “We gotta move the wagons. It’s our only hope.”

Tamsen watched as pandemonium broke out among the group, spouse arguing with spouse, some throwing down buckets and shovels to sprint for the wagons, others pulling on their neighbors’ sleeves, trying to make them stay. “It’s every man for hisself,” Franklin Graves muttered as he trotted past Tamsen, nearly knocking her off her feet.

With a fresh pulse of terror, Tamsen saw that he was right.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Edwin Bryant found the corpse in a cave.

It was the first body he’d come across, man or animal, in the weeks he’d been lost, other than the scattered bones at the prospectors’ camp, which had been around for years.

This one was, ironically, a sign of life, of normalcy. You expected to find half-decomposed animals if you walked in the woods long enough. It was the way things were in the wilderness: knots of flies, the sweet-sick smell of decay. But in the days since Fort Bridger, he’d seen nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.

He’d found the cave by accident, during a sudden sweeping rainstorm that had driven him to look for shelter. The cave was small, one of a handful pocking the side of a rocky rise. He was so weak he almost gave up the climb and bunkered where he was. But although myths of wolf-men and diseases that made vampires and corpses of all stripes he could handle, Bryant had never liked storms. So he’d hauled up through the crags, winded by even this limited exertion, and ducked into the first shelter he found.

He’d brought a bundle of sagebrush with him as fuel for a fire, and he was just looking for the best spot for it when he saw it: a male, probably in his midthirties, though it was hard to tell because of the decomposition. Probably an Indian, most likely a Washoe given where he was, or where he thought he was.

The cause of death was apparent enough. The Indian had a wicked gash in the skull, probably not accidental. The impact was too neat, and likely caused not by a fall but by the impact of some heavy weapon, but he couldn’t tell for sure—he was no expert in wounds or trauma. He had other injuries, too, deep cuts that could’ve been made by a wolf or bear, even a mountain cat. That was a funny thing. Bryant had seen no trace of predators in the area—no scores in the bark of the trees, no droppings, no dens.

The man had nothing with him, no bow and arrow, spear or rifle, not even a blanket. He had not been here long before he died. Bryant considered whether whoever—or whatever—had killed him had attacked the man inside the cave but quickly dismissed the idea. There was no evidence of blood except trace amounts on the stone. Bryant had to double over inside the cave to fit; it seemed unlikely that there had been a struggle inside the enclosure.

Which meant that the man had been injured elsewhere and climbed up, or been carried up, ten feet of rock just to die. Running away from something, most likely. Bryant pieced a story together in his head of a man attacked, mortally wounded but able to flee from his assailant. In a delirium, he had run until he saw the small cave; perhaps he mistook it for salvation.

Perhaps he only wanted to die in peace.

Bryant made a pillow of dried sagebrush as far as he could from the body in the narrow space. Every time he struck his flint, he imagined the man might sit up, blinking, irritated at having been awoken. He expected he was going a little mad. He had been alone long enough, without company for weeks now. And without food, except what he could scavenge: a tiny fish, a few eggs stolen from a bird’s nest. Mostly, he was getting by on insects and acorns. At one point he’d choked down a handful of roots but they’d given him heaves and he’d thrown up nothing but bile for hours, since there was nothing to throw up.

He drank water but though it filled his stomach, it did nothing for his hunger. After the first three or four days the gnawing had diminished—thank God, it had been like a jaw chewing out from inside him—and he felt clearer-headed, optimistic, certain that starvation had been like a sickness that had slowly passed off. It was another day before he realized he was traveling erratically, circling back over terrain he had passed before. He would wake suddenly in the mud, having lost consciousness without knowing it. He had to rest frequently; he gasped for breath. His heart raced after walking a hundred yards.

He was dying—slowly, at first. Quicker now.

All because he was hungry. All for lack of game, of meat, of food disguised as the flesh of other animals.

The corpse was dark: the color of smoked ham. It was hard to estimate how long he—it, the body—had been dead. Not too long. It smelled of rot but only faintly. The body was barely human anymore, though. His soul was long gone. He was nothing but a shell.

Shipwrecked men survived by eating the bodies of sailors who perished before them, Bryant knew. It was the law of the sea. He’d even heard a story about it once. Something Lavinah Murphy had been saying around a fire back in the early days of their journey, a story about a German shipwreck and the unlucky survivors.

The sagebrush crackled as it burned. The smoke reminded him of Christmas, and Christmas reminded him of goose, and the crackle of sizzling fat, and going to sleep full and happy with the sound of his mother’s laughter in his ears. His eyes burned before he realized he was crying.

No one would know.

No one would blame him.

His hands went to the knife in his sheath.

Through the smoke, Bryant thought for a moment that perhaps the man was not a man at all, but an animal in decay. There was no sin in eating animals.

