Chapter 14: What the Log Said

Gideon's POV

I sat on the running board for an hour and did not move.

Then the cottage door opened, and Maeve came down the steps with a folded letter in her hand.

She stopped at the gate and held it out over the rail.

"Read it," she said. "All of it. Every word."

I had heard those words from Toby.

I had never heard them from her, because she had never needed to say them.

I took the letter.

Bess had already set a chair at her kitchen table across the road, with black coffee beside it.

I sat, and I read.

It was a careful slanted hand.

At the part about my back, I put my hand flat on the table.

I had been standing in the lit doorway.

I remembered turning at the shot and finding him already down.

I remembered the healer coming out of the dark with her bag.

She had said nothing and walked straight to the hall kitchen sink to wash her hands.

I had thought she was being a healer.

I read the last line twice. Delaney telephoned me today. I told her I would tell Gideon everything in the morning.

I put the letter down on Bess's table.

My hands were steady. That was the strange part.

"Six years," I said. "I carried that debt for six years."

"Yes," said Bess, from the stove, not turning around.

"She let me. She watched me do it."

"She did."

"She called me the night the healer died."

I heard how flat my voice had gone.

"I was on the line with her. She said she was frightened, the nightmares."

Bess put down her spoon.

"Gideon," she said. "Where's your phone?"

I looked at her.

"In the creek."

"Then go and get it."

I went out the back door and down the bank in my boots.

The water ran cold and brown over the stones.

I waded in to my knees and felt along the bed where I had thrown it, then downstream of that.

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