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At least to her friends. She could lie with the best of them to an enemy, as all of them could. And did.
“And Conn poured cold water on that.”
“Not Wymie,” Krysty said.
“No. She’s got her heart set against us. But Conn managed to get some doubts in other people’s minds. I don’t think we got the whole county roused against us.”
“Yet,” J.B. said. It was becoming a theme for the evening. “But she’ll get around to coming and hunting for us, and that’s a triple lock for sure.”
“She in all probability will not come alone,” Doc said. “She showed herself to be quite persuasive, in her vengeful wrath.”
For a moment they sat in silence. A bat fluttered just outside the mouth of their cave, chasing the insects drawn by the firelight. A distant screech-owl trilled mournfully. The night smelled of moist earth and cooling, sun-warmed rock, along with the more acrid smoke of their fire.
“Then we should find evidence to clear ourselves!”
Everybody turned and looked at Ricky. His brown eyes were wide. His round cheeks showed a decidedly red flush on top of their usual olive color.
“S-sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean—”
“Kid,” J.B. said, “haven’t you learned by now, that if we let you run with us, we let you speak your mind?”
“When there’s mind involved,” Mildred said, “and it’s not just a matter of words popping into your head and rolling right out your mouth.” She liked the youth, well enough. He was a solid companion, a surprisingly good fighter and painfully smart. But he was still working on developing any damn sense, in her view.
“Ease off,” Ryan said without heat. “Clearly you got something in mind, Ricky. So let’s hear it.”
“We know we’re not guilty, and it’s a fair bet these albino creatures are what killed Blinda,” Ricky said. “After all, what she described seeing, that made her think of Jak—that looks just like what we saw.”
“What little of them we saw,” J.B. added. “But true enough.”
“So we need to find evidence it was them who did it, and not us! And then this Wymie will shift her hate off us and onto them.”
“People don’t always let go of that kind of anger easy,” Ryan said. “Even when there is evidence. Anyway, what evidence did you have in mind?”
“Well, we chill one, and take in the corpse. That’ll show them. And I bet even Wymie will admit these things are more likely to have murdered her little sister than we are.”
“Right you are, lad!” Doc exclaimed.
“But there’s a problem,” J.B. said. “We know we hit one of the things back at the dig. Chilled one, mebbe. Mebbe even more, but we found nothing but the blood trails.”
Ricky shrugged. “Maybe there’s other evidence we could find.”
“Or mebbe we could do a better job chilling one and keeping hold of it,” Ryan said. “Rather do that than cut stick and run, on balance.”
Krysty smiled. After a beat, Mildred joined her. Her friend knew her man well. You could tell Ryan had just made up his mind—if you knew the signs to look for.
The others knew them, too. “So we do us some hunting, too,” J.B. said. He tipped his fedora back on his head a few degrees. His thin lips quirked slightly at the corners.
That was his equivalent of Ryan’s wolf grin. He loved the prospect of a hunt as much as any of them. As long as there was action to take he was well satisfied, so long as it was meaningful, with a proper chance of payoff.
“The only question is, how?” Doc asked. “If they manage to elude even our master tracker, Jak.”
“Try again.” They heard the albino’s soft voice from right over their heads, perched on a ledge above the cave. “Catch next time.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said, but he was nodding, acknowledging the possibility. “They’re good. They know the country. But they make mistakes, double sure.”
“And they don’t know Jak,” Mildred said.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Krysty asked. “I mean—what are those things?”
“That one local yokel thought werewolves,” Mildred replied.
“We have seen werewolves,” Doc said. “It is just as well young Ricky didn’t choose to share that fact with that distraught young woman. It might quite have swayed the case against us.”
“He wasn’t with us when we were down in Haven, Doc,” J.B. said gently.
“Ah. So he was not. My apologies. Time…my time is all out of joint, it appears…”
“Still good,” Ryan said. “But I’m not willing to jump that far quite yet. The baron and his lady down there were special cases.”
“Muties?” Ricky suggested.
“Albinos not—” Jak began, with quiet heat.
“We know, Jak,” Ryan said. “Albinos aren’t muties. But we also know some muties are albino.”
“We lack sufficient facts to speculate,” Doc said.
“Speculation doesn’t load many magazines,” Ryan agreed. “What interests me is, you shoot these things, they holler and bleed. Meaning also, you shoot them enough, they die.”
“So you want to stay here, in the Pennyrile,” Krysty said carefully, making sure her wishful thinking wasn’t making her read more into Ryan’s words than he meant to put in them, “and look for evidence even Wymie will have to accept.”
“Go hunting,” J.B. stated.
“Bull’s-eye,” Ryan said. “Fact is, it’s not like there’s anywhere really safe in Deathlands. Shy of the grave.”
