brother and also let go of what happened. And I’m worried that he’s going to do something—stupid. As a result.”
Randy tipped his head to the side a bit. The look he gave me was a measuring one. “What do you mean by ‘stupid’?”
“That he’s going to try to take revenge on somebody for Elias not getting enough help. Cade’s not a violent person, he really isn’t. But he’s… grandiose. And with Dodge in the mix, I don’t know what that could mean.” I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t understand people like this. You do. I can tell him all day long that he needs to deal with his feelings, but that means nothing to him. He’s a man, he’s an Olmstead—he’s Cade. You can talk to him in a way he’ll understand.”
Randy’s jaw shifted in a pondering way. Then he moved forward, and I stepped out of his path as he walked around the kitchen table to a brightly lit spot where a wooden rifle lay flat beneath a round, mounted hobby mirror. Beside it a wood-burning pen sat in its holder, the source of one note of the woodsy smell. Randy took his seat and pulled the mirror into place above the rifle stock. He rested his forearms against the table and looked up at me.
“What I say to you stays between you and me and the walls of this house,” he said. “You give me your word on that.”
“You have it. You have my word.”
He picked up the wood-burning pen and turned his attention to the rifle stock beneath the magnifier. From where I stood I could see he was burning in a picture of a deer leaping through trees and brush, with script curving above and below the image. A thin stream of smoke came up from the pen as he touched it to the wood.
“Those Olmsteads,” he began, “and I’ll count the Powells, too, for sake of discussion. For a long, long time now, they’ve been coming up with ways to justify things an ordinary man would have a hard time reconciling. For my own part, between you and me, I don’t know how you set down into a feud that divides your own family about some petty difference of opinion. Or how a grown man finds it in himself to take an interest in a fourteen-year-old girl, or how a father gives a blessing on that.”
“Candy was sixteen, wasn’t she?”
He blew against the wood. “He didn’t marry her until she was sixteen, and I don’t suppose they consummated it until then, because she’s a Christian girl. But it was wrong just the same. I didn’t hold with him even giving that thought an audience in his mind. And when you look at how it corrupted her, you can’t help but lay that blame on her father’s shoulders, as well. A girl that age ought to be thinking about how she can grow up to be a worthy young lady, not how she can gratify some grown man’s appetites.”
“Corrupted her?”
He looked up fleetingly from his work, but I caught the grimness of his gaze. “I’m referring to the accident at the lake. You can make of that what you will.” He shifted the rifle beneath the magnifier. “My heart goes out to my sister-in-law in all she’s suffered. Leela raised those children as best she could. I believe in the traditional family, but there wasn’t a day that went by when those children were young that it didn’t cross my mind how much better off they’d be if my brother had a hunting accident.”
My eyes widened, and the gaze he cast on me was challenging. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I never knew Eddy then.”
“You knew Elias, so you knew Eddy. Elias was what happens when the Lord makes a fine young soul and entrusts it to the likes of Eddy Olmstead.”
I watched as he pressed the tip of the pen to the engraving of a tree, buzzing it over all the little leaves. Then he set down the pen and pushed the magnifier to the side. “But you came here to talk about Cade. I can offer you shelter for you and your son. You’re as welcome here as any of the children of my blood. But if Cade wants to speak to me, he’ll have to approach me on his own. Coax him into coming to me if you like, but I can’t go chasing him down.”
“All right,” I said. But my throat felt tense with frustration,