by Ruby Scott
Squaring her shoulders, Candice stomped down the board-lined porch to the steps. She steeled herself for whatever form of violence she would find on the other side of the building. Over her years, she had seen all different kinds, from drunken spats to people with nearly murderous intent, but she would never get used to the violence. It seemed to always surprise her, even to this day, even with all of the things she had seen.
Today seemed to be no exception. Even though Candice had braced herself, she was not expecting what she saw. She couldn’t help the sharp breath she drew in, nor could she stop the hitch in her step.
The man, the one who she had thought looked so beautiful—nearly angelic—was the cause of the noise. Not the victim, as she might have thought. No, he was the one that had the other man on the ground, knees digging into the man’s arms, one blood-whetted fist cocked back to hit the face beneath it once again.
It was only in and amongst this violence that Candice recognized him, recognized where she had seen him before. Perhaps it was the fact that he was in such a violent situation, unlike before, and that was why Candice’s mind was able to link him to the wanted poster.
It had decorated the wall of nearly every store in their little town that had never had a name and never would. Candice had seen it every time she paid for more flour at the general store, every time she sent a letter to her brother, whose intellect had managed to get him away from the utter stagnation this town seemed to bring to everyone who resided within its dead walls. That face, those eyes, had looked at her for every day for nearly a year.
William Smithson was wanted in five states for the murder of almost half a dozen women. It was the kind of violence that Candice had never witnessed. She had never witnessed murder, not once in her life, despite all of the times she came close. Death was another matter, but murder… she was foreign to the level of violence it required.
William had not simply murdered the women, either. Candice had read the reports quickly, before her father snatched them away, saying that a young woman of her taste should not be interested in such macabre things. Those poor women, only scant years older than Candice had been torn into like wild animals, ripped into pieces.
In this moment, Candice could believe that this man was capable of it. His eyes shone with a violent delight that Candice could not fathom, nor did she want to.
What struck her as odd, in the small part of her brain that managed to stay calm and detached from the shock, was that the man underneath William did not struggle a single bit. He simply sat there, as if he knew that it was futile to resist.
In the few seconds it took Candice’s mind to wrap around what was happening outside of her father’s tavern, she realized that she could very well be the next victim and quickly back-pedaled. Not fast enough, however, as her foot struck a rock that skittered across the dusty road, creating a sort of racket that such a small thing should not be capable of. Candice winced and froze, her eyes snapping up from her shoes to the cool, emotionless eyes of the killer. In a flash, he was off of the man beneath him and coming towards her.
Candice opened her mouth to scream but not a single sound came out, and she simply gaped at him as he stalked nearer and nearer, like a lion closing in on its prey.
“Why are you here?” William asked as he came towards Candice. She expected him to come right up to her, perhaps wrap his hands around her throat and squeeze until she saw stars, but he stopped three feet away. It still felt too close.
“I…” Candice’s voice sounded feeble and more like a wheeze than any semblance of sound. She sucked in a deep breath and looked away from William’s eyes. They were dead pools of nothingness that seemed to nearly suck her into them. “I came to see what the noise was,” she managed. Her voice still sounded faint, but at least it had some substance to it now.
When she dared to look back, William had raised a solitary eyebrow, the motion moving no other part of his face, and those eyes were still exceptionally dead. “And are you satisfied with what you have found?” he asked.
“Satisfied?” Candice asked, her voice now coming out in an indignant huff. “With what, you murdering someone else in the alley behind my father’s tavern? I am most certainly not satisfied.”
William’s eyes sparked, and Candice wished that they would have stayed dead, because they were much too beautiful. It was the type of beauty that burned, like a raging fire. “I have murdered no one,” he said evenly.
“What?” Candice asked, wondering for a brief moment if he did not know that taking someone’s life was considered murder. Did he not see those women as people? “You…” she gestured vaguely at the general store. “Your face is everywhere. And I have read about what you did,” she added defensively.
William cocked his head at her, the movement so utterly inhuman that it caused a shiver to go down Candice’s spine. She felt her heartbeat, which had slowed to something close to normal, skip a beat and then restart double. She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, and took a step back.
What was she doing talking to him of all things? She should be running, she should be--“Help,” she said, but it was more of a rasp than anything else. She took another step back, and her feet were even with the edge of the tavern wall. “Help!” she repeated, this time raising her voice. It cracked on the single syllable, and the voice sounded high and reedy; most definitely not her own. But it had been heard, she knew that much. She knew just how far a voice could carry from the door of the tavern, and just how far she had to stand to avoid being caught by her father or mother, as she had when she had been a child and playing with the other children rather than doing her chores.
“Miss,” William said, his eyes wide, pupils blown wide in panic. “You do not understand the situation.”
“What part of you murdered half a dozen girls do I not understand?” Candice asked, voice going up a few octaves as William began following her retreat. Would he kill her, too, for calling out for help?
“I told you before,” William said, enunciating each word carefully, his tone dangerously soft. “I did not murder a single woman.”
