The Hunger

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

At first, when Mary Graves saw the rider in the distance, she mistook it for a long shadow. They had left the arid basin the day before; the last hundred miles of the trek had been a long uphill climb, and they’d come up over the ridge to see a valley of wildflowers and pine grass, sweet-scented and pale green, that nearly startled Mary into crying. There were pine trees to be split for firewood. And a river: shallow but wide, throwing off a dazzle of light.

Mary watched the shadow lengthen and materialize on the horizon: a horse, liver chestnut, the color of Charles Stanton’s mare.

Her father, walking beside the oxen with a switch, lifted his head and brought a hand to his eyes. “He’s back,” was all he said.

Stanton had two young Indian men with him, Salvador and Luis. The Murphys, Graveses, Reeds, and Fosters rushed him; the other families had pulled ahead on the trail. The children came running at the shouts of joy and laughter as he unstrapped his packages, sounds long unfamiliar to the wagon train. Stanton smiled at everyone, and tried to calm them, too, as they grabbed for his supplies.

And yet Mary, who had begun to dream of his return, to think of him less as a man of mystery or some sort of savior and instead as a touchstone of reality—a person, perhaps the only person, whom she could trust—Mary, who had so many times glanced up to see a floating mirage in the distance and felt her heart leap at the sight of him, found that she was too shy to come forward now, and instead hung back.

“Everyone’s near to starving,” Bill Foster, Lavinah’s son-in-law, said bluntly. But it must have been obvious. Mary saw him as Stanton must: a scarecrow in clothes now too big for him, shirt bloused around his waist and skin-thin arms, pants held up with a length of rope.

“I ran into the Breens and Eddys up the trail. They told me how bad things have gotten,” Stanton said. “But I’m back with enough to last us a while.”

“I hope you brought bacon,” Mary’s little brother said, running up to him. “We ain’t had bacon for weeks.” How gaunt his face had gotten. Five years old and Franklin looked like a little old man.

“We should have a big feast to celebrate, like we did at the parting of the ways,” Virginia Reed said. Her eyes were feverishly bright. The children were turning into strange, stalky insects, all eyes and spikes and desperate twitches.

Stanton, in comparison, looked like a man in color among a wash of wraiths even after weeks in the saddle. “Now, hold on there,” he said easily. But she noticed he stood between the settlers and his mules. “We’re not out of the woods yet. Take it easy with these provisions. We’re a long way from Sutter’s Fort.”

Amanda McCutcheon pushed her way through the crowd. “Where’s my Will? Isn’t he with you?”

Mary’s heart hollowed. In her excitement, she hadn’t even noticed that McCutcheon was missing. She doubted the others had remarked on it, either. They were too hungry to think of much else.

“He took ill on the trail,” Stanton said quietly. “But don’t worry; he made it to Sutter’s Fort and that’s where he’s resting. He’ll be waiting for you there.”

“Ill? He must be powerful sick not to come back for us…”

“The doctor says he’ll recover. With the weather starting to shift, I didn’t want to wait any longer.”

The weather was starting to shift; funny, Mary hadn’t noticed until he mentioned it. It had happened in the past handful of days. Even the hot afternoons had lost their edge and the earlier sunsets brought longer, cooler evenings.

And that meant winter wasn’t far behind.

Two nights earlier, she’d sat up late with her brother William. They lay on their backs on the cool ground to look up at the stars, a favorite pastime back in Springfield. The wide black sky, the vastness that usually filled her with optimism, made her feel small and fragile that night. Nature had shown them these past few months how vulnerable they were. Her brother must’ve felt the same, for he asked Mary if she thought they were going to die.

The question was on everyone’s mind so she wasn’t surprised, but it filled her with rage. Not at the unfairness of it, for she understood that life was deeply unfair, and, truly, had never expected otherwise. But it angered and astonished her that fear and hopelessness had so easily taken root among them. Mary believed in certain fundamental truths, and one of them was in life’s persistence—in the incredible will within each of us to go on, to thrive, to improve, and, when tested, to do good.

As the crowd shifted, she found her way next to Stanton with renewed determination, despite the fact that so far he had yet to look in her direction.

Beneath the burble of the crowd, she was able to speak softly, so no one else could hear. “You came back for us.”

“I said that I would, didn’t I?” He smiled grimly as he started to loosen the rope rigging on the nearest mule.

Had he come to forget about her these weeks away, or worse, come to believe that she had led the general persecution against Tamsen? After all, it had been Mary who brought the rest to the scene of Halloran’s murder. If he believed that about her, she couldn’t blame him. But she could set him straight. Not because she needed his favor but because she wanted it.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem he was going to give her that chance, which of course made her desire it all the more.

With hardly a glance in her direction, he turned back to address the group. “If everyone is ready, we can distribute the rest of these provisions. No pushing, or arguing. It’s all been sorted according to the amount of money you put in. Let’s start with the Murphys…”

THE PARTY QUIT EARLY for the day. Everyone was anxious to have their first proper meal in weeks, to celebrate their salvation. Mary wasn’t ready to celebrate, not until she’d had a chance to say her piece. She kept an eye out for Stanton, hoping for a few minutes alone, but he was constantly surrounded by members of the wagon train intent on hearing about the trail that lay before them or about Sutter’s Fort—at this point, a destination as elusive and chimerical as heaven. She wasn’t sure if he was really that busy or trying to avoid her.

But she wouldn’t give up. It simply went against her nature. Her father had called her stubborn more times than she could count, and perhaps about that he’d been right.

So she waited on the periphery, behind the well-wishers and the curious. She would be patient. Finally, he saw her hovering just out of earshot. He ducked to say something to the two Miwoks before striding out to meet her.

“Will you speak to me, Mr. Stanton?” she asked. Her voice sounded high and nervous to her ears.

He only nodded.

They walked side by side, and Mary felt she might burn away. She was overwhelmed by relief and terror all at once. She had prayed for him to return, prayed that she would be given a chance to set things right between them, and now that he was here, she did not know what to say to him.

“I feared—” She stopped, overwhelmed. “I feared I would never see you again.”

“Perhaps that would have been for the best,” he said, his voice low and hard.

She reeled as though she’d been slapped in the face. “Can you really hate me so much?”

“Mary.” His voice softened.

“I don’t see how you can.” She pushed on defensively. “You have hardly given me any chance at all to prove myself to you. We haven’t even spoken since—”

“You don’t need to prove yourself to me, or to anyone. I don’t hate you, Mary. Not in the slightest.” At this, a broad smile spread over his face, though he attempted to tuck it away.

Now she thought she must be dreaming—perhaps hunger and exhaustion had gotten the better of her, because she couldn’t make sense of his words.

“Well, if you don’t hate me, then why have you been avoiding me?” she insisted. “Why did you say it would have been for the best never to see me again? I fear that either I do not understand you, Mr. Stanton, or you do not understand yourself.”

“More likely the latter,” he said, his smile melting into a rueful half grin. “You see, it’s not at all that I hate you but that I fear I quite like you. That’s what keeps me away, if you must know. But I can’t have you off thinking badly of me.”

“Me thinking badly of you?” Now it was her turn to smile. “I have thought of little else but you, though none of the thoughts were bad.” She was shocked by her own boldness and tempted to cover her mouth to keep a surprised laugh from bursting out.

