“I just want to make sure you’re not bleeding to death. We can settle up some other time. Can I look at your foot?”

“If you really want to,” he said, and limped back into the house.

“This should be a treat,” said Rachel.

It was warm inside the kitchen. Rachel threw a birch log into the wood stove, and sweet smoke puffed out as she dropped the cast iron lid back in place.

“Let’s see the foot,” said Claire.

Elwyn hobbled over to a chair, leaving smears of blood on the floor. He had his sock on, and there was a jagged hole at the top, near the big toe, as though a rat had chewed through the wool. “Hardly bothering me,” he said. “Not worth all this fuss, if you ask me.”

Claire knelt down and peeled off the sock. It came away slowly, the Wool matted to his foot not by blood but by sweat and dead skin.

“Oh God,” said Rachel, cupping her hand over her nose. “Don’t you ever change your socks, Elwyn?”

The bullet had passed through the fleshy web between the first and second toe.

Claire found the exit wound underneath the foot. There was only a little blood oozing out now. Trying not to gag on the smell, she tested movement of all the toes, and determined that no nerves had been damaged.

“You’ll have to clean it and change the bandages every day,” she said. “And you need a tetanus shot, Elwyn.”

“Oh, I got one of them already.”

“When?”

“Last year, from ol’ Doc Pomeroy. After I shot myself.”

“Is this an annual event?”

“That one went through my other foot. ‘Tweren’t a big deal.”

Dr. Pomeroy had died back in January, and Claire had acquired all his old medical records when she’d bought the practice from his estate eight months ago.

She could check Elwyn’s file and confirm the date of his last tetanus shot.

“I guess it’s up to me to clean that foot,” said Rachel.