“It didn’t happen.”
Cyrus welcomed them into a room behind the stable where he could speak without the hired hands overhearing.
He remembered the nighttime carriage immediately.
“Two women, one infant, and a doctor who gave orders without looking at anybody,” he said.
“Which doctor?” Caleb asked.
“Avery, I think.”
“Did one woman have a gray shawl?”
“She did.”
“Where did they go?”
Cyrus hesitated.
“That is where the story turns wrong.”
He explained that the carriage driver asked for two horses but returned one of them unused.
The travelers changed vehicles behind the storage shed, transferring one woman and the infant into a closed wagon headed north.
The other woman remained with the physician and traveled east at dawn.
“Did you recognize either woman?” Amos asked.
“The one in gray kept her head down.”
“And the other?”
“She had blood on her sleeve and wouldn’t let go of a leather satchel.”
Caleb felt a cold pressure in his chest.
“Could she have been Augusta Dobbins?”
“I don’t know that name.”
“Or Hester Wynn?”
Cyrus shook his head.
“The doctor called her ‘Mrs. Mercer’ when he told her to stop crying.”
Caleb stared.
“Mercer?”
“That’s what I heard.”
The name might have been intended for him, used to frighten him, or simply invented to disguise the woman.
But it meant that somebody else had been told a story involving his family name.
The carriage had left the station less than eighteen hours earlier, and its tracks were still visible where the road crossed wet ground.
Amos asked Cyrus whether he knew a safer route north.
Cyrus nodded toward the hills.
“There’s a charcoal burner’s track that avoids the toll gate.”
“Can you lead us?”
Cyrus looked at his uncle.
“I will.”
For the first time since the escape, Caleb heard a family member say yes without checking who might punish him for it.
Chapter Twelve: A Name on the Satchel
The northbound wagon belonged to a traveling bookbinder named Isaac Rowe.
He rented out space beneath his bundles to people who needed transport and rarely asked questions about their history.
Cyrus knew his route because he regularly repaired the bookbinder’s wheels.
They found his wagon abandoned beside a creek, the harness neatly hung from a branch.
A kettle stood near a small fire that had burned down to ash.
Caleb called out, but nobody answered.
Amos examined the wheel tracks.
“He turned here and stopped,” he said.
