Free The Exiled by Christopher Charles Page B

a while, Raney heard Clara singing, a nursery rhyme he didn’t recognize or couldn’t remember. He stood, thought maybe he should leave, decided to wait. He drifted over to Clara’s paintings, ran his eyes across them, felt somehow comforted by the abrupt changes in color, the way she’d reduced the desert to its most essential hues. A mahogany storage unit sat beside the easel, a single horizontal drawer atop a long vertical cabinet. The cabinet door had been removed, the interior stocked with brushes, rags, tubes of paint, palette knives, cans of linseed oil. The top drawer was partially open. Raney peered inside, found a well-used rolling tray and a dwindling bag of weed. He glanced over his shoulder, slid the drawer all the way out. Pushed to the back was a .32 H&R revolver with a Crimson Trace grip. Raney palmed the drawer shut, then, remembering, tugged it partway open again. He felt certain the gun was a present from Mavis. Why? Why would Clara need a firearm in a town that until recently had no crime to speak of?
    Clara returned, bouncing Daniel in her arms. The boy rubbed his eyes, seemed confused, as though he felt the aftertremors but couldn’t recall the event that caused them.
    “See?” Clara said. “The man with the badge is here to keep you safe.”
    Daniel glanced at Raney, signed something to his mother.
    “He wants you to read him a story,” Clara said.
    “Me?”
    “He’s smitten.”
    She handed her son over. The boy radiated warmth through his one-piece pajamas.
    “I set a book on his pillow,” Clara said. “Last door on the right.”
    She nodded at Raney’s gun. Raney, supporting Daniel with one arm, unclipped his holster, set it on the coffee table.
    “Thank you,” Clara said.
    The bedroom was small and makeshift, the partition walls coming up shy of the ceiling. Mavis, it seemed, had converted the loft specifically for Clara and Daniel. A column of awkwardly installed shelves housed action figures from movies or television shows Raney couldn’t place; the glow-in-the dark constellation stickers on the ceiling were no different from the ones Raney had gazed at as a child. He tucked Daniel under a handwoven cotton blanket, remembered the loom in Mavis’s study. Mavis had adopted Clara and Daniel as her own. Clara saw no ulterior motive; Raney saw nothing else. Mavis was building a surrogate family. She was distancing herself from Jack, making him disposable.
    “You’ve got a lot of cool stuff here, buddy,” Raney said.
    Daniel nodded, his eyes still red around the rims. A strand of Clara’s hair clung to the boy’s shoulder. Raney lifted it away, sat on the edge of the bed, began reading. Another desert-themed book. This one cast an armadillo as the pariah of a sagebrush community, shunned because he was ugly and difficult to eat. Daniel fell asleep before Raney could discover the happy resolution. He shut the book, lay a hand across Daniel’s forehead, felt a rush of guilt when he realized he’d been imagining Ella as his audience.
    Clara was sitting on the couch, drinking a glass of white wine. There was a second glass on the coffee table.
    “If you don’t want it, I’m thirsty enough for us both,” she said.
    He sat beside her, leaving one cushion between them, and took up the glass.
    “I’m sorry about that, by the way,” she said.
    “Does it happen often?”
    “It used to. This is the first in a while. It’s my fault. He saw me crying today. That probably set him back another year.”
    Raney stopped himself from asking what had set Daniel back in the first place. What did the gun in her drawer have to do with Daniel’s silence? Who was it that might return?
    “I should be going, Clara,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything. Anytime.”
    He set his glass on the table. Clara stood with him, blocked his path.
    “Who?” she said. “Tell me who did this.”
    “We’re working on it.”
    “That’s bullshit,” she said. “You know, or you have a damn