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Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tucker’s footfalls were heavier than usual as he made the walk from the hotel proper down to the cabins at the woods’ edge, not from a heaviness of heart—although there was weight there, he couldn’t lie—but rather from the physical weight he carried. On one shoulder, Tucker had his typewriter and paper in its case, and over the other a bag full of recordings and Pony’s call logs. Overhead, the sky was towering and blue all the way up to God’s grin. Birds sang breathlessly. It was spring; all around him were the signs of bright industry. Staff mowed the Winnet fields, dug weeds from the beds, planted new annuals from the greenhouse, and painted pollen-grimed windowsills. The diplomats were not gone yet, but they would be soon, and the Avallon needed to be ready for whoever came next. Some of these staff members waved when they saw Tucker on his walk down. A few even addressed him with that odd, flying hand gesture that they used both to greet and to reference June, a conflation of their identities that he wished was true.

He was tired, awake, anticipatory, unsure; he hadn’t felt this tangled since his first post after the academy. A long time ago. Iowa. Their SAC had Tucker pulling sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week trying to track down a hog thief. A quaint-sounding gig, but in practice, a bloodstained, high-dollar rustling affair that involved hundreds of heads of hog traveling across state lines in the dead of night. There wasn’t much glory work to be had, but what there was, SAC Des Moines performed, while Tucker resolutely took statements from neighbors, staked out in ditches while tornadoes roared a few counties away, and scraped blood-soaked floorboards into purpose-built crates destined for the lab. His SAC grunted orders: Minnick, get up. Minnick, now. Minnick, get their statements. Minnick, sit down. Don’t leave this place ’til they come back. Minnick, I have ass hairs longer than that memo, do better.

Such a long time ago.

“Hugh, you here?” Tucker called as he entered the Trillium House, letting his bag slump on the bunk snugged along the hall wall. One of his surveillance recordings was already playing from deeper in the cabin; a scratchy German conversation muttered back and forth. Stepping into the dim sitting room, he found Sandy Gilfoyle parked in a chair before the unlit fireplace as the murmured German filled the room around him.

Behind him, he heard the door open and then, belatedly, a knock on it.

“You have a minute?” June Hudson asked.

She was in the doorway like the mountains were on the horizon; once he’d seen her, there was no point looking anywhere else. There was only one question Tucker wanted the answer to, but in the way of men and women since time immemorial, he could ask anything but it. “How are the diplomats doing?”

He knew that Edgar Gilfoyle had proposed to her. Even though he’d dismantled his surveillance equipment, the walls of the hotel had their own ears and eyes. Everyone in the hotel knew. Knowing that the Grotto and the landscapers and the porters and Toad’s girls in housekeeping were all backing him instead of Gilfoyle brought him not a lick of comfort. In the end, it was June’s heart, and whatever this family was to her. Tucker was just a man. Gilfoyle was an entire way of life.

“They painted a swastika on my ballroom. One of the Italians spit on one of the Japanese consuls. Breznay left the maids a hateful letter. Did you get done what you needed to get done?” she asked. “To keep your position.”

It was unbearably polite. Tucker stacked a sheaf of paperwork, squaring the edges. The real work of packing would take far more than that, but it felt important to look industrious, unbothered. He said, “I know they already told you.”

She admitted, “Durand did just now. Is that all right? Do you feel all right?”

An easy question, finally. He smiled at her.

She peered at him as if looking for the complication in this confession, but in this broad daylight, there wasn’t any. She was the only complication.

“I need to talk to you,” June said. She glanced at Sandy. “I think we better talk alone.”

They stepped out back as the German recording continued to mutter in the background. The porch was a rudimentary slab with no railings, just an excuse to drink and look at the mountains. The groundskeepers hadn’t dragged chairs out, so Tucker and June sat on the edge of the concrete, legs dangling into the weeds. Mockingbirds called to each other; in the woods, a deer woofed in distant alarm. She stared up at the mountains; he stared at her.

“I don’t know what he can hear,” June said, “but I don’t want him to be implicated in this in case he can. I want to keep Hannelore off that train.”

