Molly touched the smoak grounds smeared around her palm. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“You don’t believe it, though.”
She stared at him and sighed. “No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“People didn’t take advantage of Nicholas.”
“Everyone’s vulnerable.”
“You didn’t know my brother.”
“But he’s dead,” Tom said, very bluntly, to disarm her.
Molly looked down, wiping her hand on the table with no apparent notice of the mess she was making. He took her hand in both of his own and didn’t let go when she instinctively recoiled. He smelled the warm smoak. She would taste like it, too—cinnamony and rich—and he had urges that were smudging up his line of proper thinking.
“How did your brother die?” he asked. Her hand spiked a fever. Tom felt it up his arm, through his shoulder, to his chest. “Did the Maimer upstairs kill him?”
“No,” she said.
“Was he after you on purpose in the woods?”
“Not at first.”
“That’s hard to swallow,” Tom said, believing her regardless. “Was he the one who threw you into the river?”
“No,” Molly said.
Then who? he almost shouted, having come to it again—the ending of the riddle she had started to reveal. He’d known enough bile and desperation to understand violence. He had shot men dead in and out of war, and yearned for vile things in and out of dreams, but what kind of man, crooked providence, or fate could have cast Molly off like rubbish in the flood?
He dropped her hand and filled the emptiness by picking up his cup, and after finishing the drink he clapped the grounds on the tabletop. Elkinaki read the present, not the future, in the dregs. “Everything is present,” he’d been told when he was young, talking with a squaw named Running at the Mouth. He used to disagree, when all his life lay ahead, but found it comforting tonight to read the symbols and the signs. He saw a woman’s open gown, or a house made of mud, and felt his nerves prickle up toward the Maimer in the holding room.
“Come on,” he said, standing up to unhook the lantern. “Let’s see if he’ll talk to us together.”
Tom walked around the table and held her under the armpits. She sagged when he raised her, like a loose sack of corn, shifting in his grip and difficult to lift.
“You have a taste for torture?” he asked.
She stared at him and tensed. It helped him pick her up.
“The town is coming tomorrow, and they won’t come to talk,” he said. “They’ll carve him up and hang him, good people as they are, and others not so good, and some of them—like me and Sheriff Pitt—plain and simple outnumbered. But they might skip torture if he tells us where the rest of them are hiding. And he might just tell us”—Tom pulled her up close—“if we use the facts you told me, any kind of leverage, to convince him that we know a lot more walking in.”
He doubted it would work, but it was doubly worth a shot. Something more of Molly might be learned if they confronted him, and Tom was frankly surprised when she took the lantern from his hand and led the way upstairs, determined, risk be damned, to save the Maimer from unnecessary violence in the morning.
They reached the top of the stairs and stood at the prisoner’s door. Molly pressed beside him, radiating oil-light and swelling as she breathed, and he imagined leading her on toward his own small room. Instead he fitted the key and turned it in the lock.
Something knocked his head as soon as he opened the door.
He fell and grabbed the air and banged against the wall. The key tinked down, Molly shrieked beside him, and the lantern light swooped and made the hall warp and fluctuate.
“Braaah,” Tom said, fighting to his feet.
He heard a thundering beyond him on the stairs, going down.
They’d left the knife behind—the goddamned knife Molly had dropped. The Maimer must have freed himself and hit him with the chair.
“He’s gone!” Molly said, fallen near the stairs.
He shook his battered head and got tangled in her skirts, almost falling over till she stood and helped him up, and after bracing on her arm he stomped downstairs, fighting dizziness and planting every step to keep his balance. The tavern’s front door was open to the night. Bess and Ichabod were coming; he could hear their frantic footsteps pounding overhead. He ran to the closet for his gun and there was Nabby with a candle, standing in a moth-eaten shawl beside