He beat her to it, though, and his laugh was like water running over stones in the creek—fast and free and clear. She wanted to enter that laugh and to swim and bathe and splash in it, to drink it down and be cleansed by it.

“Well, that’s a relief, then,” he said, though she was the one who felt relief—was nearly dizzy with it.

This feeling amazed her. How neatly the answer came to her, that this man, Charles Stanton, who had, even before she’d realized it, occupied so many of her thoughts—this man was the man for her. The person for her. She knew it in this moment, suddenly and definitively, as though it had been preordained, as though her life had been building up to it from the start: She, Mary Graves—the serious, ever-practical, always patient Mary Graves—was giddily, stupidly, happily in love with Charles Stanton.

And because she was so certain of it, she felt the truth would have to be known. She must tell him. Soon. Very soon. But not now. Not yet.

After all, since they met, they’d spent nearly as much time apart as together. She would wait, at least, until the latter outmeasured the former before she would give full voice to her feelings. It seemed only right, and she wanted to do things right, now more than ever.

As they wandered along the creek, the late-afternoon sun comfortable on their shoulders, she started to tell him about the things that had happened while he was away—about Snyder’s death and Reed’s banishment. That hit Stanton hard—he’d come to trust in Reed, and he admitted that it scared him how quickly the group could turn.

She told him about the rest, too: The old Belgian, Hardkoop, had taken ill and been left behind, and then Jacob Wolfinger had tried to go back for him, never to return. She told of how the sounds of Doris Wolfinger’s soft crying seemed to hang in the air for many nights thereafter, as though the realization that her husband was gone for good had come to her only in gradual waves.

“I don’t know what to make of everything that’s happened to us,” Mary said truthfully, feeling more overwhelmed than before as the weight of it all piled back on top of her. “I can’t tell who’s good or who’s bad anymore. It seemed so easy back in Springfield. But not one of those good people lifted a finger to help poor Mr. Hardkoop when Lewis Keseberg threw him out… Or went back to look for Mr. Wolfinger when he disappeared. It’s like everyone is just out for himself… Everyone says Tamsen’s a liar, with her tales of shadowy men in the basin. Even those who once trusted her seem to despise her now, but I saw her after they brought her back from the fire. I don’t know why she would have made up a story like that.”

Stanton shook his head. “Tamsen likes attention, but not the negative kind. You’re right, Mary. It is very strange.”

“And then there’s Mr. Reed,” she went on, not eager to linger on the theme of Tamsen and her disconcerting stories. “Reed didn’t seem capable of killing a man in cold blood like that…”

“You’re right about that, too. That doesn’t sound like the man I know.” Stanton’s voice was hard, distant.

“It just makes no sense, no sense at all.” She looked toward the horizon, hazy with sun. “That’s why I’m so glad you’re back, Mr. Stanton. One of the many reasons.” She blushed. “You always seem to make sense. I—I feel safer around you.”

He appeared to withdraw then—it was subtle but she felt a tiny space had reopened between them. He stepped closer to the river to avoid their elbows brushing, and a coldness rustled through her that had nothing to do with the changing weather.

“I don’t know why you have given me your trust—again and again, Mary. I want it, of course, but you must know I don’t deserve it.” He had stopped walking and was staring quietly at the flowing river.

“Whatever you’ve done, whatever happened in your past, it can’t be as bad as you imagine.” She touched his arm gently. “The sin has atoned for itself—I can see that in you, in the way you carry the burden of it. You must forgive yourself.” She said these words because she believed them to be true—the Bible teaches forgiveness in others so that God may bestow forgiveness on all.

She thought, fleetingly, that he might cry, but he only let out a heavy breath and pushed a hand through his hair. “I can never forgive myself—it would be like letting her die again. I already fail to save her, over and over again, in my dreams. Every night, I watch her drown again.”

Mary’s breath caught in her throat. She knew what he was referring to: the story of the girl he had loved—and whom he left when she was with child.

“I planned to marry her, you know,” he said. “I had come to tell her so that very day.” Mary watched his knuckles turn white as he clenched his hands and flexed them. Then he turned to look at her, as if expecting her to protest.

“Then it wasn’t your fault,” Mary said, though she could tell the words didn’t touch him. Mary’s father had told her that the poor girl had killed herself because Stanton had abandoned her. But now she could see that perhaps there’d been another reason altogether. The man—the boy—her father described hadn’t sounded like Stanton at all. It seemed absurd now that she had doubted Stanton, even for a minute.

The shadow of a lone cloud, high overhead, rippled over the landscape in front of them. It was a sign, like the hand of God touching the valley.

They walked slowly for a few more minutes, listening to the gentle sluice of the creek and the far-off noises from camp. He squeezed her hand and she liked how it felt, the strength in his fingers. Strength she could depend on.

“There is something more than the loss of her, and the horrible manner of her death, that haunts me, Mary.”

She waited.

“I had no money, and nowhere to go when all of this happened. My reputation had been destroyed, I couldn’t get a lick of work, and I was cast away by my own family, you have to understand. But still it’s no excuse for…” He trailed off, squinting at the fading sun. It had been setting earlier and earlier, Mary noticed, and she shivered at the knowledge of autumn’s descent, and of their limited time.

“No excuse for…” she prodded, both dreading to hear it and needing to, needing to understand him, to know him. And, she sensed, Stanton needed to be known by her.

“For accepting his help.”

“His?”

Stanton sighed. “Lydia’s father gave me the sum of money that got my life started. He was paying me off, you see. Paying me to leave, to help make the whole tragic incident go away. His money got me all the way to Virginia. When the law office no longer suited me, I went off to war in Texas. But then I found I still had nothing to return to and nowhere to start. With what remained of his… charity”—he seemed to choke on the word, but pushed on—“I was able to set up a shop in Springfield. I thought with the last of Knox’s money finally spent, the past was good and dead, then. But it wasn’t. Knox ran into difficult times of his own, and called on me to repay my debts to him. He was very demanding, and I, well… I couldn’t say no to him, Mary.”

She felt a chill; darkness was descending and she wanted to beg him to stop here. She didn’t need to hear more. She knew men could do desperate things for money. Her own family had certainly tried everything to change their own circumstances. It had always been up to Mary to take care of her family, and though she resented it, she understood it, too.

“Don’t you want to know why I couldn’t refuse him, Mary?” he said, his voice guttural and low.

“You felt guilty. Anyone would have.” A bird cawed overhead. She couldn’t make out what type in the silvery dusk.

“But I was guilty. Don’t you see? Not of Lydia’s suicide, but of other things. Knox knew… he’d discovered the affairs I’d had since.”

Affairs. Mary felt heat rise to her face. She slipped her hand out of his. So Lydia’s father had, in a word, blackmailed Stanton.

Which meant that whatever his indiscretions had been, they’d been reckless—and there’d been many of them.

Stanton sighed. “I knew Donner was an old friend and business associate of Knox’s. He was, in fact, most likely one of Knox’s primary informants. But when I heard the Donners were heading west, I sold everything to join them. I hated George Donner, but I hated Knox more. I needed a way out.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But I’ve learned better now, Mary. I see now that there’s never a way out from the past.”

