The anvil rang three times beneath Rowan's hammer before the first light of morning found the forge. Three sharp blows, then a pause to check the orange curve of the iron, then three more. The rhythm had been the same since he came back from the war, the only steady thing in a life that had gone soft and strange in ways he still could not name. Sweat traced a slow line from his temple to the hollow of his throat. Behind him the coals ticked and settled in the belly of the forge, a sound like knuckles popping, like old bones stirring in a bed.
He set the hammer down and pressed the flat of his palm to the iron. The heat came through his calluses, clean and honest, a temperature he understood. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow and his forearms were blackened with soot up to the crease of his wrists. The shop smelled of scorched metal and lamp oil and the faintly bitter tang of quench water gone cold in the trough.
A horse pulled up outside. Hooves on hard-packed dirt, then the creak of leather as the rider swung down. Rowan did not turn. He knew the gait of every horse in the valley, and that one belonged to the sheriff's deputy, a boy named Pruitt who did not ride out this early unless somebody had sent him.
"Sheriff wants you down at the office, Rowan. When you can spare a minute."
Rowan picked up the hammer again. He set the iron back into the coals and turned the damper so the heat would climb. "About what?"
Pruitt shifted in the doorway. His shadow fell across the threshold in a long pale stripe. "Arson again. Third one this month. He's got Cora Lockhart coming in too."
Something in Rowan's chest drew tight. He did not show it. He kept his hands busy with the tongs, turning the iron end over end in the coals until the metal went the color of a winter peach. "Tell him I'll be there when I'm finished with this piece."
"Sheriff said now, Rowan."
Rowan looked up then. The boy's face was pale in the early light, younger than his years, and he had the careful expression of a person delivering a message he did not fully understand. Rowan studied him for the space of two breaths. Then he lifted the iron from the coals and plunged it into the trough. Steam rose in a white sheet and the water hissed and bubbled around the metal. The sound filled the shop and drowned the boy's words when he started to speak again.
"Go on," Rowan said. "I know the way."
Pruitt went. Rowan heard the hoofbeats retreat down the lane, past the mercantile, past the feed store, past the silent row of houses with their shuttered windows and their chimneys not yet breathing smoke. He stood alone with the hiss of cooling iron and the smell of his own sweat and the faint, mineral tang of water gone hot.
He had not spoken to Cora Lockhart in seven years.
He untied his apron and hung it on the hook by the door. He rolled his sleeves down and buttoned the cuffs at his wrists. He took his hat from the peg and set it on his head, low over his brow, and walked out into the morning.
The town of Holloway lay along a single wide street with a creek running behind it and the mountains drawing up sharp and blue in the east. The buildings were wood and stone, most of them built in the eighteen-seventies, and they carried their age in the grey of their planks and the sag of their porches. There was a barber with a striped pole, a dry goods store with a faded awning, a hotel that had not taken a guest in twenty years. The marshal's office stood at the north end of the street in a low red-brick building with a wood porch and two cells visible through barred windows. The flag above the door hung limp in the windless air.
Rowan stepped up onto the porch and pushed through the door. The bell above the frame gave a thin, complaining ring. Inside the office smelled of old paper and coffee that had been on the stove too long. A lantern burned yellow on the desk. Sheriff Delaney Marsh sat behind it with his hat pushed back on his crown and his boots crossed at the ankle on the corner of a drawer. He looked up, and his face did something complicated, a flicker of welcome and wariness that he covered by lifting his coffee cup and drinking.
"Rowan. Sit."
"Morning, Delaney."
"Sit down, I said. You're making me tired just watching you stand there."
Rowan took the wooden chair by the window. The seat was hard and the back pressed against his shoulder blades in a way he did not care for. He set his hands on his thighs and waited.
Delaney set the cup down. His knuckles were swollen and the skin across the back of his left hand was pale and tight where the burn had pulled it years ago. He had been sheriff for fifteen years. He had buried two wives and outlived three horses and he had never once, to Rowan's knowledge, called a man into his office for a pleasant conversation.
"Cora's on her way," Delaney said. "Her pa's work. The Lockhart Inn business from eighty-one. I want her in on this."
Rowan said nothing.
"You knew her pa," Delaney said, more a statement than a question. "Worked with him on that fire report. Or you knew of him. Either way."