Why couldn’t he stop crying?

Not because he would do it, but because, at the last second, he couldn’t. He wept because it was no animal, it was a man, and he’d known deep down he would not be able to go through with it. He wept because that meant he would die—probably here, in the cave, to become another rotting corpse warming the air with putrescence.

It was then that he heard noises below the cave: the sound of horses’ hooves clipping stone and the murmuring of human voices, even though he couldn’t make out the words. He looked over the ledge to see four riders slipping through the sagebrush. They were Indians, probably Washoe, given the location, skinny as scarecrows under their old deerskins. Bryant tried to decide if they seemed dangerous. He could tell it was a hunting party, but what kind of luck had they had? Would they try to kill him for food? He pictured a village of emaciated women and children waiting for the hunters to return.

If he did nothing he would die. If he called out he might very well die, but sooner and quicker, impaled or gutted or shot full of arrows.

Bryant stood and waved, shouting to get their attention.

Custom demanded an exchange of gifts, so Bryant gave the Indians everything he could spare. His navy blue bandana, picked out by his fiancée in the general store in Independence just before the wagon train pulled out. The band on his hat, braided leather studded with tiny silver beads. And finally, his waistcoat, which he’d bought from a haberdasher in Louisville with his first paycheck as a newspaperman. With each item he passed to them, the men smiled, each in turn, until they decided who would accept which gift. These gifts earned him a place at the fire and a share of their evening meal: acorn bread, vegetable root dried like jerky, and a handful of mushrooms.

He forced himself to eat slowly so that he wouldn’t get sick. He bowed his head to each man in turn to show his gratitude.

They seemed to know the words he’d learned from the Shoshone, and he augmented this limited vocabulary with gestures and pantomime and drawings in the dirt. They indicated that there was a lake ahead, high up in the mountains, but that he should avoid it. They said the lake was home to a spirit that, they claimed, consumed the flesh of men and turned them into wolves.

“Na’it,” one man said to him repeatedly while pointing to the figure he’d drawn in the dirt. Bryant didn’t know what they were trying to say.

He led them up to the cave and showed them the corpse, wondering if they might have known the man in life, if he had been of their tribe. Bryant asked as best he could whether they knew what beast or spirit had killed the man in the cave. To his surprise, they had been repulsed by the sight of the corpse, had insisted on setting fire to it immediately without so much as a prayer.

Perhaps because it was so dark and the nuances were lost, or because of the mushrooms he’d eaten, which he was sure were mildly hallucinogenic, he couldn’t figure out what the drawings were meant to represent. But it seemed the Indians believed that the man’s brutal death was not the work of a man or beast but both, somehow. A man in a wolf’s skin, or a beast in a man’s skin? It was impossible to tell from their drawings, and they spoke so quickly, and so quietly, Bryant could only make out every third or fourth word.

When he woke, he expected to find the hunting party gone. But they were waiting for him, the horses packed and the fire smothered. The senior man wore Bryant’s vest over his buckskin tunic, which made Bryant smile. One of the men offered an arm to Bryant and helped him swing up behind him on horseback, and Bryant gladly accepted. With a grunt, the man in Bryant’s vest turned his paint mare west, to follow the trickling stream toward the snow-capped mountains looming in the distance. He would live, it seemed, a few days more.

He was glad to ride out of the clearing, which still lingered with the faint sweet smell of burned flesh.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It had to end.

Meet me, James Reed had whispered as he passed by John Snyder. Eight o’clock, at the cottonwood down by the watering hole.

Reed wished he could remain with his family after dinner, reading a story to the children by the light of the fire while Margaret mended clothes and Eliza Williams scoured the dishes. Ironic, when you considered how many nights he’d sat at the family dining table in Springfield, wishing he could steal away to meet Edward McGee.

But he had a reckoning coming with Snyder, one he couldn’t put off any longer.

He hadn’t forgotten the advice Snyder gave him the last time they’d met privately—don’t forget what kind of man I am. Beneath the veneer of civility, John Snyder was a wild beast, and Reed had foolishly given this man the power to destroy him. Reed could barely stand to be in Snyder’s presence any longer, fearing what he might do. If this journey had become a trek through hell, the episodes with Snyder only made it more so, a punishment that, incomprehensibly, Reed seemed to have designed for himself.

At quarter to eight, Reed kissed the children on the head and bade them good night, each in turn. He told his wife that he had to speak to the Breens about some trivial matter; she especially disliked the family, so there was no chance she might ask about the visit later. Once he was out of sight of his wagons, he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed sweat off his forehead. Once, twice, three times. He stopped himself from overdoing it—lately he noticed his hairline had begun to recede from the habit.

But for good measure, he wiped his mouth three times, too.

