Vin says. Always dealt square with everybody. Dealt square with your ma and your pa, while he was alive.”
He didn’t mentioned Mord Pascoe. He didn’t need to. Wymie’s late stepdad never dealt square with anybody. And once the gaudy owner had caught him trying to cheat him one too many times, he refused to deal with him at all.
“More’n that,” Dorden said, “he protects himself double good. And if anybody pushed Conn too hard without good reason, Tarley Gaines and his clan would step up to back him. And that’s a bunch nobody wants to mess with.”
“If aidin’ and abettin’ little-girl-murderin’ outlanders isn’t good enough reason, I don’t know what is!” Mance declared furiously.
“Words are like birds,” Vin said. “They fly away.”
Everyone stopped and stared at him for a moment. He seemed unfazed.
“Fact is,” Dorden went on deliberately, “more people here around Sinkhole reckon Conn’s got the right of it than you do. No, don’t scowl at me, girl. It’s true.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Vin said. He leaned painfully on his walking stick to pat an orange tabby cat that was rubbing his head on his homemade deerskin moccasins. This entailed ripping another ferocious fart.
Wymie sat back down.
“I don’t care about that!” she stated.
“We all have to live here,” Dorden said gently. “That means continuing to get on with our neighbors, best we can.”
“I’ll leave, then!” she half screamed. “Once I get Blinda avenged.”
Vin straightened creakily. He shook his head. “The impetuosity of youth.”
She glared at him. “What does that even mean?”
He beamed toothlessly at her.
“Never mind,” Dorden said. “But maybe you can set things straight without making enemies here among your home folk.”
Wymie kept her jaw clamped on the bile she wanted to spew on him. She knew he spoke out of genuine friendship. She also, deep down somewhere, knew he was making sound sense.
But she wasn’t in the mood for sense.
“And what if you’re wrong?” Dorden said softly. “You take your vengeance on the wrong people, that leaves the real murderer out there free to murder more. You don’t want that, do you?”
“I know what I saw!”
“You need to help us see, too.”
She frowned so fiercely it almost shut her eyes, and angled her face toward her lap.
“What’d you have in mind, Dorden?” Mance asked.
“Simple,” the older man said. Wymie heard the smile in his voice. “You need to look for evidence to back your claim. You got a power of folks hereabouts willing to help. Everybody wants to see justice done for your family—and the chillin’ stopped. This here’s a peaceful district in a world full of strife and misery. We mean to keep it that way.”
She didn’t miss the warning in his words, but she had to admit he had a point.
Better people help you than stand in your path, she thought.
“And while we’re out lookin’ for evidence to show you’re right,” Mance said, with eagerness growing in his voice as he spoke, “we can also start lookin’ for the outlanders. You gotta find ’em to take care of ’em, right?”
“They been triple good hidin’ their tracks,” Duggur said.
Garl was taking advantage of the conversational distraction to spoon the rest of the scrambled eggs directly from the serving bowl into his mouth. Yellow fragments bounced off his chins and down the massive slope of his belly.
“Nobody knows where their dig is, or their camp, should it be a different spot,” Duggur said.
Wymie sucked down a deep breath, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.
“You’re right.” She felt tears drying on her face, leaving salt-sticky tracks down her cheeks. “That’s a double-good thing I can do. And I can do it!”
Her cousin squeezed her shoulder. “I’m with you, Wymie!”
“We’re all with you,” Dorden said, “in findin’ your family’s killers.”
“Wymie, dear,” Widow Oakey called in her cracked voice from the entry to the parlor. Wymie hadn’t been aware she’d left the room. “There’s a crowd outside to see you. I’d let ’em in, but they’d frighten my babies.”
Wymie stood up again, trying not to be too obvious about kicking away a black cat that was slithering up against her leg. She managed to shift it a ways with her boot.
“I’ll come see,” she said, her heart pulsing faster.
“You know, Miz Oakey,” Dorden said, “not to be overly critical, but you need to clean out your cat boxes more often.”
She blinked rheumy brown eyes at him. “Cat boxes?”
* * *
“FOR A LONG time we’ve enjoyed an island of stability in the midst of the chaos of the outside world,” Conn said. “I hope it’s not invadin’ to stay.”
His nephew, Zedd, who had tan, freckled skin and rusty, tightly curled hair, emerged through the door.
“Looks like Layna and Mord, Unk,” he said.
“Ugh,” Nancy said. She turned away. She was hard as nails about most things, but had a squeamish touch. Her cousin and employer, Conn, respected that in her; it made her seem more human.
“How do they look?” Conn asked, despite his cousin’s visible discomfort.
Zedd showed pressed-together teeth. They were white and mostly even. Patriarch Tarley enforced hygiene in his clan with an iron hand, despite his normally easygoing ways. He had a rep for being tough when it counted.
“Like you’d expect,” Nancy said, as if she were gritting her teeth to hold in puke. Evidently she was hoping to stave off further details.
If so, she hoped in vain.
“Not really,” Zedd said. “Chills ain’t burned so much as, well, kinda roasted. And not really all over, you know?”
Conn kept his gaze steady on the young man as his cousin loudly lost her battle against throwing her guts up. “And they don’t look et so much as busted all to nuke. Like they got hacked with an ax. Heads’re both busted wide-open, and don’t look as if their brains swole from the heat and popped through the skulls like taters in the oven.”
“That’s enough details right there, Zedd,” Tarley said.
The
