Clara said. Mrs. Patterson told her you were the best teacher this town ever had. Lucy said with considerable satisfaction. That was kind of Mrs.
Patterson. She also said you fixed the schoolhouse window yourself when Mr. Anders couldn't be bothered, Lucy added. Which isn't exactly true because Mr. Carter fixed it, but Mrs.
Patterson doesn't know that. Clara looked at Lucy who was 9 years old and apparently knew everything. Back to your copy book, Clara said. Yes, Miss Huh. Margaret found her that afternoon.
Clara was at the post office sending a letter to Mrs. Aldrich III since she'd arrived, each one slightly less worried in tone than the one before when she heard the door open behind her. She knew before she turned around. She turned around. Up close, Margaret Alcott was even more carefully assembled than she had seemed at the ranch gate.
Everything about her was considered. The clothes, the posture, the precise degree of distress arranged on a face that was genuinely undeniably beautiful. It was almost impressive. The craft of it, the way an actor's performance could be impressive, even when you knew it was a performance. Miss Bennett, Margaret said.
Miss Alcott, Clara said. A pause. You know who I am. Of course. Margaret looked at her with an expression that had been calibrated for sympathy.
I was hoping we might speak womantooman. We're speaking now, Clara said. Margaret glanced at the postmaster who was making an elaborate show of sorting mail he'd already sorted. Perhaps somewhere more private, she said. I prefer here, Clara said.
A beat. Something moved behind Margaret's eyes. A recalibration small and swift. All right, she said. I'll be direct.
Please. William Carter is not who you think he is. She said it with the gravity of a woman sharing something costly. I know he seems steady, reliable, generous. He is very good at that at seeming.
She paused. I thought the same things when I came here. Under what circumstances did you come here? Clara asked a flicker. I was grieving.
My fiance had just died. William offered me sanctuary. I believed him. And then and then he made me certain kinds of promises, she said. And when keeping them became inconvenient, he destroyed my reputation and forced me to leave.
Clara looked at her steadily. That's a very specific account. It's the truth. Then you won't mind if I ask you something specific. Margaret spread her hands open, inviting.
Curtis Dempsey, Clara said, the man you were engaged to. Did he die before or after you arrived at Carter Ranch? The tiniest pause before. That's why I was and the land claim filed in his name 3 weeks ago in Billings. Who filed that?
The air in the post office changed. Margaret's face went very still. "I don't know what you're referring to," she said. "The territorial land office does," Clara said. "And the federal document examiner who's coming to Cedar Falls in 2 weeks will have a good deal to say about the signature on that filing. " "Margaret said nothing. " And Gerald's affidavit, Clara said, "The conflict of interest flag is already on record.
That one was actually my idea, so I know exactly what it says. Something cracked very slightly in Margaret's composure. The performance held but barely like a pane of glass that has been struck and hasn't shattered yet, but has gone opaque with fracture lines. You came here as a mail order bride, Margaret said. Her voice was softer now, more dangerous.
Doesn't it bother you being brought out here like like livestock selected through letters because no one wanted you at home? The words were designed to land, and they did. Clara felt them. She also knew what they were for. "Is that the best you have? " she said quietly.
Margaret blinked. "Because I want you to understand something," Clara said. "I came here on my own terms for my own reasons, and I have made my own place here. " "What you think of that, what you call it, doesn't change what it is. " She picked up her letter from the counter. And if you intend to file any more fraudulent claims in dead men's names, I'd encourage you to reconsider. You won't find this valley as easy to work as it was 3 years ago.
She walked to the door. She stopped with her hand on it. Miss Alcott, she said without turning around. Whatever happened between you and William, I don't know the full truth of it, and I'm not certain I ever will. But I know this.
Whatever you think you're going to get from coming back here, you are not going to get it. The window has closed. She walked out. Her hands were shaking by the time she reached the end of the block. She stopped, pressed her back against the wall of the dry goods store, and breathed.
It wasn't fear. It was something else. The aftermath of saying exactly what she meant precisely, and without softening, which always cost her more than people expected it to. She pushed off the wall and kept walking. Roy came to find her before supper.
He had the look of a man who had been watching something from a careful distance and had decided the time for distance was over. "She's leaving," he said. Rode out an hour ago. Gerald left this morning. Clara sat down on the bench outside the Gilmore house.
"Good," she said. Roy sat down beside her. He was quiet for a moment. "William is going to want to know what you said to her. He can ask me himself.
He's on his way. Roy, she said, "Is there something you want to say to me directly? " He turned his head in his hands, the bad knee stretched out in front of him. "I want to say," he said slowly, "that in 8 years, I have watched that man make every decision alone. Carry every problem alone, refuse help from anyone who offered it, because accepting help meant admitting there was something he couldn't handle. " He paused. And then you walked into a situation that wasn't yours with no standing and no obligation and you found the discrepancy in the document and you composed the wire and you walked out to face Margaret Alcott in the post office while he was still in Billings.
Clara said nothing. He needs to know. Roy said what that means. I think he knows but someone should say it out loud. You're saying it to me.
Clara said not to him. I'm saying it to the person who needs to hear that what she did mattered. He stood up putting weight on the good knee. The rest of it is between the two of you. He walked away.
Clara sat on the bench in the early evening. She thought about her father. She thought about the 11-year-old who had decided watching her mother sell the furniture that the only reliable thing in the world was herself. That you kept your own counsel and you didn't give anyone the power to take things from you by wanting them too much. She thought about William saying I was afraid of losing someone before I even had them.
She thought I know exactly what that is. She sat with that for a long time. M William came at dusk. He tied Duchess at the post and came and sat beside her on the bench without asking the way people do when they have moved past the stage of asking. They sat in silence for a moment.