Sarah Todd Read online

  “I see,” Sarah said.

  “And Absenta,” Pete said. “Absenta takes some work, but no skill or knowledge a’tall. You just dig a hole and hope. If you’s on the vein, it shows up under a methane light. Glows blue, did you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s how the oldtimers did it. Just dug a hole and lit a methane torch. You saw anything glowin’ at’cha, you found the absenta. You dig it out, then you hope like hell you make it home ‘thout someone killin’ ya.”

  That part, Sarah knew about. Absenta was notoriously hard to transport. Sometime after Eli Lawrence had discovered it and before Peter and Grin Lawson had stabilized the process of gettin’ absenta out of the ground and onto the train, used to be two or three men a day died over the stuff. Just too valuable to have around, Sarah thought.

  “And then it ran out,” Sarah said.

  “Then it ran out,” Pete said. “You got that part, same’s ev’ryone.”

  He turned a knob on the lantern and the flame dimmed, going from the yellow-orange of good kerosene to a frosty blue. Sarah stopped dead. All around her, the walls glowed blue.

  “Only it ain’t,” Pete said. “They just didn’t know where to look.”

  “Pete,” she said, staring.

  “I know,” he said. “I could hardly believe it myself, at first. Been workin’ this line for a couple weeks, now, and it just goes, Sarah. You have to know where to look. Diggin’ them random holes is good enough for some of it, but when you study the big lodes, there’s a pattern to it. I found it.”

  She shook her head.

  “You told anyone about this?”

  “You’re the first,” he said with a bright grin. “Ain’t it somethin’?”

  She swallowed, feeling the tremors turn to cracks in the earth, threatening to swallow her.

  It didn’t take thought.

  She took a last look at Pete’s happy face, then pulled out her gun and shot him.

  ––—

  There were enough explosives outside of Pete’s mineshaft to collapse the whole thing. She untied his horse and sent it deeper into the wilderness, then collected Dog and the big black horse and left.

  Lawrence was barely survivin’ as it were. Add absenta to the mix again, and the whole pot would blow. Bandits would be kings, good folk would be overrun by the greedy men who showed up first at the hint of easy money. It wouldn’t be like last time. Eli Lawrence hadn’t know what he’d found, when he found it. The aerospace tech associated with the alloy hadn’t been invented yet, nor had the communications tech, or the medical tech. Supercool under any electronic load.

  Sarah didn’t know much about taking absenta out of the ground, but she knew more than her share about what happened to it after that. Everyone wanted the stuff, and places like Lawrence were the only ones as could get it. Not like in Eli’s time, towns got flooded with greedy, violent men, uncontrollable and insatiable, and the places never recovered. Like a giant flock of birds or a swarm of insects. Men came, they took, they left nothing.

  Lawrence already had nothing enough.

  She got back to town after sunset and, for the first time in eight years, she went to the tavern and got roaring drunk.

  ––—

  Pete’s ma came by two days later asking after him.

  “I ain’t seen him, sorry,” Sarah told her.

  “Thought he’d’a been home by now,” the woman said with a head shake. “Oh well. He gets caught up, up there, you know?”

  “Always has,” Sarah said.

  She was going to need to find someone new she could trust to ride to Jeremiah for Perpeto, but at least she had a month or two before she had to worry about that. It was the loss of backup against the bandits that was going to hurt worst. There were still too many of them and not enough of her, and the men she had left to pick from were busy, dumb, or headstrong compared to Pete.

  Days went by. Pete’s family grew anxious, and then resigned.

  Things happened, up in the mountains. Mostly, these days, those things were accidents and wild animals. When Pete’s horse finally came home on its own, they held a small ceremony, laying a grave marker, and that was that.

  Pete was dead.

  His ma and his two little brothers cried. His big brother and his pa were stoic, but it was a close family.

  Sarah bought a bottle of whiskey and took it home, drinking it in her tea at night.