“Then why is it your face that is up on the wanted poster hanging in the tavern, the grocery and the post office?” Candice challenged, taking yet another step back. To her horror, he followed it and reached out, fingers only inches away from her wrist. She yanked her hand back and out of reach, skittering as far as she could.
With a lunge, William reached out and grasped Candice’s forearm, and just as she opened her mouth to scream, a hand that tasted of salty iron clamped down over it.
Candice struggled wildly, but although she probably had a few good pounds on the man, he was pure muscle and shoved her against the wall, using the leverage to keep her still.
“I will not hurt you,” he said in a voice that was exceptionally soft, too close to her, “but I need you to listen to me. I have not killed anyone. I was set up, framed for the murders by a man I owe money to.”
Candice looked at him wildly, noticing that his eyes were not only one color, but many, mixed together, and that he smelled of cedar, something that brought back the kind of memories that made Candice nostalgic and melancholy.
“Now I am going to let you go, but you must promise not to scream, and I will prove to you that it was not I who murdered those poor girls, but him.” William jerked his head towards the man who lay in the alley, seemingly unconscious, for he had not moved an inch since William had gotten off of him upon seeing Candice standing in the alley.
Candice nodded, her mind spinning wildly. She thought that these kinds of conspiracies only happened in the penny books she bought from the post office on the rare occasion she had the money to spend. It sounded like something straight from one of the novels she had bought only days before and devoured with a sort of voraciousness that only someone who had nothing better to do with their time could manage.
But she would not scream. She was intrigued, Candice had to admit. Whether or not this was simply a ploy to ge
t her to let her guard down, she would not scream for help again. She nodded slowly, once, and then twice, two jerky movements that barely passed for nods at all, and then William took his strangely translucent eyes and cedar smell a respectable distance away from her.
“You obviously have read the reports,” William observed without turning to face Candice as he stalked back over to the prone figure lying on the ground.
“Not the entire report,” Candice corrected. She did not feel inclined to add that it had been snatched from her before she could finish it.
“Was it too gruesome to take in?” William asked, and for the briefest moment, Candice could have sworn that she saw a glimmer of humor in William’s eyes before he turned and looked at the man’s face once more. It was battered beyond recognition, more than half of it covered in blood and bruised skin, and Candice winced as she got closer and saw the extent of the damage.
“No,” she snapped, angling a narrowed look in William’s direction before glancing back down at the man. “I simply did not have the time to finish it. It is hard work, being a barmaid.”
“I can imagine,” William said, and Candice wondered if he was mocking her. It was impossible to tell, with the lack of any sort of inflection in his voice or stain of emotion in his countenance.
She kneeled down by the man. “All I see is that you have done a fine job of putting him in a very miserable position.”
“His name is Maurice Quincy,” William said. “And I assume you know who I am.”
Candice shot him an eloquent look before examining the unconscious man. He had nice clothing, nicer than William’s, and newer as well. There was a fresh coating of dust on his black leather shoes, but Candice knew that they had been polished to a brilliant shine before he had stepped out onto the parched earth of their small town. “He happens to be rich,” Candice concluded. “Although I have no clue as to why that helps you convince me that you are not the man who killed the women.”
“If you—“ he began to reach down, to show her something, and Candice knew that it was something that would have convinced her from the sure gleam in his eye, when there was a shout from the end of the alley and the sound of running footsteps.
Candice stood quickly spinning to face this newest threat, and found the sheriff and deputy bearing down on her with guns drawn. She threw her hands up, partially to shield her face, and partially to show her innocence, but they breezed past her as if she did not exist.
“William Smithson,” the sheriff, a robust man with the sort of mustache that had always reminded Candice of a walrus, one of those creatures from a faraway land that she would never be able to visit, because she was stuck behind the counter of a bar. “You are under arrest for the murder of six women and the obstruction of justice. You will be dead by morning. Are you alright, Miss Candice?” he asked, turning to spare Candice a glance. She nodded and swallowed, putting a hand to her throat to calm the wild beating of her heart.
What had William been about to tell her? His eyes, which had been alight with emotions before, were now dead, and Candice felt some sort of foreign pang run through her at the sight. She wanted to see his eyes alight with emotions once more, that smile teasing the corners of his lips.
Before she could utter a single word to him, the deputy, who looked like a squatter, even more robust version of the sheriff shoved him away. “You will not need to worry about your safety any longer, miss,” he said, giving her a smile that she supposed would have once charmed her. “And I suppose you will want to come and pick up your reward. You were, after all, the person who found Mr. Smithson.”
Candice was speechless. This was all moving so quickly.
“I—I will come with you now,” she said without meaning to. She had meant to say that she would come by tomorrow with her father, but some part of her wanted to hear what William had been trying to tell her.
The Deputy and Sheriff shared a look that was indecipherable to Candice, and then the Sheriff nodded. “If you will follow us down to the station, ma’am.”
