VII.
Hollis Kittredge met her in the front hall in his shirtsleeves. He was fifty-eight, heavy through the shoulders, with a broad red face and thick white hair that he wore too long, and hands that still had the calluses of the man who had driven spikes on the Kansas Pacific in 1869 before he ever owned a mile of track. He came across the black-and-white tiles at something close to a run and took her by both arms and held her away from him and looked at her, at the soot and the burned hem and the bare torn hands, and his face crumpled.
"You were to come Thursday," he said. "You wrote Thursday. You said Thursday."
"I wanted to be home for your birthday."
He pulled her in against his chest and held her there. He smelled, as he always had, of cigars and bay rum and the faint coal smell that never quite left him. She let him hold her. She had not known until that moment how much she had wanted him to, and how much she would have to carry out of this house because of it.
When he let her go, she said, "Dutch Rennick is dead."
He blinked. "Who?"
"One of the men in the masks. He was twenty-two. He was going to be married at Christmas." She watched his face. "Amos Snell's leg is broken in two places and the doctor in Castle Rock does not know if he will keep it. A brakeman named Billy Ochs was shot through the thigh by Corwin Mabry, who rode away south and has not been seen since. I don't think you knew any of that, Father. I think you knew the rest."
The hall was very quiet. Somewhere at the back of the house a maid dropped a spoon, and the sound rang off the tiles.
"Come into the library," her father said.
The library was the room where her mother had died, six years before, of a fever that took eleven days. Hollis had not changed a thing in it since. Louisa sat in her mother's chair. He did not sit. He poured a whiskey and did not drink it, and stood at the cold fireplace with his back half to her.
"I told Corwin," he said at last, "that the Pueblo book could not go before Judge Fitch. That is what I told him. I did not tell him how."
"Did you ask?"
He was silent.