Mary sucked in a breath. She had no idea what to say to him, what could take away this kind of pain—the grief and shame he had carried for so many years. She’d thought she’d understood what had plagued him but was beginning to see that the secrets of Charles Stanton’s past were layered over one another, folded in on themselves, and unfolding still, into the future.

He lifted his gaze to her: sorrowful, but did she see the slightest glimmer of hope? “That’s why I’ve been trying to avoid you, Mary. It’s for your own good. I don’t deserve your trust. You deserve someone better than me.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe she shouldn’t trust him. Maybe he didn’t deserve her help after all. But then, didn’t all men deserve a second chance?

“How can I help you, Charles?” she asked quietly, unable to meet his eyes, but feeling the boldness of his first name on her tongue.

His voice came to her, low and crushing. “You can’t. Don’t you see, Mary? My heart died long ago, frozen over in that river. There is nothing of me left to save.”

But Mary was not one to be so easily swayed by melancholy words. She took his hand again, and even though he wouldn’t look at her, she kissed his knuckles. “I don’t believe that,” she said.

And her words were a promise.

She had thought she wanted to love Stanton, not to save him—but now she saw that the two might be one and the same.

Still, as she walked away from him, she remembered that there was one person who would never be saved. So that night, Mary said a quick and silent prayer for Lydia, the poor beauty frozen forever, and the unborn child within her, who was never to be known.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The early fall heat had finally broken, releasing refreshing winds from the north, blowing clean the sheets and wagon covers, breathing renewed energy into the party. Stanton had found them and supplies had been distributed. Tamsen should have felt better. The others only met her gaze fleetingly these days, with a kind of heat and disgust in their eyes, but she could live with that. She didn’t mind being ostracized or hated, so long as she had her children.

The haunting nightmares full of men with caked, chapped, inhuman skin, burning alive—of sweet Halloran turned ugly and foul, grasping at her, hungering for her—should have subsided. They hadn’t, though. She didn’t know what to believe, whether the threat she had witnessed—the creeping, dancing shadows—had been real or the mad invention of a mind corrupted by a terrible secret, something almost as hideous as the creatures she thought she’d seen.

Certainly she couldn’t trust Elitha, who babbled about the voices of the dead to anyone who would listen, or the younger girls, to support her claims. They didn’t know what they’d seen, either—it had all been a cloud of movement and panic that ended in an eruption of smoke and flame.

There was a giddiness in the air now, but it unsettled her—it was the high of a drunk gambler down to his last coin. Hope, Tamsen realized, could be a very dangerous thing, especially when dealt to desperate hands.

The Sierra Nevada, already holding open their arms to the first temptations of winter, were yet before them, looming in evergreen and rich purple, topped in white. She was continually shocked by the fact that the others seemed to forget the obvious: that the mountains, like most beautiful things in this world, were deadly.

Tonight she strained to listen for every stray noise. She was tossing fretfully under her wedding quilt, lying on the hard ground, in a tense half sleep when she heard raised voices near the tent. She jostled George’s shoulder—how did the man manage to sleep so soundly?—as she reached for her dressing gown. George stumbled on her heels as she exited the tent.

To her surprise, she saw Charlie Burger, the teamster who’d been guarding their tent, on the ground wrestling with William Pike, Lavinah Murphy’s son-in-law. Tamsen had been nervous about traveling with Mormons, having read newspaper accounts of the fighting for control of townships in Missouri and even in Nauvoo, Illinois, not that far from Springfield. But Murphy’s brood was friendly and well behaved and hadn’t tried to convert anyone. William Pike, the riverboat engineer married to one of Lavinah’s daughters, was one of the last people Tamsen would suspect of thievery. But how else to explain him being restrained outside their tent in the middle of the night? Did it have to do with supplies? Everyone’d been paranoid about their rations.

When Pike saw Tamsen, however, he ripped free of Burger and lunged for her. Burger had just managed to restrain him a second time when a warm gob of Pike’s spittle landed on Tamsen’s cheek.

“Where is he? What have you done with him?” Pike shouted at her. If Tamsen didn’t know better, she would’ve thought Pike was drunk. His hair was wild and his face tear-streaked and red. This entire scene didn’t make sense. The Murphys and Pikes had no reason to steal food, she realized; as far as anyone knew they still had a decent supply, all things considered. And he was shouting at her as though she were the one who’d taken something from him.

“What in the world is he talking about?” George asked, rubbing fists in his sleepy eyes. George’s brother Jacob and Jacob’s wife, Betsy, were emerging from their tent, Betsy whispering to an unseen child to go back to bed.

Pike twisted against Burger’s grip as he made for Tamsen a second time, his feet struggling for purchase in the sand. “I know you’ve witched him away, like you’ve done with the others!”

“Not this nonsense again,” Jacob muttered.

“God is punishing us for sheltering you in our midst.” Heaving against Burger, Pike managed to free his right arm. He fumbled for his pocket. “‘You shall not suffer a witch to live,’ that’s what it says in the Bible!”

He grabbed his small snub-nosed pistol and aimed it at Tamsen.

The next thing she knew, she had thudded to the ground, dirt in her mouth. I must be shot, she thought, though she felt no pain. Her husband stood over her. Slowly, it came to her: George had shoved her out of the way to face Pike, unarmed and in his nightshirt. A thrill of feeling alerted her to what was happening. She was under attack. Her husband had come to her defense without hesitation. All of his usual bluster seemed gone.

Tamsen had been attacked before, of course, but only ever verbally. Only with suspicious eyes and cold shoulders and harsh whispers. Nothing had ever gone this far, and she was shaken.

Pike’s gun was still drawn but apparently unfired, Pike confused and blinking at the sudden turn of events. But before anyone could speak, a shot rang out: Charlie Burger put a bullet in William Pike’s back.

A look of pure astonishment bloomed over Pike’s face as he dropped to his knees. A patch of red spread across his white shirt from where the bullet had come through his chest.

Tamsen gasped, scrambling to sit up. The girls were awake now and crying. “Stay inside!” she screamed as a couple of their faces appeared in the flap of the tent.

“What the devil?” Jacob roared at the same time, as both Donner men rushed to Pike, easing him to his back. The young man’s eyes were glassy, staring sightlessly up at the night sky.

Tamsen heard others rushing from their tents in answer to the gunshot. In another moment there would be crowds and angry shouting and more accusations. Meanwhile, William Pike scrabbled spastically with his right hand for the pocket of his trousers. What was he searching for so desperately—another gun? Did he mean to kill her even if it took his last breath?

Tamsen watched, frozen, as he reached into the pocket—and drew out a rosary. Wood beads on string, so well used that the varnish was worn off. So he had remained a Catholic in his heart, even in Lavinah’s strict Mormon household. He breathed a sigh of relief when Tamsen placed it in his palm and closed his fist around it. “I hope Lavinah will forgive me,” he gasped, bringing the rosary to his heart. Then he was still.

Tamsen sat back on her heels, faint. What had driven the man to come after her? Pike seemed the last man in the party to shoot someone in their sleep. She wiped the spittle from her cheek and looked up to see Mary Graves standing in the crowd, staring at her in astonishment.

