I shot Occam a scowl that woulda set kindling on fire, hitched my bags higher, and stepped over his legs. Without stopping to see how he would react, I jogged down the steps to the outside. Men.
I drove away, ignoring Occam standing in the doorway. I had enough problems in my life without worrying about his catty self, this close to the three days of the full moon. Yeah. It was mighty awful sometimes. But I was tired of making allowances for cats.
Back home, I turned on the electric blanket that warmed my bed—a guilty secret I hadn’t told Mama about buying. Wasteful, she would call it, when I could put heated rocks in a bed warmer in the bed with me. But I didn’t have time for rocks to heat. I made up a fire in the cookstove and set a kettle on it for tea when I woke, then let the cats off the porch and inside. I fed them kibble and petted the ones who let me.
From my closet, I pulled out the threadbare jeans and the mismatched earrings and the thin, holey T-shirts. The scarlet and purple wig. The cheap high heels. Set them all on the bed. They looked perfectly awful on Leah’s hand-stitched velvet wedding-ring quilt. I stripped down and put on flannel pajamas and fell in the bed.
• • •
I woke to my cell pealing. It was two thirty, my alarm chiming. The cats were curled around me, purring. I had shoved a pillow beneath my knee, and my face was half buried in another pillow. I was toasty, but the room was icy. I could hear sleet peppering on the metal roof two stories above me and on the windows at the back of the house. I was groggy from too little sleep over the last few days, but I had to get up. I had a wig and undercover clothes to get into. I had a job to do. I was going undercover in my first-ever meet and greet with what I hoped would become a confidential source. I was going to lie and cheat and fake with every word and every move. I was ashamed. And excited.
I turned off the blanket, crawled out of the warmth, and shivered in the cold. I added two oak logs to the firebox, thinking again about that electric heater I hadn’t bought. I dressed in a hurry, the clothes warm from contact with the electric blanket. I stared at myself in the unfamiliar clothes, the ones bought for my undercover persona by JoJo and T. Laine on what they called a “girls’ night out.” I looked long and lean in the tight jeans and the tall heels, but also odd, half-finished.
So I made it worse.
I shoved my hair up under the stocking skullcap and situated the wig in place. Put on the earrings, one a real Cherokee Indian arrowhead wrapped in silver wire, the other a silver hoop big enough to catch on my clothes. I’d have to be careful not to hurt myself. I hadn’t had pierced ears for long and I might snag the earrings and yank the jewelry through the earholes. I drew on heavy eyeliner in shades of green and purple with a thick band of black. Layered on the mascara. I added powder to make me paler. And pale lipstick.
I stared at the stranger in the cheval mirror. My new height and the tight clothes made me look modelesque, though three-inch heels with crisscrossing straps were going to make it hard to walk in the sleet. I’d manage long enough to do the meet and greet. The colorful hair was a shock, but . . . I looked . . . I looked really good, actually. I looked hot. Which was a very uncomfortable thought.
I coiled my wig up into a bun and stuck hair picks into it. The picks had faceted onyx and skulls dangling from the ends. The multicolored hair looked better bunned up. Except for the sticks and the color of the wig, the hairstyle made me think of a churchwoman’s bunned-up look.
It made me think of Mud with her hair up. For now, Daddy was keeping her safe, but I had to do something about her. Soon.
I shook my head and the earrings swung against my neck, which looked too long and skinny. I wrapped a colorful scarf around it and then tried on my winter coat, which seemed out of style with the outfit. I rooted around in the closet, among Leah’s old clothes. I had never been able to make myself give away some things, even though I never wore them, and I remembered a quilted shawl made of velvet patchwork. She had made it at the same time she made the velvet quilt for the bed. I found it on a shelf and draped it around me. It looked splendid, perfectly matching the street-waif-meets-gypsy-fortune-teller look I hadn’t realized that I was going for. I repacked my gobags with fresh clothing and with extra goop for fixing my hair after I removed the wig. I felt a car pull into my drive. If I hadn’t been so busy, so distracted, or if I’d been barefoot, I’d have noticed it sooner. A knock on the door interrupted me and I sighed. Occam. Had to be. I’d had a bad feeling he would show here, wanting to chat before work. My gypsy-fortune-teller look was working.
I threw the shawl across my chest and strode to the door. Threw it open. To see Benjamin Aden standing there.
NINE
“Is Nell ho . . . Oh,” he said. His blue eyes dragged from my sexy-sporty-strappy boots to the top of my colorful head.
Shame and horror and shock twined through me. “I’m going undercover,” I blurted out.
Ben’s eyes went wider if that was possible. “Nell, you look . . .”
I got a breath and the shock of icy air cleared my head. I narrowed my eyes at him. “Not like a prostitute.”
He shook his head. “You look fantastic.”
