“Everyone?”

Margery hesitated a moment, then took a couple of steps toward Alice. She rolled up her shirt-sleeve, tugging it above the elbow, revealing a waxy, coin-shaped scar on her upper arm. “Shot me with his hunting rifle when I was eleven years old because I sassed him. If my brother hadn’t pushed me out of the way he would have killed me.”

Alice took a moment to speak. “Didn’t the police do anything?”

“Police?” She said it poh-lice. “Up here people take care of things their own way. When Memaw found out what he’d done she took a horsewhip to him. Only two people he was ever scared of, his own mom and pop.”

Margery put her head down so that her thick dark hair fell forward. She ran her fingers nimbly over her scalp until she found what she was looking for and pulled her hair to one side, revealing an inch-wide gap of bare skin. “That was where he pulled me up two flights of stairs by my hair three days after Memaw died. Pulled a handful of it clean out. They say he still had half my scalp attached to it when he dropped it.”

“You don’t remember?”

“Nope. He’d knocked me out before he did it.”

Alice stood in stunned silence. Margery’s voice was as level as always.

“I’m so sorry,” she faltered.

“Don’t be. When he died there were two people in this whole town came to his funeral and one of those only did cos they felt sorry for me. You know how much this town loves to meet up? You imagine how much they hated him not even to show up at a man’s funeral.”

“You . . . don’t miss him, then.”

“Hah! Round here, Alice, you get a lot of what you call sundowners. They’re good old boys in daylight hours, but come nightfall when they get to drinking, they’re basically a pair of fists looking for a target.”

Alice thought of Mr. Van Cleve’s bourbon-fueled rants and shivered, despite the heat.

“Well, my daddy wasn’t even a sundowner. He didn’t need drink. Cold as ice. Don’t have a single good memory of him.”

“Not a single one?”

Margery thought for a moment. “Oh, no, you’re right. There was one.”

Alice waited.

“Yup. The day the sheriff stopped by to tell me he was dead.”

Margery turned from the mule and the two women finished up in silence.

Alice felt completely out of her depth. Anyone else, she would have commiserated. Margery seemed to need less sympathy than anyone she’d ever met.

Perhaps Margery detected some of these mental gymnastics, or perhaps she felt she’d been a little harsh, because she turned to Alice and smiled suddenly. Alice was struck by the fact that she was actually quite beautiful. “You asked me a while back if I was ever frightened, up there in the mountains, on my own.”

Alice’s hand stilled on the girth buckle.

“Well, I’ll tell you something. I’ve been afraid of nothing since the day my daddy passed. See that there?” She pointed toward the mountains that loomed in the distance. “That’s what I dreamed of as a child. Me and Charley, up there, that’s my heaven, Alice. I get to live my heaven every day.”

She let out a long breath, and as Alice was still digesting the softening of her face, the strange luminosity of her smile, she turned and slapped the back of her saddle. “Right. You all set? Big day for you. Big day for us all.”

 

* * *

 

• • •

It was the first week that the four women had split up and ridden their own routes. They planned to meet at the library at the beginning and end of each week, to debrief, try to keep the books in order, and check the condition of those returned. Margery and Beth rode the longer routes, often leaving their books at a second base, a schoolhouse ten miles away and bringing those back fortnightly, while Alice and Izzy did the routes closer to home. Izzy had grown in confidence now, and several times Alice had arrived as she was already riding out, her polished new boots from Lexington gleaming, her humming audible the whole way down Main Street. “Good morning, Alice,” she would call, her wave a little tentative, as if she were still not quite sure of the response she was going to get.

Alice didn’t want to admit how nervous she felt. It wasn’t just her fear of getting lost, or of making a fool of herself, but the conversation she had overheard between Beth and Mrs. Brady the week before, as she had unsaddled Spirit outside.

Oh, you all are just marvelous. But I confess I am a little anxious about the English girl.

She’s doing fine, Mrs. Brady. Marge says she knows most of the routes pretty well.

It’s not the routes, Beth dear. The whole point of using local girls to do the job was that the people you visit know you. They trust you not to look down at them, or to give their families anything unsuitable to read. If we have some strange girl going in talking with an accent and acting like the Queen of England, well, they’re going to be on their guard. I’m afraid it’s going to damage the whole scheme.

Spirit had snorted and they had quieted abruptly, as if realizing someone might be outside. Alice, ducking back behind the window, had felt a spasm of anxiety. If local people wouldn’t take her books, she realized, they wouldn’t let her have the job. She imagined herself suddenly back inside the Van Cleve house, heavy with silence, Annie’s beady, suspicious gaze on her and a decade stretching ahead of her at every hour. She thought of Bennett, and the wall of his sleeping back, his refusal to try to talk about what was going on. She thought of Mr. Van Cleve’s irritation that they had not yet provided him with a “little grandbabby.”

If I lose this job, she thought, and something solid and heavy settled in her stomach, I will have nothing.

 

* * *

 

• • •

Good mornin’!”

The whole way up the mountain Alice had been practicing. She had murmured, “Well, good morning! And how are you this fine day?” to Spirit over and over, rolling her mouth around the vowels, trying to stop herself sounding so clipped and English.

A young woman, probably not much older than Alice, emerged from a cabin and peered at her, shading her eyes. In the sunlit, grassy patch in front of the house, two children looked up at her. They resumed their desultory fight over a stick while a dog watched intently. A bowl of unshucked sweetcorn had been left, as if awaiting transport, and a pile of laundry lay on a sheet on the ground. Some pulled weeds were thrown in a pile by the vegetable patch, the earth still on their roots. The house appeared surrounded by such half-finished tasks. From inside Alice could hear a baby crying, a furious, disconsolate wail.

“Mrs. Bligh?”

“Can I help you?”