"I knew of him." Rowan's voice was low, careful, a sound he kept in his chest. "We never worked together directly. He was the insurance assessor. I was twenty-two and still in the war."
"You were back by eighty-two."
"I was back by eighty-three." Rowan shifted in the chair. The wood groaned under him. "And I never read his report. I read the public one in the paper."
Delaney studied him across the desk. The lantern light put deep lines in the sheriff's face and made his eyes look like polished stone. "Fair enough. But you know the case."
"I know what everybody knows. The Lockhart Inn burned in the autumn of eighty-one. Twelve people died. The cause was listed as a defective flue. The Lockharts never accepted that finding."
"No. They did not."
A knock at the door. Delaney called out and the bell rang thin again and a woman stepped inside, pulling off a pair of leather gloves finger by finger. Cora Lockhart. She was thinner than Rowan remembered, her face more drawn, her hair pinned up under a dark blue hat. She wore a brown coat over a cream-colored blouse and a skirt that brushed the tops of her boots. Her eyes moved across the room once, taking in the desk, the lantern, the sheriff, and then Rowan. They passed over him without stopping, or with only the smallest hitch, a half-second's pause that he might have imagined.
"Sheriff," she said. Her voice was warm and level, a touch of drawl beneath the words. "You sent for me."
"Cora. Thank you for coming." Delaney stood and pulled a second chair around to the side of his desk, gesturing for her to sit. "You know Rowan Castellan, I believe."
She did not look at Rowan again. She sat, setting her gloves in her lap, folding her hands over them. "I know of him. The blacksmith. He's back from the war."
"He's back from the war," Delaney agreed. "And he knows fire the way you know arithmetic. The both of you are the closest thing this town has to expert witnesses on what happened at the Lockhart Inn."
Cora's gaze shifted to the sheriff. Her expression did not change, but something in the line of her shoulders tightened, a small, careful drawing-in that Rowan saw because he was watching her and because he had learned, in a country far from here, to watch for such things. "Expert witnesses," she repeated.
"I want you both looking at these new fires with me. Three in a month. The feed store on the twelfth, the livery on the nineteenth, and the millhouse on the twenty-sixth. All of them in this district. All of them set, as far as I can tell, by hand."
Cora was quiet for a long moment. Outside, a dog barked twice and fell silent. The lantern flame drew a long shadow of Delaney's hand across the papers on his desk. When she spoke, her voice was even, but the drawl had drawn itself a little tighter.
"My father's work was on the eighty-one fire. It was never published. It was never made part of any official record. The town moved on and my father carried it with him to his grave. Sheriff, I need to know why you're bringing it up now."
Delaney looked at her. He looked at Rowan. He picked up his coffee cup and found it empty and set it down again with a small, precise sound.
"Because whoever is doing this knew what they were doing. The patterns are too clean. The accelerants are too well placed. Whoever it is has read the old case notes, or they were there when it happened, or they learned it from somebody who was. And I do not have the time to chase a ghost through thirty years of paper."
Rowan spoke for the first time since Cora had entered. "What do you need from me?"
Delaney turned to him. "The metal. The point of origin in each of these fires has held something back. A hinge, a nail, a length of wire. I want you to look at it. I want you to tell me if it's the same hand. If it's the same forge."
"And from me?" Cora asked.
Delaney did not answer her at once. He pulled open the drawer of his desk and took out a thick manila folder, tied with a cotton string. He set it on the desk between them. The string was old and the paper had gone soft at the edges.
"Your father wrote three versions of his report on the Lockhart Inn. I have two. I think the third is the one that mattered, and I think it's the one that got taken from his desk the night he died."
Rowan watched Cora's face. The change in it was small, controlled, the kind of thing only a person who had been trained to read others would catch. Her mouth thinned. Her fingers, folded over the gloves in her lap, pressed down until the knuckles went white. She did not speak.
"I want you to read what's in this folder," Delaney said, "and I want you to tell me if anything in it sounds like what's happening now. I'm not asking you to take your father's place. I'm asking you to use what he taught you."
Cora looked down at the folder. Then she looked up at Rowan. This time her gaze stayed. It was measuring, cautious, the look of a woman deciding whether the man across from her was a stranger or a known quantity. He held her eyes and did not nod and did not smile. He gave her nothing to read but the fact of his attention.
