The Island of Doves by Kelly O'Connor McNees Read Free Book Online Page A

Why, it’s”—Edward began, pulling out his pocket watch—“nearly nine o’clock. What do you mean she is not here?”
    Marjorie waved his concern away with her hand. “You know how she likes her rambles. I wouldn’t worry, sir—she knows those woods better than anyone.”
    Edward stared at the woman, dumbfounded. He had never thought her particularly bright, but this seemed foolish even for her. “I should say she does, well enough to know that she shouldn’t be in them after dark. What the devil is wrong with you, Marjorie? Why didn’t you send for me?”
    “I’m sorry, sir.” She looked at her shoes.
    Edward took the hunk of bread from the plate on the table. “Keep that stew warm for me. I’m going to look for her. I can’t imagine what she has gotten into her head.” He stalked into the front hall and Marjorie followed, twisting her apron around her fingers.
    “Perhaps she stopped to call on a friend?”
    “And what friend would that be?” Edward barked. Both of them knew he didn’t allow Susannah to have friends of her own. Edward shoved the crumbling hunk of bread into the pocket of his coat. He moved to leave, then hesitated and crossed back into the kitchen, where his musket hung by the hearth. “I won’t be long.”
    He had yet to decide precisely where he was going, but only a fool would trudge into a dark wood unarmed. In the places Susannah liked to roam, he knew, there were wolves. Perhaps bears. One of the men who worked for him liked to tell a story of meeting a bear, six feet tall on its hind legs with blood on its teeth. But Edward made it a practice never to believe a story a man tells in which he comes out the victor in the end. In his experience, most men cried like children when forced to face something they feared.
    He started out into the darkness heading north with his wool muffler wrapped tightly under his chin. Still the cold wind found its way to his skin and he shivered. Buffalo had grown at a breakneck pace, and houses now stood on land that just a few years ago had been uninterrupted forest. Edward knew that he was one of the men who had determined that this city, with its placement at the mouth of the lakes, should establish itself as the gateway by which crops and settlers would flow. Just ten years before, thousands of workers and their new machines had dug out the canal that connected Lake Erie with the mouth of the Hudson and, by extension, the Atlantic. In that time, Buffalo had swelled from a tiny village to a city of fifteen thousand souls.
    Trees came down in huge swaths, for fuel, for building, and to clear roads, but dense stands of pine and maple remained at the outskirts of the city. Edward now skirted one, shouting Susannah’s name. No one answered but a raven perched high in the canopy. Edward sighed. When they had first married, he had merely been amused by Susannah’s willfulness and believed that his bride would succumb to her bridle. But time and again—there was her attempt to run away, her refusal to conceive a child—he had learned not to underestimate her.
    It had been a day for all sorts of frustration. At the brickworks, he had broken up a fight in the yard when he saw from his office window a crowd of men converging around two workers. One had his meaty hands clenched around the other’s neck. Edward had raced out of his office and down the hall to the door that led into the yard.
    “What the devil is going on here?” he had shouted as he made his way into the crowd. Some of the men dispersed at the sound of his voice, but the fighters did not yield.
    “I
said
, what the devil is going on?”
    A young man so scrawny it seemed impossible that he could lift fifty-pound bags of sand all day said, with a little too much excitement in his voice, “It was a friendly disagreement, sir, until Colm started in on that fat one’s mother.”
    Edward stepped up to the men and put his hands on their shoulders to pull them apart. Both men panted. Colm