He said. "I know how to use a rifle." Martha said. "Harold insisted, actually. He wanted me to be able to defend the house if something happened while he was away."
Something flickered across her face. The particular irony of a man who had armed his wife against outside threats and never once considered that the threat was him. "There's a certain poetry in that." Sam took the smaller rifle from the rack by the door and set it on the table within reach. "Don't open the door for anyone.
Not Calhoun, not anyone who works for Calhoun, not anyone who says they have a message from me. If I need to get back in, I'll knock three times, then once." "Three and one." Martha repeated. "Three and one."
He looked at her. "You'll be all right." She met his eyes steadily. "I've been all right through worse. Go."
The ride into Coldwater Creek took forty minutes on a good road. This morning the road was neither good nor bad. The storm had softened to nothing overnight and the snow lay thick and clean and still, muffling every sound, turning the valley into something that looked peaceful in a way Sam knew better than to trust. He rode fast and kept his eyes moving. Coldwater Creek was a town of 212 people, which Sam knew because Agnes Porter had told him once, with the precision of a woman who counts things, it had a main street of packed dirt that turned to mud in spring and froze solid in winter.
A general store, a sheriff's office, a church, a livery, a saloon that tried to pretend it was something more respectable than a saloon, and enough history of powerful men doing as they pleased that the town had developed a particular posture. The collective hunch of a community that has learned to look at the ground when trouble walks past. Agnes Porter's general store was the first building on the left coming in from the east road, which was the direction Sam came from, which was not an accident. Agnes had positioned it that way deliberately, she told him once. "I want to see everything that comes into this town before it sees me."
He tied his horse at the post outside and went in. Agnes was behind the counter, her gray hair pinned back under a practical hat, her reading glasses on the end of her nose, going through a ledger with the focused attention she brought to all accounting, other people's business included. She was 5six years old, had outlasted one husband, declined two subsequent proposals, and had built the most profitable store in the county through some combination of business acumen, total recall for what every customer had ever bought or said, and a moral backbone that Sam had tested once, inadvertently, and found to be without flex. She looked up, read his face, closed the ledger. "Martha Briggs," she said, "you already heard.
Roy Callam came in an hour ago for tobacco, mentioned that Wade Briggs was at the sheriff's office first thing this morning, filing a report." She pulled her glasses off. Missing person. He claimed his stepmother fled the house in a state of distress two nights ago and hasn't been seen. Said he was deeply concerned for her welfare and the welfare of her child.
Her voice was perfectly flat. He used the word welfare four times in Roy's telling of it, which means he used it at least six in the actual conversation. Sam put both hands on the counter. She's at my cabin. I found her tied to the fence post on my north line yesterday morning.
No coat. The little girl was barefoot in the snow. He reached into his coat pocket and put the folded paper on the counter. This was nailed above her head. Agnes unfolded it, read it.