“What are you doing?” she asked.
Nigel, mouth opened like a panting dog, tucked the bottle between his legs and reached for a towel to wipe the grime off his face.“Trying to build this machine with the parts I already have. What does it look like I’m doing?” he said in a tone with jagged edges.
“It looks like you’re giving up. We should be getting together with the sheriff to come up with a new plan.”
His humorless laughter rang out in the copper maze as if he were sitting in a bell. “That’s funny, because it’s your plan that got us into this mess in the first place.”
Westie tried to tell herself it was the booze talking and not sweet, patient Nigel.
He continued, “No, we don’t need a plan. We need a miracle.” He looked down at the machine, rubbed a finger down its spine. It was tall, nearly reaching the ceiling, with gears the size of her head, chain belts, bearings, coils, and so on. It looked like nothing, really, just a confusing ball of metal parts.
“Plan,” Nigel said again, and repeated it over and over as if it had lost its meaning. He shook his head and belched—something he’d typically be embarrassed about but made no apologies for now. “No,” he said, “no more plans for you. You’ve done quite enough. Whatever plans are made going forth regarding the Fairfields and this machine will no longer involve you.”
He looked at her with the hollow, glassy stare of the inebriated. She wanted to think it was the drink looking at her and that Nigel didn’t detest her as much as his gaze would suggest, but she wasn’t so sure.
Alistair spoke up. “You can’t put all of this on Westie. I agreed to go with her to the inn and steal the gold.”
Nigel looked down at Alistair and took a long pull from the bottle he kept at the ready. “Yes, you did, just as you always have.” Hiccup. Burp. “Even as children she would scheme and you would follow blindly. And every time, without fail, she’d lead you right into a wall.”
Westie’s head jerked and her nostrils flared. Not once had she ever heard Nigel talk about her that way. She’d never seen him drunk either. With so many pieces out of place, it felt like her world was falling apart.
She looked at Alistair. He stared at the ground. He didn’t confirm or deny what Nigel had to say.
“Now,” Nigel said, sweeping a hand at her, “go on with your destructive ways. You’ve successfully made a mess of things . . . unless you’d like to take your machine to my invention while you’re at it.”
Westie’s anger boiled over. “At least I did something! Maybe if you’d believed me in the first place, Isabelle would still be alive.”
She backed out of the room, not waiting for a response, and closed the door behind her. She stared at the doorknob, wondering if she’d just imagined the whole thing and was about to walk in for the first time.
She took a breath, but as she let it out, a furious sob escaped instead. She brought her copper fist down on a side table holding a Japanese vase and watched the vase shatter to small pieces, then ran from the house.
Henry ran faster than ever before, as if he sensed Westie’s need for escape. She touched his long neck. You’ve always been the most faithful male in my life, she thought with bitter self-pity. When she reached the general store, it was locked up because of church services.
Punching through the door with her machine, she took an expensive bottle of aged Brave Maker brand whiskey, her favorite, from the top shelf. She didn’t crave the drink like she had before drinking Costin’s blood, but she missed how it made her feel. She just wanted to feel different than she did in that moment.
She rode Henry to the forest, not letting up until she reached the stretch of woods where Isabelle’s body had been found. If she couldn’t have her justice, Westie reckoned she could have a drink with an old friend’s ghost.
The blood on the rocks and trees was still there. Westie sat on a rock and opened the bottle. As soon as she smelled the thick, heady scent of the liquor within, she plugged the bottle with the cork and bent over.
An excessive amount of saliva filled her mouth as sickness twisted her stomach. The nauseous feeling kept her in a sick purgatory between keeping it in and giving it up. She wanted so badly to feel nothing once more, but it wasn’t going to happen. Her body might have been cured of its longing for alcohol, but her mind definitely wasn’t.
Westie had been sitting with her head between her knees, waiting for the feeling to subside, when she heard a strange yipping sound. She stood, the ill feeling temporarily forgotten as she went to investigate. A fire had swept through that particular part of the woods the summer before, after a lightning storm. It had left the trees bare except for a few stragglers.