He shouldn’t have kissed those children, not with his filthy mouth. He was too unclean. They were innocent, those children. The only good, innocent thing in his life. He didn’t deserve them.

He arrived at the appointed place well before Snyder and saw him from a distance, lumbering down the slope in his unhurried way. On the horizon, a brilliant band of orange and yellow dissolved into a thick, nighttime black. Snyder came to an abrupt stop in front of Reed.

As Snyder reached for him, however, Reed stepped backward. He’d played the scene in his head a hundred times but had never gotten past this moment.

“No.” Improvisation would have to do. “Listen. I came to tell you it’s over between us. It has to end.”

Snyder reached for him a second time, more aggressively. “What makes you think you get to call the tune? You’re done when I say you’re done.”

Reed managed to avoid him a second time. “Listen to me. I’m serious. I won’t do this anymore.” Snyder’s face twisted into an ugly sneer. He would be angry now. “I was unhappy, looking for a way to escape. But I don’t have that luxury anymore. I’ve got a role to play. People still look to me—some of them, anyway. If I should fail them, what will become of the wagon train? They need me.”

“Don’t you have a high opinion of yerself,” Snyder said. He took a heavy step toward Reed. “I could tell ’em about you, about what you let me do to you. That you asked for it, you wanted it.”

Reed tried to swallow but found he couldn’t. “You’d be implicating yourself, too,” he finally said. But he no longer knew whether Snyder cared. He felt sick—how could he have let himself fall prey to a man like Snyder? How could he have wanted him so badly?

How was it possible Reed wanted him still? The strong bulk of his shoulders. The moments of hard, rough, frantic forgetting.

“It don’t matter what I done,” Snyder said. “I’m not the one who’s a pervert.”

“Some of those men won’t feel the same way, you can bet on that. They’ll never look at you the same.”

“What about your wife?” Snyder’s expression was pure, vicious glee. “How do you think she’s gonna look at you after I tell her what you done, on your knees, how you begged for more?” He laughed when Reed’s face crumbled.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Reed said. He was light-headed with fear. This was surreal, a bad fever dream. “You don’t have it in you.”

Snyder punched him in the face. The blow landed so hard that Reed nearly blacked out. The next he knew, he was lying on the ground. Snyder straddled his chest. The pain was a relief—it brought him out of the sticky, anxious heat of his thoughts and into the present moment. He gasped for air. Another blow ground the back of his skull into the sand. He was being crushed under Snyder’s weight. He’s going to kill me, Reed realized, struggling to comprehend the notion, even as it was happening.

“Fucking faggots,” Snyder said. But he sounded calm. “I hate fucking faggots…”

He wanted to kill me all along.

But before Snyder could strike him again, they both heard voices, too far off to be distinct but unmistakably raised in argument. Then the sound of a gunshot tore through the air, a violent punch that echoed through the hollow. Snyder backed off Reed’s chest, startling like an animal.

“What the hell is going on?” he said.

Reed didn’t answer. With effort, he managed to stagger to his feet and lunge for his horse, barely making it up into the saddle. Blood dripped from somewhere on his swollen face. He was having a hard time seeing straight. His thoughts had gone numb, a faint buzz at the back of his head. It took all his concentration to stay on his horse—part of him wanted to fall off, to fall away from himself and vanish. To be wiped clean from this earth.

By the time Reed rode back to the camp, the argument was in full swing. Diminutive William Eddy was chest-to-chest with Patrick Breen, easily twice his size. Eddy, a dead shot, held his rifle firmly, but he wasn’t threatening Breen with it, at least not at the moment. The two were red-faced, shouting over each other’s words. A small boy, no older than three or four, stood to the side, bawling. A circle had formed around them.

Reed swung wearily out of the saddle, the spot on his face where Snyder had hit him throbbing. He could hardly think through a red haze of pain. “What’s going on here?” His voice sounded distant.

Breen did a double take. “What happened to your face?”

“Never mind that,” Reed said. His breath came a little easier now. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Took out his handkerchief and began to wipe down his face, carefully, methodically. “What’s the argument about?”

Breen made to grab the crying little boy, but Eddy stepped in front of him. “I’ll tell you what happened—this little thief broke into my stores and stole the biscuits we were saving for breakfast.”

Biscuits. Reed had had his last biscuit a week ago. Probably nobody in the party had enough flour left for biscuits except the Breens and the Murphys. He thought of the incident with Stanton and the gun. It was a miracle no one had forcibly tried to take food away from the Breens yet, under the circumstances. Not that he could say this to Patrick; he had firearms and he was prepared to use them.

“They’re just biscuits, Mr. Breen. What do you propose we do—hang the boy?” He looked down at his handkerchief, which was now drenched in his own blood, and then quickly back at Patrick Breen.

