“Did the men have an accent?” Curtis asked.
“Neither one of them said anything in English. Varia, or whoever she is, did the talking. I thin you’re right though; she’s not Varia. Not by what she said, but what she didn’t say. She didn’t ask about Julie, or Max, or Frank … none of them. And didn’t tell us anything about you, except they had a good job for you. She excused the fellas with her, said they’d just come from the old country and hadn’t learned English yet. Said she’s taking them around with her to learn about America. When they talked, I kind of thought they might be Eye-tahan.”
“Big hard-looking men?” Curtis asked. “Hair somewhere between carrot and bay?”
“I guess you know them.”
“Probably not them specifically. But they’re not Eye-talian.” He spoke a line of Yuultal then, ending with, “It sounded like that, right? Their part of the world is full of old rivalries, with people trained to kill. Finally I had enough of it. More than enough.”
Charley nodded, not knowing what to say, his hands still pumping milk into the four-gallon pail.
Curtis continued. “And Varia’s not dead. Her family traced us from Evansville to Illinois, and stole her back. She never imagined I could find her, so she ran away from them, and ended up married to someone else, a man who saved her when her kinfolks caught her again. So I joined another group, separate from either of those, and married a woman whose name translates out to Melody. It was Melody fell through the ice, a good good woman, that I came to love maybe as much as I had Varia.”
Charley’s aura had shrunk from doubt and concern, shrunken halfway to his skin. He’d even slowed his milking, looking over at his youngest son.
“But Varia wouldn’t have come here with two men,” Curtis went on. “If she’d come after me, it would have been alone and it would have been enough.”
Soon the jets of milk thinned. After another half minute, Charley rose from the stool, picking it up with one hand and the pail with the other. Together the two men walked to one of the ten-gallon cans, and Charley emptied the pail into it. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“Leave. Go somewhere they won’t have a notion of. Or you either; that’s the way it’s got to be.” He paused, his eyes intent on his father’s. “Did it ever seem to you that Varia was-a little bit witchy?”
Charley nodded. “In a manner of speaking. A time or two. Ask your ma.”
“Liiset’s got her own witchy powers, so I need to be gone before you go back in. I’ll saddle Blaze and ride to Max and lie’s. Leave Blaze with them, tell them I’m in trouble, and borrow some money; maybe twenty dollars. That you promised to pay it back for me. My money belt’s in my top dresser drawer, with about sixty dollars. It’s yours; I dasn’t go in for it.”
Charley blinked; sixty dollars was a lot of money.
“Max can drive me into Salem,” Curtis went on, “and I’ll take the train to Louisville. After you’ve finished milking, phone up Bob and ask if he knows where I’m at. He’ll tell you I started home after supper. Liiset will figure something’s fishy, but there’ll be nothing she can do except hope I show up later.”
Leaving his father staring after him, Curtis went to the horse shed on one end of the barn, saddled Blaze and rode away, keeping the barn between himself and the house. When he came to the lane along the fence line, he rode north through the beginning of dusk to the Maple Hill Road. He wasn’t totally sure this was necessary. Perhaps he could just go in and talk to the clone, tell her he wasn’t interested. But the two men with her? They’d kidnaped Varia that day in Macon County; they might kidnap him. And if the men were tigers, burn the house to cover the kidnaping. The bones in it would be his parents’ and Ferris’s.
He wished, though, that he could have gone in and gotten his own money, and the heavy sheath knife Arbel had given him, that had saved his life in the Kullvordi Hills.