“What good will it do? What earthly good? She won’t admit to anything, and she’ll do her best to draw blood. She’ll be gone within a week, Hannah says. Can’t Levi be satisfied with that?”

She drew in a long hiccupping breath and realized that her face was wet with tears. Curiosity held out a handkerchief, and Martha took it. Then she bent forward and put her forehead on her knees, and she let the tears come.

Some minutes later the kitchen door began to swing open and Curiosity made it close again with a single well-aimed shoo! Then she put a hand on Martha’s shoulder and she lowered her voice.

“You been keeping this all pent up inside you because you afraid what people will think if you let it out. That they’ll think you want to protect your mama, and she don’t deserve to be protected. But that ain’t what got you tied up in knots, is it? You ain’t worried about Jemima’s well-being. You thinking about the last hearing, when you was just a girl. Where they made you sit up there in front of God and man and tell what you knew with your ma looking at you. Ain’t that so?”

Martha nodded.

“That was a terrible thing to do to such a young girl, and everybody knew it. They did it anyhow, and all for nothing. Jemima walked away. That must sit like a rock in your belly still today. So it ain’t no wonder that you cain’t abide the idea of another hearing.”

“What am I going to do?” Martha said. “I can’t stay away and I’ll die if I have to sit there and listen. When they were talking about it last night nobody stopped to ask me. Nobody thought to ask me, and I couldn’t make myself say anything. Levi has a right to know what really happened to his mother, but she won’t leave it at that. You know she won’t.”

Curiosity made a comforting sound deep in her chest.

“All last night I was awake wishing she would die right then. Put a stop to everything. Make it all stop. Curiosity.”

“Hmmm?”

“I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should have gone someplace she’d never find me.”

“I expect it feel like that to you,” Curiosity said. “But you all twisted up in your mind just now. And no wonder.”

Martha let out a raw laugh. “You’re going to say that you can’t tell me what to do.”

“Why, no,” Curiosity said. “I’ma tell you exactly what you have got to do. You are going to that hearing. You have to go and hear whatever it is people need to say, your ma included. Because no matter how bad it might be, not being there would be worse. Not knowing is the worst thing of all, because until you know you cain’t put a thing done and let it go. That’s why Levi wants this hearing, and that’s why you have to go too. So you can start to put it all away from you. So you can be free.”

“I thought I was free,” Martha said.

“I know you did,” Curiosity said. “You married into a good family, and you got a good man. A strong man. And you was thinking it would be enough to turn your back on what used to be.”

“You told me this day would come,” Martha said. “But I didn’t really understand what you were saying.”

“I hoped this day would come,” Curiosity said. “It’s a gift your ma is giving you, and she don’t even know it. She is handing you a key, but you got to be brave enough to take it.”

Martha felt light-headed and weighed down all at once. “I just want it to be over.”

“And it will be,” Curiosity said. “Soon enough it will be behind you and you can get on with your life.”

—

Because she would have it no other way, Nathaniel took Elizabeth to talk to Magistrate Bookman about the hearing.

“I don’t know what you want from the man, Boots. He’s honest, you know that, and he won’t promise you anything.”

She had on her most resolute look, the one that said she would brook no contradiction. It was not something he saw often. It was not something he wanted to see today.

“I won’t ask him for promises,” she said. “What I want to do is to make sure he has the official record of what happened at the first inquest. You know what kind of fabrications and exaggerations he will have heard over the years.”

It was a reasonable enough idea, but Nathaniel had the sense that she had other plans she wasn’t ready to talk about.

They found Bookman at the Red Dog, surrounded by people who weren’t afraid to ask the most outlandish questions and keep asking them, though they knew they’d never get an answer. When Bookman looked up and caught sight of Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner he stopped the talk with a wave of his hand and got up.

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “A man can’t hear himself think with all this yammering.”

Missy O’Brien’s face began to twitch in anger, but that didn’t seem to bother Bookman. Instead it seemed to Nathaniel that the magistrate got some satisfaction at having riled her.

Once outside Bookman turned down a lane that ran between two open pastures, so that they could be seen by anybody who happened to come out of the Red Dog, but not heard.

For once Elizabeth dispensed with all niceties and came right to the point. She took a thick pile of papers tied with a string out of her basket. The handwriting on the topmost sheet was easily recognizable as Ethan Middleton’s.

“What’s this?”

“The full record of the original inquest into Cookie Fiddler’s death.”