Harriet Pike, William’s wife, broke through the cluster of onlookers a split second before her mother, Lavinah. Both women dropped to their knees beside the dead man, Harriet shaking him by the front of his shirt, as though that might bring him back to life. “William! What have you done?” she screamed, her voice painfully raw, as though she’d drunk lye.

Lavinah wrapped her arms around Harriet to calm her, but she was still shaking. “Their boy is missing,” Lavinah said to George, her hands clutched tight to Harriet’s arms. Harriet was wailing so loud it was hard to hear her mother speak. “William woke in the middle of the night to find him gone. He got it in his head that your wife was responsible.” She glanced at Tamsen. “We begged him to come to his senses, but he would not be persuaded. When he left, we thought it was to look for the boy. We had no idea he would come here.”

“There’s a child missing…” George repeated, seemingly coming out of a stupor.

“Henry, my grandson. He’s only one year old,” Lavinah said, fighting tears.

“I found this.” Harriet withdrew something from her pocket and held it out in her flat palm for all to see. Tamsen recognized it right away; it was one of the charms she’d given her children to carry for protection. A good-luck charm. It seemed ridiculous that a primitive and harmless trinket could cause such fear and suspicion. Besides, its presence didn’t prove her guilt; it easily could’ve fallen out of the pocket of one of her daughters, but Tamsen didn’t dare say so, knowing it could implicate the girls instead.

“Do you deny this is yours?” Harriet thrust the talisman in Tamsen’s direction.

Tamsen remained silent. To speak would be just as damning.

To her surprise, though, Mary Graves pushed her way through the crowd that had gathered, an indignant look on her face. “Why, that’s ridiculous. How is that proof that Mrs. Donner had anything to do with your child’s disappearance? Anyone could’ve put it there. Someone who didn’t like her, for instance.” Tamsen saw how Peggy Breen and Eleanor Eddy shrank back at Mary Graves’s suggestion.

“That’s enough out of you.” Franklin Graves was suddenly at his daughter’s side, the brute giving her a rough jerk to silence her.

But Charles Stanton, tall and strong and determined, put an arm on Mary to steady her. Tamsen felt a violent pang at the sight of him. He was clearly smitten with Mary. She had lost him entirely to the girl now, and though she’d given up on him for herself, the realization still stung.

“With respect, Mr. Graves,” Stanton said, “you shouldn’t speak to your daughter like that. She’s talking sense—more sense than anyone else I’ve heard tonight.”

Franklin Graves glared at him with real hatred in his eyes. “Why, you’ve got a nerve talking to me like that. I ought—”

But before the argument could escalate further, Graves was cut off by George, who stepped in front of Tamsen, sheltering her with his broad body. “Now listen to me, everyone… You’re wrong, Mrs. Pike. My wife has been with me all night in our tent, I can assure you. She couldn’t have left that item at your campsite. You have my word on it. We need to turn our focus toward finding the boy.”

“Not you,” Franklin Graves said. “You’ll be doing no such thing. We got rid of Reed when the power had gone too far to his head, and now looks like you’re the next. Can’t have murderers among us and I don’t care the reason.”

George swelled like a tom turkey puffing out its chest. Tamsen had seen that look before when he was ready to reprimand a servant or take the foolish preacher back in Springfield to task. “What utter nonsense!” His voice rose over their heads, sounding more confident than he had in months. “I will not waste my breath defending Tamsen—I have already done so on too many occasions. As for William Pike…” George paused, standing over the man’s body, where his wife still wept. He swallowed hard, then looked around at the gathered crowd. “Pike was a good man. But he was acting out of fear. This is what happens when we give in to our fears. I do repent for it, but I will never apologize for protecting my wife.”

Charles Stanton stepped forward. “There is a child missing and we can’t go on shouting and deliberating until he is found.”

But as if in direct response, everyone began talking at once: Peggy Breen sputtering, Patrick Breen rushing to his wife’s defense, Jacob Donner wedging himself between the Breens and his brother, Harriet Pike still wailing over her husband’s prone body. Finally, Franklin Graves broke through the cacophony once more. He wagged a finger at George Donner. “Enough! I daresay I speak for everyone when I say I’m done with you… you Donners, with your money and your arrogance, and now this! Going around thinking you’re better than everyone else—and another man dead! Who’ll be next, I ask you?” The crowd had gone quiet, listening to Graves, and a tremor of fear moved through Tamsen. “I’ve had enough! From now on, you keep to yourselves if you know what’s good for you.” He cut a line with his arm in the air as though severing all connection with them.

For a moment, George Donner seemed horror-struck, the color drained from his face, as he realized what this meant, what Tamsen had already realized. The Donners would be pariahs to the rest of the wagon train—would be left to fend for themselves just as Reed had—and it was all Tamsen’s fault. But he recovered quickly, gathering his wife protectively under one arm. “As you say—so be it,” he said as he turned his back on the crowd.

Don’t go—it’s a death sentence. The words rang in Tamsen’s head but she wasn’t sure for whom they were meant, the men about to head into the darkness to look for the missing child, or her own family.

For if the creatures she’d seen before—the men who’d surrounded her in the basin—were real, if they were still out there, they’d be waiting like wolves for the party to do exactly this: divide up into smaller and smaller groups so that it left them all more vulnerable. She and her family weren’t safe among this hateful crowd, but they were no safer without them.

Still, she kept silent. Because maybe she was wrong. Because even if she was right, no one would ever believe her: a witch, speaking of fantastical illusions. Even to herself it sounded absurd, nightmarishly strange, a trick meant simply to scare and manipulate. And what punishment might they devise for her then?

AND SO THE WAGON TRAIN CONTINUED, the Donners allowing more and more distance to slide between their wagons and the rest, as promised. It was a relief, at least, to move apart from the Murphys, and Harriet Pike’s unbearable grief. After a few days, they’d let the gap grow until there was no sign of the rest of the wagon train except tracks in the dirt.

Tamsen tried not to let her worry consume her. After the barrenness of the Great Basin, it should have been a blessing to be traveling through the mountain meadows, even in their smaller group. They were surrounded by signs of life; an abundance of alders and pine grew beside a meandering stream. There was enough grass to feed the oxen. But for all the land’s beauty and serenity, Tamsen couldn’t shake the unease that had settled into her chest. She listened hard for a crackle in the underbrush, watched for movement in the trees, became increasingly convinced the creatures she’d seen in the desert were out there and that they were watching.

The Donners were alone, of course, following a stream they’d started calling Alder Creek for all the alder trees lining its banks, when the axle on one of their wagons broke. The rest of the party was by now unspooling a fine thread of dust several miles down the road.

“Damn it,” George Donner cursed under his breath. He was lying on the ground, looking up at the underside of the wagon.

“It’s too much for the both of us,” his brother Jacob said, squatting down beside George.

“Nonsense,” said George. “We can handle this, you and I, with Burger’s help of course.”

Tamsen eyed her husband and then his brother. George was being stubborn. There was no way he was capable of fixing the wagon axle on his own. It had only been a week ago that they’d had a problem with the brake—the shoes mysteriously engaging with the rear wheels even when the lever wasn’t being applied—and George had been so flummoxed he’d had to have William Eddy effect repairs.

Tamsen knew what her husband’s skills were, and what they were not.