"I'll read it," she said at last. "I'll need until tomorrow evening."
"Tomorrow evening," Delaney agreed.
Cora rose, took the folder from the desk, and turned toward the door. Rowan stood as she passed him, a reflex of his raising, the old courtesy of a man who had been taught to stand when a woman entered or left a room. She paused for a half-step beside his chair, close enough that he caught the faint scent of lavender water and ink on her coat, and then she went on and out the door. The bell rang her out.
Delaney sat back in his chair. He picked up his empty cup, looked into it, and set it down again.
"Well," the sheriff said.
Rowan did not answer. He looked at the door she had gone through, and then at the desk, and then at his own hands, still blackened with soot at the creases. Tomorrow evening. Twenty-four hours and change to read what her father had written and decide whether the dead were trying to speak again.
"She'll come back," Delaney said, almost to himself.
"How do you know?"
"Because her father couldn't leave a question alone, either."
Rowan put his hat back on. He walked out into the morning, and the sun was fully up now, and the street of Holloway lay before him in a long pale stripe of dust and light.
The sun had climbed off the rooftops and now sat on Rowan's shoulders like a hand. The street of Holloway stretched before him in a long pale stripe of dust and light, and the smell of it was the smell of every morning he had known since he came back from France: horse and dry wood and the iron-and-charcoal tang of his own forge living in his clothes no matter how many times he scrubbed at the creases of his hands.
He had walked three steps down the boardwalk before he stopped.
Behind him, the sheriff's door stood open. The bell that had rung her out was still trembling faintly on its spring. Coffee smell and old paper leaked out into the street, and beneath it the faint metallic bite of iron filings that never quite washed out of him.
He had said nothing in there. That was the part that sat wrong now.
A wagon rattled past, its driver lifting a hand from the reins in greeting. A yellow dog trotted in its wake, ears flapping. Down the block, Mrs. Crewe was sweeping her porch, the bristles hissing against dry planks, and the sound was so steady and so familiar that for a moment Rowan could pretend the morning was the same morning it had been five minutes ago, before Cora Lockhart had walked back into his life carrying a folder that smelled of her father's pipe tobacco.
He turned around.
He did not make himself walk slower. He climbed the two wooden steps and went back through the door, and this time the bell over the frame rang him in, and Delaney looked up from his desk with the expression of a man who had been waiting for exactly this.
"I was wondering," the sheriff said.
"You can't let her do it."
"Sit down, Rowan."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Then stand there. But close the door. You're letting the morning out."
Rowan closed the door. He stood with his hand on the knob for a moment, feeling the cool brass under his palm, and then he crossed the room in three strides and stopped in front of the desk. His shadow fell across the blotter, across the empty cup, across the place where the folder had been not five minutes ago.
"You sat there," Rowan said, "and you handed her everything he wrote."
"He wrote it to her. He asked for her."
"You don't know what he asked for. You never read the letter."
"No," Delaney said. "I didn't. But I knew her father, Rowan. I knew what he was like when he set his mind to something. And I knew what he was like when he was afraid. A man who is afraid writes to the person he trusts most."
"Then you knew better than to call her back."
Delaney leaned back in his chair. The springs complained the way they always did, a small metallic groan that had become part of the room. He looked at Rowan for a long moment, and his face did the thing it did when he was weighing whether to treat a man across the desk as a friend or as a problem he would have to solve.
"Say what you came to say," the sheriff said at last.
"You know what she is."
"I know what she was. Twelve years ago."
"She hasn't changed, Delaney. She's still the one who picks up and goes when the wind shifts. Her mother fell sick and she raised those kids for a year and a half, fed them and dressed them and walked them to school, and then one morning she walked into the city like the whole thing had never happened. Her father died and she wasn't here. She got the letter six weeks ago and she stood in that general store and read it and then she asked if there was a train tomorrow, and yes, there was a train tomorrow, and she would have been on it if you hadn't sent word she was needed."
"And yet," Delaney said, "here she is."
"Here she is because you ambushed her. Because you made her feel like it was her duty. You know how she is about duty. You knew she couldn't say no if you framed it that way."
