“You can’t know that.”
“You know about saint’s hands?”
Now his sleepy eyes widened and he wheezed a sick laugh. “Like you can’t fucking imagine.”
“I have them. And they tell me when people are threatening me, or thinking about it. And they aren’t even tingling right now.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Pea, sitting on the bar, a cocktail in one hand and a man’s tie in the other, looked as though she could hardly remember my name but she hummed warmly against my fingertips. Pea’s thoughts of me weren’t threats, but they were enough of something that my hands could touch them anyhow. I had never felt that with a woman before.
“Then tell me something,” Trent said, after a moment. “Something you wouldn’t want others to hear.”
It was a clever test. “I’m working for the fuzz,” I said, conversationally.
He’d been prepared for this; he only swallowed. “All right,” he said. “All right. You guys promise you’ll get me out? He’ll kill me for this. And they say he’s got the hands for betrayal.”
“You’ll have to work with us. But if you give us enough rope to hang him, we’ll give you a new life.”
“For me and my girl,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, blithely. What did I care about the moll of some aging stoolie? Pea was tap dancing on the bar and I was dreaming of picking her up and carrying her home.
7
The next morning I wake to a twisted cramp reverberating from my knuckles to my elbows. The light is yellow and young. The house is silent save for the creak of Pea’s shutters in the breeze. I run to her room first, even while I sift through the complicated braid of threats and feelings and realize that whoever wants to kill me isn’t currently in the house.
And neither is Pea.
The duvet is bunched at the end of her bed, last evening’s clothes lay a trail from the window to the closet. A perfume lingers. She is drying the Angèle Pernets by the headboard, and they anchor a scent indefinable, beloved.
She’s gone, hours earlier than normal, and the threat still encircles my joints, less forcefully but unmistakably. I wonder if it threatens her as well, and the thought spurs me back to my room. I hesitate, but I take the gun.
My hands can touch threats. That’s easy, the sort of thing I learned that first summer after the dream on the farm in Murbad, when my only threats came from vipers under stones in my path. But following them is the last thing I ever learned. Even now I have to gather my concentration like a skein of yarn.
This takes me to the river. Footprints the size of her garden boots slide through the mud to the track that follows the southern bank. It’s choked with leaves from the recent rain and perilous with gnarled roots. I used to prefer this path as a child, until the fact that Bobby Junior also lived in a house with river access made that inadvisable. I still would rather use the road into town, but for some reason Pea went this way, and so does that fading burn of rage and ill intent.
I follow.
The river is high today, red with mud and white with the foam of spinning cataracts. It kisses the edge of the towpath, a gentle seduction. But the undertow is strong enough to drown you in seconds. I keep my eye on the steady track of Pea’s boots and think. The trembling edges of an old memory: hard men with misted eyes, dredging the river for Thomas Pullman. One of the boys from Bobby Junior’s gang, my old tormentors. No one ever knew why he went to the river that night. None of the other boys ever admitted that they had come out on a dare, or that Tom had fallen into the river when he tried to push me in the treacherous near-darkness. All I had done was to step neatly to one side. The river did the rest.
I pass the overgrown grass of Craver’s church, the old family farmhouses nearby. Then I reach the backyard of the River House, squatting on the bank like a fat swan.
“They’re real beauties,” Pea says, out of sight.
Another voice answers her. “I used to call them dinosaur eggs when I was a kid.”
She laughs. “There’s sure something odd about them. Maybe that’s why they’re beautiful. That kind of unnatural nature.”
A pause. Mae says, “Watch the round leaves, they ain’t weeds, they’re for the aphids.”
“What’re they called?”
“Nasturtium. Taste good too, when they flower.”
I edge around the trees until I have a line of sight to the garden. Pea and Mae are on their knees in a muddy row of vegetables. They seem to be alone. But I have a hard time imagining that Mae could pose a threat credible enough to pull me out of bed. Someone in the big house above? And yet it feels like it’s here, not a dozen yards away.
“And what’s that?” she asks.
“Should be black-eyed peas, if the spider mites don’t get them this year.”
I wish I could say I’d never recognize the city Pea, Victor’s Pea, in this woman quietly weeding another man’s garden. But it’s only blood that washes off. Hearts abide. Pea doesn’t like mornings, but she left early enough to avoid me.
“That’s Alvin, you know,” Mae said, after another long pause. “What you said, unnatural nature. It’s God’s gift, those saint’s hands. That dream came to him four years ago, nothing any of us could do about it, and still there’s something uncanny about him. My poor boy. Even to me and his father, we can love him, but there’s some things you just aren’t given to understand.”
“My mother didn’t have them,” Pea says, “but my grandmother did. And so did my brother.”
“And you?”
She looks speculatively at her hands for a moment. Is she wondering if they will behave? There have
