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and
Patience, avoided speaking the name that echoed in her mind: Hawkin Rhone.
Instead, she said, “He told us he’d have us drawn and quartered if we said a
word. And scatter our body parts around the pasture for a vulture feast.” She
shrugged unconvincingly. “He’ll do whatever it takes to protect his ranch.”
    “No kidding. I can’t believe they
shot Indigo,” Tanner said with zero emotion. “Wish they’d shoot that gluebag
Blackjack next.”
    Patience rubbed her hands up and
down her bare arms as if she felt cold, only it was still at least ninety
degrees out. “What’s the matter with all the cows anyway?”
    “Who knows?” Tanner said. “And who
cares?” He popped open another beer.
    Hazel took a long swig from her
own, hoping the alcohol would dull the edge on her increasingly sharp dread.
“Doc Simmons hasn’t figured out what’s wrong yet?”
    “Nope. He was poking around the
pasture all morning. Picking weeds and scooping up shit.” Tanner chucked his
can through an empty window frame. “Why doesn’t somebody just bulldoze this
whole crappy place?”
    “Can’t do that.” Patience blinked
hard, as if incredulous that he’d even suggest it. “Where would the spirits
go?”
    “What spirits?”
    “Don’t ask,” Hazel said, grateful
for the change to a less frightening subject.
    “Dead miners.” Sean seemed
relieved too. “Badass sonofabitch ghosts. You do not wanna mess with ’em.
Believe me.”
    “Screw those dead miners.” Tanner
wrenched off a piece of wood from the lip of the bar and pretended to throw it
toward the casket-sized mirror hanging on the opposite side.
    “Don’t do it!” Patience reached
for his arm. “It’s bad luck!”
    “Bawk, bawk,” Sean made like a
chicken.
    Tanner swiveled away from
Patience, pulled back, and flung the wood hard. They all watched the clouded
mirror crack, hold for a split second, then shatter into scores of pieces that
plinked noisily to the wood floor.
    Sensing Patience’s distress, Hazel
put a hand on her friend’s shoulder.
    “Oh . . . ,” Patience whispered.
“Oh, no.”
    “What?” Tanner raised his hands in
mock innocence.
    Patience placed her fingers over
her lips and slowly shook her head.
    “Don’t tell us,” Sean said,
flicking his lighter on and off. “Three years’ bad luck.”
    “Seven,” Hazel corrected, desiring
to lighten the mood. “But is that seven for Tanner or seven divided by the four
of us?”
    Patience stared, unblinking, at
the dark rectangle of wallpaper where the mirror had hung.
    “Guess those ghosts’ll be haunting
me now,” Tanner tried to joke with Patience and when that didn’t work, he
looked at Hazel with whoops written all over his face.
    “There’ll be no hiding from them,”
Hazel confirmed. Thanks to recent reminders of horrors past, she feared those
words just might be true.
    Patience spun to face Tanner. “You
should’ve listened to me. It’ll be worse than that.”
    Accustomed as Hazel was to the
dire predictions of Winslow’s rodeo queen, she still felt bees in her stomach. Hazel
looked behind the bar at the fragments of mirror still clinging to soiled
wallpaper, alive with the light of the lantern, and heard Patience add, “For
all of us.”

Sunday Morning
    Day Three of
the Heat Wave

The Mercantile
    F retful, Hazel had hardly slept the night before.
And two restless nights in a row had left her feeling dazed and disoriented, as
if she were lost at sea.
    Strolling along in the early
sunlight, she tried to convince herself that it was quite simple, really. Vet
Simmons would figure out what was wrong, give the cattle medicine, and
everything would go back to normal. Simple.
    She popped into the Mercantile to
pick up groceries for her grandmother and boxes of Lemonheads and jawbreakers
for herself. She had it bad for candy—the harder the better—and her
dad kept warning her that she was bound to crack a tooth. Walking down the
humming, refrigerated aisle, she placed