The Ballad of Dinah Caldwell Read online

  His breathing gurgled and blood sprayed out from the wound. His jaws released. She’d punctured his throat.

  Dinah scrambled to her feet. He stumbled back, swayed, and fell. She couldn’t watch that.

  Her shoulder burned and just the weight of her arm was too much. She stumbled around the dying dog and back to her bags.

  Why this, too?

  She grabbed the backpack and hauled it with her good arm back to the blanket. A first aid kit was in there, shoved to the side. She pulled up her sleeve and grimaced. Her upper arm was mangled meat.

  Her head swam and her vision blurred, so she held still for a moment and inhaled slowly.

  Okay. Iodine. She could do this. So she didn’t have to use both hands, she braced the bottle between her knees and unscrewed the cap. Her eyes watered as she tried to flush out the wound.

  Flush, seal, wrap. She had to do it. Wincing every time her fingers touched the inflamed flesh, she spread a thin layer of antibiotic salve over her arm, and then wrapped it in strips of cloth from the kit.

  Now she had to go back near the dog to get the wood. Her whole body was crawling with chills.

  One armload of wood turned into three when she could only use one arm. Fiddling with the dying coals was too painful, so she used one of her matches to start a pile of twigs and sat there to feed the tiny flames.

  She had to get rid of that carcass if she didn’t want big cats or wolves coming for it. Though, maybe that was the answer. If she stayed here and a cougar came for the carcass and killed her, that was just nature. She’d be like a deer or a rabbit, there as food. Part of the cycle for something with bigger teeth and claws.

  Maybe that was the case, regardless.

  But she didn’t want to look at it anymore, so she trudged over to the dead dog and grabbed a hind leg with her right hand. The dog’s coarse fur rubbed her already raw palm. The ravine wasn’t far, but dragging an animal through the forest with a torn-up arm and bloody hands took her twice as long as it should have. She pushed the body over the edge of the ravine with her foot and didn’t watch it fall.

  The fire was burning steadily when she returned. Dinah sank to the ground and wrapped up in her blanket.

  She needed to get up. She needed to find Gates. But all she could do was lie there, feeling her bones turn numb as they pressed into the earth.

  She felt like she’d stopped breathing without even knowing it. Like the gray fog inside her had suffocated the impulses that said lungs, breathe. Heart, beat. And it had taken her a while to notice that disconnected parts of her body hadn’t been talking to each other.

  But it was a good thing. It kept her close to them. If they weren’t breathing and she wasn’t either, then at least they still shared that.

  By the time she woke up, the blisters on her palms had burst and her knuckles were sticky with seeping blood. When she sat up, the stiffness in her muscles made her groan. Moving her left arm was ridiculously painful. She dug the water jug out of the backpack and poured a little on her hands to wash off the blood.

  It must be early afternoon already, and somehow she had to clean her arm again. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead on them for a moment.

  Procrastinating wouldn’t make it hurt any less. She unwrapped the cloth strips. It didn’t look too bad. A little inflamed, maybe. Flushing it out with iodine was hard one-handed and from the side, and she wasn’t doing a thorough job of it. She applied salve and wrapped it in a clean bandage. Maybe it didn’t look great, but she couldn’t bother with getting help for it right now.

  She kicked dirt over the smoldering coals and shouldered the backpack on her good side.

  Gates lived on the other side of St. George, and that meant she was heading toward town.

  A little over fifteen miles away. She wouldn’t make it there today, but maybe by tomorrow morning. Her best bet was to find the road and stick inside the woods a few yards. She’d have taken her bike and used the road if she wasn’t certain he had people watching for her. And he couldn’t know where she was yet. Better for her to find him than for him to find her.

  She touched the smooth pebble in her pocket and the knife on her belt, reminding herself they were still there.

  She was the only person in these mountains who didn’t owe Gates anything.

