The Whippoorwill Trilogy - Sharon Sala Page 0,306

prayed to God that it was something she never had to face.

Letty’s pregnancy had, in an odd way, eased Robert Lee’s yearnings. He still cared for her—dreamed of her, yearned for her. But he was well aware that her entire being was focused on nothing but the baby she was carrying.

Because she couldn’t ride out to the mine anymore, he made a habit of stopping by the house more often. The ease of the routine into which they’d settled was pleasing to both. Letty didn’t realize how much she’d come to look forward to Robert Lee’s visits until he’d gone three days without stopping by.

Letty stared at her growing girth in the full-length mirror in her bedroom, then turned sideways and cupped her hands beneath her belly to test her size from that angle as well.

“Amazing,” she muttered, then slowly smiled as she patted her belly. “Come on, Little Bit, it’s time we started our day.”

She moved out of her room and headed down the stairs, taking care to hold onto the railing as she descended. Once light on her feet, she now moved at a slower, awkward gait.

The imminent arrival of a baby in the house had set every female hormone into overdrive. Alice was piecing a baby quilt. Delilah was saving and hand-hemming flour sacks to be used for diapers. Mary Whiteside had traded a traveling salesman a nugget of gold for two skeins of cotton yarn to knit the baby a bonnet. Even little Katie had involved herself. With Alice’s help, she was making a rag doll for the baby out of a couple of handkerchiefs and a stocking.

And, unknown to all the women in the hen house, Robert Lee was making a gift of his own. He’d built a cradle out of hickory, honed it down to a smooth, satin sheen, and spent his nights carving figures into the headboard by candle light. He’d finished the little bird he’d put in the center of the design, and was working on a small rabbit. He had plans to put a turtle on the other side to balance the image, and imagined tiny fingers tracing the shapes of what he was carving into the wood. When he was deep into the dream, he imagined himself teaching the baby the animals’ names and the baby trying to repeat the words.

Letty was all the way down the stairs and moving through the parlor into the kitchen before she realized the house was completely silent. With so many women in residence, it wasn’t often the house felt like this.

“Hello,” she called. “Where is everybody?”

A floor board creaked behind her. She turned, expecting to see one of the women, but there was no one there.

“Probably out in the vegetable garden,” she said, and headed toward the kitchen.

The screen door squeaked as she walked out onto the porch. T-Bone was noticeably absent and the women were nowhere to be seen.

Enemy Within

After calling their names with no answer, Letty began to feel uneasy. She circled the house, thinking they might have gone into the woods to look for berries, but when she went back into the house and searched the kitchen, the berry basket and both bowls they might have taken were still on the shelf.

She turned and gazed out the window toward the forest, hoping to see the women emerging from an early-morning walk—certain that wherever they were, T-Bone would be running in circles around Katie, waiting for her to toss a stick for him to fetch.

Lost in her muse, she stared out the window for several moments, trying to shake a feeling of unease. It wasn’t until a bird flew past her line of vision that she shook off the feeling of malaise and decided to look for them in earnest. She was all the way across the kitchen and reaching for the screen when she saw the first drop of blood.

It was the size of a pea and almost lost in the shadow of the threshold. Startled, she went down on her knees and then touched it with the tip of her finger. It was still sticky.

Breath caught in the back of her throat. When she looked up, she saw a trail of blood drops leading all the way out the door and off the porch. By the time she dragged herself to her feet, she was trying not to panic. There were all kinds of reasons why the blood could be here. Children get nose bleeds, and Alice was known