Chapter 29
Okee
“How should I know?” Lula says with a scoff.
There must be some way to get to the bottom of this.
All those little coincidences I let pass unremarked—the storm, the Gemini sign, the Aces Suite, the timing of Mr. Everett’s arrival, Lula herself appearing with a suitcase full of tinctures and powders—now seem less like chance and more like design. Something so sinister it makes my skin itch.
The devil works in patterns. Men only notice once the noose is already fitted around their necks, the nuns at Tullahassee Mission School used to say.
Lula’s chin lifts, defiant as ever, but there is too much that is strange about her. Too much that arrived at once.
Boone gets up and groans loudly. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
Neither of us looks at him. I cannot stop now. This has burrowed too deep into my bones.
Boone has lowered himself to the ground, kneeling in front of Lula. He pats her leg, and she raises it so he can get a grip on her shoe and help her tug it off.
“Your arrival marks the start of a series of strange happenings. Signs. Sudden weather. Coincidences—”
I know how it sounds. That is perhaps the worst part. A clever man should not feel his thoughts slipping toward omens and signs like an old clairvoyant reading tea leaves. Yet once the mind begins arranging chaos into a pattern, it becomes near impossible to look away.
Boone sets down the second shoe, then throws both hands into the air. “You have officially lost your goddamned mind.”
Lula stiffens and hurt flashes across her face before she smooths it away into anger.
“You think I bewitched you.”
I comb my fingers through my hair and find my nape damp. It might be bathwater. It might be sweat from this panic poisoning my blood.
“You suspect me of witchcraft?” she asks, louder.
“Those are your words,” I say, “not mine.”
“How else does a woman control the weather?” she asks, with a stomp of her foot.
It is a fair question. One I cannot answer.
It is precisely this ignorance that has braided a knot in my gut.
“If there were any explanations compatible with truth or reason, I would offer them. But I cannot explain any of it. I can merely point out a correlation between your presence in our lives and these strange happenings.”
“Let us, for the sake of argument, say that I am an evil sorceress sent here by Lucifer himself. What do these supernatural powers have to profit from targeting you, you buffoon?” she snaps.
“Look at me in this ridiculous gown. All evening swooshing around the gambling floor and trudging through icy mud. I ought to return home and leave you two to sort out your bounty on your own.”
She has a point. Though it proves nothing.
“Why are you dressed like that?” I ask, sounding quite confident despite the fact that these deeply implausible coincidences have threatened my grasp on reality.
“Because Mr. Everett asked to walk with me.”
Boone goes very still.
I feel my own spine straighten, sobering instantly at the thought. “He what?”
“Mother thought it useful that I be introduced. He knew only that I was her daughter.” Lula crosses her arms. “He took me around the camp. Spoke freely enough, believing I knew nothing. He blamed it all on the Aces and said a rich bounty would see you captured soon enough.”
My thoughts, moments ago tangled with devils and signs, shift suddenly toward something far more earthly.
Everett.
Hollister.
That should be it. The bounty. The danger.
But I see a company man’s hand on her arm. His mouth near her glove. Fire blazes across my chest and I draw in a quick breath.
“You went off alone with him.”
Lula blinks. “That is what you take from this?”
“You should have told us.”
“A moment ago you were one breath shy of calling me a witch, and now you object to my manners? Do you expect me to request your permission?”
“Christ almighty, Lula,” I reply with a grunt. I take a beat, every muscle in my jaw drawn taut enough to snap.
I take a breath. My shoulders fall. I drop my face into my palms, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands. The muted piano and tomfoolery downstairs drift up through the floorboards.
I would sooner return to that day at the hiring line. I would find another way to survive winter. Any other way.
But then there would be no Lula.
Here, in this absurd suite, with Boone sitting bare-chested in a bathrobe beside a paper full of ghosts and signs, I feel the world shifting beneath my feet.
“I cannot make sense of all this,” I say, finally.