  But life was normal. There were skirmishes in town out front of the tavern, women fought with each other over their men, folk farmed and ranched and scratched and dug their living out of the ground, same as they always had.

  And Sarah started to breathe again.

  Until one late afternoon, about three weeks after she’d shot Pete.

  She was coming back from town and saw a figure sitting in the chair on her front porch. She checked her guns, sliding the rifle out of its holster and resting the butt on her thigh, then adjusted her hat and clicked at the black horse to keep him moving. Lazy beast.

  It was a man.

  Little surprise, there. Women tended to stand at the gate to wait for her, whereas the men would often put their feet up on the rail. She got closer, close enough to recognize him, and she drew her gun.

  “Don’t know what you think you’re doin’ here, but you ain’t welcome,” she said.

  “Sarah,” Jimmy answered. “What kind of a greeting is that for your oldest friend?”

  ––—

  She stared at him over her cup of tea.

  “You talk or you walk,” she said. “I ain’t got time for games. It’s a bad time.”

  “Mama would be devastated to hear you talk like that,” Jimmy said. “You know better.”

  “Talk like what?” she asked defiantly. “‘S’how we talk, ‘round here.”

  “Sarah Todd, you hold three university degrees in technology and economics and an advanced degree in finance. Unless you’re going to finally come clean that the college education I paid for was a fraud, all this time.”

  She glared at him, sipping her tea. She hadn’t offered him a cup. He hadn’t asked.

  “What d’you think you’re doin’, here?” she asked. “I ain’t in the mood for visitors.”

  “Thought I owed you the courtesy of letting you know, first, that we’re moving back.”

  Thunder shook the house, in her mind, the shutters on the front room rattling against their glass and dust drifting down from the ceiling. He looked around.

  “Why are you still living here? This place is awful. You should come back up to the house with me.”

  “You’re re-opening the Lawson house?” she asked.

  “Why not?” he asked plainly. “It’s ours.”

  “You left,” she said. “I didn’t ‘spect to see you ‘round here ever again.”

  He tipped his head to the side.

  “Surely you’ve heard,” he told her. “They found absenta again.”

  She was on her feet, the grip of her gun in her hand, but she didn’t draw. At least she didn’t do that.

  “What?” she asked. “Where did you hear that?”

  “I pay the right people the right money,” he said, reaching across the table to take her teacup and sip at it. He wrinkled his nose and put it back. “We’ll fix that.”

  “It’s fine,” she insisted. “Who told you there’s absenta?”

  “The lab in Preston,” he said. “They tested it for purity and found it was better than anything we’d been exporting, all that time ago. Better than anything else coming out of the mountains these days. Told me Pete Hunter was the one who sent it in.”

  “He told me he ain’t told no one,” she said. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He hadn’t told anyone. He’d just sent it away for analysis, the way they always had in the old days. That was how you evaluated a claim. You got the purity and quality rating to establish the value of the claim, and then you started hiring guns. You registered the claim val
ue with the Lawsons, and you hoped for the best.

  Only this time there weren’t any Lawsons.

  Hadn’t been any Lawsons.

  “Heard he had a bad turn of some kind,” Jimmy said vaguely. Sarah picked up her teacup and threw it across the room.

  “Dammit, Jimmy, you left.”

  “So?”

  “You ain’t got no right,” she said. “We got on as best we could, without y’all, and we done fine, considering. Now you turn up again and expect me to act like nothin’ ever happened...”

  “Sarah, I asked you to come with us. I begged you. Never in my life have I sacrificed so much dignity for anything. And you said no.”

  “My pa was ailin’,” she said. He tipped his head again, eyebrows narrowing.

  “Yes, that’s what you said,” he agreed. “And then he died. And yet you’re still here. In his house.”

  “What was I s’posed to do?” she asked. “You was gone.”

  “Sit down,” he said quite sharply. “And speak with me like a civilized person. This act may be necessary for the quality of people left here, but I am not they.”

