“Get out before you damn near freeze,” I tell her.
She turns and finds me standing there, blanket tucked under my arm. Her fingers are raw from the scrubbing, knuckles blue with cold. It’s like me talking ’bout the temperature makes her finally feel it, ’cus she scrambles from the tank. She flops to a seat in the mud and I drop the blanket over her shoulders.
“You had to,” I say.
She grunts but keeps staring at the water. “Is that how you deal with it? You tell yourself you had no choice and that soothes your conscience?”
I find a rock in the mud and sit beside her. “The first time’s the hardest,” I admit. “You’ll have nightmares, prol-ly. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after mine.”
“How’d it happen?”
“You don’t care.”
“I do, or I wouldn’t have asked.”
I knead my hands together, not sure I want to reopen those wounds. They’re hard enough to think on, but it ain’t like I’ve ever been able to talk ’bout them neither. Riding with the gang made sure of that. But maybe that’s how healing works. Maybe sometimes you gotta bleed out the poison in order to recover strong.
“’Bout a week after I started riding with the boys,” I begin, “we were identified while passing through a town. A deputy rounded up a small posse to come after us, but they never stood a chance. Boss waited till that posse entered a dry arroyo, and then he had us open fire from our perch farther up the gully. When he noticed I weren’t shooting, he told the other boys to stop. There were only one posseman still standing by then. I reckon he were ’bout the age I am now.”
I press my thumb into the palm of my shooting hand, staring at the thin scar there.
“And?” Vaughn prompts.
“The fella knew he was beat. He threw his gun up to us and told us to ride off. Boss picked up the man’s weapon and told me to execute him. ‘I ain’t shooting an unarmed man,’ I said. Boss kicked me in the back, and I went tumbling into the gully, splitting my palm open on rocks as I tried to slow my fall. When I came to a stop, I were ’bout a few dozen paces from the posseman.
“Boss checked the fella’s pistol and snapped the chamber shut. ‘He’s armed now,’ he said, and threw the pistol back down to the posseman. It landed near his feet. That fella looked at me and the gun and me again. He knew Boss weren’t gonna let him walk home. I reckon he figured it better to die fighting than to just roll over and take it. So he dove for the gun and I made my decision as his barrel leveled with my chest. I shot him.”
“You had to,” she says, same as I told her.
I turn toward her. “You know what happened next, Vaughn? Boss came sauntering down into the gully. He plucked the pistol from the dead guy and showed me that the chamber were empty all along. He’d emptied it before tossing it over. Boss clapped me on the shoulder, smiled, and said, ‘Guess you shoot unarmed men after all, Murphy. Yer one of us now.’?”
“You didn’t know. You didn’t have a choice,” she says.
“Ain’t there always a choice?”
“But Rose tricked you. If the gun had been loaded and you didn’t shoot, where would you be?”
“Dead,” I say. “But like you, I did what I had to in the moment, and it’s haunted me ever since. That’s our punishment. We gotta live with the things we done.”
She looks right at me, and it ain’t like the glares I’ve been given so far. This look ain’t hateful or vengeful or full of spite. It ain’t judgmental neither. No, this is warm, something akin to understanding.
“Reece . . .” she says slowly.
I shoot to my feet.
She keeps looking at me, and I think there’s gonna be more, but that’s it. Just my name. Not the Rose Kid, but Reece. It leaves me feeling like I been knocked from the saddle.
“You should change out of them wet clothes,” I say. “Before you get ill.” I head for the house, not once looking back.
Chapter Thirty-Two
* * *
Charlotte
Dinner is a stew of potatoes and rabbit (pulled from one of the snares), plus freshly baked bread. It is warm and surely flavorful, but I barely notice.
I can’t stop picturing Parker’s face as I struck him with the candlestick—his eyes wide with shock, his mouth caught in a perfect O.
You had to, Reece said.
I refuse to believe it. I understand what he meant, can follow every point he made, yet it still doesn’t seem fair. Parker was my enemy for that one moment at the hotel, but that does not mean he was a bad person. In fact, the clippings on his wall suggested he was a very good person—an old man nearing retirement who had delivered many an outlaw to the Law. Uncle Gerald can be quite persuasive, and as far as Parker was aware, he was doing us both a favor. I was just a confused, ill-minded young woman, terrorized by the Rose Kid, whose doting uncle longed to see her safely home. Parker was only trying to do what he deemed right. And I killed him for it.
“You understand, right, Charlotte?”
“What?” I glance up from the stew.
“It ain’t safe for you to leave again,” Kate says. “Not after what happened at Banghart’s. Word of that man’s death’s only gonna bring more bounty hunters to the area, and you’d do best to lie low a little while.”
I touch my brow, feeling dizzy. She’s right—I know she is. I can’t very well help Mother if I end up thrown in jail or charged with murder, but Mother doesn’t have days to waste. I could doom her by sitting still.
“At least one good thing’s come of all this,” Reece says. “The Rose Riders’ll make their way to Banghart’s.”
“I already said that ain’t nothing but trouble,” Jesse argues. “They’ll be looking for this clearing, searching us out.”
“That’s why I’m gonna go to them.”
“They’ll kill you,” Kate says. “And if they don’t give you the bullet, they’ll give it to that ma of yers.”
“Not if I give ’em what they want.”
The room seems to ripple with tension, everyone at the table suddenly very still.
“I will shoot you myself before I let you give us up to Rose,” Jesse snarls.
“Yer misunderstanding,” Reece says. “See, I been thinking . . . Say I go for a ride ’long the rail, and when they show up, I tell ’em I’ve been looking for ’em. That I got an in with the man Boss wants dead—the gunslinger done killed his brother. They’ll wanna come straight here, but I’ll say yer holed up strong. Too many guns. A path that bottlenecks. I’ll suggest they get on a southbound train from Seligman instead and I’ll be sure to get the man onboard. They’ll think I’m turning you over, Jesse, when really, you and me’ll be waiting to pick ’em off one by one.”