Alone in the Wild(27)

I open the weapon and show her the cartridges. Then I nod toward Dalton’s weapon.

“That’s a revolver. Also for self-defense. An entirely different type of ammo, though.”

He opens it and shows her.

I continue. “We have a third handgun in town, for our deputy. It’s a forty-five. Again, another kind of ammo. Now, first, we can’t give you any of those three because they’re the only handguns we have, and we keep them on us at all times.” I add the last to be clear they won’t find them lying around Rockton. “We can get ammo for them. You can’t. Once the magazine is empty, you’d have a lovely paperweight.”

Her brow furrows, and I realize “paperweight” wouldn’t mean anything to her.

“A deadweight,” I amend. “Now, if you wanted to trade for a rifle, we might be able to arrange something. We don’t carry ours unless we’re hunting. Otherwise, they’re secured in a gun safe, and even I can’t get at them. We’d be willing to consider trading you a rifle but we’d need to know what caliber you have already and whether we can match it. Otherwise…” I shrug. “You’re back to the same problem of ammo.”

The girl nods. “My grandfather is very careful about that. Our rifles are all three-oh-eights.”

Dalton grunts behind me. He’s finally figured out where this odd line of conversation was going. I seeded in the information about our gun lockers, as a matter of security, but the main purpose is to find out what type of weapons the First Settlement has, and whether they match the one used to kill the murdered woman. While her death isn’t my top priority, I’m a homicide detective; I’m not going to ignore a chance to solve it.

There’d been no way to ask Edwin this without his guessing why I was asking and tailor his response accordingly. While his granddaughter is obviously bright and shrewd, she’s also young, and she doesn’t sense a trap here. She’s focused on her goal of getting a gun.

“I can’t promise you a trade,” I say, “but we might have an old—”

“We want that gun,” the bearded youth says, pointing at Dalton’s. These two boys have been silent until now. Dalton had called this one the leader, because he stepped out first, but it’s obvious that the girl is in charge. She just wasn’t foolish enough to expose herself so quickly. Having stepped out, she’s done all the talking, and the boys let her, as if they’re accustomed to this.

“We want a handgun, as you call it,” he says. “I like his. It has bigger bullets.”

The girl rolls her eyes. “Bigger only means it’ll put bigger holes in our dinner. The barrels are too short, meant for shooting at close range. That’s not what I want.”

“I want—”

“And what are you going to trade for it?” she says. “This gun is for me.”

“You do not need a gun. I will hunt for you, when you are my wife.”

“Which is why I am never going to be your wife, Angus,” she says, and Dalton snorts at that, earning a sour look from the bearded boy—Angus.

“If Felicity wants to hunt, she should,” says the towheaded boy, who looks a year or so younger than the others. “She is good at it.”

“Do you mean that?” Felicity retorts. “Or is it false flattery to win my approval?”

The towheaded boy stammers, searching for a response. Then he says, “You are a good hunter, and if you married me, I would let you help me hunt.”

“How kind of you,” Felicity says dryly. She turns to me. “The gun is for me. My grandfather says I may only have one if I barter for it myself.”

“I can’t promise anything, but let me see what we have, and the next time we come by, I’ll speak to you.”

While I’m not eager to supply the First Settlement with weapons, hers is a reasonable request. We shouldn’t refuse them the means of survival for fear they’ll turn those hunting tools on us. I also suspect Edwin’s granddaughter would be a good ally to have among the younger generation.

The trio starts to leave. Then Felicity says something to them, and they stay where they are while she jogs back to us. When she decides we’re out of earshot of the boys, she stops.

“I wanted to say thank you,” she says. “For taking Harper away.”

“We didn’t take her,” I say. “She left.”

Felicity nods dismissively, as if this is the same thing. “She is Angus’s little sister, so he will not appreciate me saying this, but even he would agree. She was … not right. Dangerous. We knew it. Angus saw it. She would do things that hurt him, and she would not care, as long as she got what she wanted. The elders never saw it. She was very, very careful.”

“She was—” I’m about to say “a good actor,” but Felicity won’t understand that. “She was very good at being what others wanted to see.”

“Yes. Sometimes, living like this, it does things to people. Makes them hard and cruel. I just wanted to say thank you.” Her eyes cloud for a second as she glances at the boys. “She is gone, yes? Not coming back?”

“Almost certainly not.”

Her lips set, as if that’s not as clear an answer as she’d like, but she nods and says, “I hope not. For all our sakes.” Then, without another word, she lopes back to the waiting boys.