“Good question.” Maybe Cousin Hugh? He’d been spending a lot of time in Raleigh these past weeks. He and that lawyer Rountree. “People down here talk in some sort of code, and I’ll be damned if I can catch onto it.”

“We’ve been over this,” she said. “You think I like it any better than you?” She was still waiting for a dinner invitation to the MacRaes’. She had met Hugh and his wife only accidentally, on the street. She suspected it was a deliberate slight.

“It’s worse than that,” he insisted. “The stakes are going up. Yesterday, I was looking for pencils. I started opening closets in the storeroom. Know what I found?”

“Not pencils.”

“Winchesters—brand new. And pump shotguns, the kind they call riot guns. Forty, fifty guns. Cases of ammunition. A whole arsenal.”

Gray Ellen stopped writing out lessons. “At a newspaper office?”

“Looks more like an armory now. I’m telling you, something is in the air. I mean, here I blow the whistle on one armed camp, and I wake up and find myself sitting smack in the middle of another one.”

Gray Ellen stared out the window at the spreading branches of the locust trees and thought of the child she had lost. Sometimes, he came back to her like a little ghost, out of the blue, when she was feeling melancholy. She never knew what triggered the memory, but it always came sharp and all at once. She felt tears backing up behind her eyes. “I don’t give a damn what they do to each other,” she said, and went into the bedroom.

“Gray? What’s wrong?” Before Chicago, he’d never seen her cry. She considered it a matter of pride to keep such emotional outpourings to herself. But lately, she burst into tears for no reason at all. He never seemed to know what was wrong. One part of him wanted to help, but the other part just felt left out, exactly the way he felt at the office.

His instinct was to go after her, but that never worked, just made things worse. He would sit out here quietly, sipping tea and wishing it were scotch, staring out the window, listening to her cry, knowing that it was somehow about their lost baby and that somehow, as usual, he was to blame, wondering how her imagination had made the jump from rifles in the storeroom to a baby she had miscarried months ago, wondering how a life that had started out so promising had ended up in a rented house in a strange place where everybody was getting ready to kill everybody else and acting like it was a family secret, while the woman he loved most in the world was miserable.

It was all supposed to have turned out different.