The Steep and Thorny Way
Cat Winters
CHAPTER 1
MURDER MOST FOUL
JULY 1, 1923
I DREW A DEEP BREATH AND MARCHED into the woods behind my house with a two-barreled pistol hidden beneath my blue cotton skirt. The pocket-size derringer rode against my outer right thigh, tucked inside a holster that had, according to the boy who’d given it to me, once belonged to a lady bootlegger who’d been arrested with three different guns strapped to her legs. Twigs snapped beneath my shoes. My eyes watered and burned. The air tasted of damp earth and metal.
Several yards ahead, amid a cluster of maples blanketed in scaly green lichen, stood a fir tree blackened by lightning. If I turned right on the deer trail next to that tree and followed a line of ferns, I’d find myself amid rows of shriveled grapevines in the shut-down vineyard belonging to my closest friend, Fleur, her older brother, Laurence, and their war-widowed mama.
But I didn’t turn.
I kept trekking toward the little white shed that hid the murderer Joe Adder.
Fleur’s whispers from church that morning ran through my head, nearly tipping me off balance during my clamber across moss-slick rocks in the creek. “Reverend Adder doesn’t even want his boy around anymore,” she had told me before the sermon, her face bent close to mine, fine blond hair brushing across her cheeks. “He won’t let Joe back in the house with the rest of the kids. Laurence is hiding him in our old shed. And Joe wants to talk to you. He’s got something to say about the night his car hit your father.”
I broke away from the creek and hiked up a short embankment covered in sedges and rushes that tickled my bare shins. At the top of the bank, about twenty-five feet away, sat a little white structure built of plaster and wood. Before he left for the Great War, Fleur’s father used to store his fishing gear and liquor in the place, and he sometimes invited my father over for a glass of whiskey, even after Oregon went bone-dry in 1916. Bigleaf maples hugged the rain-beaten shingles with arms covered in leaves as bright green as under-ripe apples. A stovepipe poked out from the roof, and I smelled the sharp scent of leftover ashes—the ghost of a fire Joe must have lit the night before, when the temperature dropped into the fifties.
I came to a stop in front of the shed, my pulse pounding in the side of my throat. My scalp sweltered beneath my knitted blue hat, along with the long brown curls I’d stuffed and pinned inside. I leaned over and drew the hem of my skirt above my right knee, exposing the worn leather of the holster. I took another deep breath and wiggled the little derringer out of its hiding place.
With my legs spread apart, I stood up straight and pointed the pistol at the shed’s closed door. “Are you in there, Joe?”
A hawk screeched from high above the trees, and some sort of animal splashed in the pond that lay beyond the shed and the foliage. But I didn’t hear one single peep out of Joe Adder.
“Joe?” I asked again, this time in as loud and deep a voice as I could muster. Tree-trunk strong, I sounded. Sticky sweat rolled down my cheeks, and my legs refused to stop rocking back and forth. “Are you in there?”
“Who’s there?”
I gripped the pistol with both my hands. The voice I heard was a husky growl that couldn’t have belonged to clean-cut, preacher’s-boy Joe, from what I remembered of him. It and a splashing sound seemed to come from the pond, not the shed.
“Who’s there?” he asked again. I heard another splash.
I lowered the pistol to my side and crept around to the back of the shed, feeling my tongue dry up from panting. I pushed past a tangle of blackberry bushes, pricking a thumb on a thorn, and came to a stop on the edge of the bank. My feet teetered on the gnarled white root of a birch.
In the pond, submerged up to his navel in the murky green water, stood a tanned and naked Joe Adder, arms akimbo, a lock of dark brown hair hanging over his right eye. His shoulders were broad and sturdy, his biceps surprisingly muscular, as though prison had worked that scrawny little white boy hard.
My mouth fell open, and my stomach gave an odd jump. The last time I’d seen Joe, back in February 1921, seventeen months earlier, he’d been a slick-haired, sixteen-year-old kid in a fancy black suit, blubbering on a courthouse bench between his mama and daddy.
This new version of my father’s killer—now just a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, almost brawny, his hair tousled and wild—peered at me without blinking. Drops of water plunked to the pond’s surface from his elbows.