"Maybe I did," Delaney said. "Maybe I also knew that her father was the one man in this town who kept a record of things. If there is a record of what happened out at that house in 1919, it will be in that folder. And Cora was the only person he would have trusted to read it."
Rowan's hand tightened on the brim of his hat. He had taken it off when he came in and now he was holding it in front of him like a thing he didn't know what to do with, turning it slowly between his fingers.
"You're asking her to open it up," Rowan said. "Whatever's in there. You're asking her to read what her father saw, and what he thought, and maybe what he did. And then you're asking her to come back here and tell us. And when it's done, when the trouble is past or the trouble is worse, she'll do the same thing she always does. She'll fold herself up and she'll buy a ticket and she won't tell anyone she's going until the train is already moving down the line."
"You sound sure of that."
"I am sure of that."
"How?"
Rowan did not answer at once. The clock on the wall ticked. A fly circled the empty cup on the desk and settled on its rim. Outside, the wagon had moved on and the street was quiet again except for the hiss of Mrs. Crewe's broom three doors down.
"Because I waited for her once," Rowan said.
Delaney's eyebrows lifted a fraction. He said nothing.
"Before the war," Rowan said. "We were young. Foolish, I suppose. She was sixteen and I was eighteen and we had decided, in the way that young people decide things, that we were going to be married when I came back from France. I asked her to wait. She said she would. I went. I came back. And she was gone."
"Gone where?"
"The city. Teaching. Her mother's sister had a boarding house on the south side. She had a letter of introduction to a school. She did not write to me before she went. She did not write to me after. I found out from her brother Tom, who was twelve at the time and wrote me a letter because he thought I ought to know. He used nearly a whole inkwell doing it, that boy."
Rowan set his hat on the desk. He did not sit. He stood with one hand on the back of the empty chair, and the chair creaked faintly under his grip.
"I do not say this to complain," he said. "I'm not asking for sympathy. I'm telling you what I know of Cora Lockhart. She can love something. She can be good at it. She can stand in the middle of it and hold it together. And when the weight gets too much, she leaves. That is what she did to her mother's kitchen. That is what she did to me. That is what she will do to this investigation if we let her into it."
Delaney picked up his cup. He looked into it. He seemed to remember it was empty and set it down again, and the small sound of porcelain on wood was the loudest thing in the room.
"You ever ask her why she left?" the sheriff said.
"It never seemed the kind of question a man could ask without sounding like he was begging."
"Maybe she had her reasons."
"Everyone has their reasons, Delaney. That doesn't change what they did."
"No," Delaney said. "It doesn't. But it might change what we should do now."
Rowan shook his head. "You don't know her."
"I knew her father. I knew her mother. I knew her brothers before they were gone. I knew her when she was the girl who read every book in the lending library twice and could add a column of numbers faster than her old man. I did not know the woman she became. But I'll tell you this, Rowan. The woman who walked out of here just now, with the folder under her arm and the look on her face I haven't seen on a Lockhart since her mother passed, that woman did not come back because I asked her to. She came back because something in that letter woke her up. And whatever it is, it is going to eat her alive if she tries to carry it alone."
He paused. He looked at Rowan steadily.
"You want to bar her from the work, fine," he said. "Then you stand beside her while she does it. You be the one who stays."
The room was very quiet. The fly lifted off the cup and buzzed once against the window glass. The clock ticked. Down the street, someone was calling for a pig that had got loose in the alley behind the feed store.
Rowan let go of the chair. He picked up his hat. He put it back on his head with the slow deliberation of a man performing a task he had done ten thousand times, the brim low over his brow.
"I'm not a patient man, Delaney."
"I know."
"I am not a man who forgives easy."
"I know that too."
"And I am telling you, as her friend and as the man who has waited longer than he cares to count, that if you put her in the middle of this and she breaks, I will hold you to it. Not with the law. Not with a fist. With the rest of my life, in whatever way I have to."
Delaney looked at him for a long time.
"All right," the sheriff said at last.
"All right?"
"I'll hold the work with her. And you hold me to it. But you also stay close, Rowan. You don't let her out of your sight. You don't let her leave town without telling me. And you don't let her convince herself she can do this on her own, because she will try, and you know she will try."
Rowan nodded once. It was not a friendly nod. It was the nod of a man sealing an agreement he did not entirely trust, the kind of nod a man gives when he knows the cost of it and means to pay it anyway.
