“We’re alone in the forest,” I say. “I’m not about to demand murder evidence without a gun in my hand.” I put my hand out. “How about you give me that instead of burying it?”
“Burying?” Another widening of the eyes. Then he winces. “Burying the evidence. No, that wasn’t what I was doing. It’s just…”
“Maybe not evidence of a crime, but evidence of a secret. A lover’s gift.”
He nods, his gaze still down, shoulders hunched as he sits with the bracelet in his hand. “I wanted to bury it. Pretend it never happened. But that isn’t fair. It isn’t right. This was…” His hand closes around it. “Important.”
“So what were you going to do with it?”
He exhales. “I don’t know. I should talk to Nancy. That’s the right thing to do, and maybe I’m a coward, but I just…” He opens his hand again. “I shouldn’t pretend it didn’t happen. Nancy and I need to discuss why it happened. I just … I want to protect my family. Down south, I had girlfriends and lovers, and that’s all I thought there was, for a guy like me. Then I met Nancy, and she’s so much more. A friend, a partner, a lover. And now…” He takes a deep breath. “I just don’t want Nancy to think I blame her.”
“Blame your wife for you screwing around? I should hope not.”
He looks up in genuine confusion. “Screwing…?” A short laugh. “Of course that’s what you thought. That’s how these things normally go, isn’t it? I wasn’t having an affair with Ellen.”
“But you wanted to,” I say. “You gave her that.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not the one who gave it to her.”
There’s a moment where I don’t understand. As soon as I do, I feel stupid. I also feel very close-minded. My brain drew what seemed like the obvious conclusion, because it’s the one that fit the norms I was raised with, and even if I’m long past that, my mind still follows that long-carved path.
I remember Tomas’s pain on seeing the bracelet. I remember how he’d hesitated, coming into the tent with Nancy, how he’d hung back and made sure of his welcome before comforting her. It was behavior consistent with a man who’d cheated on his wife. It wasn’t, however, what I’d expect from a man who’d just discovered his wife had been cheating on him.
“You knew,” I say. “About Nancy and Ellen.”
He forces a wry smile. “I might have barely gotten my high school diploma, but I can figure some things out just fine. I knew they were more than friends. I just…” He takes a deep breath. “I thought it was a fling. That bracelet means it was more. Nancy loved her and … I didn’t expect that.”
“Finding out your wife was having a fling with a woman must have come as a shock.”
That twist of a smile again. “Such a shock that I went crazy and shot Ellen? The redneck trucker so horrified by the thought that his wife prefers women that he destroys the evidence? No. I knew what Nancy was when I married her and…”
His face screws up in pain as he rubs his hands over it. “Growing up, my friends called gay people fags and homos. Did I stop them? Hell, no. I chimed in, because that’s what we were taught—that homosexuality was wrong. When I was twenty, a bunch of us were at a bar, and my friends went after a gay guy. We beat the shit out of him, just because we were drunk and spoiling for a fight and he seemed a perfectly fine target. After I sobered up, I realized what I’d done, and I was sick. I didn’t exactly start joining gay-pride parades, though. I just stopped caring about other people’s sexual orientation. Then along came Nancy, and I still didn’t care, but in the wrong way, you know?”
“You married her knowing she preferred women.”
He nods. “That’s not acceptable here. We might be all about nature and kindness and love thy neighbor, but we must procreate, and for Nancy to say ‘Sure, I’ll have babies, but I’d rather be married to a woman’ was not an acceptable work-around. Her parents caught her with a settler girl, and they offered her in marriage to this other guy. Nancy said she’d rather marry me. I was…”
He flails his hand. “I was a twenty-five-year-old man who figured he wasn’t ever getting a wife because he wasn’t born here. Then this eighteen-year-old girl is in trouble, and she wants to marry me, and I like her, and I know this other guy’s a jerk, so I say sure. Look at me. A damn hero stepping up like that. A hero, though, would have taken her out of here. Taken her back to Rockton and let her go down south to be with someone she wanted.”
The tears start again, and he looks away, bracelet still in his hands. I remember their obvious love and affection for one another, and I know they’ve made the best of a difficult situation. Nancy just needed more, and she’d tried to get it without hurting her husband. I don’t see wrongdoing on either side. I see tragedy. The question I must ask, though, is whether one tragedy led to another. Led to murder.
* * *
I don’t question Tomas further. There’s no point. He knows he’s a suspect. He may even realize Nancy is, and something tells me he’ll protect her even more than he’ll protect himself.
I tell Dalton about Nancy and Ellen. He says,
“Fuck, that’s a mess all around.”
He’s right. Everyone loses here. And for what? As Tomas said, marrying a woman wouldn’t have stopped Nancy from procreating, if that was so important to the settlement. They never gave her that option, though, which means that, like most of those objections, the justifications are just excuses to backfill a decision rising from ignorance rather than rational thought.
However “enlightened” the Second Settlement is, they’d still brought their prejudices with them, because those who made this law had grown up in the same world as Tomas, where it was fine to insult and beat homosexuals because they needed to be “scared” onto the right track.
The settlement elders had given Nancy an ultimatum, and she made the best of it, choosing her own husband. Tomas knew he wasn’t her actual “choice,” but he went along with it, driven by those old prejudices, too, the ones that doubtless whispered that if he was a good enough husband, Nancy wouldn’t miss anything. Only she did. Ellen comes along, they become friends, and then more than friends … and Ellen winds up dead.
Tomas might have said he understood—maybe wanted to understand—but when he first found out, had he seen red, grabbed his forbidden shotgun, and hunted down his rival? Or did Nancy do it in a lover’s quarrel? Perhaps she expected to go south with Ellen in the spring, and Ellen told her no. Or Nancy didn’t want to go south, so Ellen threatened to tell Tomas about them.
Where does Abby fit into this? Nowhere, I realize. Nor does she need to. Ellen was helping Abby’s parents. She might have been looking after the baby when she’d been shot, and with Abby hidden under Ellen’s coat, her killer never realized they’d almost claimed a second life. Solving Ellen’s murder may not find Abby’s parents, but it is still justice for one victim I found in the snow.