Chapter 34
Lula
The carriage rocks over rutted ground, every jolt knocking my shoulder against the padded wall.
The deputy sits up front with the reins. I can see only his bony shoulders through the little forward window. He has not spoken since helping me in.
Helping.
As if I stepped into this carriage by choice.
Everett sits across from me now, one gloved hand resting on his knee.
“I regret the necessity of this,” he says. His voice is low, pleasant, almost tender. The sort of voice a doctor might use before setting a bone.
I keep my hands folded in my lap so he cannot see them shake. “Then do not do it.”
A faint smile touches his mouth. “If only regret and restraint were the same virtue.”
The carriage turns, wheels grinding over gravel. The Gemini must be behind us now.
Mother. Pearl. Boone. Okee.
I do not let myself think their names too long.
Everett leans forward. Not quickly. Never quickly. He does nothing that might be called force if a witness is watching. “I must ask one more unpleasant thing of you.”
My throat tightens. “You have already asked several.”
“Yes.” He looks almost sorry. “And you have borne them with admirable composure.” From inside his coat, he withdraws a strip of black silk.
“No.”
“It is for your protection.”
A laugh tears out of me, small and sharp. “And I am to believe you give a damn about my protection, and not just your own?”
His eyes flicker. Only once. Then the softness returns.
“I will not pretend you have no reason to distrust me.” He unfolds the silk with careful fingers. “But where I am taking you must remain discreet. If questioned, you cannot reveal what you do not know.”
The honesty chills me worse than a lie.
He shifts to sit beside me. The carriage suddenly feels too small, all varnished wood and trapped air. I press back against the wall.
“I give you my word,” he says. “I will be a gentleman.”
The silk brushes my cheek. His hand settles, light as a blessing, at the back of my head.
I go still.
Not because his touch is rough.
Because it is not. Because every movement is measured. Gentle. Apologetic. The silk comes over my eyes, cool and soft, and he ties it behind my head with such care that he does not pull a single hair.
Darkness swallows me.
“There,” he murmurs. “You see? No harm done.”
The carriage rolls on.
I sit blind beside him, listening to his breathing. I breathe in the clean scent of shaving soap. Wool. Supple leather gloves. Nothing monstrous.
“All of this over a timber concern,” I mutter.
“Timber is rail ties. Bridges. Towns. Churches. Coffins, when necessary,” he snaps, as if I have just insulted his child. “It is paper for contracts and newspapers. Whoever controls timber controls what gets built, what gets printed, and what gets buried.”
The carriage rattles. Frosty air slips in at the seams, our breath hanging in the air like fog.
He clears his throat, then softens slightly. “You are right that this mess has spread quite unpleasantly. But with your help, we will soon tidy this up and put it all behind us.”
The screams. Gunfire. Bitter cold inching through my clothes with slow, cruel death. The flashes of light in the dark. Blood on snow.
“I will never put this behind me.”
At that, I can feel him twist slightly, placing a gentle hand on mine. “Of course you will, dear,” he says gently, as if reassuring me. “Providence grants forgetfulness as a mercy. The sharp edge of sorrow cannot last. No constitution could bear it. Time will wear the blade dull.”
A hot, helpless pressure gathers behind my eyes. I will not weep blindfolded in front of this man. I will not give him tears.
“So this is the kindness you offer?” I ask. “Time will blunt it? The mercy of lost memories will sweep my friends under the rug?”
His hand lifts from mine at last. The place where it rested feels colder than before.
“Your party entered disputed land. Hollister’s men were told to remove the problem. They performed that task badly.”
“Badly. Had they done it well, what would that have looked like?”
A pause.
The air is changing now. Less town smoke. More damp earth. Old wood. River rot.
We’re near the water. Marshland.
“Your friends would have returned home empty-handed and shaken. Another senseless attack in dangerous territory. Nothing to tie it back to Hollister, no bodies to bury. It was handled disastrously. I can admit that.”
I force my mind to focus. To listen.
The carriage rattles, wheels grinding against gritty earth.
It slows, turning hard enough that my shoulder slides along the wall.
Gravel gives way to softer ground, then wooden planks beneath the wheels.
A bridge, perhaps. Or a yard laid with boards to keep wagons from sinking.