“Maybe you ain’t meant to make sense of it,” Boone says, stalking over.
“The signs. The timing. Her.” Boone nods toward Lula, then at me. “You’re talkin’ devils because you’re scared. But why’s it got to be devils?”
His gaze drops to the symbol inked into his skin.
“Why’s it got to be wicked just because it’s strange?”
Lula’s expression changes.
Boone’s voice softens. “Ain’t it uncanny, how well we fit?
” He gestures helplessly, almost embarrassed by his own sincerity.
“She tends us. You steady us. I keep us from bein’ miserable bastards all the time.
Maybe something powerful we don’t understand set it in motion.
Gave us marks. Gave us each other. Put us in this room, under this roof, at the very hour Everett sat downstairs thinking himself untouchable. ”
The clock ticks.
The penny sits still on the paper.
I look at Lula then, and shame burns through me.
Boone leans forward. “Maybe the question ain’t whether she bewitched us. Maybe the question is whether we’re brave enough to trust whatever force brought her here.”
Lula’s eyes shine, though her jaw tightens.
Perhaps I wanted Lula to be a witch. That would be simpler than admitting how quickly she has become necessary to me. Simpler than admitting every force, natural or supernatural, seems to be thrusting us together, as if our bond is as fated as what Boone and I share.
“I am sorry,” I say. “Intelligence offers little protection against fear.”
She looks down at herself.
At the gown. The muddied hem. The lace. The tight bodice. The gloves limp against her wrists like shed skin.
“I hate this dress,” she says. “I hate this room. I hate this paint on my face. I hate these pins in my hair.” She reaches up and tears one free with enough violence to make me wince. “And I hate that I let her put me in any of it.”
The words leave her sharp, but something underneath them trembles.
Boone’s expression changes first. His easy humor fades into a softness I know well enough to recognize.
“There’s a basin,” I say, and gesture toward the little washstand where a porcelain bowl waits beside a pitcher and folded cloths. “There.”
For a moment I think she will refuse the offer simply because I made it. Then she turns, strides to the washstand, and begins worrying at the buttons down her bodice with quick and clumsy fingers.
The first button slips. The second catches.
She hisses through her teeth.
“Here,” I say quietly.
“I can undress myself.”
“I know. But may I help you?”
Her hands still. “Fine.”
I step behind her slowly enough that she may step away if she wishes. She does not. In the mirror, her eyes find mine and hold there, wary and bright beneath the kohl her mother painted around them.
I lower my hands to the row of tiny buttons.
They are absurd things. Pearl buttons, no larger than teeth, fastened through loops made to punish the human hand. My fingers are not as steady as I would like, but I manage them one by one. With each loosened button, the gown gives a little, surrendering its grip on her ribs.
Lula exhales.
It is such a small, ordinary sound, but the relief in it undoes me.
I work the last button free. “Arms.”
She obeys without comment, letting me ease the gown from her shoulders. The silk slides down with a whisper, catching briefly at her hips before falling in a heap around her feet.
Beneath it, she wears a chemise of fine white cotton, trimmed with lace at the neckline and sleeves.
It is modest by every practical measure, but after all that armor of silk and paint and borrowed grandeur, the simplicity of it feels more intimate than nakedness.
Her shoulders are bare above the lace. Her throat unadorned.
Her hair, half fallen from its pins, curls loose around her face.
There she is. Our Lula.
She bends to step out of the gown, but I catch it first, lifting the ruined hem away from her ankles. Mud has dried along the edge in stiff brown stars.
“You were miserable,” I say. “And still you brought us here.”
Her expression stills.
“You knew what it would cost you.”
“It did not cost me much.”
“That is not true.”
She looks away first. “We needed protection. Information,” she says. Her eyes narrow slightly. “You are not the only one capable of difficult and dangerous things.”
I have spent so long thinking of Lula as something stumbled upon—a woman we dragged accidentally into our mess—that I have forgotten she has walked into danger willingly. Again and again.
