My hand sweated against the gun. “I don’t feel a shred of pity for you.”
“Just one week before the accident, someone—my father wouldn’t say who—came by the church and tried to recruit him into the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which I’m certain had something—”
“No!” I marched right into the pond’s shallow edge with the pistol still aimed at Joe’s head, and I pulled the hammer into the full-cock position. “I know full well there’s a Klan church up the highway in Bentley. I know they host baseball games and print anti-Catholic pamphlets, but they never once gave a damn that my black Christian father lived in this measly spit stain of a town.”
“I’m not the one you should be shooting, Hanalee.” Joe backed away in the water. “I’m not the one who deserves to die.”
“I’ve never even heard about a single Klan-provoked killing in this state, Joe. You can try to scare me all you want, but I know you’re just switching your guilt onto other people because you—”
“No, I’m not. Look in your stepfather’s bedroom.” He stopped backing up. “I bet you’ll find a robe and a hood stashed among his clothing somewhere. I bet he married your white mother just to piss on the memory of your father. And I bet the Klan promoted him to a powerful position for killing the last full-blooded Negro in Elston, Ore—”
I squeezed the trigger with an explosion of gunpowder and fired a bullet straight past Joe’s ear—not close enough to hit him, but enough to make his face go as white as those hooded robes he talked about. I staggered backward from the kick, and my ears rang with a horrendous screeching that sounded like a crowd of keening mourners wailing inside my head.
Beyond the cloud of dissipating smoke, Joe thrashed his arms about in the water and struggled to stay upright, but I didn’t wait to see if he’d recover from the shock. Instead, I tucked that gun back into my holster and hightailed it out of the woods.
CHAPTER 2
LESS THAN KIND
“HANALEE?” CALLED MAMA FROM our backyard, beyond the Douglas firs that shot up to the clear July sky on the edge of our property.
I stopped in my tracks. My black-and-white Keds sloshed and squeaked with pond water.
“Hanalee?”
I shoved the derringer—still tucked inside the holster, still holding one remaining bullet—into the depths of a hollow log ten feet from the opening in the woods. I wrapped the leather in an oilcloth that I kept hidden in that spot specifically for times when I couldn’t sneak the pistol back into the house, and I scattered leaves over the lump. Dirt clogged my fingernails; mold from the leaves tickled my nose. I sneezed so hard, my ribs hurt.
“Hanalee?” called Mama again, her voice high and panicky.
“I’m coming,” I called back, and I kicked off my wet shoes and moseyed out of the woods with my best attempt at a casual strut. Mama hated guns. She didn’t know that my former friend Laurence—once my staunchest protector—had given me a pistol when I was just fourteen.
My mother relaxed her shoulders when she saw me coming her way, but her face looked paler than usual.
“I heard a gunshot,” she said.
I shrugged. “It was probably just Laurence, shooting squirrels again.”
“Where were you? I thought you said you were going to pick raspberries for our Sunday dinner.”
“I remembered something I forgot to tell Fleur at church this morning.” I picked up the wicker basket I was supposed to be using for berrying. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”
She put her hands on her hips and scowled at the woods. Loose strands of honey-blond hair fluttered around her eyes, which she narrowed into slits. “I don’t want you going over there if Laurence is shooting his father’s guns again,” she said. “I don’t know why his mother allows him to do that.”
“It’s his way of grieving for his father.”
“That war killed Mr. Paulissen five years ago.”
“Sometimes it takes a while to recover from a father’s death, Mama.”
She swallowed and averted her gaze, her lips squeezed together. People told me that she and I had the same mouth, especially when we looked as vexed as she did at that moment. “A white girl’s lips,” the older ladies in church would say when sizing me up like a county-fair squash, debating the degree of my whiteness. I’d also inherited my mother’s hazel eyes and long, slender neck, but my nose, my brown curls, and the shape of my eyes “derived from that Negro father,” the ladies often added in their bored-old-biddy evaluations. My skin—a medium shade of golden brown—was a few shades lighter than my father’s had been, but it caused all my troubles.
“Did you hear that the prison let Joe Adder out early?” I asked Mama.
“Yes.” She fussed with a lock of hair that had fallen out of its pin and coiled down the nape of her neck. “I overheard all the whispered rumors at church.”