repeatedly through each evening. “He knew Margery wouldn’t bat an eyelid if someone looked at her down the barrel of a gun. But if he picked off the things she loves . . .”
Alice considered this. “Are . . . you worried, Sven?”
“For me? No. I’m a company man. And he needs a fire captain. I’m not unionized, but anything happens to me, all my boys go out. We’re agreed on that. And if we walk, the mine shuts down. The sheriff might be in Van Cleve’s pocket but there are limits to what the state will tolerate.” He sniffed. “Besides, this one’s about him and you two girls. And he won’t want attention drawn to the fact that he’s engaged in a fight with a pair of women. Oh, no.”
He took a slug of bourbon. “He’s just trying to spook you. But his men wouldn’t hurt a woman. Even those thugs of his. They’re bound by the code of the hills.”
“What about the ones he’s bringing in from out of state?” said Fred. “You sure they’re bound by the code of the hills, too?”
Sven didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
* * *
• • •
Fred taught her how to use a shotgun. He showed her how to balance the stock and pull the butt against her shoulder, how to factor in the hefty kick backward when she lined up her sights, reminding her not to hold her breath but to release the trigger as she breathed out slowly. The first time she pulled the trigger he was standing close behind her, his hands on hers, and she bounced so hard against him that her face stayed pink for an hour.
She was a natural, he told her, lining up cans on the fallen tree at the edge of Margery’s land. Within days she could pick them off, like apples falling from a branch. At night, as she secured the new locks on the doors, Alice would run her hands along the barrel, lift it speculatively to her shoulder, firing imaginary rounds at unseen intruders coming up the track. She would pull the trigger for her friend; she had no doubt of that.
Because something else had changed too, something fundamental. Alice had discovered how, for a woman at least, it was much easier to feel anger on behalf of someone you cared about, to access that cold burn, to want to make someone suffer if they had hurt someone you loved.
Alice, it turned out, was no longer afraid.
FOURTEEN
Riding all winter, a librarian would wrap up so heavily it was hard to remember what she looked like underneath: two vests, a flannel shirt, a thick sweater and a jacket with maybe a scarf or two over the top—that was the daily uniform up in the mountains, perhaps with a pair of man’s thick leather gloves over her own, a hat rammed low as she could get it, and another scarf pulled high over her nose, so that her breath might bounce back and warm her skin a little. At home, she’d strip off reluctantly, revealing only the swiftest slice of bare skin to the elements between shedding undergarments and sliding, shivering, under her blankets. Aside from cloth-washing, a woman working for the Packhorse Library could go for weeks without seeing her body much at all.
Alice was still locked into her own private battle with the Van Cleves although, thankfully, they seemed to have gone quiet for now. She could most often be found in the woods behind the cabin practicing with Fred’s old gun, the crack and zing of bullets hitting tin cans echoing through the still air.
Izzy could be seen only in glimpses, trailing her mother miserably around town. And there were only intermittent appearances from Beth, the one person who could be relied on to notice these things, or joke about them, and she was mostly preoccupied with her arm and what she could and couldn’t do. So nobody observed that Margery had put on a little weight, or thought to comment upon it. Sven, who knew Marge’s body like he knew his own, understood the fluctuations that occurred in the female form and enjoyed all of them equally, and was a wise enough man not to say anything.
Margery herself had become accustomed to being bone-tired, trying to double up on routes, fighting every day to convince the disbelievers of the importance of stories, of facts, of knowledge. But this and the constant air of foreboding left her struggling