“That crazy chick in the gaudy was right about one thing,” Mildred said. “They don’t call these Deathlands for nothing.”
“Got a plan, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“Go scout around. Keep our eyes skinned. We know they hang out around the dig site, so we can inspect the area around it triple close. Better than we did this afternoon. See if we can cut sign on a second pass.”
“And if we don’t?”
Ryan shrugged again. “Widen the search, I reckon. There doesn’t seem much point in continuing with the scavvy operation until we figure out who these hoodoos are and how to keep them off our necks anyway, the way I see it. We can head off the local folks from doing anything rash, so we won’t have to ventilate a power of them.”
“Now?” Mildred asked. She yawned. It wasn’t an attempt to back up her question—not consciously. She was that beat.
It had been a long, hard day before they’d had to face down wild murder accusations and a potential lynch mob.
“Mildred, the way our asses are dragging, we’d be in double-deep shit if we ran into any of the shadowy bastards. If Jak couldn’t follow their tracks in the daylight, we bastard sure aren’t turning up anything now.”
He straightened and stretched.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
Chapter Four (#ulink_c45440f6-93f6-503f-bdc5-48eacc513a92)
“What a mess,” Mathus Conn said, shaking his head.
The ruins of the Berdone house still smoldered, drooling dirty brown smoke into a mostly cloudless blue morning sky. The sweetish smell of overcooked meat spoiled the freshness of a new day’s air. It even overpowered the stink of still-burning wood.
“You didn’t expect it to be pretty, did you?” his cousin and chief lieutenant, Nancy, said.
He grunted and rubbed his chin. “Just funny how it always turns out worse than you expect.”
“I always hear tell of how your imagination makes things worse than they really are,” Tarley Gaines said. “But then the reality usually sucks harder.”
The three, along with a few of Tarley’s kinfolk and half a dozen or so well-disposed or just curious ville folk from Sinkhole, had trekked out to the Berdone location to see for themselves what could be learned from the site. It was clear that Wymie had been telling the truth.
At least so far as she knew it.
“So who set the house afire, I wonder,” Conn said.
“Don’t see as we’ll ever know for sure,” Nancy replied. “Mebbe the outlanders did it. Mebbe Wymie did it in hopes of trappin’ some of whoever chilled her family inside.”
“Speaking of which,” Tarley said. “Yo, Zedd. Find any chills in there?”
“Two,” came back the voice of one of his nephews from inside the gutted house. Like many established homes in the Pennyrile, the outer walls were stoutly built of fieldstone, not scraped-together scavvy and newly sawn lumber the way villes like Sinkhole tended to be. Wymie’s great-grandfather, a man remembered only as “Ax,” had built the house with the help of his sons, after setting up a successful wood-cutting claim in the area.
And now it’s gone to ruin overnight, Conn thought, shaking his head.
“Reckon we’d best go see for ourselves,” he said.
* * *
“NUKE THAT MATHUS CONN!” Wymie exclaimed, slamming her fist on the breakfast table in the boarding house Widow Oakey ran. The assorted crockery clattered and tinkled. “I can’t believe he stuck up for those outlanders like that!”
“Now, Wymie,” the widow said, tottering in from the kitchen holding a steaming pot of spearmint tea on a battered tray. “You got no call to be pounding around raising a fuss like that.”
Wymie judged the old lady had to have seen her. She was deaf as a rock, unless you hollered in her face. At that there was no telling how much was lip-reading rather than any kind of hearing.
Widow Oakey was a tiny woman, who seemed to consist entirely of a collection of dried hardwood sticks bundled up in what had most likely started its existence as a gingham dress, but now seemed mostly made up of roughly equal amounts of soaked-in seasoned sweat and patches, all topped off by a bun of yellowish white hair. She seemed frail and so bound by arthritis and rheumatism that her joints barely functioned at all. Yet Wymie knew she chipped her own kindling like a pro, and her cooking was better than passable good.
It was her housekeeping that fell by the wayside.
“Why are you wishin’ death and devastation on Conn?” asked Garl, one of her fellow lodgers, from across the table. A few fragments of scrambled egg dribbled from the side of his mouth and cascaded down his several chins toward his belly, which kept him so far back from the table his comically short-seeming arms had trouble reaching his plate. He looked as if he went straight from being a baby to being a vast, gnarled, weathered, grizzly baby, without passing through the intervening stages of childhood and adulthood.
“How dare he stick up for outlanders who chilled my baby sister?” she asked hotly. “Cannie coldhearts. The worst thing! Worse than muties, even! I saw it with my own eyes!”