This wasn’t at all what he’d expected her to say. “June.”

“I know, and don’t lecture me on things I already know. I know what I can live with and what I can’t, and I can’t live with this. Seems to me if I can get the train out of the station without her on it and her parents not crying the alarm until New Jersey, the wheels’ll already be in motion. They’ll look for her, but they’ll think she went missing, and they won’t stop the machine for one little girl. So we just keep her off that train and they’ll get on that boat.”

“And then?”

“And then even if she shows back up, it’s months before Pennybacker’s stooges can get paperwork through to do anything about it.”

It was a glorious idea. It was a terrible idea. The sort of potent, impossible idea the sweetwater would whisper on a clear day. “How will you get her away today?”

“The water.”

A prickle of nerves, both memory and anticipation, just below his belly button.

June spidered her fingers, as if the air was sweetwater and she could read it. “You still afraid of it, after all this?”

Casto Springs. Poison Point. He could remember lying in the dark, knowing the sweetwater was moving in its secret way beneath the rock, so very interested in how he was feeling. He knew now the poison had been inside him, not the water. The sweetwater should have been afraid of him , not the other way around. What was it doing before people arrived? Remembering last year’s snow. “ Afraid ’s not the right word.”

“What is the right word?”

He looked at the side of her face, at her pensive mouth, her clever eyes. He couldn’t bear it anymore. “June, what am I to you?”

The breeze made her flutter her eyelashes low. “What do you want to be to me?”

The first night Tucker lived as Tucker Rye Minnick instead of Richard Monrow Minnick had lasted forever. He’d traded lodging in a room in exchange for chasing down a homesteader’s bull, and he’d curled on a quilt on the pantry floor listening to the man berate his wife in a hard, low tone, and thought of how he was still within walking distance of his mother and sisters and he could still go back to face justice instead of leaving everything behind. He thought of prison and he thought of hanging. He thought of his father. He had the cold, miserable realization that he would never be happy again.

But in the morning, the sun was clear, and the road ahead of him was downhill and the road behind uphill, and he felt like he had started a completely new life. Tucker Rye Minnick. Whatever happened would be something that he would have never even imagined.

That was how he felt now.

“Everything,” he replied. “I want to be what makes you smile when we come home to each other and I want to be what makes you settle under a full moon and I want to be what makes you wild when I’m gone and I want to be what makes you laugh when I’m inside you and I want to be what makes you weep when I die and I want to be everything else in between and I want to take you out into the world and see it with you, but if it has to be here, then here is where I land.”

Words rarely came easily to Tucker, but they didn’t stop coming to him then, breaking through to the surface until there were no more left. He wanted her to know. He wanted every part of her to know, in a thorough way, in a way that left no room for doubt.

June whispered, “Then that’s what you should be to me.”

Much is made of first kisses, and not enough of third or fourth kisses. Not enough is made of the third or fourth time a man takes a woman’s hand. Not enough of the third or fourth time a woman smiles at a man with all her teeth, like a girl. June and Tucker kissed, Bureau and hotel, although that was only true for another few hours, and it was better for not being the first time. Then he tugged her back inside. She let herself be tugged, and he knew she expected and wanted him to take her to one of the rooms. He wanted that, too. But that was for later.

Instead, he led her into the sitting room. The recorded German conversation had gotten a little heated. Sandy was still in front of the fireplace, notes piled beside him. If June had looked closely, she would probably have recognized the handwriting. Tucker pulled the curtains to cover the windows between the lawn and the cabin. One window did not have a curtain, so he pushed a hutch to block the view. He returned to Sandy’s side. The youngest Gilfoyle sat motionless, gazing at nothing, handsome and scarred.

When he’d first encountered Sandy, Tucker had thought he was just another Gilfoyle, but he realized now that Sandy was very little like the rest of his family. He was much more like June. Made sense, really, once you knew.

Tucker said to him, “Twenty horsemen.”

The silence stretched out in the dim.

Then Sandy turned on one elbow and said, “April Fools’, June.”