The Steep and Thorny Way (2 page)

I DREW A DEEP BREATH AND MARCHED
into the woods behind my house with a two-barreled pistol hidden beneath my blue cotton skirt. The pocket-size derringer rode against my outer right thigh, tucked inside a holster that had, according to the boy who'd given it to me, once belonged to a lady bootlegger who'd been arrested with three different guns strapped to her legs. Twigs snapped beneath my shoes. My eyes watered and burned. The air tasted of damp earth and metal.

Several yards ahead, amid a cluster of maples blanketed in scaly green lichen, stood a fir tree blackened by lightning. If I turned right on the deer trail next to that tree and followed a line of ferns,
I'd find myself amid rows of shriveled grapevines in the shut-down vineyard belonging to my closest friend, Fleur, her older brother, Laurence, and their war-widowed mama.

But I didn't turn.

I kept trekking toward the little white shed that hid the murderer Joe Adder.

Fleur's whispers from church that morning ran through my head, nearly tipping me off balance during my clamber across moss-slick rocks in the creek. “Reverend Adder doesn't even want his boy around anymore,” she had told me before the sermon, her face bent close to mine, fine blond hair brushing across her cheeks. “He won't let Joe back in the house with the rest of the kids. Laurence is hiding him in our old shed. And Joe wants to talk to you. He's got something to say about the night his car hit your father.”

I broke away from the creek and hiked up a short embankment covered in sedges and rushes that tickled my bare shins. At the top of the bank, about twenty-five feet away, sat a little white structure built of plaster and wood. Before he left for the Great War, Fleur's father used to store his fishing gear and liquor in the place, and he sometimes invited my father over for a glass of whiskey, even after Oregon went bone-dry in 1916. Bigleaf maples hugged the rain-beaten shingles with arms covered in leaves as bright green as under-ripe apples. A stovepipe poked out from the roof, and I smelled the sharp scent of leftover ashes—the ghost of a fire Joe must have lit the night before, when the temperature dropped into the fifties.

I came to a stop in front of the shed, my pulse pounding in the side of my throat. My scalp sweltered beneath my knitted blue hat, along with the long brown curls I'd stuffed and pinned inside. I
leaned over and drew the hem of my skirt above my right knee, exposing the worn leather of the holster. I took another deep breath and wiggled the little derringer out of its hiding place.

With my legs spread apart, I stood up straight and pointed the pistol at the shed's closed door. “Are you in there, Joe?”

A hawk screeched from high above the trees, and some sort of animal splashed in the pond that lay beyond the shed and the foliage. But I didn't hear one single peep out of Joe Adder.

“Joe?” I asked again, this time in as loud and deep a voice as I could muster. Tree-trunk strong, I sounded. Sticky sweat rolled down my cheeks, and my legs refused to stop rocking back and forth. “Are you in there?”

“Who's there?”

I gripped the pistol with both my hands. The voice I heard was a husky growl that couldn't have belonged to clean-cut, preacher's-boy Joe, from what I remembered of him. It and a splashing sound seemed to come from the pond, not the shed.

“Who's there?” he asked again. I heard another splash.

I lowered the pistol to my side and crept around to the back of the shed, feeling my tongue dry up from panting. I pushed past a tangle of blackberry bushes, pricking a thumb on a thorn, and came to a stop on the edge of the bank. My feet teetered on the gnarled white root of a birch.

In the pond, submerged up to his navel in the murky green water, stood a tanned and naked Joe Adder, arms akimbo, a lock of dark brown hair hanging over his right eye. His shoulders were broad and sturdy, his biceps surprisingly muscular, as though prison had worked that scrawny little white boy hard.

My mouth fell open, and my stomach gave an odd jump. The last time I'd seen Joe, back in February 1921, seventeen months earlier, he'd been a slick-haired, sixteen-year-old kid in a fancy black suit, blubbering on a courthouse bench between his mama and daddy.

This new version of my father's killer—now just a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, almost brawny, his hair tousled and wild—peered at me without blinking. Drops of water plunked to the pond's surface from his elbows.

“You don't want to shoot me, Hanalee,” he said in that husky voice of his. “I don't recommend prison to anyone but the devils who threw me in there.”

I pointed the pistol at his bare chest, my right fingers wrapped around the grip. “If you had run over and killed a white man with your daddy's Model T,” I said, “you'd still be behind bars, serving your full two years . . . and more.”

“I didn't kill anyone.”

“I bet you don't know this”—I shifted my weight from one leg to the other—“but people tell ghost stories about my father wandering the road where you ran him down, and I hate those tales with a powerful passion.”

“I'm sorry, but—”

“But those stories don't make me half as sick as you standing there, saying you didn't kill anyone. If you didn't kill him, you no-good liar, then why didn't you defend yourself at your trial?”

Joe sank down into the water and let his chin graze the surface. Long, thick lashes framed his brown eyes, and he seemed to know precisely how to tilt his head and peek up at a girl to use those lashes to his advantage. “They never gave me a chance to speak on
the witness stand,” he said. “They hurried me into that trial, and then they rushed me off to prison by the first week of February. And I didn't get to say a goddamn word.”

I pulled the hammer into a half-cocked position with a click that echoed across the pond. Joe's eyes widened, and he sucked in his breath.

