Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

he sat down in the leaves and put his face into his hands and did not move until he heard Rusty calling his name.

Chapter 44

        There was no one in the lane, but as Rachel paced the length of it she saw her friends through the trees and was amazed by the ease and immediacy of their surrender. Earl and Mag were still circling their house, their faces serious but pleased, first one pointing up at the chimney, then the other at how the sunlight struck a window, as if they were saluting the house and all its singular merits. But it was Angela who stopped Rachel in her tracks, for she was lying full length in a bed of pine needles, their barbs weathered blunt, her eyes closed, her hands resting easily on her belly. She seemed to be smiling.

Rachel turned away and walked out of the woods. She walked past the van, through a field of long grass, and up over a rise.

Here, hidden from the woods where Joe had built his houses, was another house. It was big, sound, freshly painted, well kept. A vegetable garden to one side still had tomatoes, cabbages, a pumpkin or two, some Indian corn. On the other side of the house a few horses grazed in a fenced pasture. They were racers, lean and shapely.

She walked up to the fence and called to the horses. They ignored her so completely that she blushed.

Her head hurt. She felt as if she might throw up. Her toes were clenched so tightly that they strained the seams of her shoes. Everything had gone so wrong. What was she supposed to do now? There were things in those woods that Rachel had not reckoned on. No matter what she did, what she said, she would do some wrong, commit some injustice.

She had been unkind to Joe and it had come easy. She had not felt the slightest hesitation, no inclination at all to choose her words or soften them.

She cursed softly and smacked the top rail of the fence with the flat of her hand, but the horses did not spare her a glance. One of them straightened its legs and shook itself all over. Its mane was like a woman’s hair.

Rachel suddenly became aware that there was an old man walking toward her along the fence. “Never mind them,” he said, stopping next to her. “They play hard to get ’less you feed ’em.”

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said, stepping back from the fence. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“No intrusion.” The man put out his hand. It was like wood. “Denver Simms.”

“Rachel Hearn.”

“Nice name, Rachel.”

“Denver, too.”

He looked at her closely. “You going to be one of our new neighbors?”

She looked away, toward the horses. “No.”

“No?”

“No. I just came along for the ride.”

He tipped his head toward the animals. “You like horses?”

“To look at.”

“Ah, well, these are fine for that. Even better for riding. Fast.” He hissed through his teeth, skimmed the air with his hand. “Smart, too.”

“You breed them?”

“Did. Raced them, too. Trained them. Mine, other folks’. World’s finest way to make a living.”

“But you’ve sold your land.”

“Oh, well. Ada, my wife, and I are getting on, and my son, Steven”—he rubbed the bridge of his nose—“well, he didn’t really take to it. So, he’s an architect and that’s what he’s good at so that’s what he ought to do. And I’m proud of him, which is not to say I don’t wish it were otherwise.”

Rachel glanced back toward the van, but it was hidden on the other side of the rise.

“You nervous they’re going to leave you behind?”

“No,” she said. “They’ll wait for me.”

“They like the houses Christopher built for them?” Denver leaned toward her slightly, smiling, eyebrows lifting, pleased.

The Christopher had thrown her for a moment. Finally, “I guess,” she said. Shrugged. Bit her lip.

“I’ll tell you, Ada and I are very happy with the whole arrangement. We had plenty of offers from developers wanting to clear out all the trees and build a hundred look-alikes on our land. But I don’t hold no truck with developers. Christopher, he’s a different sort. He told us what he wanted to do, said we could keep these few acres, promised us there’d be only a few houses and the trees would nearly all stay. We said yes, just like that. And when he said he wanted to live in that old cabin in the woods, we approved. We understand about these things, Ada and I.”

“So do I,” Rachel said.

“But the thing that really sold us was the way the horses took to him. He walked up to the fence, about where we are now, and he made a little kiss sound, and they came ambling over, blowing, and stood still for him. They don’t often take to strangers that way, not these horses. So if we needed a clincher, that was it.”

Rachel tried to picture Joe—Christopher—to picture him with the horses, but she kept shying away from the thought.

“Well, I guess I’d better get on back to the van before they come looking for me.”

“All right,” he said, putting out his hand once more. “It was nice to meet you, Rachel. I hope we’ll be seeing you again.”

She liked the way he kept saying “we,” as if his wife were never truly absent.

“It was nice to meet you, too,” she replied. “Take care of your horses.”

“You can count on that,” he said, and she turned away.

On her way back toward the van, Rachel felt her fury resurfacing, but it was a pervasive, chaotic anger that seemed to have too many sources, too many targets, to contemplate. It exhausted her, made her feel truly desperate. And so she forced it down and thought, instead, of horses and of Denver’s wayward son.

She was tempted to give up, give in, and not to mind that the people she had lived her life with had chosen to go their ways, too. But in the face of this temptation came a