A gunshot cracked through the blizzard. Then silence. A silence thicker than blood. On the snow plains of Wyoming territory, December 1883. A long trail of red dragged itself toward the dark line of Ponderosa pines.
Two bodies lay close together at the end of that trail. Clothing frozen solid into sheets of ice. Black hair spread across the snow, each strand frozen separately, as if the cold had stopped time at the exact moment they fell. Around the wrist of the woman in front, a rope, thin, frayed by cold, the cut end still trailing in the snow, severed by a blade, not torn by struggle. Someone had tied them together.
Not the storm, not an accident. Someone wanted them dead, and wanted them never found apart. Somewhere behind the pines, a figure stood watching. Motionless, waiting from across the white field. A rider on a gray horse emerged through the driving snow.
Boots came down, sinking kneedeep, 40 years old. A wool coat worn through at the left elbow. The eyes of a man who had buried his wife seven winters ago, and had never once stopped counting the days. A bare hand pressed against the throat of the first woman. a pulse, faint, but there he exhaled, turned toward the second face, and his hand froze in midair.
Gideon Marsh had lived through 11 Wyoming winters. He knew this cold, the way it arrived without announcement, the way it settled into the bones of the land, and the bones of a man like it intended to stay, like it had paid rent and expected to be treated accordingly. He was 40 years old. He moved like someone who had learned to waste nothing, not energy, not words, not the particular kind of grief that doesn't announce itself either, just arrives, settles, stays. His coat was dark wool, worn through at the left elbow, repaired twice with thread that didn't match, because matching thread had not seemed important at the time, and still didn't.
His hat brim collected snow the way a roof collects rain. patient, heavy, uncomplaining. The horse, a gray quarter horse named Abel, plotted forward without drama. Gideon appreciated that about Abel. No opinions, no hesitation, just forward motion through whatever the world decided to throw at them this particular December, which was considerable.
He'd been checking the north fence line for 3 days running, not because he wanted to be out here, because a rancher who ignores his fences loses cattle. And Gideon Marsh could not absorb another loss. Not this season, not any season if he was being truthful with himself, which he tried to be, even when the truth was not especially comfortable. The homestead sat 4 miles east of the Laram foothills, 43 acres of hard ground. two creeks, a stand of ponderosa pine running along the northern edge, dark and weighted with snow, a cabin he and Norah had built together in the summer of 1876 with her own hands.
Gideon had done the heavy work. Norah had done everything else, which turned out to be the larger portion. She'd come from Boston's. People always said that with a specific look, as though Boston explained something, as though it were a condition rather than a city. Norah had not cared what people said.
She had wanted the real West, not the dime novel version, the actual ground, the actual sky, the horizon that went on long enough to make a person feel both very small and strangely free. She had gotten exactly what she wanted. She had also gotten five Wyoming winters before the fever came in the fifth one. And Gideon could not stop it, no matter how much wood he split, or water he boiled, or prayers he pushed into a sky that was not that particular winter listening. She had been gone 7 years.
7 years, 2 months, 11 days. Not that he was counting, except that he was. the way a person counts the steps from the cabin door to the well. Not deliberately, just because some distances get built into how you move. The cabin, when he was not in it, sat exactly as Norah had left it.
Her copper kettle on the hook above the stove, her sewing basket beside the eastern window, where the morning light came in best, the thread inside still organized by color, smallest spool to largest, the way she always kept it. Her quilt, gray blue wool, hand dyed with wild sage, folded at the foot of the bed, edges matched, corners squared seven years. He still folded it the same way. People in town had offered their thoughts on this. Mrs. Alcott at the dry goods store had suggested once in her gentlest voice that it might be time to put some of Norah's things away, that keeping everything as it was might be making the grief harder.