LITMIR.BIZ

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back once you take the lid off.”

      “And what if she’s wrong?” Tarley asked. “Then chillin’ the outlanders will leave the real murderers still loose. And murderin’ more, unless I miss my guess.”

      “That’s what I fear,” Conn admitted.

      He raised his voice and called to the rest of the party, “Any sign of tracks anywhere?”

      “Nary a scrap, Mr. Conn,” Edmun replied. “Just the prints Wymie made when she got onto the trail toward town.”

      Edmun was an indistinct blond man somewhere in his thirties, bland as tepid water, but with a reputation for steadiness, which made it a matter of curiosity to Conn why he had first taken up Wymie’s cause—when she’d carried her dreadful burden toward Stenson’s Creek—and then promptly fallen away when Conn raised the voice of reason.

      Conn didn’t hold that highly by his own powers of persuasion. He was a skilled bargainer, with a lifetime of experience in dealing with everyone from desperate dirt farmers to booze- and crank-fueled coldhearts one twitch away from a chilling frenzy. Yet he’d always found Edmun Cowil and his like the hardest to move, once they got set in a groove.

      There was something working here. It tickled the underside of his brain like gaudy-slut fingernails along the underside of his ball sack—though that was a pleasure he had long chosen to deny himself, as it was fundamentally bad business.

      But no time for that now.

      “Yard’s hard-packed and sun-set hard as brick,” Tarley said, taking a blue handkerchief from a pocket of his overalls and dabbing at his broad mocha forehead, where sweat ran out from beneath the brim of his black hat. Conn wasn’t sure what good the rag would do him at this point. It was long since soaked sopping from earlier duty. But the patriarch seemed to derive some kind of comfort from it.

      “Found something, Unk,” Zedd called from in between the charred and mostly roofless stone walls. He appeared in the doorway holding an ax. Its head was covered in smoke and crusted crud. Its haft showed charring on what Conn reckoned had been the uppermost surface as it lay on its side and the house burned down toward it. But it looked as if it’d be serviceable enough, once it got cleaned up.

      “Wonder why Wymie would leave her grandpappy’s ax,” Nancy said. “She treasured that dang thing.”

      “Even though the haft has been replaced a dozen times and the head twice,” Tarley said with a chuckle for the hoary old joke. Although truth told, it likely had more than a scrap of truth, if it wasn’t the literal thing.

      Conn shrugged. “Reckon she had to leave in a hurry, whether the marauders fired the place, or she set it alight to trap them.

      “Reckon we’ll never know what really happened here. Oh, well. World’s full of stuff I’ll never know. Best get back to Widow Oakey’s place, now, and see what kind of mischief Wymie’s gettin’ up to in this bright new day.”

      * * *

      THE “CROWD” WIDOW OAKEY had spoken of turned out to consist of about half a dozen, Sinkhole residents and people from the surrounding countryside. They included a couple who had joined her sorrowful procession the night before, like Walter John and Burny Stoops, who had followed Conn’s orders to carry her sister to the coffin-maker’s place.

      With a shock she realized she’d still have to go talk to him, to Sam, about arrangements for Blinda, and her ma, for that matter.

      Mord Pascoe could lie out to feed the wolves and coyotes, as far as she was concerned. Unless the bastard had burned too far to carbon for even the likes of them to stomach. She wished he could’ve felt the flames that had consumed most of all she had held dear. But a person in her circumstances had to make do…

      She swayed.

      “We come to see how you was, Wymie,” Burny said. “And to see what you wanted to do about your, you know. Quest for vengeance.”

      She felt her eyes fill with hot tears yet again. But this time, they were tears of gratitude.

      She smiled at them.

      “Thank you. Thank you all.”

      It’s not much, she knew. But it was a start.

      She could work with this!

       Chapter Five

      “Wait,” a voice called from the scrub oak. “Don’t shoot. I’m not one of them.”

      Mildred saw Ryan look at Krysty, who shrugged.

      The midafternoon mugginess hung heavy in the air of the little glade on the slope a few dozen yards above a gurgling brook. Red oak and hickory branches overhung the clearing, masking most of the direct sunlight. Mildred didn’t want to imagine what the afternoon would feel like without that shade.

      “Define ‘them,’” Ryan called back.

      “The coamers,” the unseen man said. “The albino grave robbers. The ones you’re looking for.”

      “Grave robbers, as young Ricky suggested,” Doc stated. “That adds a new dimension to our present difficulty.”

      “Dark night,” J.B. muttered. “It surely does.”

      The companions had been traveling single file along a game trail a couple miles southwest of their dig site, with Ryan in the lead and J.B. protecting their rear. They had just begun to fan out on entering the clearing when Jak’s warning birdcall brought them up short. They had immediately crouched or knelt, covering the brush-screen on the far side with their blasters.

      “Mebbe,” Ryan said. “How do you know so much about them?”

      “And how do you know what we’re looking for?” Mildred asked.

      “I’ve roamed these woods nigh onto thirty years. I seen many a thing come and go, some stranger than most. And I seen the ones the locals call ‘coamers.’ They come and go, too. Currently they seem to be coming.”

      J.B. grunted in interest.

      “Come out where we can get a better look at you,” Ryan commanded.

      “Don’t go shootin’ me, now.”

      “If we were going to, we would’ve by now,” J.B. said. “That brush won’t stop many bullets.”

      The branches rustled.

      What appeared from the vegetation was anything but threatening, at first glance: a man of smallish to middle size, middle-aged to old, walking tentatively on rather bowed legs left bare by ragged and dirty cargo shorts with bulging pockets. A coonskin cap covered the top of his head. Around his shoulders he wore a cape made of shaggy bark that gave the locally abundant shagbark oak its name. Beneath that was a linen shirt. His round face was fringed by a shock of black hair and a beard with brushstrokes of gray in it. His eyes suggested strong Asian ancestry, but his accent, unsurprisingly, was pure western Kentucky.

      He had his hands, clothed in shabby fingerless gloves, raised over his head to signal benign intentions, which was good, because he was clearly far from helpless: the butt of a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century replica longblaster stuck up over his right shoulder, supported by a beadwork sling, and he wore both a Bowie knife with worn staghorn grips and a single-action, cap-and-ball revolver on either hip in cross-draw holsters, likewise beaded in colorful geometric patterns.

      “Osage Nation work,” Krysty said, nodding at the beaded accessories. “Nice.”

      “That’s right, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a local boy, but I been everywhere. Abe Tomoyama is my name. Abe to my friends, so you can call me that, long as you don’t chill me.”

      Ryan raised a hand. “Stand down, everybody,” he said. “Keep eyes skinned

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