The scent of minerals is thick in the air, along with the earthy bite of sediment and plant decay.
A gate creaks open, then shuts behind us.
My stomach drops.
The carriage rolls another short distance before stopping. Up front, the deputy murmurs to the horses. Leather creaks. A boot strikes ground.
Everett’s hand appears at my elbow. “Careful now.”
The door opens and cold air rushes in. He helps me down as if we are arriving at a supper party. My boots touch packed mud. Somewhere nearby, water moves sluggishly. A chain knocks against wood in the wind.
“Where are we?”
“All you need know is we are in a safe, quiet place.”
He guides me forward, hand light at my arm. I count steps. Ten through mud. Three up onto a wooden threshold. A door opens. The scent hits me first: sawdust, lamp oil, damp timber, and beneath it, something green.
Everett releases the blindfold with a delicate tug of ribbon. My head lifts.
A warehouse.
There. Not fresh flowers. Not pine. Something sharper, medicinal, and wrong.
We are in a low building stacked with crates, rolled maps, survey stakes, and bundles of paper tied with twine. A stove smokes in one corner. The deputy stands by the door with a bored expression. Everett watches me blink myself back into sight.
“Temporary,” he says. “Comfortable enough, I hope.”
My gaze drifts past him to a worktable near the wall.
A tin basin. Rope. A lamp.
Swept into one corner is a mess of roots and dried leaves, carelessly piled together as if gathered with other yard sweepings.
Dried cattails. Grass. Dead hollow stems, purple-brown streaks gone dull with frost, dried umbels, and pale tuberous roots split open where some fool has chopped them with a spade and tracked them inside on his boots.
My pulse kicks once, hard.
Cicuta maculata.
Of course.
Mary and I found a patch near a marshy bend in October. Then it still held a few white flowers through fall, innocent as lace. In winter it looks like nothing at all. Dead stems. Muddy roots. Just like every other withered thing above ground in this block of ice.
Everett follows my gaze, and I smooth my face before he can track the source of my interest.
We settle in, and a nervous-looking woman brings supper not long after. Potatoes, carrots, a side of boiled beef gone gray at the edges. She will not meet my eyes. Her hands shake as she sets the tray down.
Beside me, Everett writes into a notebook. He peeks up at me, noticing me noticing him. “Eat, if you can.”
“I am not hungry.”
“Come now, I must return you to Goldie in good health.”
“Then perhaps I should starve.”
I catch only a glint of irritation before his hand is in my hair.
My face slams into the plate with a crash.
Silverware clatters off the table. Pain bursts white behind my eyes. Before I can draw breath, he yanks me up and brings me down once more. The second blow splits inside my mouth.
When he releases me, the room spins.
I do not look at him.
I will not.
“I think you’ll find,” Everett says gently, “that you will enjoy my company much better if you can follow my instructions.”
My breath comes shallow through my nose. I nod once. The nod costs me something. I feel it leave me.
Everett draws a handkerchief from his coat. White linen. Monogrammed, of course.
I flinch when he reaches for me.
“Be still.” Not sharply. Worse. Softly.
I go still because my face throbs and my mouth is full of blood, and because there is no dignity in making him hold me down to clean what he has done.
He cups my chin with one hand. With the other, he wipes mashed potato from my cheek, dabs at my split lip, takes care around my nose where pain blooms hot and bright.
“There,” he murmurs. “No permanent harm.”
I stare at his waistcoat rather than his face.
“You are doing very well, Mrs. Clay.”
He folds the ruined handkerchief once, hiding the blood inside, and sets it beside his plate as if it is merely a used napkin.
Then he returns to his notebook. The scratch of his pencil fills the room. I do not ask what he writes. I will not give him the pleasure of my fear sharpened into curiosity.
Everett writes another line, pauses, considers, then tears the page free with neat precision. He folds it once. Twice. His hands are clean again. Somehow that feels obscene.
“Hepburn,” he calls.
The deputy opens the door at once, as if he has been standing just beyond it. Perhaps he has.
Everett holds out the folded note. “Take this to Lucas Whipple at the Fort Gibson Register. Into his hand, and no one else’s.”
Hepburn takes it. “Yes, sir.”
“Remind him of our agreement.”
The deputy nods.
