Chapter 25. What Did You Do?

Josie's POV

The rogue on the door of the stone house was named Orrin. He was nineteen. He'd brought me a bucket of creek clay for the oven the morning before, and asked shyly whether I'd teach his sister to make doughnuts.

Somebody had broken his neck from behind, very neatly, and left him sitting against the wall with his rifle across his knees as if he'd fallen asleep on watch.

The rope that had held Marsh's wrists was coiled on the floor of the cell. Not cut. Untied, carefully, and coiled, the way a tidy man leaves a thing he's finished with.

I stood in the doorway with the lamp and breathed in.

Stone. Damp. Orrin, and his fear at the very end, sharp and sour. Marsh's soap and pipe tobacco, already going stale. And something else, very faint, that I'd smelled somewhere be