Chapter 4 - The Men Who Came Before the Snow Stopped
The knock came again.
Three slow strikes.
Elias stared at the door as though the sound had awakened a buried memory.
“You heard that?” I whispered.
His eyes moved to my lips.
Then toward the door.
He nodded.
Not confidently.
But he had heard something.
The creature—or whatever it was—continued twisting between the tweezers. I dropped it into a glass jar and covered the opening with a saucer.
Elias grabbed the notebook.
Hide it.
“Who is outside?”
He wrote only one word.
Doctor.
The pounding returned.
A man called through the door.
“Barragan! Open up!”
Elias’s face went pale.
I carried the jar to a cupboard behind hanging herbs and pushed it beneath sacks of flour.
Then I opened the door only a few inches.
Two men stood in the snow.
One was Dr. Silas Wren, Saint Jude’s aging physician.
The other was bank manager Horace Bell.
The same man who arranged my marriage.
Dr. Wren carried a leather medical case.
Bell wore a heavy black coat and the expression of someone who expected every door to open for him.
“We heard Elias suffered another episode,” Wren said.
I kept my body in the doorway.
“From whom?”
Neither answered.
Bell glanced past me.
“Your husband requires treatment.”
“He has lived alone for years. Why are you concerned tonight?”
Wren’s eyes shifted toward the table.
The oil lamp.
The bloodied cloth.
The sewing tweezers.
His face changed.
“What did you do?”
Elias stepped behind me.
For the first time, he stood close enough that I felt the heat of him through my dress.
“I helped him.”
Wren pushed against the door.
“You may have killed him.”
“He is standing.”
“You don’t understand his condition.”
“No,” I said. “But I understand something was placed inside his ear.”
The doctor stopped pushing.
Bell’s expression became perfectly still.
That reaction answered more than a confession would have.
Elias saw it too.
His breathing grew heavy.
Wren lowered his voice.
“Clara, step outside. Your husband is dangerous during these spells.”
Elias’s hand moved toward my shoulder, then stopped before touching me.
He expected me to believe them.
The doctor.
The banker.
The respectable men of Saint Jude.
I looked at the man who slept on the floor so I could have a locked bedroom.
Then I looked at the two men who had purchased my marriage for fifty dollars.
“No.”
Bell’s polite mask cracked.
“Your father’s debt was forgiven under certain conditions.”
“What conditions?”
His eyes moved toward Elias’s ear.
I understood.
The marriage had not been arranged merely because Elias wanted a wife.
They needed someone inside the ranch.
Someone poor enough to control.
May you like
Someone they believed no one would listen to if she discovered the truth.
Me.
