The List Beneath Her Dress. Redstone Flats Buried Its Daughters Alive.
The first thing Caleb Horn noticed was that the girl was not crying.
That frightened him more than if she had been screaming.
She stood beneath the crooked limb of a half-dead cottonwood with her wrists tied behind the trunk, her bare feet sinking into the blistered red dirt, her torn gray dress stiff with dust and sweat. The afternoon sun had bleached the desert almost white. Heat shimmered above the stones. Somewhere beyond the ridge, a hawk screamed once and vanished into the brightness.
Caleb reined in his horse.
The girl lifted her head.
She could not have been more than twenty.
Her face was narrow beneath a curtain of tangled brown hair, and there was dried blood at the corner of her mouth. One sleeve had been ripped away. The hem of her dress hung strangely, bunched around one leg as though something beneath the fabric had caught.
Caleb swung from the saddle.
The girl stiffened.
“Easy,” he said.
He moved slowly, palms open.
He had learned long ago that frightened people watched hands before faces.
When he came within ten feet, she whispered, “Don’t.”
Caleb stopped.
Her eyes were enormous.
Hazel, he thought.
Hazel and terrified.
“Don’t what?”
Her gaze dropped toward her dress.
Then came the words that made the desert seem suddenly silent.
“Don’t look down there.”
Caleb did not.
He looked at the ground.
There were rope marks dragged across the dirt. Deep heel furrows. Two horses had stood beneath the tree recently. One shod in front only. The second had a chipped left rear shoe.
Both sets of tracks led east.
Then, thirty yards away, one set curved sharply south.
Circled.
Returned.
Caleb’s jaw tightened.
Someone had left her tied here.
Someone else was coming back.
The old memory rose before he could stop it.
A barn in Wyoming.
Snow against the doors.
A woman named Annie Mercer begging him not to leave her alone while Caleb, young and stupid and wearing a deputy’s star, rode after the wrong man.
When he returned, Annie was dead.
For eleven years he had heard the sentence she spoke before he left.
Please don’t make me stay here.
Caleb removed his coat.
The girl flinched when he stepped closer.
“I’m covering you,” he said quietly. “Nothing else.”
He draped the coat over her shoulders.
She stared at him as if he had performed some trick.
Caleb pulled a knife and sawed through the rope around the tree.
When her arms came free, her knees folded.
He caught her before she struck the dirt.
She recoiled immediately, breathing hard.
“All right,” he said, releasing her. “Stand if you can.”
She managed it.
“Who did this?”
Her lips trembled.
A sound drifted over the ridge.
Hoofbeats.
Caleb turned.
The rider came fast, a black shape against the burning horizon.
The girl whispered, “Oh God.”
“Know him?”
She nodded.
The man descended the ridge without slowing.
Caleb stepped away from the girl and rested one hand near his revolver.
The rider stopped twenty feet away.
Broad shoulders. Yellow neckerchief. Dark beard. A double-barreled shotgun across his saddle.
His eyes moved from Caleb to the severed rope.
Then back again.