  She sat.

  She hadn’t wanted to sit, nor had she planned on it, but there she was, on her butt in her chair, looking at him with her hands folded in her lap.

  Such was the power of Lawsons.

  Right now, she hated Lawsons.

  “What do you want?” she asked. She had to remember that voice, the one she’d used at the university in Oxala, where they’d mocked her for her roots right up until she’d realized the one thing that had gotten her through her entire life.

  People respected people they wanted something from, and if you had something they wanted enough, they not only respected you, they paid you.

  She’d made a profit, at college. Jimmy had paid for all of one semester, then she’d funded the rest of her education on bootleg liquor and faked IDs, alibis for parents, girlfriends, and teachers, reports and test answers, anything she could invent that college students with more money than effort were willing to pay for. She’d adapted, and she’d adopted their language and their mannerisms, to the point that by the time she’d finished her masters in international finance, none of her classmates had any idea that she was from anywhere but the coast. She’d come home with a bunch of clever ideas and a new way of speaking that had thrown her right back into friction with the people at home, but Jimmy had loved it.

  And at the time, anything that Jimmy appreciated was worth keeping.

  At the time, she’d been in love with him.

  “What do you mean, what do I want?” Jimmy asked. “They found absenta. We came home. How is this complicated?”

  “You left,” she said again. “Where have you been all this time?”

  There was the tiny, impish grin, just the lifting of the corner of his mouth as he spread his long, delicate fingers in front of him like a flourish at the end of a magic trick.

  “Where haven’t we been?” he asked. “We were in Wellsley for a while, then we went to Richmond. We’ve spent the last three years in Intec, up north, making money hand over fist.”

  “And why do you care what happens in Lawrence?” she asked. “Why are you paying for information, this far out in the sticks?”

  “Because it’s home, Sarah. Why is this hard? We all wanted to be here. Well, okay, Yip found a girl who wouldn’t budge, so he’s still in Intec, but the rest of us, we wanted to be here. There just... wasn’t anything here. We had to go. You see that, don’t you?”

  She swallowed.

  “You left a great big hole, and I’ve spent the last eight years trying to fill it,” she said. “Don’t talk to me about home.”

  “You don’t even think of it as home, do you?” he asked. “If you did, you wouldn’t be living here.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “You hated this place. Every single day you were here, you hated it. I bet you still do. You came here because Dad sent you here, and you enjoy being miserable in exile.”

  She slapped him.

  Hadn’t felt that one coming, either. Hadn’t slapped a man in... well, in eight years, since she’d slapped Jimmy, standing at that front door, pleading with her to abandon her pa and go wandering the world, just forget about Lawrence.

  “Had that one coming,” he said. “Long time, coming. You know, I think you are still the only person other than my Mom who has ever slapped me.”

  “Elaine slapped you?” Sarah asked, taking the diversionary bait almost by accident. She knew he put it there on purpose, and she knew she’d have to reel him in again at some point, but he knew how to pick just the right tidbit, so that it was worth chasing.

  She might be educated, but Jimmy was good.

  “A few times,” he said. “Always deserved it. I had a mouth on me, as a kid.”

  “Still do,” she told him. He looked around.

  “You have anything decent to drink, around here?”

  “No,” she told him, leaning back in her chair.

  “I bet that’s true,” he said, with another small smile.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. She’d put a finger on the point in the conversation he was trying to avoid, not necessarily because he didn’t want to talk about it, but because he wanted her to work for it. Bastard.

  “If I know about the absenta, you know other people do, too,” he said. She shrugged.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Not everyone’s got pockets as deep as yours.”

  “They know,” Jimmy said. “Promise. You know what’s going to happen when that rumor finally gets big enough to really spread.”

  She didn’t answer. Of course she did.

  “You need us,” Jimmy said, eyebrows up. “You know you do.”

  “Needin’ you never changed nothin’, before,” she said.

