Sawlady's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sawlady found the glove missing before she found the body gone. She stood at the edge of the ditch she had dug the night before and counted her fingers through the torn leather of the one glove she still wore. The other glove was black, ripped at the seams, soaked dark at the palm where she had gripped the man's jaw. She had left it in the grass beside him. Now the grass was flat, the body was gone, and the glove with it. Somewhere out there, a stranger was holding a piece of her work. Sawlady tightened the strap of the mask her grandmother had stitched by hand and started the chainsaw to think. She walked the two miles back to town with the saw quiet against her shoulder. The overalls were stiff with old blood, most of it not hers. She had come out here to do the family work and to find someone worth handing the mask to before her own hands went the way her grandmother's had. That plan could wait. First she had to find whoever had picked up the glove. At the edge of town she saw him: a thin man in a brown coat, standing on the second-floor balcony of the old hotel with the peeling sign, a pair of binoculars raised toward the road she always used. He had chosen his perch well. From up there he could watch every path into the fields. Sawlady went in through the kitchen door and up the back stairs. She left the chainsaw on the landing. She wanted quiet for this. When she stepped onto the balcony behind him he was still looking through the binoculars, the torn black glove folded in his back pocket like a receipt. She took the glove first. He turned, and she showed him the mask, and then she showed him the knife she kept for close work. It was done before he could name her. She dragged him inside, closed the shutters, and sat on the edge of the bed with the glove in her lap. The stranger was handled. But someone had sent him, and that someone now knew a body had gone missing and a scout had not come back. Sawlady pulled the mask off and looked at the dead man's face. Too old. Wrong hands. Not the heir. She would have to start looking again, and faster now, with someone else's eyes turning toward the fields.