"Yes, ma'am," he said, and the smoke came down off the hills and covered the valley like a held breath.
Chapter 3
She woke before light out of habit older than grief, and for a moment lay listening to the cabin's familiar inventory of silence โ and heard, under it, a sound that did not belong: an axe, working. Steady, unhurried, splitting with the grain instead of against it, the way her father had taught her when she was nine and furious at a knotty round of pine.
June dressed in the dark, took up the rifle, and eased the door open a hand's width.
Dane Mercer stood at the woodpile in the grey first light with his sleeves rolled, splitting her winter wood at a craftsman's pace, stacking as he went in the crisscross her father had favored because it shed the rain. The stack was already higher than she had managed in a week of mornings. On the porch rail sat her coffee pot, full, and a cup he had clearly set out for her โ and then thought better of touching anything more, because the pot was full and the cup was empty and both were exactly where a man puts things when he understands he is not invited to pour.
"You were to be gone at good light," she said.
He set the axe down before he turned โ carefully, blade to the block, nothing sudden. "Horse is still favoring. And your flueโ" He jerked his chin at the chimney. "I was up on the roof at first light. Cleared a starling's nest out of it the size of a hat. You'll draw better now."
"You climbed my roof while I slept."
"I cleared your flue while you slept. There's a difference, though I grant it's mostly in the intentions." He wiped his hands on his trousers. "I'll go, if you're set on it. Only the bay's not fit to carry me far, and I'd be walking him through ash country with that fire turning. Two days. Three. I'll earn it double."
It was then, watching him, that the wrongness she had felt the night before sharpened into something specific. It was not menace. It was familiarity. He had found the woodpile without asking where it was. He had known the well sweep's trick โ the iron pin that had to be lifted before the handle would travel โ though the pin was invisible from the yard. He had set the coffee pot on the porch rail, the third board from the door, which was where her father had always set it, because the fourth board was loose and rattled.
No stranger knew the fourth board rattled.
"Mr. Mercer," she said, "where did you trade last winter?"
"Up the Milk River. Down through the Cypress Hills with a partner who drinks more than he traps." The answers came smooth as stones from a pocket, each one ready. Too ready. "Year before, the Judith Basin. Year before that, trapping the border sloughs with my uncle, who taught me the well sweep's pinโ" He stopped, half a breath too late, and she saw him hear it.
"Your uncle taught you the pin on my well," June said. "That's a neat trick, seeing as my father built that well before I was born and never had a partner in his life."
The silence went long and thin between them. Somewhere down at the river a heron cried once, rusty as a hinge.
"You're quicker than he said you'd be," Dane Mercer said at last, very quietly โ and then, at her face, he swore under his breath with the particular despair of a man who has stepped through ice he himself had tested. "That came out wrong."
"He," June said. The rifle had come up without her deciding it; it rested across her body, not aimed, not lowered, a punctuation. "Who is he, Mr. Mercer? Who told you about the well, and the roof, and the fourth board on my porch?"
"A dead man," he said. "And I swore to him I'd be careful, and I'm doing poorly at it, and that's the whole of what I can say this morning." He looked at the stacked wood, the cleared flue, the empty cup on the rail, like a man taking inventory of his own failure. "You want me gone, I'll go now, lame horse and all. You want answersโ" He shook his head slowly. "Answers are the one currency I can't spend here. Not yet. It isn't stubbornness, miss. It's the only promise I ever kept."
June Callahan stood in her doorway with her father's rifle and looked at the stranger who had set out a cup he did not pour, in the place her father used to set it, and she did the arithmetic her whole life had taught her. A man who meant harm did not clear flues and stack wood and warn you he was lying by omission. A man who meant harm was still a man she did not know.