We are both exactly where we choose to be." "Yes, ma'am." Calhoun reached into his coat. "I have a document here filed by Mr. Wade Briggs requesting temporary I know what it requests." Martha came down the porch steps.
She stopped 6 ft from Calhoun and looked at him steadily. And then she looked past him at Wade, who was still on his horse, still wearing the grief-stricken face. She looked at him for a long count of 5 seconds without speaking. And Wade's expression shifted just in a way that Sam suspected most people in that yard didn't notice. Martha noticed.
Sam could see it in the line of her back. "Sheriff Calhoun," she said, returning her eyes to him. "I am going to show you something and I want you to look at it carefully." She pulled back her sleeves, both of them. The bandages were clean and white against her skin and they ran from her wrists halfway up her forearms and even covered the shape of what was underneath them was unmistakable.
One of the deputies shifted in his saddle. The other one looked at Wade. "I was tied to a fence post on Mr. Cole's property line yesterday morning," Martha said. "In January without my coat. My 3-year-old daughter was barefoot in the snow beside me.
I was left there by two men employed by the Briggs household." She let that sit for precisely the right number of seconds. "I did not flee my home in a state of distress. I was removed from it and bound to a post and left to die. Mr. Cole found us and saved our lives."
Calhoun looked at the bandages. He looked at Sam. He looked at the document in his hand. His jaw worked. "Those could be," Wade began from his horse.
"Mr. Briggs." Calhoun's voice came out sharper than Sam had heard it before with a quality in it that suggested Calhoun was doing his own calculations and had just arrived at an answer he didn't like. "I didn't ask you to speak." Wade closed his mouth. The grief-stricken face held, but the eyes behind it went flat and cold.
"Mrs. Briggs," Calhoun said carefully. "Are you stating of your own free will that you are here by choice and wish to remain?" "I am." "And that you were not brought here against your will by Mr. Cole? Mr. Cole saved my life and the life of my daughter.
I am here because I choose to be here and because it is the only safe place available to me. She held Calhoun's eyes without blinking. If you serve that document today, Sheriff, you will be returning a woman and the three-year-old child to the custody of the man who left them to freeze. I want you to be clear that you understand that before you decide what to do next. The silence in the yard was absolute.
Calhoun looked down at the document in his hand for a long moment. Then he folded it slowly and deliberately and put it back in his coat pocket. I'm going to need to conduct a proper investigation before I can act on this petition, he said. He did not look at Wade when he said it. Mrs. Briggs, I'd ask that you remain available for questioning in the coming days.