Edmund and Molly had been out hiking again that afternoon, but by just before sunset, had made it back to his truck at the campgrounds. Edmund unloaded the firewood and the cooler, and they worked together to build a small campfire for the evening. They weren’t staying out that night, but a cookout sounded like a good evening out.
Once the fire was going, and the canvas folding chairs were adjusted back and forth to a comfortable distance, and they both had hot dogs roasting over the fire, Edmund turned to Molly. “So…I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while, but you are,” he paused for a moment to find the right word, “quite distracting.”
Molly chuckled quietly. “Ok?”
Edmund rotated his hot dog over the fire, then turned to look at Molly.
“How on Earth did you figure it out?”
Molly turned to look at him, knitting her brow in confusion. “Figure out…Oh! What you’d been doing?”
Edmund tilted his head and raised his empty hand to say Obviously!
She looked back at him and pursed her lips in thought. “Tell you what, a question for a question.”
“No, I am not going to church with you tomorrow morning.”
“That was not it.”
“Maybe someday, but not right now.”
“Ed, that was not it.” She glared at him a moment. “Can I ask my question now?”
Edmund nodded. “Go.”
“You’ve killed people.”
Edmund looked at her quizzically, but nodded.
“How does that feel?”
He turned back to the fire and took a deep breath. In his silence, the campfire popped and hissed.
“Okay,” he nodded. “Okay. But you go first.”
Molly pursed her lips and looked him askance, but then nodded.
“To be honest, it was kind of a series of guesses, but—I don’t know if this makes sense—they were guesses I would’ve bet my life on.”
Molly pulled her hot dog back from the fire and examined it, then grabbed a bun from the top of the cooler next to her, added ketchup and relish and took a bite.
Edmund said, “So you’re going to add more, right? Because you haven’t really answered anything yet.”
Molly swallowed her bite of hot dog and grinned at him. “M-m-maybe…okay, okay. The most concrete thing I had was a receipt you left on your table one time. It was from a place in Greensboro. I googled Greensboro and was looking at all kinds of stuff, and I found a news story about the trial that included a picture of you.”
Edmund turned and stared at her, then rubbed his free hand up and down his forehead. “A receipt. One receipt. Holy crap.”
“So that told me who you were, but what you’d been doing…? Well, you said that your job was revenge. And I found out just a couple days before I met you, that lawyer had died ‘in a carjacking.’ And not long after you were flying out, the judge died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Edmund pulled his hot dog back, inspected it, and set it back to roasting.
“Molly, remind me to never get on your bad side.”
Molly took another bite of hot dog and smiled at him as she chewed. After finishing that bite, she said, “So, nothing that would mean anything in court. Just…guesses. But I was dead certain.”
Edmund just looked at her, then turned back to the fire. “Well.”
Molly said, “Your turn to answer, Ed. How does that feel?” She took another bite.
Edmund pulled his hot dog back again. Significant parts of it were blackened, and this apparently satisfied him because he took it off the fork and started assembling his own.
“How does that feel?” he repeated. He took a bite and thought about it as he chewed.
“Something…I think something broke inside me in that day in the courtroom, when they said ‘not guilty.’”
He stood and poked into the fire, stirring up sparks and wincing a bit at the heat, then resumed his seat.
“I don’t know what you’d call it, but I lost something that day. If I still had that part of me, I guess what I’ve done would eat at me. But as things stand? I’m just doing what needs to be done. What do I feel? Satisfaction at having done the job.”
Molly watched him intently until he turned from the fire to look at her, then she quickly looked down.
“I sometimes wish that part of me weren’t gone…. But it is.”
“Edmund.”
He nodded.
“You’re going to come back from this. You’re going to be you again.”
Edmund didn’t say anything to this, but just turned back to watch the fire.
The Mayor of Christ Mountain 
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