  He owed her.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  ST. GEORGE USED TO BE BIGGER. ABANDONED HOUSES AND closed businesses skirted the ten busy streets that made up the town. Farms and small ranches spread out from it, but every year more fences came down between them—Gates’s money spreading like a disease, infecting everyone until he owned their jobs and their homes and their heartbeats.

  Dinah’s own pulse felt weak, sick. Dizzy. The dog bite had gotten infected since yesterday, and now her whole arm was swollen. Her skin was stretched too tight, angry and red. And that meant she couldn’t go around past the town and bang on the door of his ranch house. Not with yellow spots blooming in her vision.

  She’d walked through St. George all afternoon, looking for the doctor’s office. But it was empty, the schedule on the door showing he’d come around again in three days.

  If she was going to live long enough to find Gates, she needed water and a doctor. And the sun was tipping toward the mountains, so she only had about an hour and a half until it was totally dark.

  Her boots kicked up puffs of dust as she walked down Main Street. People moved around her, carrying grocery bags and dinging bicycle bells. A few motorcycles and lighter motorbikes buzzed up and down the street.

  She’d been to St. George a lot when she was younger—sometimes she’d go with her dad to his garage to help him on Saturdays. She’d run errands and go to the package center to pick up orders for the garage, and he’d buy her an hour of time at the media den where she could use the computers for games she couldn’t play on her school tablet. A few times he’d let her bring Kara and they’d play pinball together or watch shows on the wall screen. And once a year, her family and Kara’s family and the McCaffreys all loaded up in the bed of the Franklins’ truck and Mrs. Franklin drove all of them into town for the Christmas church service.

  But otherwise, without a car and with no money to spend, there wasn’t much reason to go to town. And since the school was farther north so it could reach Wright County too, she’d only been to St. George a handful of times in the past few years. And that at least meant no one was likely to recognize her.

  She paused by the post office and sat down to lean against the empty flagpole, partially because her dad used to come here to get his deliveries for the garage and partially because she couldn’t walk any farther. After the national mail service had collapsed, Gabriel Gates had set up his own package delivery service headquartered in the post office. He also owned the seed and feed company and the hotel above the bar, and he was on the school board. Mitch Harding, Judge Harding’s son and Gates’s buddy, was also on the school board, and she’d seen her teachers and now Kara struggle with funding cuts and new policies from the board so many times the dysfunction seemed like a normal part of school.

  All she wanted was to sleep.

  No, what she wanted was for her arm to be fine enough for her to have skirted town and kept going to the sprawling ranch in the valley. But she had to get her arm taken care of first. She had to figure out a way to do that, once she stood up.

  A kid ran past her, carrying a bag, feet pounding on the sidewalk. All she saw of him were speeding legs and a flash of sandy-blond hair. He ducked behind the post office into the alley, just as a group of boys reached the cross street. One of them pointed to the alley, and all five of them ran behind the building.

  Five boys on one kid. She sighed.

  Dinah stood up and shouldered her bag again. She rounded the corner.

  The boys, yelling and shoving, circled a heap of something in the alley. Dinah set her guitar down, grabbed one of them by the shoulder, and whirled him around. Her fist caught him o
n the nose and cheekbone, and it hurt her raw palm in a way that woke her up. The boy dropped to his knees, holding his nose and screaming.

  Dinah shook her hand out. All the boys looked fourteen or fifteen. Young predators, smart enough to travel in a pack.

  The boy with the broken nose wailed loudly enough that they all stopped kicking and taunting the heap on the ground and turned toward her. She backed up a step and pulled her knife from her belt.

  The boy she’d seen running was the heap on the ground, lying pretty damn still.

  His leg was twisted and his face so dirty she couldn’t tell if he was really as young as he looked. His shirt hung in tatters and his bag had been flung across the alley. But he didn’t have sandy-blond hair. His hair was brown.

  Dinah set her feet. “You guys gonna leave, or are you gonna do something?”

