Alone in the Wild (Rockton #5)(77)

He flails his hand. “I was a twenty-five-year-old man who figured he wasn’t ever getting a wife because he wasn’t born here. Then this eighteen-year-old girl is in trouble, and she wants to marry me, and I like her, and I know this other guy’s a jerk, so I say sure. Look at me. A damn hero stepping up like that. A hero, though, would have taken her out of here. Taken her back to Rockton and let her go down south to be with someone she wanted.”

The tears start again, and he looks away, bracelet still in his hands. I remember their obvious love and affection for one another, and I know they’ve made the best of a difficult situation. Nancy just needed more, and she’d tried to get it without hurting her husband. I don’t see wrongdoing on either side. I see tragedy. The question I must ask, though, is whether one tragedy led to another. Led to murder.



* * *



I don’t question Tomas further. There’s no point. He knows he’s a suspect. He may even realize Nancy is, and something tells me he’ll protect her even more than he’ll protect himself.

I tell Dalton about Nancy and Ellen. He says, “Fuck, that’s a mess all around.”

He’s right. Everyone loses here. And for what? As Tomas said, marrying a woman wouldn’t have stopped Nancy from procreating, if that was so important to the settlement. They never gave her that option, though, which means that, like most of those objections, the justifications are just excuses to backfill a decision rising from ignorance rather than rational thought.

However “enlightened” the Second Settlement is, they’d still brought their prejudices with them, because those who made this law had grown up in the same world as Tomas, where it was fine to insult and beat homosexuals because they needed to be “scared” onto the right track.

The settlement elders had given Nancy an ultimatum, and she made the best of it, choosing her own husband. Tomas knew he wasn’t her actual “choice,” but he went along with it, driven by those old prejudices, too, the ones that doubtless whispered that if he was a good enough husband, Nancy wouldn’t miss anything. Only she did. Ellen comes along, they become friends, and then more than friends … and Ellen winds up dead.

Tomas might have said he understood—maybe wanted to understand—but when he first found out, had he seen red, grabbed his forbidden shotgun, and hunted down his rival? Or did Nancy do it in a lover’s quarrel? Perhaps she expected to go south with Ellen in the spring, and Ellen told her no. Or Nancy didn’t want to go south, so Ellen threatened to tell Tomas about them.

Where does Abby fit into this? Nowhere, I realize. Nor does she need to. Ellen was helping Abby’s parents. She might have been looking after the baby when she’d been shot, and with Abby hidden under Ellen’s coat, her killer never realized they’d almost claimed a second life. Solving Ellen’s murder may not find Abby’s parents, but it is still justice for one victim I found in the snow.

The big clue here is the shotgun. I suspect that someone in the Second Settlement is cheating on the “no firearms” rule. They’ve gotten hold of a shotgun and been shooting their prey and then jabbing in an arrow making it look as if the beast was brought down with a bow.

Does the entire settlement know someone’s breaking the law? Are they turning a blind eye because it’s winter and meat equals survival?

Nancy knows what’s going on, though. I’m certain of that. She knows who has a shotgun, and that’s why she tucked away the pellet.

Is it Tomas’s shotgun, and she’s covering for him? Or has she only figured out that someone in the village is using a gun, and she’s protecting whoever it is?

I need to find out who has that gun.





THIRTY-THREE


Dalton and I are talking around the fire when we hear running footfalls. We shine our flashlight and a voice huffs, “It’s Tomas,” sounding out of breath, before he appears. He bursts in and stops, panting, “Nancy’s gone. I got back to the village, and went to speak to her. When I couldn’t find her, I thought she was avoiding me. Miles said she’d told the kids to stay with the other women, that she needed to find Lane.”

“Lane?” I say, and it takes a moment for me to remember that’s his nephew. “Where is he?”

“Hunting. Lane … struggles with village life. His mother died when he was a boy, his father passed five years ago, and he lost his best friend the summer before last. Lane’s had a rough go of it lately. He spends most of his time hunting. Nancy and I worry about him, but the elders tell us not to interfere. He’s the best hunter we have.”

“Because he’s not using a fucking bow,” Dalton mutters.

“What?” Tomas says, sounding genuinely surprised.

“Someone has been hunting with a shotgun,” I say, “while pretending to use a bow. That’s why you’ve found so many pellets in the meat. Nancy figured out it was Lane, and now that Ellen has been killed with a firearm…”

Tomas’s eyes widen. “You think Nancy’s gone after Lane. I thought…” He swallows. “I thought that was just an excuse to get away, that she was distraught over Ellen. Lane would never hurt Nancy, but we still need to find her. It hasn’t snowed in three days, and there are too many prints for me to track. You’d mentioned your dog can do that.”