“George,” she said to him quietly. “This is not a time for pride.” She wasn’t sure why she’d said it, though. He’d protected her. It was because of this that they were separated from the others in the first place.

“We could send a couple of the men for help,” said Jacob. “The rest of the group are bound to stop sometime for the night.” He peered up at the darkening sky.

Tamsen knew it was too early for night; the sky meant a storm. It felt like snow, even though it was only the end of October. Once again, panic curled itself inside her gut like a sleeping snake.

“We,” George grunted, trying to adjust something Tamsen couldn’t see, “don’t. Need. Them.”

Jacob sighed, before turning to Charles Burger, who’d remained with them. “Let’s send for Eddy, at least,” he said quietly. “After all our generosity to his family, the man owes us. I think we have to replace that axle and he’ll know best.”

So against George’s wishes, they sent Charlie Burger and Samuel Shoemaker on foot—no saddle horses left—to find Eddy and remind him of the Donners’ earlier generosity. Beg, if necessary. Tamsen almost voiced her objection to the plan, sure more than ever that the shadow creatures were out in the woods, and that this was just another invitation for them to close in. But seeing the necessity, she once again remained silent, choking back the warnings like swallowed smoke. They were sending two men, after all, and both would be armed. They would be safe enough. They had to be.

Tamsen thought wildly that perhaps the men would bring Stanton back with them, too. Even after all the hatred between them—she had certainly moved on ages ago from the longing and the craving she had felt around him in the early weeks of the journey—she still felt something. Despite the way he’d scolded her, almost jealously, after Keseberg came after him with her gun. Stanton was, quite simply, the kind of man you could trust, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that no one did.

In the meantime, Jacob’s older boys started pulling the cargo out of the damaged wagon.

While they worked, Tamsen took the younger children into the field. It was swampy where the wagons stood, but beyond a stand of scrubby pines there was a proper meadow. Tamsen sent the girls to pick wildflowers for her mixtures. As she supervised, she looked to the white-capped mountain range visible in the near horizon, looming larger than ever. It was pretty here, not a bad place to remain for a time, but she thought fleetingly of James Reed. He would have insisted they needed to press on for California, and he would have been right. Winter could close off the passes any day.

She looked again at the gathering darkness of the sky. They were, even now, at the mercy of its whims.

She heard her husband cry out in pain, followed by men’s voices swelling in panic. She ran back to the wagons, calling the children to follow her. She found George kneeling beside the wagon, his face white with pain and shiny with sweat, his arm disappeared behind one of the wheels. Burger and Shoemaker, the two teamsters, had not yet returned with Eddy. The rest of the men had jammed a long branch under the wagon bed and were leaning on the far end.

“Hang on there, George,” Jacob said. He faced the others. “One, two, three—that’s it, put all your weight on it.”

The pole slipped out of position once, then twice, amid a lot of cursing and groaning, but finally the end of the pole bit and managed to hold up the wagon bed long enough for George to free himself, falling backward onto the mud.

He raised his right hand, his left hand circling the wrist for support. Tamsen nearly fainted; it looked like he was wearing a bloody mitten, his hand was so chewed up. It was a paddle of mashed, pulpy flesh drenched in blood. Her husband’s eyes were rolled back in his head, nearly unconscious.

Tamsen dropped to her knees beside him. “Bring me some clean water! Tell Betsy to put some water on to boil! Milt,” she called to one of their teamsters, “take the children away, they shouldn’t see this. And have Elitha fetch the satchel with my medicines and Leanne tear fresh bandages.”

She worked on him for the better part of an hour. Mercifully, he’d passed out so she didn’t need to worry about hurting him further. She cleaned the open flesh with water and then the very last of their alcohol. The hardest part was bandaging it up so that the pieces would heal correctly. She didn’t want to leave him crippled. Jacob paced behind her the entire time while the other hired men moved away, spooked. “We were using the pole to hold up the wagon bed and it slipped,” Jacob explained as Tamsen tried to make sense of the crushed fingers.

The first fat wet drops fell from the sky as she was finishing up. They were not quite rain, not quite snow. “We’d better set up the tents,” Tamsen said to her brother-in-law. “This is as far as we get today.” She wondered, but didn’t ask aloud, just how far ahead the others had gotten by now.

They hobbled the last remaining oxen to graze and set up the tents under a huge old tree with broad branches that made a natural shelter. They tried to make George as comfortable as possible, propping his hand in place with pillows.

“He’ll be wanting some of your laudanum when he comes to,” Jacob noted.

Burger and Shoemaker still had not returned by the time the sky had completely darkened. Tamsen tried to banish the worst from her mind. They had a rifle; no shots had been heard. Surely if they’d encountered any danger, they would have at least tried to defend themselves.

“How far away could the rest of the wagons be?” Betsy muttered as she wrung her hands.

“I’m sure they didn’t want to walk back in the wet,” Jacob assured her.

Sure enough, the snow had started to accumulate in a slushy layer. An hour later the wind shifted, cold and dry, and the snow become lighter, fluffier. It was going to pile up, Tamsen could tell.

The hired men slept on one side of the tree, piled into their tent. Tamsen persuaded her Betsy and Jacob to forgo a separate tent and for all the members of both families to make do with one.

“Are you sure?” Betsy asked as she tried to find space for all the children to lie down.

“It’ll be easier to keep warm,” Tamsen said, though that wasn’t the reason. Safety in numbers, she thought.

It had gone quiet around them. The wagon party, at its height, had been over ninety people. Even with deaths, losses, and departures, they’d still been like a moving village. Now, Tamsen glanced around at this diminished group of no more than twenty and felt just how shockingly small they were, facing the mountains, and the winter, and the night. The silence was oppressive—no one even snored. The only thing she heard was the soft hiss of snowfall and the occasional sound of snow slipping off the waxed cotton overhead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Edwin Bryant had been with the Washoe for close to a month now. Though the great Washoe tribe was scattered throughout the mountains and beyond, he’d been brought to a small and highly organized village, which consisted of two dozen bark-wrapped shelters stretched across the red dirt clearing. Lazy plumes of smoke rose above a few of them, burning off the morning chill. Gray sky hung low over it all.

Bryant was feeling better, but with no horse or food, he stood little chance of survival on his own and he was sure the Washoe knew this.

The leader of the small group was called Tiyeli Taba, which—as best Bryant could tell—meant something like “large bear,” because as a young man he had brought down a huge grizzly with a single arrow. Tiyeli Taba let Bryant stay in his galais dungal with his family, shared his food with him. Food wasn’t particularly plentiful, mostly nuts and roots and toasted wild grasses, but they gave him the same portion as the other men. Not knowing when or how he would leave the village, Bryant tried not to think about the life he’d abandoned. He wanted to think it was suspended in time with his fiancée, his friends, Walter Gow, and Charles Stanton all waiting expectantly for him. One day, he would return and life would continue exactly as he’d left it. He wanted to believe this even though he knew it wasn’t likely. Without his letter-writing, he felt untethered, undefined. Anything might happen, and no one would hear of it. Margie might wait forever, never knowing…

Each night as they sat around the campfire, Bryant coaxed the elders into telling him their tribe’s folktales. It was laborious as he had to stop the speakers frequently to clarify what was being said and, in the end, he could only guess what they were trying to tell him. Then one day a hunting party returned including a young man, Tanau Mogop, who had scouted for a military regiment and spoke some English. Bryant was overjoyed.

