“Why bother waiting for the train?” Jesse argues. “I’ll follow when you try to meet ’em. Stay hidden in the trees and take ’em out while yer proposing the train setup.”
Reece shakes his head. “You’ll barely get one shot off before Boss realizes I’ve conned him and shoots me dead. And that’s even assuming there’s tree cover where we end up meeting. Or that the whole gang’s together. Last thing I want is to be making the deal with Boss and one the other Riders finds you camping out in the shrub. Once they see I ain’t loyal, it’ll be over. The train job’s the way, and I can pull it off if you let me set it up alone.”
“There’s just one problem with that,” Kate says. “Remember yer buddy that got away back in Prescott, the one you and me shot at from the porch? He already knows you ain’t loyal.”
A smile spreads over Reece’s lips. “Nah. He thinks I ain’t loyal. He didn’t see me kill no one, and his back were turned and fleeing by the time I joined you firing from the porch. It all happened so fast. All I gotta do is plant a seed of doubt, make Diaz reconsider what he saw, and Boss’ll believe me.”
It all seems too easy, but the Coltons are seriously considering it. As I swallow another spoonful of stew, they exchange meaningful glances, unspoken words passing between them.
Reece glances around at us, resolute. “Look, Luther Rose don’t want to think I defected. He wants to believe I’m loyal. If’n I give him the right story, he’ll accept it and fall right into our plan. His bloodlust is blinding him, his need for revenge making him sloppy.”
“That I can believe,” Kate says.
“But what if he doesn’t buy it?” I argue. “What if Rose doesn’t wait to hear your story and shoots you before you even get a word out? Folks entering the lions’ den rarely emerge unscathed.”
His smile flattens into a thin grimace. “I thought ’bout that too, Vaughn, but it’s a risk worth taking. Even when I consider all the ways it can go wrong, it still feels like the right course.” He glances my way, his eyes hollow. “I gotta do this. For myself, for the Coltons”—he glances at them—“for all the Territory. This is how I make up for the bad I done. This is how I set things right.”
The Coltons nod in agreement and start discussing how Reece should wait a day before wandering the plains. The Rose Riders will surely hear about my incident with Parker, but it may take a little time for word to travel and for the gang to make it this far north.
And all the while I remain silent, thinking how grossly I have misunderstood the boy sitting beside me. He is not an innocent man, true. His hands are not free of blood, but neither are mine as of today. The lifelessness in his eyes no longer scares me. It is not an indicator of him lacking a soul, but rather the very real proof that he has one—one that’s seen and done evil and struggles to make amends with that every single day.
Outside, I’d called him by his name for reasons I was not entirely sure of. I think maybe I just wanted to hear myself say it. But now I know the truth. He’s not really the Rose Kid. Perhaps he never was. He’s just a kid, just Reece Murphy. It’s that simple, and that complex.
I have terrible dreams, as he predicted. Mostly of Parker not dying, but crawling his way across the office floor after me, blood dripping into his eyes, a hand clawing at my skirt.
The third time I wake, I am sweating, a gasp still on my lips. Reece does not stir from his spot on the floor.
I abandon the bed and wander into the kitchen, where I find Kate awake too, reading a book by the soft glow of the fire. She must have roused it, as it is not coals, but a nest of flickering tongues.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks, but I can tell she knows precisely why. I imagine she is no stranger to the kind of nightmares that follow dark deeds.
I nod.
“Me either.” She bobs her chin at her belly. “Figure I might as well enjoy myself if the little pest won’t let me sleep.”
“What are you reading?”
“A favorite.” She holds it up, and I catch the foiled title—Little Women—glittering in the firelight. “I think I done read it a hundred times now. You wanna turn?” She holds it out.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t.”
“There’s others,” she says, signaling at the shelf behind me. I turn and find many of the books previously shelved in her Prescott home. “Jesse brought ’em,” she explains.
I run a finger over the spines, considering my options.
“Yer daddy helped build the train, didn’t he?” Kate asks.
“He funded a lot of it, yes.”
“Try Around the World in Eighty Days. It’s got trains and then some.”
I lift it from the shelf and sit with her, reading. The protagonist, Mr. Phileas Fogg, strikes me as eccentric to the point of insufferableness, but his adventures are compelling enough and his passion admirable, and I find myself turning the pages in a bit of a trance. It is Kate who pulls me from my daze.
“Charlotte! Oh, Charlotte, feel this.” She grabs my hand and presses it to her belly. The life inside her rolls beneath my palm, then jabs at me with what can only be a limb. Kate smiles wide, the firelight gleaming off her teeth.
I pull my hand back. “What happens if Reece can’t make contact with the Rose Riders, Kate? Do you intend to hide here forever? Don’t you want your normal life back?”
“There’s no normal,” she says. “Not for me. It ain’t been normal since my pa died, and even when he were ’round, I ain’t sure it was normal then, neither. We were always hiding.”
“From who—the gang?”
She presses her lips together, sighs through her nose. “We’re all running from something,” she says finally. “Even you. Yer running, ain’t you?”
“I suppose.”
“Right. So you can either be scared yer whole life or you can try to enjoy it. I suggest the latter. Otherwise yer gonna blink and find yerself old and weary, taking yer last breath and regretting that you passed yer years tense and worrisome.” She sets her book on the table. “What is it you really wanna do, Charlotte? Start now. Don’t wait for this”—she motions at the room—“to pass, ’cus there ain’t a guarantee it will.”
She retires to the bedroom before I can tell her that what I really need is a hired gun to threaten Uncle Gerald. But after today, I know I need to lie low. I can’t help Mother—can’t save us both—if I get myself caught, so I take Kate’s advice in the sense that I turn to my ambitions for a distraction. I retrieve my journal from the bedroom and write by the light of the fire. I write as though I am already the journalist I dream of being, and I make note of everything worth reporting. Reece’s hollow eyes and crippling guilt. Kate’s bulging belly and Jesse’s history with Waylan Rose. Uncle Gerald’s greed and extortion and illegal bookkeeping. I record it all, right down to what I can recall of the weather (frost-dusted mornings and crisp, arid days) and the landscape (ponderosa pines in the mountains and a valley lined with rails).
When my lids begin to droop, I pad to bed, my brain too busy sifting through narrative details to dwell on the thing that kept me from sleeping in the first place.
Chapter Thirty-Three
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