“You lied to your family about delivering food to the poor that Christmas Eve,” I said, “and you crashed into my father because you were drunk on booze from some damn party. My new stepfather witnessed him die from injuries caused by
you
, so don't you dare fib to me.”

“Don't you dare shoot me before I talk to you about that stepdaddy of yours.”

“I don't want to hear what you have to say about Uncle Clyde. I'm not happy he married my mama, but he's a decent man.”

“Stop pointing that gun at me and let me talk.”

“Give me one good reason why I should listen to you.” I aimed the pistol at the skin between Joe's eyebrows. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn't squeeze this trigger and sh—”

“You should listen to me, Hanalee, because you're living with your father's murderer.”

A shallow breath fluttered through my lips. All the doubts and fears I'd harbored about Dr. Koning since he married my grieving mama last winter squirmed around in my gut. I stared Joe down, and he stared me down, and the gun quaked in my hand until the metal blurred before my eyes.

“For Christ's sake, Hanalee, stop pointing that gun at me and let me talk to you.”

“Clyde Koning did not kill my father.”

“Your father was alive when I helped him into my house. He even joked with me—he said he thought he'd been hit by Santa's sleigh as punishment for misbehaving on Christmas Eve.”

I shook my head. “My father wouldn't have said any such thing. The only thing he did wrong that night was to walk down the dark highway to try to join us at church. He wasn't feeling well, and—”

“His leg was bleeding and maybe broken,” continued Joe, ignoring me, rattling off words as if he had them memorized from a script. “So I let him lean his weight against me while I helped him inside. My family was running the Christmas Eve service, so I laid your father on my bed and telephoned Dr. Koning.”

“I don't—”

“The last thing your father said to me before I opened the door for the doctor was ‘The doc's going to be the death of me. I just know it.'”

I stepped off the gnarled root, landing so hard I jarred my neck. “That's a lie.”

“And when I asked, ‘Do you want me to send Dr. Koning away?' he told me, ‘No, just make sure no one ever hurts my Hanalee.'”

My eyes itched and moistened. I blinked and rocked back and forth. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“When Dr. Koning arrived, he shut my bedroom door behind him and left me to wait in the living room.” Joe rose back up to a standing position. Water rained off his body and splattered into the pond, and a wave lapped at his stomach, just above his hip bones. “The next time that bedroom door opened, your father was dead. He wasn't hardly even bleeding before that point—he seemed to
have only suffered a busted leg and a sore arm from the crash. But suddenly he was dead, as if someone had just shot a poisonous dose of morphine through his veins.”

I shook my head. “That's not true.”

“People shut me up at my trial. No one, not even my own lawyer, let me speak, as if they'd all gotten paid to keep me quiet, and I suffered for it.” His voice cracked. “I can't . . . do you know . . .” He pushed his hair out of his eyes and exposed a C-shaped scar above his right eyebrow. “Do you know how badly I fared as a sixteen-year-old kid in that godforsaken prison, Hanalee?”

My hand sweated against the gun. “I don't feel a shred of pity for you.”

“Just one week before the accident, someone—my father wouldn't say who—came by the church and tried to recruit him into the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which I'm certain had something—”

“No!” I marched right into the pond's shallow edge with the pistol still aimed at Joe's head, and I pulled the hammer into the full-cock position. “I know full well there's a Klan church up the highway in Bentley. I know they host baseball games and print anti-Catholic pamphlets, but they never once gave a damn that my black Christian father lived in this measly spit stain of a town.”

“I'm not the one you should be shooting, Hanalee.” Joe backed away in the water. “I'm not the one who deserves to die.”

“I've never even heard about a single Klan-provoked killing in this state, Joe. You can try to scare me all you want, but I know you're just switching your guilt onto other people because you—”

“No, I'm not. Look in your stepfather's bedroom.” He stopped
backing up. “I bet you'll find a robe and a hood stashed among his clothing somewhere. I bet he married your white mother just to piss on the memory of your father. And I bet the Klan promoted him to a powerful position for killing the last full-blooded Negro in Elston, Ore—”

I squeezed the trigger with an explosion of gunpowder and fired a bullet straight past Joe's ear—not close enough to hit him, but enough to make his face go as white as those hooded robes he talked about. I staggered backward from the kick, and my ears rang with a horrendous screeching that sounded like a crowd of keening mourners wailing inside my head.

Beyond the cloud of dissipating smoke, Joe thrashed his arms about in the water and struggled to stay upright, but I didn't wait to see if he'd recover from the shock. Instead, I tucked that gun back into my holster and hightailed it out of the woods.

CHAPTER 2

LESS THAN KIND

“HANALEE?” CALLED MAMA FROM
our backyard, beyond the Douglas firs that shot up to the clear July sky on the edge of our property.

I stopped in my tracks. My black-and-white Keds sloshed and squeaked with pond water.

“Hanalee?”

I shoved the derringer—still tucked inside the holster, still holding one remaining bullet—into the depths of a hollow log ten feet from the opening in the woods. I wrapped the leather in an oilcloth that I kept hidden in that spot specifically for times when I couldn't sneak the pistol back into the house, and I scattered leaves over the
lump. Dirt clogged my fingernails; mold from the leaves tickled my nose. I sneezed so hard, my ribs hurt.