“Nobody’s going to lay a hand on Peter,” Eddy said. “Not unless they want a bullet in the gut.” So the kid was Eddy’s son.

“He’s a thief. He deserves a good whipping.” Breen spat, barely missing Eddy’s shoe. “Kids don’t come up with these ideas by themselves.”

“What are you saying?” Eddy’s voice was dangerously low. “Are you saying I put him up to it?”

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, is all.”

Eddy began to shoulder his rifle and Reed only just managed to push the barrel aside. “Will, you don’t want to do that.”

“You came around asking for food,” Breen said. “Don’t deny it.”

“You refused to give me a bite,” Eddy returned. “Not very Christian of you. My family is starving and you got cattle on the hoof. You won’t slaughter your livestock even if it means saving my family’s lives.”

When Breen frowned he was an ugly man. “It ain’t my fault your cattle run off or that you didn’t bring enough provisions with you. I might let you buy a cow if I had one to spare, but I brought these cattle with me for a reason.”

“This is an emergency. None of us knew what we were signing up for.”

Reed’s head throbbed. He needed a cold compress and willow bark powder. He could still hear Snyder’s voice in his head, like the shard of some fractured dream. Faggot. “The Eddys are not alone,” he said, stuffing the soiled hanky into his pocket and doing his best to draw up his height. Even still, his voice sounded thin above the shouting. “It’s no secret that a good number of families are nearly out of provisions.”

“That’s right,” Amanda McCutcheon said. Already, her face looked hollowed out, as if over the course of the journey all her fat had simply burned away in the heat. “If my Will don’t get back soon, I’m going to be in desperate straits.” Will had gone ahead with Stanton to seek out supplies—with Reed’s permission.

Reed held up his hands to quell the murmuring. Panic, barely suppressed, vibrated the air almost constantly now. And who, besides a monster, would be able to stand by and watch a child starve to death? Patrick Breen would. Of that he was sure. This party had its share of monsters.

And sins.

“We have to face the possibility that Charles Stanton and Will McCutcheon may not return,” he said, sternly but calmly, “or may not return… in time. It’s a long, dangerous way to California.”

Lavinah Murphy squinted at him. “What do you propose we do about it?”

He was so tired. “You know my thoughts. We must pool our food—”

He was nearly drowned out by an explosion of protest.

“—and begin strict rationing. It’s the only way,” he persisted.

“Why should my family suffer because someone else was too cheap to bring enough?” Patrick Breen was shouting now. “It’s not my fault. It’s their tough luck. I’m not going to let my children starve.” Some in the crowd murmured in agreement.

Things were turning ugly faster than Reed expected. “Let’s not start with blame. Every family in the party has had plenty of bad luck…”

“Easy for you to say. You’re one of the ones who needs help, not one who’d be making the sacrifice,” Lavinah Murphy said.

Faggot. I’m not the one who’s a pervert. Was it possible that what had happened in the desert, that all his losses, the cattle roll-eyed and plugged with bullets, or vanished overnight, was punishment for his own wrongdoings? “True, Mrs. Murphy,” he said quietly. “True enough. But didn’t I sign a voucher promising to pay John Sutter for any charges Stanton incurs on our behalf? I’m not without generosity.”

Breen shook his head. His beard and hair were overgrown. They were all starting to neglect themselves, losing the will to keep themselves clean and tidy. To remain civilized. Day by day, they grew wilder, filthier, more animal. “It’s easy enough to make promises when it’s not food out of your mouth.”

There would be no resolution, Reed could see that. But things could get very ugly, very fast. Every man in the party had a rifle and would use it to defend himself. On the other hand, Reed’s heart went out to William Eddy, who’d counted on finding game to feed his family. He was a crack shot, the odds had been in his favor; how was he to know the plains had been unaccountably depleted? Today it was the Eddys who were suffering. But tomorrow it would be the McCutcheons and before long, his own family.

He caught sight of his wife, making her way to the gathering. How small she looked, wrapped in her shawl. She was still mourning the loss of their wagon. She blamed him, he knew. He thought not of her belongings but of his daughter’s doll then, the bisque and calico scraps—frayed, love-worn—buried in the earth miles back, a final bit of hope now covered in dirt and gone.

Reed was just about to speak again when John Snyder pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Reed hadn’t seen him approach. He would have thought Snyder was drunk if he didn’t know there was almost no alcohol or beer to be had. Besides, there hadn’t been any time—he had just been close enough to smell him, to smell the familiar reek of his sweat, the smell of harness leather on his fingers.

“Hang on, everybody,” Snyder said. “Before you listen to one more word from that man”—he jerked his head in Reed’s direction—“there’s something you should know about him. He’s not the man you think he is.”

