Clive Kensington's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Clive sat across from Dorothea with his hands flat on the table. The lamp threw a small circle of light between them. On the shelf behind her stood a glass jar of colored candies, the same jar he had bought from a hundred times as a paying customer. Nothing in the room told him what he was about to hear. Only her face did. It had gone still and careful, the way a person looks before they step onto thin ice. "Once I say it, you can't give it back," Dorothea said. "You can walk to my door in daylight, or you can walk away tonight and forget the alley. But not after. So choose now, with your eyes open. Do you want to know?" Clive's throat felt dry. He thought of the courtship he had planned, the slow proper visits, the ring he had priced but not bought. All of it depended on her name staying clean. A secret could sink that faster than any gossip. He did not know its weight. He only knew that refusing would tell her he loved the idea of her more than the truth of her. "I want to know," he said. Dorothea reached past the lamp and turned the wick lower. She unfolded the paper weighted with the stone and slid it toward him. On it was a rough sketch of a masked rider, drawn by some frightened witness. He had seen the like nailed to the post outside the jailhouse. "The town calls this rider the Prairie Phantom," she said. "The one who fights Scofield in the storms. The one nobody can name." She held his eyes. "It's me, Clive. I ride out when the dust comes. I'm the Phantom." Clive did not move. The words did not fit the woman who sold him candy and folded his change into his palm. Then they fit too well. The nights she closed early. The mud on her boots. The green eyes that missed nothing. "You could hang for it," he said. His voice came out thin. "I could," she agreed, calm. "Now you carry that too. If you court me openly, Scofield's people will watch you. They'll wonder what a bank teller knows." She folded the paper again and set the stone back on it. "That's the price of my door in daylight. I told you it was consequential." Clive looked at the candy jar, at the small ordinary life it stood for. He could not have both that life and this woman. He understood that now. "I still want to walk up to your door," he said. "In daylight." Dorothea let out a slow breath. For the first time all night she looked younger, unguarded. "Then it's done," she said. "You know me now. And knowing me makes you a target too." Outside, the wind picked up sand against the shutters. Clive had won her trust. He had also just made himself Scofield's problem.