and trembling, as if even now she could feel McCullough’s grip still on her, his hot breath on her skin. And Sven Gustavsson, a man renowned for his unusually level temperament in a town full of hotheads, a man who would break up a bar fight nineteen times out of twenty where another would be unable to resist the satisfaction of the hurled punch, found that he was possessed of an uncharacteristic rage, a red mist that descended and made him want to seek out McCullough and deliver some of his own brand of vengeance, a vengeance that involved blood and fists and busted teeth.
None of this showed in his face, or in the calm of his voice when he spoke again. “You’re exhausted. Go to bed.”
She looked up at him. “You not coming?”
“Nope. I’ll be out here while you sleep.”
Margery O’Hare was not a woman who liked to depend on anyone. It was a measure of how shaken she was, he realized, that she thanked him quietly, and took herself to bed without a word of protest.
ELEVEN
Fair Oaks was built about 1845 by Dr. Guildford D. Runyon, a Shaker who renounced his vow of celibacy and erected the house in anticipation of his marriage to Miss Kate Ferrel, who died before the house was completed. Dr. Runyon remained a bachelor until his death in 1873.
• WPA, The WPA Guide to Kentucky
There were fifteen dolls on the dresser. They sat shoulder to shoulder, like a mismatched family, their porcelain faces pale and rosy and their real hair (where had it come from? Alice shuddered) curled into immaculate glossy ringlets. They were the first thing Alice saw when she woke up in the morning on the little daybed, their blank faces watching her impassively, their cherry-colored lips curled into faint, disdainful smiles, frothy white pantalettes peeking out from under full Victorian skirts. Mrs. Van Cleve had loved her dolls. Like she had loved her little stuffed bears and her tiny china ornaments and her porcelain snuff boxes and her carefully embroidered psalms that hung around the house, each the result of hours of intricate needlecraft.
Every day Alice was reminded of a life that had been almost solely focused on the inside of these walls, on tiny, meaningless tasks, tasks Alice felt increasingly strongly that no adult woman should view as the sum total of her day’s activities: dolls, embroidery, the dusting and precise rearranging of totems that no man noticed anyway. Until she had gone, after which they had become a shrine to a woman they now insisted they idolized.
She hated those dolls. Like she hated the heavy silence in the air, the endless stasis of a house in which nothing could move forward and nothing could change. She might as well be one of those dolls, she thought, as she walked through the bedroom. Smiling, immobile, decorative and silent.
She glanced down at the picture of Dolores Van Cleve that sat in a large gilt frame on Bennett’s bedside table. The woman held a small wooden cross between two plump hands and an expression of pained disapproval, which to Alice seemed to settle on the two of them whenever they were alone together. “Perhaps we could move your mother a little further away? Just . . . at night?” she had ventured when she had first been shown their room. But Bennett had frowned, as disbelieving as if she had cheerfully suggested digging up his mother’s grave.
She snapped out of her thoughts, gasping quietly as she splashed the icy water on her face and hurried into her many layers. The librarians were riding a half-day today, to allow them all some time for Christmas shopping, and a small part of her had to fight her disappointment at the prospect of time away from her routes.
She would see Jim Horner’s girls this morning. That helped. The way they would wait at the window for the sight of Spirit making her way up the track, then bolt through the wooden door, bouncing on tiptoe until she climbed off the horse, their voices bubbling over each other as they clamored to find out what she had with her, where she had been, whether she would stay for a little while longer than the last time. The way they would hang casually around her neck while she read to them, little fingers stroking her hair or planting kisses on her cheeks as if, despite the slow recovery of the little family, they were both desperate