He halts so suddenly that I almost careen into him. He turns. Behind the steely freeze of his face lives the truth. I am sure of it.
“Will’s letter?” he repeats. Is it fear that flickers in his eyes? Or is it something else?
“Yes. It told everything. That he and Nate were both prisoners of war, and both of them were sent to Camp Sumter.” My words spill before I can catch them back. “Something happened to Will there, didn’t it? He had no glorious death on the battlefield. He wasn’t any hero. That’s what Nate meant when he spoke about being the only one to slip the noose. Did Will commit some horrible crime while in prison? Was he…punished? Was Will hanged in prison?” I feel my lungs strain against the pressure of my corset as I voice my most shocking thought. “Quinn, was he?”
But he is shaking his head. “How did you get hold of that letter?”
“Nate gave it to me.”
“This changes everything,” Quinn says.
“It changes nothing,” I protest. “Except that you can stop protecting Will. Please, tell me the truth.”
“It’s a deadly rotten, rotten business. I didn’t think…I didn’t realize you’d got hold of that letter.” His voice is shaking.
“I understand that you’re scared. None of us wants Will’s name smeared. But I can’t help re-piecing together from bits I’ve got when the whole picture doesn’t make sense. And the less I know, the more it frightens me especially when I’m sure that Will’s spirit won’t rest until the truth is laid bare. Geist himself has proved to me that it is fully possible for a restless soul to commune from beyond.”
Quinn looks ashen, and I sense his reluctance to hear me out even as he waits for me to continue.
“I know that you’re angry enough about whatever Will’s done that you hid my necklace. It was you, wasn’t it? But I found it anyway, see? He led me to it.”
I draw out the locket and chain from beneath my collar. The winter light catches it. Quinn’s gaze is pulled to the gold pendant as if hypnotized. “All right, Jennie,” he answers after a pause, “if it’s a confession you want. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I…yes. I had it and I hid it. Just don’t give me that Spiritualist bunk that you were led. Someone must have been spying on me from the house when I buried it.” He flexes an eyebrow. “Most likely you, since you always seem to locate me easily enough.”
It’s no use trying to justify how I came to discover the locket. “The point is that it wasn’t yours to hide.”
Quinn thrusts the information at me quickly, as if he can’t stand holding on to it anymore. “Actually, it was mine. Sometimes the truth laid bare is ugly. But here it is. My brother bet and lost your necklace in a card game.”
“No.” I draw back. The information is the lash of a horsewhip. “No, that’s a lie.”
“I wish it were. When I won it back some weeks later, I kept it.” He shrugs, defiant. “Then when I came home, I couldn’t give it to you. To see it ’round your neck would have been hypocrisy.” His fists are solid at his sides. “Some things I won’t abide.”
I try to picture the soldiers’ tent. The sputtering oil lanterns and empty whiskey bottles. Will at the poker table, slouched in his slatted chair, cards fanned to his chest, dangling the chain from his fingers before dropping it into the pot of coins and dented gimcracks. The sweat of suspense, then his good-natured laugh when he’d lost. It’s an unnerving sort of image of a Will I’d never known.
“But that necklace has worth to me.”
“I apologize. Guess I’ve never been much of a gentleman when I needed to be.”
“You knew how I treasured it, you knew ” In a quick, choppy motion, Quinn’s hand cups my chin as his kiss lands hard upon my mouth.
“Oh.” My heart thumps with unladylike vigor. My desire if that’s what it is frightens me. I pull away.
“Wear the damn necklace if you like,” he says, his voice just above a whisper. “I didn’t mean to kiss you. But it was the only thing I could think to do, to make you be quiet.” He turns to go.
How can I think nothing of it when I am all afire? “Wait, Quinn. Wait.”
He doesn’t. I join him, my boots crunching along behind his as he forges the way. He hurries, but at one point he drags back the branch of an overhanging red maple so that I can duck beneath.
“You once spoke of defending the dead!” I call out. “What you couldn’t have known is that Will comes to me in his own defense. He craves my forgiveness. And I would forgive him, Quinn. We all need our peace in order to move on.”
Quinn glances over his shoulder, his eyes gleaming like a wolf’s. “Is this more bunk from your communing with that fraud, Geist? I’m all for forgiveness, if that’s where you’re coming out. But the less said of Camp Sumter, the better. The truth would destroy my parents.”
“You can’t shrug off everything that you don’t want to face.” Though I’m unsure if I am referring to Camp Sumter or our kiss of a moment ago.
He stops walking, his posture losing some of its starch as his fingers press the temple of his bad eye. I can almost feel it throb myself.
“We did fight at the Wilderness, back in May,” he supplies. “All of us Dearborn, too. Dearborn was brazen but not a bad sort. But we lost more than half our company in Virginia, and it changed us. We were in a strange country, with death and horror all around. Soldiers stole food and bullets, fought with their fists, with knives it wasn’t long that some men of the company began to make alliances. It’s one way to protect yourself. Watching one man’s back and hoping he’ll have yours. Will and Dearborn were thick. What happened after the two of them were captured I can’t say firsthand. We got separated and I continued on to Savannah.”
“Where you were wounded.”
“Yes.” He touches his eye reflexively. “Through runners, I learned Will and Dearborn had fallen in with another fellow, Charles Curtis.”
“That name is familiar. It was in the letter.”
“Curtis made the newspapers, too, though it wasn’t much reported it didn’t put us Yanks in so pretty a light. I have an article I can show you. Curtis spearheaded a gang of prisoners that called themselves Curtis’s Raiders. A brutal bunch with murder in their hearts. I heard of one Raider who killed his own brother for a few dollars. Hid the corpse in a ditch and slept on top to hide the bones. Honest prisoners fought Raiders every day a war inside a war till orders came in from a Confederate general to get it stopped.”