Chapter 2: The Weight of a Sin

By the middle of October, Alice Conrad had begun to feel that Millfield was growing smaller around her. The streets seemed narrower than she remembered, the same faces appeared in the same doorways at the same hours, and the conversations she overheard in the general store or outside the post office had become a dull repetition of complaints about the weather, the price of flour, the condition of the roads, and the occasional trouble with cattle. She listened with her customary quiet expression, answering politely when someone addressed her, but beneath that ordinary exterior her impatience had begun to grow. Thomas Reed was gone, and Clara Whitmore was gone, yet the world continued as though their absence were nothing more than an inconvenience. People had searched, whispered, speculated, and frightened themselves with stories about strangers passing through the region, but already their attention was drifting toward other matters. Alice found that she resented them for it, although she could not have explained why their indifference angered her when she herself had shown so little concern for the lives she had taken.

She began thinking about another victim almost as soon as the first two killings had settled into the town’s uneasy imagination. This time, she chose Walter Grady, a middle-aged rancher who lived several miles beyond Millfield and came into town every few days to purchase supplies. He was broad-shouldered and weather-beaten, with gray beginning to spread through his dark beard, and he possessed the unremarkable manner of a man who had spent most of his life working outdoors. Alice had spoken to him on several occasions, usually about the weather or the condition of the road leading toward his ranch. He had always been courteous, once even helping her carry a heavy sack to the wagon when she had pretended to struggle with it, and there was nothing about him that she disliked. That, she realized, was precisely what made her choice so disturbing. She had no grievance against Walter, no old wound to avenge and no secret cruelty to punish; she had selected him because he was available, because she had begun to regard murder as something she could arrange whenever the emptiness inside her became unbearable.

The opportunity came on a cold afternoon when Alice learned that Walter intended to inspect a stretch of land near the cliffs west of his ranch. The place was known locally as Crow’s Edge, a high shelf of rock overlooking a deep, wooded ravine where the ground descended in broken shelves toward a narrow stream. The path leading there was seldom used except by ranchers and hunters, and the steep slope below the overlook was littered with loose stones, exposed roots, and patches of dry grass that offered little protection to anyone who lost their footing. Alice knew the area from childhood walks with her father, although she had not visited it in years. She left town before noon with her coat buttoned to the throat and a small bundle of food in her satchel, telling the woman at the boardinghouse that she intended to take a long walk. Nothing in her appearance suggested urgency or unease, and when she reached the wooded path, she moved at an unhurried pace, stopping once to drink from a stream and again to listen for the faint sound of a wagon in the distance.

Walter arrived later than she expected. She saw him from behind a stand of pine trees, walking along the narrow trail with his hat pulled low against the wind and his hands tucked into the pockets of his coat. He carried no rifle, only a walking stick that he occasionally used to test the uneven ground, and he seemed entirely absorbed in his own thoughts. Alice waited until he had passed the last cluster of trees before following him, keeping enough distance between them that the crunch of her boots would not attract his attention. The closer she came to the overlook, the more carefully she watched his movements, imagining how easily a sudden push might send him stumbling beyond the edge. She did not consider what his last moments might be like, or whether he would understand what was happening to him; she had trained herself not to think about such things, because once she allowed another person’s fear to become real in her imagination, she sometimes felt the faintest suggestion of shame.

At the edge of the cliff, Walter stopped and leaned forward to examine something below. The wind moved through the pine branches with a dry whisper, and the ravine stretched beneath him in layers of dark green and brown, its bottom obscured by the afternoon shadows. Alice approached from behind, her heart beating faster but her mind strangely calm. She was close enough now to see the worn seam across the back of his coat and the gray strands at the nape of his neck. One step, she thought, perhaps two, and she would be near enough to put both hands against his back. The simplicity of the act astonished her. She had imagined that killing would always require some terrible emotional preparation, some great effort of will, but the decision had become almost ordinary, a thing she could carry out as quietly as closing a door.

Then the ground shifted beneath her boot.

It was such a small thing at first that she barely understood it. A flat stone, loosened by the recent rain and concealed beneath a thin covering of dry needles, slid away from the trail, and her foot followed it toward the edge. Alice threw out her arms in an instinctive attempt to regain her balance, but her other boot landed on a patch of loose gravel, which scattered beneath her weight. For one absurd instant she seemed to be standing perfectly still, her body tilted at an impossible angle while her mind insisted that she could yet recover. Then her heel slipped, her knee buckled, and she fell hard against the sloping ground. She caught at a root that tore free in her hands, struck her hip against a buried rock, and began sliding down the incline before she could draw a proper breath.

The first impact drove the air from her lungs. The second sent a violent shock through her left leg, and the third came with a sound she would remember for the rest of her life, a deep, sickening crack that seemed to originate somewhere inside her thigh. She tried to scream, but the breath would not come properly, and she rolled onto her side, striking her left arm against a jutting stone before coming to rest against a patch of exposed earth. For several seconds she could hear nothing but the rushing of blood in her ears. Then the pain arrived in its full force, spreading from her hip through her thigh and pelvis, burning along her left arm and stabbing at her heel with every involuntary movement. She attempted to draw her knees together, but the instant she tried, something deep inside her seemed to tear apart, and a scream escaped her throat so suddenly that she scarcely recognized it as her own.

She lay among the rocks, unable to understand how she had come to be there. The slope above her looked impossibly steep, the trees leaning over it at strange angles, and the strip of pale sky visible between the branches seemed far too distant to belong to the same world. She tried to move her left leg again, not because she believed she could stand, but because some primitive part of her mind refused to accept that it no longer obeyed her. The attempt brought a fresh explosion of pain through her thigh and hips, and she cried out, clutching at the dirt with her right hand. Her left arm lay awkwardly against her body, already beginning to swell around the forearm, while her left foot rested at an angle that made her stomach turn. She could feel the ground beneath her, the coldness of the stones against her back, and the trembling that had begun somewhere around her knee and seemed to travel through the entire injured limb. When she tried to call for help, her voice came out thin and broken, scarcely louder than the wind moving through the trees.

Above her, Walter had turned at the sound of her fall. He hurried to the edge and looked down, his face changing as he understood what had happened. For a moment he seemed unable to find her among the rocks and scrub, but then he spotted the dark shape of her coat and began making his way down the safest part of the slope. Alice watched him approach through a haze of pain, and the sight of him filled her with a confusion so sharp that she almost forgot to breathe. This was the man she had intended to kill. She had followed him there with the deliberate purpose of sending him over the edge, and now he was descending toward her with one hand stretched out to steady himself, calling her name and asking whether she could hear him.

“Don’t try to move, Alice,” he called as he came closer. His voice was urgent but controlled, the voice of someone trying to keep fear from spreading into another person’s mind. “Stay exactly where you are. I’ll get help.”

She wanted to tell him not to come near her, though she could not have explained whether the impulse came from shame or terror. Instead, she opened her mouth and gave a small, broken cry when he crouched beside her and examined the position of her legs without touching them. Walter’s expression tightened as he saw the swelling around her thigh and the way her left arm rested against her coat. He asked where she hurt, but every part of her seemed to hurt at once, and she could only shake her head weakly before another spasm of pain forced her eyes shut. He took off his coat and folded it beneath her head, then remained beside her, speaking in a steady voice while he sent a passing ranch hand for the doctor and two men with a wagon.