For us.
I take up one of the folded cloths and wet it in the basin. The water clouds faintly when I wring it out. Then I hold it toward her.
She takes it, but instead of using it, she stares down at the damp linen as though uncertain what to do with my gentleness.
So I say, “May I?”
Her lashes lift again.
The room grows very quiet.
After a moment, she gives the smallest nod. “All right.”
I turn her by the shoulders, gently, until she faces me. Then I take the cloth and touch it to her cheek.
The rouge comes away in peach streaks.
She watches me with a solemnity that makes my chest ache. I wipe carefully beneath one eye, then the other. The color from her mouth stains the cloth pink. She looks younger without it. Not innocent. Lula could never look innocent. But less carefully arranged.
“You had no obligation to help us,” I say.
Her chin rises. “Don’t start making me sound charitable.”
“You had no obligation,” I repeat. “We brought danger to your doorstep. We mistrusted you.” Boone sits up slightly, poised to object.
“I mistrusted you,” I correct myself as I rinse the cloth, watching the water turn gray and rose.
“I had fear. Not just today. But with the Osage. I confused it with anger, and I was cruel.”
Her breath catches, barely.
I touch the cloth beneath her chin and lift her face so I may clean the last of the powder from her jaw. In the mirror, I see myself behind her: too tall, too stern, shoulders broad enough to cast her in shadow.
My hand falters.
Lula sees it. “What?”
I set the cloth down.
There, reflected before me, with her in her thin white chemise, I understand at last what has been wrong with me since the trail. Since the Osage camp. Since the first moment she stepped into danger and I discovered my reason had no dominion over terror.
My gaze meets hers in the glass. She must see something change in me, because her scowl falls away.
I lift my hand and drag one knuckle, slowly, down the outside of her arm. Her skin rises beneath the touch.
I let it pass again from her shoulder to the soft bend of her elbow.
“When you stepped into that standoff, all I could see was what might happen to you. Every possible harm arranged itself in my mind with perfect clarity. I saw you insulted. Struck. Dragged away. Shot. I saw Boone bleeding again. I saw myself unable to prevent any of it.” My voice lowers.
“I have always trusted intellect, because intellect gives the illusion of control. But there are moments when feelings render me stupid.”
Lula’s throat works.
“I could not command the danger,” I say, “so I tried to command you.”
Her eyes glisten. “You did more than try.”
The shame of it burns, but I do not look away. I have looked away too often. Men like my father build whole lives out of looking away from the wound they have made. By convincing himself every injury is justified, no matter how heartless.
“I am sorry,” I whisper. Then I kiss her shoulder.
Her eyes close.
I linger only a moment before lifting my head again, because desire is the least trustworthy part of contrition, and I will not let it speak louder than remorse.
“You are not a creature to be managed,” I say, breath against her neck. “Not by me. Or any man. You are a person entirely unto yourself. And if I am fortunate enough to stand beside you, then beside is where I belong.”
In the mirror, her gaze finds mine once more.
I stop there, because the rest of it has no proper language.
Lula turns slowly, the lace of her chemise brushing against the rough linen of my robe.
She looks up at me, no paint on her face now, no borrowed gown, only those eyes that have already undone more of me than any sign or symbol ever could.
“Good. Because I will not be managed.” Her hand rises to my chest, resting there over my heart. Not pushing me away. Not pulling me closer.
Behind us, Boone lets out a quiet breath. “For what it’s worth, I kinda liked that you were wrong and I got to be in the right for once.”
Lula laughs then, sudden and honest.
I do too.
The sound loosens the argument’s grip over the room.
For a moment, all of it falls away—the men hunting us, the curse, the dead scientists, the false maps, and rich men twisting the law to suit themselves.
For a moment, there is only Lula’s hand against my chest, Boone’s fond silence behind us, and my own reflection looking back at me.