That was not the reaction I expected from a churchman. The cold air was stealing my meager heat and I stepped back to let him in. He shut the door behind him and I walked away, knowing my backside in the tight jeans was . . . moving . . . in front of him. I wanted to wrap up in the shawl to hide, but I tossed it on the couch. I wasn’t a churchwoman. Not anymore. Except that I went straight to the woodstove, just like a good female in her homemade dress, and put a tea bag in a mug with the water I’d left heating. I put coffee on the Bunn, a strong French roast I knew a churchman would like. My tall heels clomped on the floor. I hadn’t offered Ben a seat. I was equally mortified and electrified.
I got myself under control and turned back to him. “Have a seat.” Not Whyn’t you’uns take a chair and rest a spell. Not Welcome to my home. Hospitality and safety while you’re here. Not the old God’s Cloud of Glory sayings. The church and I were truly parting ways. At long last. My cell dinged with a text. I ignored it.
Ben looked squirmy and twitchy, standing by the couch, looking everywhere but at me. Cello jumped up on the sofa and went to him for attention, sticking a demanding cat nose in his hand. Ben jerked away, his eyes wide. There was a cat on the sofa. Cats weren’t allowed in most church homes except when there was a mouse problem. I stifled a giggle.
At the soft sound that escaped me, he flinched, but then he laughed and shook himself like a wet dog. He held out a basket in his other hand. I hadn’t even noticed it. “Your mama suggested you might like some fresh eggs. She has some new laying hens. Easter Eggers and Ameraucanas.”
I accepted the basket and pulled back the cloth that covered the contents. There were greenish and bluish eggs inside. I put the basket on the long kitchen table. One designed and built for a multiwife family with dozens of children. It was dusty. Unused. There were cat tracks across it. The floor beneath was dusty too, the result of a wood-heated house and a homeowner too busy to clean. Another sign I was following the yellow brick road to hell. My silence had gone on too long.
I glanced at Ben and away, fast. He was staring at me. “Please tell my mama thank you. And that I’ll be over to see her soon.” The Bunn stopped drizzling and I asked, “Cream? Sugar?”
“Black, please. Um, Nell, your hair—” He stopped.
A feeling like shame whipped through me. I knew what he had to be thinking. What any churchman would be thinking. “I’m not a scandalous woman.”
His blue eyes widened. “I know that. I’m—”
“I’m a law enforcement officer.” Still speaking, I placed the cup with a cloth napkin on the coffee table and turned back to the stove. “I have an interview with a girl who dresses like this. It’s to make her feel comfortable so she’ll talk. Like Paul when he went into the pagan temple and talked about the missing god. He didn’t condemn. He started where they were.”
“I know my Bible, Nell,” Ben said, amusement in his voice. But he sat on the edge of the couch and tasted the coffee. “This is good.”
“Thank you.” I carried my tea to the armchair and sat. It was totally inappropriate for me to have Ben Aden in my house, unchaperoned. Alone. Me, wearing sinful pants that showed off my feminine form. I fought a smile and sipped my tea. It needed to brew much longer, was weak and unsweetened. I sipped anyway, fighting the giggle that wanted to erupt from me. “My mama—”
“Sent me to see you. Away from family.”
“She’s matchmaking,” I said, thinking that she woulda never done such a thing except that I’d been widowed and the social mores were different for widder-women. “Being devious,” I added.
“Oh yes. She is. It’s what churchwomen do whenever there’s a single man looking for a wife.”
Looking for a wife. I sipped my tea. Placed the mug on the table with a soft thump. “Ben, I like my job. I like my life. I love my farm. I’m not a churchwoman anymore.” I was, however, babbling. “I ain’t—I’m not ever going to live on church grounds and be part of a huge family. I don’t even know if I want kids.” I stopped suddenly. I’m not human. That was the important part. I couldn’t say that. Some of the churchmen might still be desirous of burning nonhumans at the stake. It had happened before, long ago. A woman accused of being a witch, burned to death. Mud. Esther. Priscilla. Judith. Mama. Or perhaps Daddy. Or my whole family, every man, woman, and child. It would be a midnight fire, source unknown, fast burning. The church would never call a fire department. Everyone inside would die.
Ben’s full lips moved in an easy smile that was slightly crooked, his teeth strong and white. “Nell . . .” It sounded like a caress.
I shook my head no. My cell dinged with another text. I pulled it from my pocket and cradled it in my hand without looking at it.
Ben said, “I love the land and the people. I don’t love the lifestyle of four wives and forty children running around all over.” Forty children wasn’t an impossible number, if a man kept four wives and a few concubines all busy, but it made my frozen face crack a smile. “I came back to the church to effect change. Along with Sam and his other friends, we want to see the church move into the twenty-first century. I want a wife who can help that happen.”
I stilled. Wife . . . I’d been a wife. It hadn’t been all bad. John was an old man when he told me it was time to come to the marriage bed. I was fifteen. I’d been an old bride by church standards. John wasn’t too demanding. A few times a month. And it had kept me safe. Until he fell sick and died and left me a widder-woman and landowner and far better off than the churchwomen. John had left Soulwood to me.
Being in John’s bed had been unpleasant, but I’d thought it was worth it to be safe from the man who wanted to own me. It was the kind of compromise women made all over the world: sex and nurturing and nursing for safety. Prostitution of a different kind.