The first evening with Tanau Mogop, Bryant asked him to find out if his tribe knew anything about the prospectors’ camp he’d stumbled on earlier. He had not been able to stop thinking about the collection of bones and skulls in the abandoned cabin. If anyone knew the secret of what had happened in that grisly camp, it would be this village, which appeared to be the closest. Tiyeli Taba sat meditatively without saying a word, but two of the men, agitated, began speaking simultaneously to Tanau Mogop.

Tanau Mogop turned to Bryant and explained that the camp he’d stumbled on had indeed been built by prospectors and that they’d lived there for over a year, trying to find gold in the river and rocky caves. The tribe had nothing to do with the prospectors, the elders made clear. They would pass close by from time to time to make sure that nothing bad had happened. Occasionally they would leave a pouch of pine nuts or tubers if the prospectors looked hungry. There was still game then, mostly rabbits, and they did not worry that the white men would starve. But then one of the prospectors became infected with the na’it.

“Na’it?” Bryant asked. “What’s that?” He recognized the word, could swear it was the same word one of the other Washoe had used when they first found him by the cave.

“It is the hunger. A bad spirit that can pass from man to man. A very old myth among our people, though it had rarely if ever been upheld with proof. But what had happened to the white man… it was certainly the na’it. That’s what the elders say.”

“How does this happen?” he asked. “How does this… na’it… work?”

Tanau Mogop listened patiently to the elders before explaining. “In the ancient tales, the na’it will attack a man to eat him, but we think… we believe that sometimes the man survives the attack, only he has been infected with the bad spirit. Before long, he will be na’it, too, and will want to eat the flesh of men.”

Bryant remembered stories he’d read of how the Incas, when first confronted with Spanish conquistadors over three hundred years ago, had mistaken the tall, light-skinned Europeans for gods. Then again, he suspected those stories had been a mere invention of the Spanish. But could the na’it-worshipping Anawai have mistaken a white-skinned stranger with a ravening hunger as the sufferer of a punishment by an ancient evil spirit? Perhaps if they truly had no other context to explain the white man’s sickening behavior…

He rubbed his lower lip. Of course, if it was a proper sickness they’d experienced, there might be any number of diseases that could be said to exhibit similar symptoms. Walton Gow had told him of the work of a British researcher, Thomas Addison, on a strange type of anemia. Sufferers of Addison’s anemia, as it was called, were said to rarely, but on occasion, exhibit a desire to consume blood. Bloody meats. Organs. Surely it was conceivable that there were more diseases like this out there that had not yet been studied or fully understood. This na’it might be a variation of Addison’s anemia.

But the coincidence—the similarity to the incident in Smithboro, the man who seemingly had devolved to an animal state, killing livestock with his teeth and bare hands—felt uncanny.

Which is to say, it was just what Bryant had, in some form or another, been chasing all along.

“So it is your understanding that one of the prospectors killed the rest after he was infected with the na’it?” Bryant wanted to be clear. “Killed them”—he thought of the bones he had found, picked clean—“and ate them?”

Tanau Mogop nodded solemnly. “Na’it are never satisfied. Na’it want everything. Kill everything.”

“And you’re saying that this condition is contagious? That it can be passed from a person exhibiting the symptoms to someone who is healthy?” Anemia wasn’t contagious; that meant this might be a new type of disease, a contagion like rabies. A disease that made men desperate for raw meat. Human flesh. And frightened the Indians enough to kill anyone with the symptoms.

Na’it kill everything.

From the galais dungal later that night, Edwin stared into the empty distance and wondered if he would ever leave this place and see his friends again. He was starting to think Margie was a figment of his imagination, marvelous and unlikely, an invisible friend he’d dreamed up to hide the fact that he was a lonely old bachelor destined to die alone.

Tanau Mogop saw him and asked if there was something Bryant wanted.

“I must find my way home,” Bryant said. “Do you think your people could help?”

Tanau Mogop whittled while he thought. “I will ask Tiyeli Taba,” he said at length. It was not a small thing to ask, he explained, because they would have to cross through Anawai territory to get to Johnson’s Ranch.

Tanau Mogop shook his head. “The Anawai were not always this way, though. They only began the practice of sacrifice five or six summers ago. Protection against the na’it.”

Bryant’s hands froze around the arrowhead he’d been honing. Something Tanau Mogop had said began twirling through Bryant’s head, activating a theory, a suspicion, you might call it, that had been nagging at him these last weeks. “Six years ago…”

Tanau Mogop nodded and ran the edge of his knife hard against a whetstone. “They do many shameful things, this group. They will choose a man among them to offer up to the na’it, to satiate the evil spirit. But this is wrong. This is what feeds the evil spirit, what gives it strength.”

Bryant could understand this notion, why certain parts of their tribe might have been moved to sacrifice their own people to cannibals, perhaps to keep other cannibalistic men—or monsters, really—at bay.

Tanau Mogop had said the Anawai had begun actively worshiping the na’it—had begun making sacrifices to the na’it—five or six years ago. It seemed abundantly clear to him that the resurgence in perceived na’it activity all began around that time—around the same time that Bridger claimed the lost prospectors had disappeared. He pictured the spooky camp, the disturbing signs of cannibalism.

The vanished white prospectors might not have been victims of the disease at all.

They were its originators.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Through the window of his grandfather’s Victorian—one of the more prominent homes in the area—Stanton could see the wide white swath of frozen river that cut through the middle of town. School was closed and children, shrieking with delight, skated close to the banks.

But it was farther down, at a bend that opened up into a wider pond abutting the woods, where he’d promised to meet Lydia. For today was the day they had planned to run away.

When he first arrived, at the very spot where they’d spoken yesterday, he was convinced she hadn’t come at all, had changed her mind or been delayed or too scared.

He heard the gong of the church bell.

Then he saw her. All by herself, this tiny dark figure inching farther and farther out onto the frozen pond, where the ice thinned.

“Lydia!” he called out. “Lydia!” She paused for a second, but she did not turn.

It took him a moment to understand that she had heard him. A second more to realize she wore no overcoat, no hat or scarf. In fact, she appeared to be dressed in her nightgown even though it was midafternoon. He felt frozen in confusion. The blood began to pump furiously in his veins, and he cleared his throat, calling to her again.

She did turn, at last, but from that distance, he couldn’t see the expression in her dark eyes. The only noise she made was when the ice broke underneath her.

In an instant she disappeared.

Stanton snapped out of the trance that had briefly held him—he was dashing through the biting cold before he knew it, the scenery passing in a blur, panic making his ears ring. He must have been screaming, because suddenly there were many footsteps in the snow, shouts echoing off the trees. He ran until two men grabbed hold of him to keep him from following her.

By then, the body had been pulled out of the water. Someone else had gotten there first. Icy water ran off her hair and face in rivulets, the nightgown plastered to her pale blue skin.

For one cruel moment, he thought he saw her eyelids flutter—thought there was still a chance, somehow, that she had lived.

And then, like the surface of the pond itself, the truth finally cracked open, and he plummeted.