“Now, are you sayin’ you saw them all in the act of chilling your sister, Wymie?” the other boarder at breakfast asked. “Because that sounds double crowded to me. They’d all be gettin’ in each other’s way. Not to make light of a terrible thing, or nothin’. Still, it don’t seem practical.”
Duggur Doakz was a middle-aged black man with a fringe of gray hair and not a tooth in his head. A gifted silversmith, he could have been a rich man—an important tradesman to some important baron. But that would take him far off beyond Pennyrile, and he hadn’t chosen to leave the place where he was born. He kept his hand in and his body out of the ground by being a tinker and general repairman.
Wymie scowled furiously into her own plate. It was bare except for a few crumbs of biscuit and near-invisible scraps of egg. She had eaten like a ravenous wolf. She had a hearty appetite at the best of times. For some reason the onset of the worst had made her even hungrier.
Or mebbe it’s because I ain’t et since yesterday, she thought.
A cat jumped as if on cue onto Wymie’s shoulder. She started to swat it off, but refrained. She was a guest in the oldie’s house, after all. And her pa had seen her raised right as to politeness to one’s elders. She in turn had passed that on after he died to— Her eyes drowned in hot, stinging tears.
The cat jumped to the floor, then rubbed against her leg and purred.
Wymie didn’t like cats. She couldn’t trust a creature that looked only after its own interests and never after hers. But Widow Oakey’s rickety-seeming predark two-story house was overrun with the wretches. Mebbe a dozen of them.
The whole place reeked of cat piss and shit, which at least kept down the smell of dust and mold. The house was a crazy quilt of scavvy furniture, decorations and irregularly shaped lace doilies apparently made by Widow Oakey herself, without apparent skill, and strewed haphazardly over chairs, tables and bric-a-brac alike to protect them from…something.
“I saw one of them,” she muttered fiercely. “The mutie. I saw the white skin and white hair, plain as day. And the eyes. Those red eyes…”
“Now, now, Wymie,” Duggur said. “Albinos aren’t hardly muties.”
She raised clenched fists. But becoming vaguely aware of Widow Oakey hovering fragilely nearby with her tray trembling precariously in her hands, she refrained from smashing them down on the piss- and grease-stained white damask tablecloth.
Someone knocked on the front door. Widow Oakey set down the tray, spilling about half a cup of tea out the spout of the cracked pot. She tottered off to answer.
Before Wymie could reach for the spoon to ladle out a second helping of eggs, she came back with a trio of locals.
Her cousin Mance Kobelin immediately came to her, spreading his arms. She rose to join in a wordless embrace. She felt the tears run freely down her face, moistening the red plaid flannel of his shirt beneath her cheek.
“We heard what happened, Wymie,” intoned Dorden Fitzyoo, hat in hand, as Mance released her. He had doffed it per Widow Oakey’s stringent house rules, revealing a hair-fringed dome of skull that showed skating highlights in the morning sun as filtered through dusty, fly-crap-stained chintz curtains. “It’s a terrible thing.”
Wymie nodded thanks, unable to speak. Dorden, who made and milled black powder on the far side of Sinkhole, had been a close friend of Wymie’s mother and father. He had been driven somewhat apart from the family after Tyler Berdone’s accident. Like so many others. Wymie still thought of him as a kindly uncle.
He had already sweated through the vest, which didn’t match the suit coat he wore over it, straining to contain his paunch. “What happened to your parents, then, child?” the third visitor said in a cracked and quavering voice. “We heard they’re dead too.”
“They got chilled,” she said.
“Ah. How horrible that you had to witness that.” He shook his wrinkled head, which showed even more bald skin that Dorden’s though, as if to compensate, his hair stuck out in wild white wings to both sides. “Only the good die young.”
So long as you’re talking about Blinda, she thought. I wonder if you’d say that if you knew how often Mord talked about grabbing you some dark night and hanging you over a fire till you spilled the location of that fabled stash of yours.
But Wymie’s stepdad had never acted on his gruesome fantasy, and never would’ve. Though this man’s hands shook like leaves in a brisk breeze most of the time, they steadied right down when he gripped a hammer or other tool. Or a handblaster. He was still the best shot for miles around with his giant old Peacemaker .45 revolver.
Wymie had a hard time believing the stories that oldie Vin Bertolli had been the western Pennyrile’s biggest lady-killer in his prime. But that was decades ago: he had lived in and around Sinkhole for over half a century, since arriving as a young adventurer in his twenties who’d been forced to seek a quiet place to settle by a blaster wound that’d crippled his left hip some.
“The outlanders did it,” Wymie said. “I saw the white face and red eyes of the murdering son of a bitch myself. I could almost reach out and touch him! But that taint Conn sticks up for them!”
“You got to do somethin’ yourself then, Wymie,” Mance suggested. “I’ll help.”
“Obliged,” she said.
