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The older visitors exchanged uneasy glances.
“Mathus Conn’s a good man,” Vin said. “A good man is hard to find.”
To her surprise, Wymie found the stuffy air inside the boarding house could smell worse than it already did. The oldie ripped a thunderous, bubbling fart. Her knees actually weakened as the smell hit her.
A black-and-white cat rubbed against the wrinklie’s shins, purring loudly. It’s like the little monsters are applauding him for out-stinking them, she thought.
“How can he be good if he shields murderers of little girls?” she demanded.
“I hear tell he wanted evidence that what you saw was really one of them outlanders, Wymie,” Dorden said.
“I saw him with my own eyes!”
“You saw an albino,” Dorden corrected her, “just like Shandy Kraft was. There’s likely one or two more in the world than just that skinny kid with the outlanders.”
“Are you defendin’ them, too? Whose side are you on?”
He raised his hands. “Yours, Wymie. We’re not blood kin, but I allus been close to your family. But Conn’s a good man, like Vin says. Always dealt square with everybody. Dealt square with your ma and your pa, while he was alive.”
He didn’t mentioned Mord Pascoe. He didn’t need to. Wymie’s late stepdad never dealt square with anybody. And once the gaudy owner had caught him trying to cheat him one too many times, he refused to deal with him at all.
“More’n that,” Dorden said, “he protects himself double good. And if anybody pushed Conn too hard without good reason, Tarley Gaines and his clan would step up to back him. And that’s a bunch nobody wants to mess with.”
“If aidin’ and abettin’ little-girl-murderin’ outlanders isn’t good enough reason, I don’t know what is!” Mance declared furiously.
“Words are like birds,” Vin said. “They fly away.”
Everyone stopped and stared at him for a moment. He seemed unfazed.
“Fact is,” Dorden went on deliberately, “more people here around Sinkhole reckon Conn’s got the right of it than you do. No, don’t scowl at me, girl. It’s true.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Vin said. He leaned painfully on his walking stick to pat an orange tabby cat that was rubbing his head on his homemade deerskin moccasins. This entailed ripping another ferocious fart.
Wymie sat back down.
“I don’t care about that!” she stated.
“We all have to live here,” Dorden said gently. “That means continuing to get on with our neighbors, best we can.”
“I’ll leave, then!” she half screamed. “Once I get Blinda avenged.”
Vin straightened creakily. He shook his head. “The impetuosity of youth.”
She glared at him. “What does that even mean?”
He beamed toothlessly at her.
“Never mind,” Dorden said. “But maybe you can set things straight without making enemies here among your home folk.”
Wymie kept her jaw clamped on the bile she wanted to spew on him. She knew he spoke out of genuine friendship. She also, deep down somewhere, knew he was making sound sense.
But she wasn’t in the mood for sense.
“And what if you’re wrong?” Dorden said softly. “You take your vengeance on the wrong people, that leaves the real murderer out there free to murder more. You don’t want that, do you?”
“I know what I saw!”
“You need to help us see, too.”
She frowned so fiercely it almost shut her eyes, and angled her face toward her lap.
“What’d you have in mind, Dorden?” Mance asked.
“Simple,” the older man said. Wymie heard the smile in his voice. “You need to look for evidence to back your claim. You got a power of folks hereabouts willing to help. Everybody wants to see justice done for your family—and the chillin’ stopped. This here’s a peaceful district in a world full of strife and misery. We mean to keep it that way.”
She didn’t miss the warning in his words, but she had to admit he had a point.
Better people help you than stand in your path, she thought.
“And while we’re out lookin’ for evidence to show you’re right,” Mance said, with eagerness growing in his voice as he spoke, “we can also start lookin’ for the outlanders. You gotta find ’em to take care of ’em, right?”
“They been triple good hidin’ their tracks,” Duggur said.
Garl was taking advantage of the conversational distraction to spoon the rest of the scrambled eggs directly from the serving bowl into his mouth. Yellow fragments bounced off his chins and down the massive slope of his belly.
