The Centaur's Wife by Amanda Leduc

Author:Amanda Leduc [Leduc, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Cans of stewed tomatoes, cans of corned beef and Spam. Bags of beans and lentils. The food that is dropped off at various parts of the town is just enough to keep their stores from dwindling into nothing. And yet as the winter begins to rage in earnest, even these gifts are not enough. It snows constantly. Soon the food drops are only on the outskirts of town. Deliveries go unnoticed, buried under the snow.

Sometimes there are footprints. Someone on a horse.

Brendan suggests putting a guard at the front of the clinic, to try to catch the “Food Angel,” as some of the people have begun to say. Tasha vetoes this idea.

“Don’t you want to know?” Annie asks her, incredulous, one night as they lie together in the clinic. Elyse is back at the townhouse, huddled in blankets, sleeping alone. They told her she could stay, but she refused.

“You’ve done so much for me,” she said. “You deserve some time alone.”

But this is what alone time with Annie means now—it’s like lying on a mattress beside a stranger, the gulf between them growing wider by the day.

“Someone’s been hiding food from us all this time,” Annie presses. “Doesn’t that make you angry?”

“Maybe it’s not someone in the town,” Tasha says.

“Who else could it be?”

Tasha shrugs. “Look—it’s helping us get through the winter. Let’s just stop asking questions for right now, and be thankful someone is helping at all.”

“You’re making no sense,” Annie says. “You’re the one who always wants answers to everything! Why are you letting go of this so easily?”

Tasha thinks about this. What else could it be? Some strange visitor, creeping through their city streets at night. Magic? She feels a whisper of something black and dark against her soul and tries not to shiver. If that’s real, what else is real? What other stories might come to life?

“What are we going to do if we find them out?” she says, slowly. “Raid their stores? If it’s someone from outside the city, are we going to keep them here, make them give us everything they have? Whoever they are, they want to stay hidden. And I don’t think we can spare the energy to find out who it is. Things for the townspeople are already”—broken, she wants to say, but still she refuses—“bad.”

Annie stares at the ceiling, silent for a moment, then says, “We could go, you know.”

“What?”

“You and me. And Elyse. We could take a car and whatever gas is left and go find somewhere else.”

“How far do you think we would get in the snow?”

“We walk out, then. We wear warm clothes. We keep moving.”

“You want to take Elyse out in the snow? For days on end?”

“Randall and Stella’s deaths weren’t accidents!” Annie says, and Tasha goes silent. “They chose to freeze to death. I know that. So do you. I also know that not everyone is going to make it through the winter, no matter what we keep saying.” She sits up, stares down at Tasha.

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