The air went out of Reed’s lungs. Even after Snyder’s attack underneath the cottonwood, even despite the burn of bloodthirst he’d felt in Snyder’s muscles, his anger, the blood staining Reed’s handkerchief—despite all of it, he’d still thought that maybe the teamster wouldn’t dare make good on his threats…

“What are you talking about?” Breen asked, and Reed could see, on Snyder’s face, how much pleasure he was taking in the sudden hush of attention: the same pleasure he always took in crushing and destroying, in leaving open wounds.

Reed never gave Snyder a chance to respond. He couldn’t afford to. If he let Snyder speak, he’d be strung up by nightfall.

He launched himself at Snyder, knocking him to the ground. For a moment they were pressed together, cheek against cheek. Snyder’s hands on his wrists felt familiar, the breath on his face intimate. Reed couldn’t see what the others were doing but he heard their shocked murmurs, the sharp intake of breath. He expected someone to separate them, but no one came. No one stopped him.

The tender spot on his face throbbed; his aching head pulsed like it was set to explode.

The seconds passed like hours. Snyder had a choke hold on him, but Reed would not surrender his grasp on Snyder’s collar. Finally, Snyder let go of Reed’s throat but only to reach for his belt, for the hunting knife kept there in a sheath. Reed had seen Snyder play with it a dozen times. Snyder meant to kill him; there wasn’t a question in Reed’s mind.

Faggot. Faggot. What about your wife?

One second, Reed was waiting to feel the knife plunged into his side, cracking his ribs apart. But the next, it was his hand holding the knife.

He thrust it to the hilt in John Snyder’s chest.

For a split second, Reed felt relief fly through him, as though this, in the end, were what he’d wanted all along. Sweet air rushed into his lungs even as Snyder went soft, letting out a long dry hiss like the sound of wind escaping the plains. Then Reed stared, with no feeling at all, as John Snyder fell back, lifeless, his eyes rolling open and unseeing to the sky.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Mary Graves had been just about to turn in for the evening when she heard the swell of voices and saw people rush past their campsite. Had something terrible happened? Her first thought was of another fire, or an Indian attack, or a raid on the remaining cattle.

Her heart sped up. She followed the crowd to the Donners’ campsite. George Donner, sitting by the fire, looked up at the sudden interruption. Lewis Keseberg and William Eddy held James Reed between them. Reed looked terrible. The man was shaking uncontrollably. A huge welt was rising on his forehead, and a dark bruise blackened his jaw. Then she saw that his hands were wet with blood.

Keseberg shoved Reed to his knees. “We were fools to follow this man. Dragged us over the mountains and through that desert. I told you all that he didn’t know what he was doing, but you wouldn’t listen to me! And now he’s up and killed a man—”

Donner finally stood up. “Who?”

“The teamster John Snyder.”

Mary was immediately relieved: She didn’t like Snyder. Nor did Donner. No one did. There were some people in the party you could probably kill and there was a chance you’d get away with it; Mary had to admit that her own father might even be one of them. And unaccountably, she found that she felt sorry for Reed, a man her father hated.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Donner asked, with genuine puzzlement. He looked over the assembled crowd as if surprised to see them there.

“You’re our fucking leader, aren’t you?” Keseberg said. “Or were,” he spat. Mary was surprised. He had once been one of Donner’s staunchest defenders. But a man like Keseberg didn’t know loyalty. “He just killed a man in cold blood. Didn’t give Snyder a chance to defend himself. What do we do with him?”

“Murder’s a capital offense,” Samuel Shoemaker said, as though anyone needed reminding.

They might have acted like George Donner was still the party captain, but it was James Reed who had been leading the wagon party for weeks and they knew it. He’d done the brutal, dirty work, found a trail through the desert and listened to their bickering and complaints. He had served them selflessly, kept his calm in the face of panic and loss, and yet now they were talking about stringing him up. If only Charles Stanton were here. The thought came to Mary automatically, but once she noticed it, she didn’t mind it warming somewhere in her chest. Stanton would talk sense into them. He wouldn’t let them hurt Reed.

The longer Stanton was away, the more Mary came to inwardly rebel against her father’s admonishments and her own hesitations. Without Stanton’s calm presence, she felt even more keenly how he’d been the only truly sensible person among them.

She knew he had terrible secrets that ate at him from within, and that these were things she ought to know about a man before she’d be willing to trust him, but she had begun to realize, too, that only a man with a conscience could be so seriously afflicted by his own past as to show it in his every gesture—the apology in his shoulders, in his voice, in the way he avoided eye contact with her despite the tension, the good tension, she knew they both felt.