THEY’D GROWN UP almost next door to each other. Stanton’s father was a surveyor and was away often, so he left Stanton and his mother with his father, a prominent minister. It was a strange childhood. Stanton’s grandfather, the Reverend Resolved Elias Stanton, was impossible to please and it seemed he was doubly so with his grandson. Perhaps this was why Stanton became close to Lydia; her house provided an escape. At least, this was his reason in the beginning. As they got older, he fell hard for the girl, who had always struck him as mysterious, even as a child, despite how close they lived.

There was something dark about her soul, something remote and flickering, like a flame in wind, and Stanton, well… he was young—too young to understand what had made her that way.

Lydia’s mother had died when she was very young and she lived alone with her father in their big house, bustling with servants. She could be high-handed and people blamed this on her father spoiling her. It was true. She expected to have her way and she exasperated adults to no end, though the person she bedeviled the most was Stanton. It was because she knew he was in love with her—that had to be it.

There had been nothing between them, other than a few frantic kisses stolen in the hallway, or in Lydia’s attic, or behind the house, at the place where the boxwoods grew tallest.

The Lord knows Stanton wanted to do much more than that, but he hadn’t had the opportunity, and, truth be told, might not have known what to do with it if he had. His grandfather and mother had made sure to keep him sheltered from the realities of what occurred between men and women in the dark.

He’d always imagined he would do everything the right way. He would make a man of himself in the world, and would earn Lydia’s love properly. He’d ask her to marry him, and then the fantasies that had begun to bubble within him would become reality. There was a confident ease with which he believed that all of this would come to pass—he trusted his love for Lydia the way his grandfather trusted the firm hand of God.

But when Stanton first told her of this dream, she started acting coldly. It was sheer torture. He became sick with worry, thinking he’d disappointed her or overstepped the bounds of their friendship. Or worse: that she’d found someone else.

The fall of 1831 flew by, and Stanton hadn’t seen Lydia for months, other than a curt nod in the market or across the aisle at church. It was approaching the holidays by then and they were having a terribly cold winter, when he finally pulled her away after church one Sunday. Her father had taken ill and she’d come to the service alone. Stanton noticed her hands were icy and pale, and he wondered where her gloves had gone.

She led him back toward the woods, where they fought angrily. She told him to leave her alone, that she’d never wanted his advances. He was crushed, the years of their friendship and the flashes of heated intimacy between them racing through his mind in a confused blur. Where had he misstepped?

He begged her to explain, to help him understand, didn’t want to push her or make demands and yet refused to accept her dismissal outright. There was something she wasn’t telling him, and he simply had to know it. She owed it to him to give him a reason why she would never be his. Give him one reason, and he would take it, and go away forever.

Finally, she relented, and gave him the reason—one he’d know soon enough, anyway.

She was pregnant.

He stuttered in confusion and embarrassment, the cold suddenly creeping through the threads of his good wool coat—the one he saved for Sundays. “But… how?” He felt the burn of his cheeks. He might have been inexperienced, but he was not stupid. He knew where babies came from. He understood: There had been someone else.

His jealousy, his fury and hurt, were tempered by worry. “Who is it? Are you to be married?”

It was then that she began to cry—at first faintly, so that he thought perhaps a light snow had begun to fall again. But then harder. She wouldn’t say a word.

He got down on his knees. Her hands were too cold, and he clutched them between his own, rubbing them vigorously even as she wept. Maybe by restoring warmth to her, he would restore the Lydia he knew—or thought he’d known. “Whoever it is, it doesn’t matter to me,” he said through her tears. “I have always loved you and I always will. Please marry me, Lydia, if you love me back.”

She finally stopped crying—the tears left tiny tracks through her wind-chapped skin, and she seemed to him like a painting in danger of blurring until its true form became lost forever.

“Do I know him? Has the cad gone and left you, Lydia?”

She shook her head. “He has not left. He… I… I cannot ever escape him, Charles.”

His concern had reached a peak now. “I will not let a monster ruin your life, Lydia. We will go to your father. He will make whoever it is pay.”

At this she cried again, in broken, heaving sobs, and pulled away. She ran toward the woods and he followed, calling out to her, finally grabbing her arm and twirling her around. She fell into him, saying something over and over again and even as his ears finally began to comprehend it, his mind refused to.

ItwashimitwashimitwasHIM. It was Father.

The secret fell like a blanket over the woods. Even the birds were silent as the details, slowly and painfully, emerged: Mr. Knox had been forcing his daughter into his bed for nearly two years.

Sickened, shaken, Stanton held on to her, panic and nausea coursing through him in equal measures. All this time he had stood by, not seeing, not helping. Could he ever forgive himself? Ever be worthy of another woman’s trust?

“I will make it better,” he kept saying, though he had no idea how.

She begged him never to let anyone know of the shame she had experienced, saying she couldn’t live with the notion that anyone might find out. In some dreadful, twisted way, she wanted to protect her father. Eventually she pulled herself away, wiped off her face, insisted she had to be home before her absence was noticed.

That was when he made the promise: “Meet me here tomorrow. I will make it right.”

She nodded once, and said, “Please don’t tell anyone.” Then she flew from him.

He stalked the woods for hours after their conversation, shivering as the afternoon dove rapidly toward night. His legs had to keep moving, or the horror would somehow suffocate him.

At last he returned home and went straight to his grandfather’s study. He had a problem, he knew; his grandfather was a good friend of Knox’s. Stern and unforgiving as he was, the chances of him believing Stanton’s story seemed slim to none. But that didn’t matter. The truth didn’t matter, so long as he could fix it.

And so he wove the tale: He told his grandfather that the baby was his. He asked to do the honorable thing and marry her immediately. In his young mind, he thought permission, and means, would follow, no matter the quantity of stern lectures he might receive.

But that wasn’t what happened. Instead of granting them permission to marry, his grandfather threatened to disown Stanton. Lydia’s father had already cast him as the playboy and villain, and Stanton had no choice but to play along—no one would have believed him. Money was power—he was beginning to see that—and Knox was able to buy his own version of the truth.

Stanton only realized the worst of it later: that Knox never wanted him for a son-in-law—not when he knew the man’s terrible secret. Not when he considered him below their station.

Not when he still wanted her for himself.

If permission was not an option, it didn’t matter. They would run. There was no plan in place but there didn’t have to be. Love, and the truth, would carry them, would set them free.

That was what he believed.

TINY FLECKS OF SNOW swirled around Stanton’s head as he entered the Knox house several days later for the funeral. He looked up at the sky, white flannel stretched across the horizon. A storm was coming.

Inside, the parlor room had changed overnight. The furniture had been pulled out to accommodate the coffin, as dainty as its occupant, standing on trestles in front of the fireplace. After a push from behind, Stanton went up and peered inside. There was Lydia, his Lydia. He recognized the dress they had put on her, cream flannel with a tiny rosebud print; she had hated it, thought it made her look like a child. He’d heard Mr. Knox had the female servants prepare the body and they hadn’t bothered to curl and fix her hair the way she normally wore it. Instead, they’d left it long and combed it out over her shoulders. She didn’t look at all the way he remembered her.

Worst of all was her skin, white and chalky. Her eyes were closed, her face slack and inanimate. She was not Lydia as he’d known her.

