Page 127 of The Widow and the Wanted

I do. The map is beautifully made. Rivers in blue. Timber tracts washed green. Roads in fine black lines. Claims marked in red ink, boundaries cut across the land. He moves to the desk and lifts a leather folio and opens it. “Photographs as well.”

Photos of men standing beside felled trees. My notebook seems to burn in memory.

Dated stumps. Damaged roots. Soil spoiled. Flora disturbed. Mary laughing over bee balm. Dr. Bowering’s stupid voice explaining the sky.

I keep my face empty, though my insides wrench from the pain of knowing their death warrants were probably signed in this very room and this monster held the pen.

Everett shifts the folio, a folder stacked underneath. He unties the string.

Inside are papers, a clipping, a list of names written in a clerk’s fine hand. I see Dr. Bowering before I can stop myself. The name strikes like a nail through my palm.

Professor Edwin Bowering.

Mary’s name too. Others. Bobby. Assistants. Dates. Fort Smith. Verdigris.

Then a description.

Female survivor presumed dead.

Herbal assistant. Widow. Petite. Blonde.

My mouth dries so completely my tongue sticks to my teeth.

Everett turns one page toward me.

LULA CLAY.

The letters sit there in black ink, plain and impossible.

For a moment, I am back in the wagon with a knife clutched in my hands, too frozen to use it. Back in the snow. Back beneath torn canvas, listening to men die outside and thinking of my mother too late.

I do not move.

Moving would tell him which part of me he struck.

Everett’s voice remains gentle. “You were difficult to trace.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Not impossible. Only difficult.”

My heart beats hard, each thud a foolish thing trying to escape.

“I do not know what you mean.”

“No?”

“No.”

He studies me a moment, almost kindly.

Then he reaches into the file and removes another paper. A small inventory, looks like. Items left at Fort Smith by the victims. Beside my name is the word trunk.

“Your belongings were still in Fort Smith,” he says. “Or most of them. A rooming housekeeper was very distressed to have a dead woman’s trunk taking up space. She was grateful for us to have retrieved it.”

He gets up, crouches behind a desk and sets my trunk on the surface with a dull thud. The sight of it after all this time, with all that’s happened since last laying eyes on it, turns my stomach. The floor seems to move under me. I steady one gloved hand against the back of a chair.

“The first assumption was that you died with the others,” he says. “Understandable. The storm did its work. The bodies were not all easy to account for by morning, what with wildlife and⁠—”