“That may be true within the sovereign territory of the United States of America,” Donner was saying now. “But I remind you all that we are outside that territorial limit. We are no longer governed by U.S. law.” His eyes went to Reed. What, she wondered, could he be thinking? Reed had fought him from the start and had displaced him at the head of the wagon train. But Donner only shook his head. “If you kill this man, you will be in essence taking the law into your own hands.”

“You’re talking a lot of fucking nonsense as far as I’m concerned,” Keseberg said, smiling crookedly in a way no one could mistake for friendly. “I’m talking biblical law. He killed John Snyder. He deserves to die.”

As hideous a person as Keseberg was, people seemed to listen to him. He had a kind of power over them.

As for Mary, her own voice felt stifled in her throat. She needed to say something, but caution held her back.

She had always been a practical person, to a fault. She wished sometimes she were passionate, that her beliefs came pouring out of her unfiltered and uncensored.

Perhaps it was those qualities Stanton had been drawn to in Tamsen.

Mary kept quiet. She was glad, at least, that some of the others did not agree with Keseberg. “I’m not going to kill a man unless a judge orders it,” Milt Elliott finally said. “We don’t want to do anything that’ll get us in trouble later.”

“Banish him.” Tamsen spoke up suddenly. Everyone turned to her with a faint rustling of cloth. Despite everything that had happened—despite how much people despised and distrusted her now—she held her head high and was unafraid to make eye contact. To Mary, she looked almost regal.

Something twisted in Mary’s stomach at the sight of her. People were still afraid of her, that much was clear. Peggy Breen and Eleanor Eddy told anyone who’d listen that the woman was using her witchcraft to draw the life from George Donner like a succubus. And then there’d been the incident with the fire. Mary didn’t buy into the worst of the rumors—still, she saw that Tamsen was taking a serious risk now, in speaking up for Reed.

Taking a risk where Mary had not.

“It’s God’s place to judge him, not ours,” Tamsen said. “For those of you who think this is too lenient a punishment, just remember: A man can’t survive out there on his own. Sending him out is as good as a death sentence.”

Keseberg glowered at Tamsen. Mary caught the look. “Most of you mighta only thought of John Snyder as a servant. That he was only good for driving the oxen and doing what he was told. But he did his part. We owe it to him.”

Donner frowned. “We need the facts. Do we know why Mr. Reed did what he did?” Before Keseberg could answer, Donner raised a hand to shut him up. “James?”

Reed swallowed. His eye was nearly swollen shut. “You all saw what he was doing, and you know the kind of man he was. He was a liar, hoping to ruin lives with his lies. He came at me—I, I had to defend myself.”

“Don’t speak ill of the dead.” Keseberg cuffed him, shoving him down on his hands and knees again.

“He could get a wild hair up his ass and speak out of turn,” Walt Herron said. Walt had been the closest thing Snyder had to a friend. “But like Keseberg said, that’s no reason to kill him.”

A murmur went through the crowd. Mary turned and saw a momentary disturbance in the knot of people before she saw Margaret Reed shove her way into the clearing.

She spoke directly to Donner, as though the others didn’t matter. “Don’t kill my James, I beg you.” She was a small woman, and sick, apparently. But there was still something fierce about her, something hard-edged as a blade. “He’s done a terrible thing, I don’t disagree. He’s killed a man and he deserves to be punished. But I ask you to consider the circumstances, and all the good he’s done for the wagon train.”

“Good—what good has he done? He nearly got us killed in the desert,” Keseberg said.

“We would’ve had to face that godforsaken miserable desert no matter who was leading us,” Lavinah Murphy chimed in, with a determined air about her. She had pushed her way toward the front as well and stood just behind Margaret now and slightly to the right, like a soldier behind a captain. As a mother of thirteen, the lone woman in the wagon train leading a family, Lavinah was well respected in the group, though there were some who whispered about her Mormon beliefs.

Keseberg looked taken aback. Mary wasn’t sure she’d ever heard anyone stand up to Keseberg, and perhaps the man himself hadn’t, either.

“James got us through, didn’t he?” Margaret demanded. “No one died, even though we all thought we might.”

No one objected. What she said was true.

“Killing him isn’t going to bring the man back,” Margaret went on. “Listen to me, every one of you, before you make your decision. I don’t know why James did what he did, but I beg you to consider the whole man and see if you can’t find it in your heart to be merciful. I was a new widow, sick, with four mouths to feed. James Reed married me when no one else would. He’s provided a home for my children, put a roof over their heads and food on the table. He’s treated those children as though they were his own. Only a man of remarkable generosity and kindness would do such a thing, don’t you think?”

Mary felt tears welling in her eyes as she listened.

“He worked his fingers to the bone for the children of a man he never knew,” Margaret said, her body shaking visibly, but her jaw and stance firm. “What kind of man does this? I beg you”—she walked the perimeter, looking each man in the eye—“find some other way to punish him, yes, but don’t take his life. Spare my husband.”

