Help me, she writes.
Reed has not washed up or changed out of his ranging gear. His hat is in his lap and his face looks like the cracked remains of a mud puddle. When he leans forward, laying his hands flat on the table, his leather vest creaks. Normally his posture is straight, but this afternoon his body appears bowed, the shape of a question mark. At moments like this Clark can’t help but consider him weak. He should be taking orders; she should be in charge. His voice is hushed when he says, “How can we help you? Why are you here?”
Sent.
“By whom?”
Burr.
Reed says, “Who is Burr?” at the same moment Clark says, “Why were you sent here?”
The girl’s attention flits between them, then settles on Clark. Brot letter. Letter tels yu.
“Letter?” Reed says over the top of Clark saying, “What letter? We searched your horse—there was no letter.”
Letter for—
At that moment the door crashes open and the sheriff, Rickett Slade, fills the doorway, and then the room, the space seeming smaller. He moves swiftly for such a big man. He does not pause to acknowledge any of them but stalks directly to the girl and pouches a hand behind her head and slams her face into the table and knocks her unconscious.
Slade breathes fiercely through his nose. Clark can never tell where his eyes are looking, pocketed as they are into his face, but he seems to regard them both at once. “I will take it from here,” he says. “You are excused.”
“On whose authority?” Clark says.
Slade says, “Your girl has a mouth on her, doesn’t she?”
Before Reed can respond, Clark says, “I said, on whose authority?”
“As always, I speak for the mayor.”
*
Heavy brown curtains choke away all but a cool white line of moonlight running down their middle. There are no paintings on the walls, no decorations on the bureau except for a single short candle sputtering on an iron tray, illuminating this room in the upper stories of the museum. There are, in abundance, books. Some yawning open. Some closed with a ribbon or feather marking his place. Stacked along the walls, piled and tiered across the floor, like their own kind of furniture.
Lewis stands between the room’s two narrow beds, his own empty, the other occupied by a woman. Her body is so slight it barely dents the blanket that covers her, tucked all the way to her chin. Her downy white hair twists across her pillow like the silk from a split milkweed pod, and Lewis runs a comb through it now. His movements are delicate, with first the comb, then his fingers, as he untangles the snarls, neatens her hair into a white halo that surrounds her ruined face.
His mother suffered a stroke three years ago, and since then, he has cared for her as she once cared for him. He was so often sick as a child—wracked by fevers that sweated into his mattress the imprint of his body—and many of his memories are of her hovering over him in the dark, laying a cool washcloth on his forehead, humming lullabies.
Now the left side of her face appears melted. She sometimes yammers at him, as if reciting some foreign alphabet, but mostly she remains still and silent, propped up in a chair, curled up in bed, sleeping with one eye closed, the other half-shuttered.
He sets down the comb on the night table between their beds and picks up the vial from Oman and uses a dropper to squirt some of the tincture into her mouth. It is meant to increase brain activity, speed recovery. Whether it works, he does not know and does not particularly care, as long as he is doing something for her. She smacks her mouth at its bitterness and regards him with her one good eye. He gives her a pained smile.
The owl, too, sits on the bedside table like a little brass clock. When Lewis sets down the dropper, he notices beside it a letter. It is sealed with a red circle of wax that bears the imprint of what looks like an eye.
“What’s this?” he says and tears open the letter. He holds it before a candle whose flame trembles like his hand as he reads.
The entry to the museum is a fanned set of stone stairs. Lewis rushes down them with the letter in his hand and then secreted up his sleeve. He pauses for a moment on the sidewalk, listening to the small sounds of the city at night, the groaning of the wind turbines, before hurrying in the direction of the prison—where he knows the rider is being held—and where he does not plan to sign in with the guards or request permission to speak with their prisoner. In his gray duster he appears yet another shadow sliding along the street, and he has ways of making himself unseen, of distracting and then sliding past whoever might block his way.
He does not know what hour it is—he has trouble keeping track of time—but guesses it late, the streets empty. There are no lamps lit. The buildings are stark and silver-gray. Beyond them the black mass of the wall rises into the less-black sky, and above it hangs a half-moon, the shadowed side of it visible, but barely.
He has so many questions. He tries to keep them straight in his head, but they crawl all over each other and merge into a swarming mess like so many fire ants. It is because of his distracted state of mind that he does not notice the two men charging out of an alleyway until they are upon him.
The last thing he sees, before they drag a bag over his head and carry him bodily away, are the black sacks that shroud their faces.