was naturally likewise the most tiresome. He had manifested on the ridge some weeks previous as a hollow, lingering redness that closed around Josie and stopped her picking any more of the season’s last piñon. “I had to flee home right away,” she had announced rather tremulously to the entire kitchen. “But I can’t say he didn’t follow me.”
Dolan, ever the first to take her at her word, sprang to his feet and made a big show of looking out the door. “Did he mean you harm?”
Josie was already wilting into a chair and reaching for a cup of water—an unnecessarily generous one—outheld by Rob. “No. But he did fill me with sorrow. He don’t know where he is at all.”
An interminable, wasted afternoon’s interrogation revealed that Josie had no sense of the lost man’s aspect or intentions, nor the nature of his demise. She knew only that he was not gone for good. Talking of nothing else for days did little to steel her for his return—which surprised her, quite conveniently, while she was clearing snakes’ nests from the overgrowth at the top of the claim. Josie was mid-swing when she felt him arrive. Into the bushes went her machete. Down went Josie, face-first into the thickets, hurrying to make contact. As Nora understood this carry-on—which she had personally witnessed once or twice, usually at parties when revelers pickled enough to welcome a bit of nonsense had goaded Josie to reach across the great divide to their dead kin—séance involved a great deal of singsong and mumbling. But it was the hand-holding where Nora’s belief ran aground—for whose hand did Josie hold when she was all by herself?
“Perhaps if we went out with you,” Nora said, “and stood around in a circle, morning and noon, you might induce him to reveal his desires.”
As this had earned her a look of general outrage from every man in the room, Nora had kept all further suggestions to herself. And in any case, the lost man had not returned since.
“No doubt he will reappear the first instant she is tasked with something more arduous than sewing,” Nora had concluded a week later, climbing into bed.
Emmett shook his head. “It’s a wonder to me that you can be so taken in by Rey Ruiz’s water-witching, and yet treat our poor Josie with nothing but contempt.”
The comparison was absurd. Rey Ruiz had made a science of divining water. Perhaps his implements were a bit crude—but willow sticks aside, he was more reliable than any cloud massing in the distance. Countless people owed their livelihoods to his proficiency at reading sign.
Josie, on the other hand, had been born to absolute chicanery. She was the daughter of Emmett’s cousin Martha and the mesmerist Reverend Kincaid, whose five other wives she had grown up likewise calling “mother.” As Nora understood it, Josie was the only child of that entire dubious coven and the sole heritor of the Reverend’s celestial gifts. These withdrawn, enigmatic people extorted money from nitwits in a dark house on Mott Street. All their séance and card reading and divination, however, had failed to predict the typhus outbreak to which they succumbed within days of each other when Josie was but thirteen. Alone in the world, Josie found herself the custodian of a ramshackle townhouse and all its attendant debts. She refused to set foot outside. For a few lean years, she performed readings by mail, and in this manner struck up a correspondence with a certain Mister George A. Hamill of San Francisco. Friendly letters quickly turned to betrothal. But he, being a gentleman, insisted that such a union be superintended by the appropriate parties: in this case, Miss Claver’s Heart & Hand Club, which connected Atlantic State brides with reputable men of the West. The necessary arrangements had somehow managed to cost Josie her remaining inheritance—which disappeared, along with Miss Claver, all evidence of her Heart & Hand Club, and Mister George A. Hamill himself—while Josie was writing verse about the landscape on a train somewhere east of Cheyenne.
These facts had been remitted to the Larks in a long letter from Emmett’s sister, Lenore, the day Emmett brought Josie home from the Prescott station. Lenore was raising cattle and eight children on the Powder River, and her patience with Josie had played out. The girl was, in her words, “a gentle soul.” But Lenore’s husband preached the gospel. He did not think it fitting to tolerate communion with spirits under