There was a long silence. Reed had been hanging his head during this speech, perhaps rightly aware that a wrong word would be the end of him, but now Mary saw him wipe his face against the shoulder of his jacket, and she wondered if he was trying to swipe away tears of his own.

Mary could hear the wind hissing in the distance. She could hear her heart drum a beat in her throat, in her head. The sun seemed to glare down on them like a lidless eye.

Donner finally asserted himself. “He goes with nothing—no horse, no food.”

It was as if all Margaret’s strength deserted her at once. With a small noise of shock, she collapsed beside her husband. It was impossible to tell whether she was relieved or upset, but she cried over him as though something in her had been split open.

Meanwhile, Keseberg gave Tamsen another hard stare before spitting on the ground at her feet. “Get him out of here before I kill him myself,” he said, pushing his way curtly through the crowd and causing Lavinah Murphy to stumble as he did.

Mary rushed toward them then, knowing that if she waited a moment longer, her chance would be gone. As Tamsen lifted Reed to his feet—miserable, stunned, still bleeding—Mary came around and wrapped an arm under his weeping wife, helping to lift her to standing. Tamsen caught her eye, and Mary felt something pass between them, something like understanding. She suspected that Stanton, should he ever make it back to them, would disapprove of any sort of bond between her and Tamsen. For some reason, though, this thought pleased Mary very much. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from Stanton, but it wasn’t his approval.

After that night—James Reed folding away into its darkness forever, without a single protest, which unnerved her more than anything else had—Mary moved in with the Reed family to give them help. She pitied Margaret—now twice a widow—and it felt good to be of use.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

James Reed had made it all the way to the livery stable to fetch his saddle horse before he realized he’d forgotten his new hat. Walking back to his office, he could picture it hanging from a peg on the wall: broad-brimmed like a Quaker’s, made of black brushed felt with a narrow band of plain brown leather. He could wait until tomorrow and ride home bareheaded—having left the old one, rotted from sweat, at the haberdasher’s—but the lapse of concentration bothered him. It wasn’t like him to be forgetful. It wasn’t like him to ride through town hatless, either, and he dabbed his brow with his handkerchief self-consciously at the thought, then twice more.

When he swung open the door to his office, however, he was surprised to see the new junior clerk, Edward McGee, sitting behind his desk, an open ledger in front of him. McGee looked up.

It was he who should have been startled, but instead Reed felt like the one who had been caught where he shouldn’t be.

McGee’s wavy hair was a light gold, his eyes were dark and uncommonly beautiful. At the time, those eyes had not looked guilty but full of a kind of knowing that made the boy seem older than he was. He had the same long, sharp nose, the sculpted cheeks and jaw of the young Irish lords Reed had seen from a distance as a child.

“McGee, isn’t it?” Reed said as he closed the door behind himself. “You’re the one who replaced Silas Pennypacker.”

McGee ran a hand through his hair.

Reed cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It seems you have mistaken my desk for your own,” he went on.

A youthful grin crept across McGee’s face, lighting him up. Then he quickly corrected it, once again giving Reed a knowing look, as though the two of them were sharing a secret. “I beg your pardon, sir. It isn’t what it looks like—Mr. Fitzwilliams sent me to find this. He told me exactly where it was kept. I disturbed nothing else on your desk, sir.”

“And did Fitzwilliams direct you to open it as well?” he asked with a curt nod toward the ledger.

McGee looked Reed steadily in the eye. “I wanted to make sure I had the correct volume. The accounts can be confusing sometimes.” The young man was incorrigible—and lying, certainly.

Reed felt a pang of alarm as McGee rose from the chair—taken aback by his tall build, the way his shirt pressed firmly against the muscles in his chest. There was an energy about him, something Reed couldn’t quite pinpoint, that made it seem like he was going to reach out and touch Reed.

Reed held still, waiting for it.

But instead, McGee retrieved his jacket and moved toward the door.

For some indefinable reason, Reed couldn’t let the clerk leave just yet. He remained where he stood, blocking McGee’s way. “Why don’t you take a seat, Mr. McGee, and have a glass of whiskey with me? Perhaps I can help explain the ledger to you.”

McGee did not retract his bluff, if that was what it had been. He stayed and made himself comfortable as Reed poured two generous shots of whiskey from the bottle he kept in a desk drawer. They sat in chairs by the window, the fading afternoon sun falling across McGee’s lap, tracing fingers of light over his jaw. He seemed to be perpetually grinning even when he spoke, and Reed found he often lost the thread of McGee’s words as he stared at the younger man’s mouth.

