The Outlaw's Queen

She is a deputy marshal now. She learned to shoot left-handed after a bullet fragment lodged in her right shoulder, and she practiced the draw until her hands bled. She was ten years old the first time this town took something from her. Her mother was killed. Her father, William Vance, was framed, and his name is still a stain on the courthouse records. But that is not today's job. Today there is a man in a leather vest forking hay in the livery stable, and a warrant that reads Jasper Hollister, stagecoach robbery near Durango, two dead. He does not startle. He leans on the pitchfork like they are old friends catching up. *"You've got me confused with someone else, ma'am."* Then he throws a flour sack, and by the time Cora stops coughing he is through the back door and gone, the street full of panicked horses. And Edwin Harcourt, her father's former deputy, the man promoted the day William Vance was arrested, is standing outside the sheriff's office tapping his badge and smiling past her at the empty livery. What she has actually ridden into takes longer to see. A saloon woman named Ruby, who tells her the name is one that gets people killed, hands her a single line in a careful hand. *Little Creek. June 1887. Ask about the children.* Hollister's brother Emmett was trying to do the right thing when somebody put a bullet in him. Hollister holds a gold claim deed, filed under his brother's name, and Silas Taggart has been trying to buy it for months. Half the town works for Taggart, including, it turns out, some of the men wearing badges. The outlaw she came to hang may be the only person in Silver Creek telling her the truth, and the paper in her pocket is worth less every day she keeps believing in it. It ends with a parade, a shooting contest, pies on a long table, and a marshal pinning a fresh-stamped deputy's star to the chest of the man she once dragged onto a train in handcuffs. *"Dance with me, Marshal."* The band is slow, a little off-tempo, but earnest, and his limp makes him lead with a rock she has long since learned to follow. A closed-door western romance about a lawwoman carrying a warrant she no longer believes, a man hunted for someone else's crimes, and a town that buried the truth in a place called Little Creek.