  One of the boys rushed at her, and the other three followed him. She kicked the first one in the groin, then bent and came up with a second knife from her boot. She kept her voice steady. If they could tell she was winded and her arm hurt, she wouldn’t be able to handle all five of them. “I’m done punching. And the doctor won’t be able to sew you up for another three days. So if you don’t want to bleed until then, get out of here.”

  The three boys left standing shuffled back. “Let’s go,” one of the older kids muttered. “Not worth getting stabbed.” The shortest one darted for the boy’s bag.

  “Don’t touch that. You kids get out of this alley right now. All of you. Get up.” She kicked the leg of the kid with the bleeding nose.

  This was making her feel better. Her head was clearer right now than it had been for the last two days.

  The two boys on the ground struggled to their feet and all five of them, grumbling and swearing at her, straggled out of the alley. She backed toward the boy and watched them leave.

  The kid lying in the dirt groaned and tried to sit up. It was hard to tell how badly he was hurt.

  “Hey,” she said. “You okay?”

  “Uh. I think so.” But the boy was holding his wrist funny, and even though he was sitting up, he was kind of doubled over.

  She knelt down by him. “Lemme see. What hurts?” Her brain must have filled in sandy hair, big gray eyes, because this kid didn’t look at all like Warren.

  “I’m fine. It’s not bad.” He was twelve, maybe thirteen. Older than she’d thought, but still. He seemed nervous, constantly looking toward the street, but he didn’t move away from her.

  She kept her voice quiet. “I’m Dinah. What’s your name?”

  “Cole.” He let her check over his arm. She made him flex his wrist and track her finger with his eyes.

  This should have been her helping someone who needed it, but it was only her rewinding time. Forcing the world back to four days ago, when she would have been cleaning Warren’s cuts and checking his wrist after a fall from his bike or a tree.

  “Just a second.” She slid her backpack off her shoulders and dug around before pulling out her little medical case. Cole simply stared at her.

  “What’d they want?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “My deliveries, like always. Last time they got my bag, and my boss was so pissed I probably would have gotten fired if they’d gotten it away from me this time. My first job doesn’t cover everything, so I really need the tips from this one.”

  “That’s not right. I’m sorry.”

  Cole reached for his bag. “I can deal.”

  “Yeah, but you shouldn’t have to.” Cuts and blossoming bruises covered his pale face and arms. His peach-white skin was discolored from the dirt ground into it. She should be helping this boy just because of that, not because she wanted Warren to be here and alive.

  “So you have a second job?” she asked.

  He nodded. “This one is my second job. My main job is at the big ranch. Mr. Gates has me cleaning his barns.”

  Dinah slowly raised her head. He met her gaze straight on. Everyone had to get by somehow. So he cleaned the man’s barns.

  No matter who he was, he deserved to have someone help him just because he’d been hurt.

  She gave him water in some kind of failed atonement so he could rinse out his mouth and wash his face. She cleaned his cuts with iodine and applied some of her salve, made him stretch out his arm and wiggle his fingers. The whole time she chatted quietly with him about everything—his jobs, why she had a guitar with her, what he listened to on the radio. Everything except what had happened. The boy actually responded, even grinning a few times.

  And then he picked at his shoe. “You said your name is Dinah—does your family have a well?”

  She never should have told him her name. “Why?”

  He looked up. “I don’t think you should be in town. Mr. Gates was talking to the barn manager and his foreman about you. He thinks you ran off somewhere.”

  If he told Gates she was here, it would all be over. And she hadn’t thought Gates even knew her first name. “What else did he say? Did he say anything about my home?”

  Cole shrugged. “Just that he’s got a guy running some kind of project there. I shouldn’t tell you this—you can’t be in town, and you shouldn’t go back there, either.”

  Someone was working at her house? Someone else was there already?

  Dinah eased back from Cole a little.

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly. “I won’t say I saw you.”

  The packed dirt floor of the alley was seeping cold into her jeans. The night breeze gusted chills up her jacket sleeves and down the neck of her shirt. Cole looked toward the end of the alley, and so did she—this space with high walls and only two ways out felt like a trap.