“Nobody knows where their dig is, or their camp, should it be a different spot,” Duggur said.
Wymie sucked down a deep breath, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.
“You’re right.” She felt tears drying on her face, leaving salt-sticky tracks down her cheeks. “That’s a double-good thing I can do. And I can do it!”
Her cousin squeezed her shoulder. “I’m with you, Wymie!”
“We’re all with you,” Dorden said, “in findin’ your family’s killers.”
“Wymie, dear,” Widow Oakey called in her cracked voice from the entry to the parlor. Wymie hadn’t been aware she’d left the room. “There’s a crowd outside to see you. I’d let ’em in, but they’d frighten my babies.”
Wymie stood up again, trying not to be too obvious about kicking away a black cat that was slithering up against her leg. She managed to shift it a ways with her boot.
“I’ll come see,” she said, her heart pulsing faster.
“You know, Miz Oakey,” Dorden said, “not to be overly critical, but you need to clean out your cat boxes more often.”
She blinked rheumy brown eyes at him. “Cat boxes?”
* * *
“FOR A LONG time we’ve enjoyed an island of stability in the midst of the chaos of the outside world,” Conn said. “I hope it’s not invadin’ to stay.”
His nephew, Zedd, who had tan, freckled skin and rusty, tightly curled hair, emerged through the door.
“Looks like Layna and Mord, Unk,” he said.
“Ugh,” Nancy said. She turned away. She was hard as nails about most things, but had a squeamish touch. Her cousin and employer, Conn, respected that in her; it made her seem more human.
“How do they look?” Conn asked, despite his cousin’s visible discomfort.
Zedd showed pressed-together teeth. They were white and mostly even. Patriarch Tarley enforced hygiene in his clan with an iron hand, despite his normally easygoing ways. He had a rep for being tough when it counted.
“Like you’d expect,” Nancy said, as if she were gritting her teeth to hold in puke. Evidently she was hoping to stave off further details.
If so, she hoped in vain.
“Not really,” Zedd said. “Chills ain’t burned so much as, well, kinda roasted. And not really all over, you know?”
Conn kept his gaze steady on the young man as his cousin loudly lost her battle against throwing her guts up. “And they don’t look et so much as busted all to nuke. Like they got hacked with an ax. Heads’re both busted wide-open, and don’t look as if their brains swole from the heat and popped through the skulls like taters in the oven.”
“That’s enough details right there, Zedd,” Tarley said.
The young man shrugged.
“I was only tryin’—”
“Ace. Thanks. Enough.”
Nancy straightened, grunting and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The group shifted upwind of the fresh pool of barf in the tramped-earth yard.
“Doesn’t that support Wymie’s claims?” she asked, all business once again. “I mean, would the weird fanged monsters the outlanders claim to’ve seen have done somethin’ like that? Whacked them with an ax?”
Tarley shrugged. “Why not?”
“Truth,” Conn said. “We don’t know what these things’d do. We don’t know if they’re even real. It’s a matter on which I’m far from makin’ up my mind.”
“But what difference does it make, anyway, Mathus?” Nancy asked. “They’re strangers. Outlanders. Why are you botherin’ to stick up for them?”
“Fairness?” Tarley suggested. “Justice?”
Nancy scoffed. “How many magazines do them things load?”
“More than you might think,” Tarley said stolidly.
“A reputation for fairness is part of my stock in trade,” Conn reminded his assistant. “And let’s not forget that dealin’ with these rough-lookin’ outlanders has been highly profitable. We can resell the scavvy we get from them to folks who want it most at considerable markup, and everybody’s happy. Or do you want to go scout out their node and then dig scavvy yourself?”
She shook her head. “I’m not the outdoor type, boss,” she said. “You know that. Had folks out looking, though.”
“No luck, however,” Conn said.
“No. They cover their tracks triple well.” She frowned. “A suspicious mind might judge that as pointin’ to them, too.”
“A suspicious mind judges everythin’ as pointin’ to those it suspects,” Conn pointed out.