That made it slightly easier.

He tried not to hear the muffled sobs of Lydia’s father, but they were everywhere, muffled and yet stifling somehow, like a heavy snow. Stanton could hardly breathe, trapped in the weight of that sound.

Afterward, he spent the day fitfully, so preoccupied and moody that his grandfather sent him out to chop wood in what was now a heavy snow. He chopped until he had raised a healthy sweat under his clothes and his mind had finally been able to forget his worries, at least for moments at a time. But no sooner had Stanton stepped inside the house than his grandfather ordered him to take a wheelbarrow of firewood to Knox as a neighborly gesture.

He stacked the firewood outside the kitchen entrance. He was too numb to protest.

The door opened in his face and there stood Herbert Knox looking down at him. His cravat had been loosened and his starched collar unbuttoned. His gray-streaked hair was mussed. He was in his cups, Stanton judged.

He insisted that Stanton come inside. He sat next to Mr. Knox in a dining room chair that had been placed in the parlor for the viewing. He stared ahead at the coffin, not wishing to speak for fear of betraying Lydia.

“Do you know why I’ve asked you in?” Herbert Knox’s voice boomed, echoing off the high ceiling.

Stanton gave one tight shake of his head.

Knox waved his hand. “You can speak freely. I gave the servants the afternoon off. There’s no one in the house except you and I.” When Stanton still said nothing, Knox leaned toward him and Stanton smelled alcohol on his breath. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.” He paused, his gaze sweeping over Stanton’s face. “You were close to my daughter. I want to know—did she tell you her secrets?”

Don’t tell anyone, please, she’d begged.

He began to sweat.

Herbert Knox rose to pace around the room. “Because I know my little girl had secrets, Charles. Secrets even you don’t know. Do you believe that? There are things about my daughter you know nothing about.”

“I imagine everyone has secrets,” Stanton said, finally, though he felt like he was choking on his own saliva.

“My daughter was pregnant, Charles. Did you know that?” Stanton started, but tried to hide his surprise. “Don’t think she didn’t tell me. I know who the father was.”

He once again felt how the air seemed to refuse to come into his lungs. He heaved a breath.

Mr. Knox plunged ahead. “You needn’t act so guilty, Charles. Your attraction to my daughter was understandable. It’s your behavior that was not.” So he was going to persist in his denial. Stanton thought he was going to be sick, though he didn’t know which would have been worse—Mr. Knox accusing him of being the father, or confessing to be the one at fault himself. The room seemed to be shrinking. Stanton’s head pounded. “Lydia and I were very close,” Knox went on, a distant look on his face. As if he were somewhere else. “Much closer than most fathers and daughters. She was all I had after my wife died, all the family left to me in the world. She told me everything.”

Stanton jumped to his feet, repulsion like a poison flooding his veins, his mind. He had to flee from the house, flee this abomination.

The sudden movement seemed to snap Herbert Knox out of his strange reverie. His stare was cold and reptilian now. He knows that I know, Stanton realized. Inebriated or not.

Please don’t tell anyone. Lydia’s pleading voice wrapped around his throat like a noose.

Herbert Knox, wrapped in a stink of alcohol and sweat, suddenly had him by the arm in a wild man’s grip. He pulled Stanton close so he could search his eyes, to know what he was thinking. “You think you know the truth, but you don’t understand. You thought my daughter loved you, but you were a child to her. She pitied you, following her around like a lovesick puppy. You don’t know what love is, son…”

The next thing Stanton knew, Knox was sprawled on the floor, rubbing his jaw in surprise. Stanton had punched the man so quickly that he had no memory of it except the soreness of his knuckles.

Knox gazed up at Stanton, his glazed look quickly replaced by something steelier. “If you really love Lydia, Charles, you’ll protect her memory. She would hate being gossiped about. You know that.”

“You think I won’t tell anyone…”

“No one would believe you if you did.” Knox started to rise from the floor, slowly and deliberately, watching him. “You’ve already made your bed, Charles. You may as well leave Lydia in hers. No one will take your word against mine, son. Not after how you’ve behaved, dogging my daughter over the years. Not after you already went ahead and took the blame.” Stanton nearly blacked out from anger.

He was on him, straddling him, his knuckles becoming as bloody as the old man’s face. Over and over again, pummeling that sick, smug grin. Wanting to make those gray eyes glaze over forever. Knox was death itself—he’d destroyed everything good in the world.

Herbert Knox would have met his maker that day, had it not been for the housekeeper, Mrs. Talley, running in and screaming. Her hollering drew the other servants, who pulled Stanton off the bruised and bloody mess Knox had become.

Stanton was heaving, crying, shaking. The servants stared at him in wonder and horror, and he was eventually dragged home to his grandfather in a cloak of fear and shame.

He was left in his bed for hours—maybe days. His grandfather didn’t come to him at all. Neither did his mother. No one came. He wondered if maybe he, Stanton, had died, and was caught in a kind of purgatory, a world defined by the edges of his bed and the boundaries of fitful, nightmarish sleep. Outside his window, a blizzard raged.

Finally, morning dawned, and his grandfather called him into his office. Stanton realized his whole body ached—from the struggle, no doubt. There were scabs on the backs of his hands.

Would his grandfather whip him? Beat him within an inch of his own life? Send him out into the streets? He couldn’t fathom the many ways in which Mr. Knox might try to ruin his life now, what sort of punishment he might devise.

He heard his mother weeping in her room, the door firmly locked. He didn’t blame her. She was powerless to help him.

Gingerly, he pushed open his grandfather’s study door with a creak.

His grandfather said nothing but nodded for him to take a seat. The room felt eerily silent—the snow had quieted the whole world.

What happened next floored Stanton.

It seemed, according to his grandfather, that Herbert Knox had “taken pity on the grief-stricken boy.” His grandfather produced a letter in a fat envelope. The sum of money inside it caused Stanton to rock backward in his chair.

“This,” his grandfather explained, “is to help you start over, to make a new life for yourself. Courtesy of the Knox family.” He paused. “On the condition that you never return.”

Stanton was frozen. He didn’t want Knox’s money. He didn’t want his so-called charity, the sum of which was so great it seemed clear evidence of Knox’s guilt. It was hush money. Stanton wasn’t a child; he could see that.

“Take it, boy,” his grandfather said. “You are no longer welcome here.”

Stanton may not have been a child, but still, he was young. If he had another choice, he didn’t know it. If there was a way to make things right, to reveal the truth, he didn’t see it.

The wad of money stared up at him. How could he have known that one day Knox would want it back—long after it had been spent?

How could he have foreseen the many ways—and many women—he would seek to drown out the memories of this time? Who could say if there was a specific point at which Stanton’s innocence in Lydia’s death no longer mattered, became subsumed in all the mistakes, and affairs, that were to follow…

Maybe he was naïve, then. Maybe he was a child.

He couldn’t make it right for Lydia, could not bring her justice or peace. And neither could he continue to live in this town, next door to the man who had betrayed her trust and love. He would go mad or one day kill Knox, or both.

There was nothing he could do, it seemed, but take the money and leave.

A real hero would have known what to do, surely—would not have built his whole life on a foundation of rot and guilt and horror.

But Charles Stanton was no hero.

Forgive me, Lydia.