According to Ebrooks, the entire town was mildly intoxicated most of the time. I had no way of confirming that, but did notice that both he and Kesey smelled of rum. I did not venture into town anymore. Just as I had hoped the furor over Fala’s disappearance would die away, her body had been found. She had been strangled with a leather strap and her body discarded in a pile of waste straw behind the stables. Falling snow and subsequent piles of waste straw mucked out from the horses’ stalls had been heaped over her, or she would have been found much sooner. As it was, she was only discovered when the straw was being loaded into a wagon to be hauled away for the general tidying-up that Gettys was undergoing prior to our inspection.

I did not bury her, nor attend her funeral. Colonel Haren proved that he was not unaware of the rumors and temperament of the town, for he ordered me to take myself to the end of the road and lend a hand to the work crews there for that day. I wished I could have paid my final respects to a woman who had, although very briefly, been a comfort to me. Later, I would learn from Kesey that the funeral had been “a regular tea social” as he put it, for all of the Whistle Ladies of the town turned out to follow Fala’s coffin to the cemetery and watch her lowered into the ground. I think this display of sympathy was intended to inform the men of Gettys that the women would not tolerate the mistreatment of any woman, no matter how common. I wondered, but dared not ask, if Epiny had been part of that delegation.

For me, the day was a peculiar one. Clove and I appeared, as ordered, at the road’s end, just beyond the fear zone. Once we were there, however, no one was quite sure whom I was to report to or what we were to do. I passed the day as an object of curiosity to the prisoners and their keepers.

It was the first time I had observed the lot of the penal workers at such close range. I still cannot decide which appalled me more, the brutal treatment they received from their guards or the brutish nature of the louts that made them seem almost deserving of such abuse. By the end of the day, my only clear judgment of the whole operation was that it dehumanized the keepers just as much as those who were kept. I resolved to never belong to either group.

When I returned to my cemetery that evening, I went to Fala’s grave and paused there for a moment of prayer. It pleased me to see that her grave had been strewn thickly with flowers from those who had attended her funeral. I fervently hoped that whoever had ended her life in such a brutal fashion suffered similarly at his own end. What sort of a man could murder such a slight woman so cruelly and then so heartlessly dispose of her body under a heap of soiled straw? Her fate weighed on my mind as I cooked my simple meal, and it was probably why I sought my bed that night rather than seeking Olikea on the edges of the forest.