He turned toward the door.
"Rowan."
He stopped with his hand on the frame.
"Her father didn't write that letter to be a burden.
"He knew that," Rowan said.
He did not turn around. He stood with his hand on the frame and his back to the sheriff, and he let the silence gather the way a man lets a fire gather before he throws the next log on. Then he walked out into the night and did not look back.
The street was empty. The boards under his boots gave up the day's heat in a thin, dusty smell, and somewhere down past the livery a dog was barking at something that did not care. Rowan stood on the boardwalk a moment and listened to the town settle into its own bones. He could feel the shape of the sheriff's office behind him, the shape of the street, the shape of the long walk back to the forge where the fire in the forge would still be banked and waiting. He could not make himself move toward any of it.
He thought of Cora Lockhart in the back booth of the diner with her hands wrapped around a cup of cooling coffee. He thought of the way she had looked up at him when he had walked in, the half-second before her face decided what to do with him. He thought of the freckles he had known since he was nine years old, and of a number of years since then that he did not intend to add up.
He set off walking.
---
The Lockhart cabin sat at the end of a lane that had been a road once, before the lane had given up pretending. The store and the post office and the kitchen all lived in the main house up the hill, but the cabin at the lane's end had been Grandpa Lockhart's, and after him Pa Lockhart's, and now it was nobody's, which was the way Cora had said she wanted it to look when she asked Hettie Wilkins to sweep it out and put a sheet on the bed.
The lamp was lit.
Rowan stopped at the fence line where the lane bent around the old apple tree and the light from the cabin's only good window made a pale, wavering square on the dark grass. He could see the shadow of her moving inside. He could not see her face. He stood for a long minute with his hands on the top rail and his hat low and watched the shadow move, and he did not go in.
He had promised Delaney he would not let her out of his sight. He had not promised to crowd her. He had not promised to push his way through a door she had not opened for him. He had learned a long time ago that Cora Lockhart opened doors when she was ready and not one minute before, and that if a man tried to pull a door open ahead of her, she shut it harder than any woman he had ever known and then nailed it shut.
He turned the horse he had walked out here on and rode back toward town. He would come again at first light.
---
Inside the cabin, Cora heard the hoofbeats slow and stop and then start up again and fade down the lane. She knew the rhythm of them. She knew the slight hitch in the second stride that meant a horse was being held to a walk it did not entirely want to take. She sat very still at the table under the lamp with her hands flat on the wood and let him ride away.
She had not expected him to come. She had not expected him to know she was here.
She looked down at what was spread out on the table in front of her. The case files from her father's desk. The manila folders he had brought home from the courthouse the week before he died and had not put away again. She had not opened them when he was alive. He had asked her not to. She had honored the request then because she had not yet understood what was inside them. She understood it now.
The first page of the first folder was a surveyor's plat of the northern range. The second page was a deed of mineral rights dated eighteen years before her father had been born. The third page was a list of names she did not recognize, and the fourth page was a letter she had read twice and still could not make sense of.
She turned the pages slowly. The lamp threw a yellow circle on the wood and let the corners of the room fall into shadow. The cabin smelled of lamp oil and of the old dried sage her grandmother had hung from the rafters twenty winters ago and had never taken down. The smell was sweet and a little sad, the way a thing becomes sweet and a little sad when it has been hanging in one place long enough to forget what it once was.
She reached for the second folder. Her hand brushed the corner of a third folder that had been slid underneath, and she drew it out into the light, and the smell of the cabin changed. It did not change in any way she could have explained to another person. It changed in her.
The folder was not from her father's desk. The folder was older. The manila was the color of old tea. There was a label on the tab in her father's handwriting, but the handwriting was not his current hand. It was his hand from twenty years ago, the hand he had used before he had married her mother, before he had taken over the store, before the fire.
The label read: LOCKETT RIDGE. JUNE LOCKHART. RECOVERED ITEMS.
Cora opened the folder.
---
The smoke came up first.
Not in pictures. Not in words on a page. The smoke came up through the floor of the cabin and the boards of the table and the pages of the folder and the skin of her hands, and it was everywhere, and it was the smoke of that night, and she was nine years old again, and her mother was pulling her down the hall of the old house on Lockett Ridge with the smoke rolling along above their heads in a black boiling ceiling that was eating the light.