McGee told him how grateful he was for this job—the business of real men, he’d said—after a failed apprenticeship with an actor. At first, the story seemed far-fetched to Reed—perhaps even fabricated—but as he learned more about McGee’s childhood in New York, the father who had been distant and cruel, and then the loss of both parents to illness, he began to soften toward the young man. There was a darkness in McGee’s past, that was certain—something he wasn’t telling Reed. But Reed didn’t pry. He wasn’t interested in the details, only in the way McGee looked at him—like he was a light in all that darkness. It seemed impossible.

“But enough about me,” McGee said then, though he didn’t seem at all ready to stop talking. “My background is hardly worse than what anyone might read in the news.” He laughed, and the sound caused Reed’s stomach to flip with anticipation. He crossed and recrossed his legs. “I read every newspaper I can get my hands on,” McGee went on. “Do you enjoy the news, Mr. Reed?”

“Me?” Reed frowned into his whiskey; he had no desire to answer questions. He felt once again caught, exposed. “I suppose I follow the news as much as any other businessman.”

This prompted McGee to reel off a series of delightfully horrific stories he’d read recently. How bodies were still being found two weeks after a terrible tornado had struck Natchez Trace and that Christian ministers were protesting the opening of some scandalous play in Philadelphia. Then a strange tale about a German ship that became stranded at sea and how, as the weeks without rescue dragged on, passengers and crewmen had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Edward’s eyes glowed as he heaped on detail—describing how they gutted a corpse in a lifeboat on the open sea, cracked rib bones apart to suck out the marrow—and Reed wondered once again whether Edward might be making it up. But why would he—merely to prolong the moment? Was he also reluctant for their time together to end?

“I was wondering, Mr. McGee, if you might care to join me for dinner? I was just on my way to the chophouse up the street.” Where had this idea come from? He had been on his way home to dine with his family. Margaret and the children were expecting him. Yet it seemed very important that this conversation with his new junior clerk not end. “They do a very fine lamb with mint jelly. You have my permission to crack the bones for the marrow, if that is your wish.” Reed had made a kind of joke—something he didn’t usually do. He was surprised by that.

He was surprised later, too, when he realized he’d never remembered to bring home his new hat.

The inevitable started that night, because Edward McGee really had seen something in Reed with those searching eyes—had discovered, or sensed, the secret that lay deep within James Frazer Reed. He knew what Reed wanted, probably well before Reed had admitted it to himself.

The change occurred over dinner brandy, the liquor relaxing Reed, lowering his reserve. He let his gaze linger on the clerk, who did not look away. At one point they both reached for the bottle of brandy and the young man’s hand rested on Reed’s. It was only for a moment, but that was enough. Reed would remember that touch for the rest of his life.

The next six months were bliss. Reed turned into a besotted schoolgirl. To think he had gone so long in life without love.

They passed as business associates, Edward acting as Reed’s private clerk. It was only natural, wasn’t it, for a man’s assistant to accompany him on business trips out of town, to long lunches at the club, to work late in the office? They carried on right under everyone’s noses. Reed was amazed that they got away with it.

Edward had even mentioned the possibility of the two of them running away together. Going to California to start a new life. Reed could let go of all his responsibilities: Margaret and her brood, his business, his large house and grounds! Sure, he’d worked hard for these things but did he really want them? Didn’t he want freedom instead?

Reed had been a striver all his life, desperate to leave the poverty of his youth behind. And yet he could not choose freedom. It didn’t seem real. It seemed an illusion. And he couldn’t bring himself to leave his family behind. It was something he simply could not explain to Edward, who had no family to speak of.

You’re afraid to be happy, Edward said to him reproachfully. You don’t trust me.

But Edward was wrong. Reed did trust him. Far too much. And that was the root of all the trouble.

REED HADN’T BEEN ABLE to see then what would follow in the years to come. The gradual frustrations that would arise between them. The aching and uncontrollable jealousy, the suspicion that McGee had transferred his affections to other men. Reed didn’t know then about the accounts, either. It would still be several years before Fitzwilliams started pointing out the irregularities—insisting there could be no other explanation but one: Edward had been stealing from them, slyly and steadily, for years.

How could Reed have known then that when he would later confront the young man, McGee would threaten to tell the whole world what had been going on between them, would demand hush money—a large sum immediately and a regular annuity on top of it? That McGee’s demands would threaten to ruin him, ultimately leaving Reed no other choice than to flee Springfield?

How could Reed have known that the Donners’ plan to travel west would ultimately save him?

He couldn’t have known, of course. He couldn’t have known any of it. And maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had. Because the slant in Edward’s smile had snagged in his heart like a fishing hook. The loneliness in Edward’s dark eyes—that had been real, Reed was sure. It had called to him, had echoed his own, had rendered him powerless. The boy’s touch had brought him to life. There could be no helping it. What would come, would come.