  “You need us more than you ever did, since we left,” Jimmy said.

  “How can you know that?” she asked. “How could you possibly know what’s happened since you left me?”

  “I don’t,” he admitted. “And I bet life got really tough here, really fast. Take the law and the money out of a place, things are going to get bad. But you and I both know how much worse they’d get, if we weren’t here, now.”

  “I don’t know where it is,” she said, throwing out her own distraction.

  “Of course you do,” he answered. “You’re Sarah Todd. The information I pay for, you get for free.”

  She shrugged.

  “Pete never came home. I never saw his site. He worked off-claim all the time, anyway. He could have found it anywhere.”

  “You killed him,” Jimmy said, reading her without much surprise. She reached for her hat and stopped, wanting to adjust it, but not wanting to give anything away that he didn’t know for a fact.

  “You did,” he said. “Because you didn’t want it getting out. Anyone else would have been celebrating that prosperity was coming back to Lawrence and you killed the guy who knew how to find absenta. What did he tell you?”

  “His horse came back without him. We’re guessing he had an accident.”

  “You hated mining,” Jimmy said. “But you’re too smart for it to just get away. You know how to find it. Or, if you don’t, you know how to figure it out.”

  She was smarter than Pete. He’d had knowledge she didn’t have, but she...

  She had the history of every claim in Lawrence, and its value. Sitting in the vault at the Lawson house.

  “I’m not moving out,” she said. He grinned. Victory. She cursed herself for going along so easily. He wasn’t forgiven. She still hated him, and she might shoot him in the back as he left. She wouldn’t promise not to.

  “I didn’t ask you to,” he said. “I just said you should. And you still should.”

  “You’re still a bastard,” she said.

  “What kind of thing is that to say to a man whose mother nursed you as a baby?”

  “The truth,” she answered.

  He played h
is tongue along his back teeth, then nodded.

  “You should come up with me,” he said. “Just to see the place. It’s not really like you remember it, after all this time.”

  “I’m busy,” she said.

  “What, with your six cows and your pantry full of guns?” he asked. “How much work could they possibly require?”

  “I don’t like you,” she said.

  “You lie a lot, now,” he answered.

  “The men who didn’t leave when you did mostly turned to stealing from the landowners,” Sarah said. “I’ve spent the last eight years trying to keep what little bit of stuff we have from going to them.”

  “For a handsome fee, I hope,” Jimmy said. She glowered, not giving him the satisfaction. He looked amused.

  “Sarah, we’re going to do it right this time.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” she said, standing as he stood.

  “I mean we’ve spent the last eight years seeing how things work, out in the world. We aren’t just going to fight with small-time prospectors. We’re going to do it right.”

  She took a moment, but finally she heard it.

  They were going to turn Lawrence into a city.

  “The train don’t come,” she said.

  “It will if I tell it to,” he answered. “How do you think we got here?”

  She swallowed. A train that ran on a schedule, brining supplies, people, money. It almost made the coming storm of prospectors and cheats seem worth the exchange.

  “I ain’t who I was,” she warned.

  “Nor am I,” he answered. “But this isn’t about who we were. This is about the future.” He put on his hat. “Come on. My brothers will want to see you.”

  ––—

  The Lawson house was further outside of town than Sarah’s. It was on one of the foothills, built into the side of it with pillars and stone steps. Peter had built it for Elaine a few years after they’d gotten married, importing some of the material, but mostly just paying lots of laborers to dig it out of the ground.

  It was beautiful.

  No one had broken the windows or tried the doors, because everyone knew it was pointless.

  Lawrence might have been a backwater with single-pane glass and simple wooden doors, but the Lawson house was state-of-the-art, in its day, with composite doors and tempered glass that was strong enough to stop a bullet. Short of the equipment used to build it, Lawrence had never seen anything capable of breaking into the place, and the Lawsons had paid richly to make it that way.