Chapter Thirty-Three
Janesville, 1905
Half past five o’clock in the morning Arden looks back over her shoulder as she runs, even though there’s nothing to see now, and it makes her sad. In different circumstances, she might have liked Officer Virgil Holt, and he might have liked her. All she can do now is wish him well and keep running.
Alongside her, Clyde runs, matching his stride to hers. She wants to stop and swoon and melt into his arms, let the rest of the world go hang, but there isn’t time for it, not now. If they’re caught, she doesn’t want it to be like this, with so many questions unanswered on both sides. If they can get away free, there will be hours and days and years yet for kissing. If. She glances back again, hoping for an empty road.
“Don’t look back,” he says. “It slows you down.”
“I know.”
They run on the hard-packed road, past squat dark houses one after another, houses full of good people still asleep. Her hand hurts, her feet hurt, her lungs hurt, everything hurts. But the pain doesn’t stop her from relishing the feeling of running. She is going forward with a freed mind and a freed body, and Clyde is beside her, and there is so much they are leaving behind.
“He’ll be all right, won’t he?” she asks, her breath coming harder but not so hard that she can’t form words.
“Yes, of course. I barely touched him.”
“He thought I killed Ray,” she says.
“I know.”
“But I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“Because it was you,” she says, even though she doesn’t want to say it out loud, but if she doesn’t say it now, she’ll always be thinking it, for the rest of her life. The rest of their life together, if they’re going to have one.
“Ah,” he says, slowing then stopping. He stares down into her face. She looks away, looks behind him. Have they run far enough, for now? They’re at the edge of this small town. It seems like a lovely place to live. A haven. But because of the choices they’ve made, it’s a place to be escaped. Behind her are sleepy, closed-up houses. Behind him are trees and the open road.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” she says.
Instead of responding, he looks behind them and says, “Was it just one officer?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no one else chasing us?”
“No.”
“Just to be safe,” he says and nods toward a stand of trees off to the side of the road. She shuffles into the shelter of their covering branches, Clyde following closely. The sun is nudging up over the horizon now, but its light is blocked and scattered by the leaves, so they stand in a pocket of shadow.
He says, “I wasn’t sure. That’s why I didn’t come in. I didn’t know how many there were, whether we were outmatched, and I couldn’t take the chance you might get hurt.”
He kneels down at her feet silently, and something small and silver flashes in his hand, and she feels the first of the cuffs on her ankles give way. Instead of throwing the cuff away, he tucks it into a small bag at his waist and then starts on the next.
Now that they are safe, at least for now, she feels a dizzying relief everywhere in her body. The worst she feared hasn’t come true, and the best thing she could hope for—Clyde, here, alive—is right in front of her. She begins to cry, and when she can reach up to her face freely with both hands to wipe away the tears, the joy makes her cry even harder.
“I wasn’t sure it was you, at the door,” she tells him. “He kept talking about a dead man, but he couldn’t tell me what the dead man looked like. I thought it was probably Ray. I prayed it was. I was terrified he might have meant you.”
“It wasn’t me,” he says, head down. He picks the lock on the second ankle cuff, it pops open with a soft clang, and he tucks it away. “At the door, knocking, that was me. I would have figured something out, you know. I would have gotten in to rescue you.”
“No need,” she says. “Rescued myself.”
“It’s not a joke.”
“I wasn’t joking. Now I want to know what happened.”
He doesn’t look up, still crouched at her feet, turning the silver stub over and over in his fingers. “I heard there was a man with you on the road. Doreen came back to New York, after you sent her packing. I thought I was stupid for not seeing it, that the reason you didn’t want to marry me was that there was someone else. We were apart so often, it made sense that you’d seek comfort in another man.”
“Never.”
“That’s what I thought. But I wasn’t sure. That seed of doubt got in, and—”
“I know.” She breathes out. “I know.”
“So I needed to see for myself. Who you’d chosen over me.”
“But I hadn’t. I was trying to protect you,” she says, her voice trembling. “He said he was going to kill you if I didn’t…”
Clyde stands up, leaning in, his eyes shining with tears. He lays his palms flat against her shoulders. She can feel the warmth of his hands. That soft welcome feeling, after the torture of the past few weeks, makes her light-headed with happiness. His touch is so gloriously ordinary that it almost undoes her completely. She puts her hand against his rough cheek and leans forward to kiss him, a soft, swift kiss, as simple and honest as their very first, under the mistletoe.
“I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”
“Nothing did. At least nothing fatal.”
He lifts his shirt. She squints to see in the half dark, but once she sees it, it’s clear. His stomach is wrapped with something white, with a slash of dark brown cutting all the way across it. The dark stain is soaked into the bandage, a few inches above his waist. Drying, darkening blood. Only hours ago, it would have been red.
“Knife?” she asks him.
“Ax.”