“Wymie’s on a rampage,” Tarley said thoughtfully. “She ain’t in a frame of mind to listen to reason. She could cause a power of mischief, it seems to me.”
“Then seriously, boss,” Nancy said. “Why not just throw the strangers to Wymie like a bone to a beggin’ dog? Sure, justice, profit, all those good things. But if it gets her to calm the rad-dust down, mightn’t that work out more profitable in the long run?”
Conn chuckled. His cousin had a way of reminding him exactly why he’d hired her, and without any sign of intent. Just by doing…what he’d hired her to: minding the bottom line.
But this time he still thought she’d made a rare mistake in her tallying.
“She’s already stirred up a mob,” he said. “That kind of thing is like a shaken-up jar full of wasps. It’s hard to put back once you take the lid off.”
“And what if she’s wrong?” Tarley asked. “Then chillin’ the outlanders will leave the real murderers still loose. And murderin’ more, unless I miss my guess.”
“That’s what I fear,” Conn admitted.
He raised his voice and called to the rest of the party, “Any sign of tracks anywhere?”
“Nary a scrap, Mr. Conn,” Edmun replied. “Just the prints Wymie made when she got onto the trail toward town.”
Edmun was an indistinct blond man somewhere in his thirties, bland as tepid water, but with a reputation for steadiness, which made it a matter of curiosity to Conn why he had first taken up Wymie’s cause—when she’d carried her dreadful burden toward Stenson’s Creek—and then promptly fallen away when Conn raised the voice of reason.
Conn didn’t hold that highly by his own powers of persuasion. He was a skilled bargainer, with a lifetime of experience in dealing with everyone from desperate dirt farmers to booze- and crank-fueled coldhearts one twitch away from a chilling frenzy. Yet he’d always found Edmun Cowil and his like the hardest to move, once they got set in a groove.
There was something working here. It tickled the underside of his brain like gaudy-slut fingernails along the underside of his ball sack—though that was a pleasure he had long chosen to deny himself, as it was fundamentally bad business.
But no time for that now.
“Yard’s hard-packed and sun-set hard as brick,” Tarley said, taking a blue handkerchief from a pocket of his overalls and dabbing at his broad mocha forehead, where sweat ran out from beneath the brim of his black hat. Conn wasn’t sure what good the rag would do him at this point. It was long since soaked sopping from earlier duty. But the patriarch seemed to derive some kind of comfort from it.
“Found something, Unk,” Zedd called from in between the charred and mostly roofless stone walls. He appeared in the doorway holding an ax. Its head was covered in smoke and crusted crud. Its haft showed charring on what Conn reckoned had been the uppermost surface as it lay on its side and the house burned down toward it. But it looked as if it’d be serviceable enough, once it got cleaned up.
“Wonder why Wymie would leave her grandpappy’s ax,” Nancy said. “She treasured that dang thing.”
“Even though the haft has been replaced a dozen times and the head twice,” Tarley said with a chuckle for the hoary old joke. Although truth told, it likely had more than a scrap of truth, if it wasn’t the literal thing.
Conn shrugged. “Reckon she had to leave in a hurry, whether the marauders fired the place, or she set it alight to trap them.
“Reckon we’ll never know what really happened here. Oh, well. World’s full of stuff I’ll never know. Best get back to Widow Oakey’s place, now, and see what kind of mischief Wymie’s gettin’ up to in this bright new day.”
* * *
THE “CROWD” WIDOW OAKEY had spoken of turned out to consist of about half a dozen, Sinkhole residents and people from the surrounding countryside. They included a couple who had joined her sorrowful procession the night before, like Walter John and Burny Stoops, who had followed Conn’s orders to carry her sister to the coffin-maker’s place.
With a shock she realized she’d still have to go talk to him, to Sam, about arrangements for Blinda, and her ma, for that matter.
Mord Pascoe could lie out to feed the wolves and coyotes, as far as she was concerned. Unless the bastard had burned too far to carbon for even the likes of them to stomach. She wished he could’ve felt the flames that had consumed most of all she had held dear. But a person in her circumstances had to make do…
She swayed.