Faster, baby. Faster.
Her mother's hand was in hers. Her mother's hand was hot. Not warm, hot. Hot the way a kettle gets hot if you leave it on the stove too long, hot the way a piece of iron gets hot when it has been in the forge past the time the smith meant to leave it. Her mother's hand was hot and it was slick and it was slipping.
Mama, I can't.
You can, baby. You have to.
The hall was longer than any hall in any house she had ever been in since. The hall went on forever. The smoke was down on them now, thick and gray and tasting of wet wool and of something chemical and sweet that she did not learn to name until she was twenty-two years old and read about it in a book in the schoolhouse library. The smoke was in her mouth. The smoke was in her eyes. She could not see. She could only feel her mother's hand and the carpet under her shoes and the floor tilting under the carpet the way the floor of a boat tilts when the water under it decides to move.
Her mother's hand slipped.
She felt the fingers come loose one by one, the way a fist comes loose in slow motion. She felt the thumb go and then the forefinger and then the middle finger and then the ring finger and the little finger, and then there was nothing in her hand but air, and the air was hot, and the air had her mother's hand in it and was pulling her mother's hand away.
She turned. She tried to turn. The smoke was a wall. She could not get her body to obey her. She could hear her mother somewhere in the smoke behind her, and then she could not hear her mother, and then she could hear a man shouting her name from downstairs, and the shouting was her father, and her father was not supposed to be in the house, and her father was running up the stairs now, and the stairs were already gone.
She tried to scream. The scream would not come. The smoke was down in her lungs. The smoke was heavy and wet and sweet and it would not come out of her, and she was on the floor, and her mother's hand was gone, and the house was folding in on itself the way a house folds when it has decided to stop being a house.
A hand found her in the smoke. A big hand, a hand that did not feel like her mother's hand. A hand that closed around her wrist and pulled and would not let go, no matter how she kicked, no matter how she clawed at the carpet. A hand that got her down the stairs that were not there anymore and out the front door that was not a door anymore and onto the lawn where the air came back into her lungs like a fist.
When she could breathe again, she was sitting on the grass in her nightgown. Her father was sitting beside her with his face in his hands. The house on Lockett Ridge was not a house anymore. It was a shape in the dark with fire coming out of every window and the roof sliding off into the yard in slow pieces.
Her mother was not on the grass with them.
Her mother did not come out of the house that night. Her mother came out of the house three days later, in a pine box her father had ordered from the cabinetmaker in town, and she came out feet first, and Cora did not look at her mother's face, because she had decided she would not look at her mother's face until she was a woman old enough to understand what had happened to it.
She had been a woman old enough for a long time now. She had never looked.
---
The folder was on the floor.
The lamp was still burning. The cabin was very quiet. Cora was sitting at the table with her hands flat on the wood in the exact position they had been in when the folder had slid out from under the other one, and her face was wet, and she did not know her face was wet until a drop fell off her jaw and hit the back of her hand and startled her back into the room.
She looked at the drop. She looked at the folder on the floor. She looked at the lamp and the rafters and the dried sage and the empty chair across from her where her father should have been sitting and was not sitting and would never sit again.
She reached down. She picked up the folder. She opened it on the table in the circle of yellow light.
The first page was a typed inventory. The second page was a photograph. The photograph was of a piece of iron that had been recovered from the ruins of the house on Lockett Ridge on the morning after the fire, and the piece of iron was a piece of a branding iron, and the brand on the iron was a C and a circle.
She stood very still in the cabin at the end of the lane, and she read the name of the ranch the brand belonged to, and the name of the ranch was not Castellan.
She sat down slowly in the chair. She put her hands flat on the wood. She read the name again, and the lamp burned, and somewhere down the lane a horse that had been rode hard and then walked slowly back to town was being unsaddled in a dark yard, and the man unsaddling it was looking back over his shoulder at the pale square of the cabin window as if he had heard something through the boards that he could not have heard.
She read the name a third time.
She picked up the pencil her father had left on the table. She put the pencil down again. She picked it up. She wrote the name in her own hand on the back of an old envelope so she would not forget it by morning.
Then she blew out the lamp.