Chapter 18: Nobody Believes Her

I went down the ladder faster than I had ever gone down anything.

Carys was behind me with the rifle left on the catwalk.

We came out of the stock alley into the main concourse, and it was packed shoulder to shoulder.

Nobody was buying food.

Everyone was looking up at the owners' stairs.

Cassidy came down them in the black dress with her hair falling out of its pins.

"Move!" she screamed. "Get out of my way!"

A woman in a church-sale cardigan stepped across the bottom stair and planted her feet.

"Cassidy Rawlins," she said. "You stood in my kitchen and cried about your husband's body."

"Get off me."

"His body," the woman said. "You asked us to pray for it."

Someone behind her laughed, short and ugly.

A man in a feed-store cap held up his phone and filmed.

"Say it again!" he shouted. "Say you didn't do it!"

Cassidy shoved past the woman and ran into the crowd.

The crowd did not part.

It closed.

A big man in a Faulk Rodeo cap took off the cap and threw it at her feet.

A girl from the clinic, in her scrubs, stepped up and said in a loud flat voice, "You told me he was a deadbeat."

"I never said that."

"You said it every Monday for a year," the girl said.

A tall man in a good jacket pushed forward.

He was the doctor who owned the clinic, and he had hired her himself.

"Don't come in Monday," he said. "Or ever."

Cassidy turned in a circle.

Every face around her was a face she knew.

She had been the town's sweet young soldier's wife, and she had worn that part for nine years.

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