  Something rattled above them. On the roof of the building beside them stood a man. He was so backlit by the sun she could barely see him. Dinah leaped up and unsheathed her knife.

  The man climbed down the side of the building, jumped the last few feet to the alley.

  Not a man, really. Maybe eighteen, twenty. Tall, white and tanned by the sun, wiry under his bulky jacket.

  Cole scrambled up. Lines settled on his forehead. “Hey.”

  The guy flipped his collar up against the breeze. “You okay?” he asked Cole.

  “Just some kids trying to take his stuff. We handled it,” Dinah said. “Who’re you?” She turned the handle of her knife over and over in her hand.

  Cole gathered up his things. “Johnny’s my brother. He’s okay.” He glanced at her for barely a second. “I gotta go. Thanks. See you around, I guess.”

  “Wait,” Johnny said. “I went home, saw Dad. Dropped off some stuff. He said he hadn’t seen you in two days. You gotta check in more than that. Sleep at the house. Where you live.”

  Cole nodded. His lip and cheekbone still bled, his shirt was torn, and he moved like he was sore, but otherwise he looked alright. With one more glance at her, he jogged down the alley and disappeared around the corner.

  Dinah shoved the water jug and her first aid kit into her backpack. She winced as she shouldered the bag. “I need antibiotics. Is there anywhere in town I can get that tonight?”

  But this Johnny guy took a moment to answer. He was obviously looking her over, she just couldn’t tell if he was checking her out or if he recognized her somehow. Like maybe he knew Gates was looking for her. If Cole knew, his brother might.

  “Is there?” she asked again.

  He gestured to her hands, to the sores and blisters. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  It took her a moment to find words. “That’s not your business.” She turned to leave.

  He grabbed her good arm, but then instantly let her go. “Sorry. I wanted to say, thanks for helping Cole. Taking on those boys.”

  Dinah turned back around. “How did you know I did that?”

  He nodded to the warehouse. “I was on the roof.”

  Cruel, that he would sit there and let that happen. “And you didn’t help?”

  Johnny snorted. “Cole would have been
super pissed if he knew I saw him getting beat up. He gets angry and defensive when he so much as has a bruise. He’d hate knowing I saw someone rescue him.” When she didn’t change her expression, he shifted from one foot to the other and said quietly, “I would’ve jumped down if things got bad.”

  Things had gotten bad. Five teenagers had kicked his little brother until he couldn’t get back up.

  Dinah turned away. She was done with this guy.

  “Painkillers,” Johnny said. “Some over-the-counter stuff. You can get that at the general store, but they won’t have antibiotics.”

  Dinah turned and left him in the alley.

  She made it four blocks before she had to sit down again. Her arm had started throbbing, but all she could do was clean it out again. It was just a bite. It shouldn’t keep her from what she had to do like this.

  A straw. Like breathing through a tiny straw, Warren had said. It made her own chest hurt so much she couldn’t breathe, either.

  Three other travelers with bags had passed her since she sat down on the sidewalk. A lot of vagrants, a lot of homeless travelers. People walked by, either briefly glancing or ignoring her entirely. She wasn’t unusual.

  She looked up to the pale moon and the stars starting to show. Dusk was almost gone.

  Something along one of the rooftops moved. A person—jumping from roof to roof. And then they disappeared.

  Difficult way to travel. A good one, though, if someone didn’t want to be seen.

  Dinah rested her head on her knees for a full minute before taking a drink and standing up.

  Back down the street.

  Get medication, break into an empty house at the edge of town to sleep, find Gates in the morning. Cole was right that she shouldn’t let Gates see her, and that was bound to happen if she stayed in town long. But she’d be delirious by morning if she didn’t get the infection in her arm handled.

  And she couldn’t use Kara’s money. Now that the well was gone, Kara would need it even more.

  They would all know she was gone by now. Kara, her family, everyone. Kara would be messaging her tablet and not getting a response. They would have all come over to help with canning and found the house empty.