Candice nodded and waited until they had sufficiently tied William up. He stood with his chin tucked to his chest, utterly still, tad-too-long hair covering his face. Candice wished that she could look him in the eye, explain that she had never meant for this to happen—but then, and was that not what she had wanted? For this dangerous killer to be captured? Surely, he was simply trying to lure her in to make her an easy target—his next target.
Candice felt chilled. Surely he wouldn’t—but would he not? She shook her head. The conflicting feelings raged against her, the knowledge that she had likely just brushed death that crashed against the honest, sure look in William’s eyes as he had started to extend his hand out towards the man’s body. Candice glanced back—he was still unconscious on the ground. After she had collected her money, perhaps she could come question him, get the real answer, and do away with her doubts.
She followed the men to the station, mulling over her thoughts.
###
“Give me one reason to believe you,” Candice said, wrapping her fingers around the bars of the cell.
William did not glance up right away. He was huddled in the cell, on the bar cot in a way that made him look much smaller than he was—a good four inches taller than Candice, and even then, she was understating. She was by no means a short girl.
The candle light softened everything, made the harsh lines of the jail into something that could perhaps pass for a home—save the bars that separated her from William.
She had been here for hours, and the darkness had gathered around the edges of the sky and crept slowly over it in the time that it took to get William into the cell, fill out the paperwork, telegraph the marshals and give Candice her reward. The money bag weighed heavily at Candice’s hip, a reassuring sort of weight that might mean her freedom. However, before she could go home and celebrate, she had to know for sure. She would never rest if she ever found out that her freedom had been gained at the expense of a completely innocent man. Well, perhaps not completely innocent, for there had been that look of complete and utter violence in William’s dead gaze as he had beaten that man to a pulp. The man who had been gone when Candice had gone to put the majority of the money in a safe place upstairs from the tavern in her father’s office. When he got home, he would find it, and perhaps it would ease whatever complaints he would have about her leaving the tavern unattended for hours.
William finally glanced up, and she saw that he had a bruise along one cheekbone that had not been there before. She drew in a sharp breath, wondering when he had gotten it. His eyes were unreadable in this light, such a strange color. He looked at Candice for several moments before unfolding himself slowly, methodically, as if he had all the time in the world, though he was to hang in less than seventy-two hours, if they got word from the marshals fairly quickly.
“I have many reasons,” William said softly, his voice low and musical. It did something strange to Candice’s mind. She felt herself blush at the tone alone, and was glad for the deep shadows that were all around her. They would hide her traitorous cheeks.
William did not attempt to come closer, and Candice was strangely torn by this. She felt a little bit of relief; he would not try to kill her then. Part of her wanted to smell that cedar again, feel the weight of his muscled arm against her once more; where his hand had wrapped around her forearm still tingled no matter how much she rubbed at it. “Well, I would be very inclined to hear them.”
“What if I do not want to give them?” William’s voice was low, dangerous. Something like what a killer might sound like before they gutted their victim. Candice shivered, but it was not entirely from fear, not if she was being completely truthful with herself.
“I apologize for getting you in here,” Candice said, trying to keep her voice level. She was amazed when it came out in a smooth, unaffected tone. “But the past is the past, and the only way you will be able to get out is by having me help you. So whether you are alrig
ht with this arrangement or not, I am all that you have.”
“That is true,” William said, and this time, he did step closer, two steps, which ate up half of the distance between them. The cell was painfully small, something made for maybe a few hours to hold someone. Not days.
But then, what did the sheriff care about an animal that murdered several innocent women? Candice knew that she should move back; there was doubt in her mind that this man was innocent, but she did not twitch a single muscle. Instead, she leaned in closer, pressing her cheek against one bar, and the rest of her face through the other. “Would you like anything? Water? Food?”
“The men of this town were nice enough to provide me with both,” William said, and there was the barest hint of sarcasm in his voice. Candice frowned and glanced at the floor, where a silver tray rested, untouched. Stale bread and water from the horse’s trough. She swallowed.
“I apologize,” she said, and this time, she actually meant it. Even if he had murdered someone, or multiple people—even those girls—she felt responsible for his mistreatment. Innocent until proven guilty, she thought suddenly. Yes, that was something that she had learned from her father, and she would follow it.
“Do not bother,” William said, waving an elegant hand in front of himself vaguely, as if he could dispel the horribleness of it all with that simple gesture. “It is no fault of yours.”
He stepped closer once again, and Candice drew her face back, but did not remove her fingers from the bars. William was close enough for her to smell him, and she allowed herself two deep draughts of that smell, closing her eyes briefly, and saw her mother’s face, clear as day; clearer than it had been for years. She felt a pang go through her and fought back sudden tears. She would not cry in front of William. Instead, she took another sharp breath in—damn him and that smell—and focused on the matter at hand. “You say that you are innocent,” she said, prompting him. “How can I prove this? There needs to be evidence that will allow people to believe this, for whoever botched these murders did an exceptionally good job of it.”