“Prominent placement,” Everett says. “Not tucked below freight notices or temperance lectures. If he wishes to enjoy continued access to Hollister advertising, he will treat the matter with the gravity it deserves.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Hepburn?”
The deputy stops with his hand on the door.
“If anyone asks where you have been, you were conveying a witness for her own safekeeping.”
Hepburn’s gaze flicks once to me. “Yes, sir.”
He leaves. The door shuts behind him.
Everett watches it a moment longer, then returns to the table. He pours coffee from the same pot the woman brought and helps himself to the beef. Not much. A controlled portion, cut into small pieces with his knife.
My gaze stays low, dull, obedient.
Everett has accounted for every man.
The deputy. The newspaperman. Boone. Okee. The men in the street who will swear to whatever story reaches them first.
He has counted the roads and locked the gate and set his little clock running.
But my face aches where he drove it into the plate. My lip throbs with every breath. Blood gathers under my tongue, warm and copper-bright, and somewhere beneath it I can still taste potato.
I lower my eyes to my lap like he has taught me something. Perhaps he has.
The roots sit in the corner, pale under their crust of mud.
Not a weapon any man in this room would think to take from me.
Not a knife.
Not a gun.
Not a thing that shines.
I fold my hands, swallow blood, and wait.
In the middle of the night, I wake with a dry mouth and a heart already racing.
For one foolish second I forget where I am.
The darkness is absolute. No velvet curtains, no low murmur of the Gemini through the floorboards, no Boone muttering in his sleep or Okee’s steady breathing beside him.
No scent of whiskey, soap, and smoke woven into the wallpaper.
Only damp timber, lamp oil, mud, and beneath it all, that sharp green bitterness I have tried not to name since Everett removed the blindfold.
I lie still on the narrow cot, listening.
The stove in the corner has burned low, its iron belly showing only a sullen red eye. Beyond the walls, water moves sluggishly. The building creaks under the river wind, carrying the smell of rot and wet planks. A rat scratches behind a crate.
Deputy Hepburn snores by the door. A thin, nervous snag of breath.
Everett sleeps in the room beyond the partition. He has not locked me in. Men like Everett prefer their ugliness gloved. The door between us stays closed, the outer door guarded.
I sit up. The cot ropes groan.
Hepburn’s snoring cuts off.
I freeze.
A chair scrapes. “Ma’am?” His voice is thick with sleep.
I press a hand to my stomach and breathe like a woman merely inconvenienced. “I need the privy.”
A pause. “Now?”
“No, Deputy. I thought I’d announce it and wait for breakfast.”
He clears his throat, embarrassed. The stove’s dull glow catches the edge of his oversized badge.
“Mr. Everett said you’re not to wander.”
“I don’t intend to wander. I intend to avoid humiliating myself in this room. That is unless Mr. Everett arranged more civilized accommodations and forgot to mention it.”
That leaves him stranded. Men like Hepburn can drag a girl into a carriage but turn boyish at the mention of a woman’s body.
He fumbles for the lantern. “I’ll walk you.”
“Of course you will.”
The words come out mild. Inside, every nerve is wire-tight.
Outside, the yard is mud and shadow. The river whispers close by. I let him lead me halfway to the privy, then stumble in the slick mud, catching myself against a stack of boards with a hiss.
“My ankle,” I say, bending.
He lifts the lantern. “Need help?”
“No.” I soften it at once. “No, thank you.”
He decides, reluctantly, to wait at a distance.
Inside the privy, the stench is foul enough to steady me. A woman who has survived worse can endure fear. I count to fifty, make the ordinary sounds, then limp back out.
At the threshold of the building I stop again. “My shawl. I snagged it on a crate inside.”
Hepburn looks at me like I’ve pulled a knife. But he lets me step back in.
The lantern throws a low arc of light. I crouch near the corner where sweepings have been shoved—dried grass, splintered stems, hollow roots with faded purple-brown streaks. Pale tuberous pieces split open, their chambers visible even in death.
Cicuta maculata. Water hemlock.
Dead. Shriveled. Still lethal. The poison lives in the root, concentrated like oily yellow bitterness in hidden chambers. Frost and time may wither the stems, but the root remembers death.
Please, God. Let it have hoarded enough.
I wrap my shawl around my hand, sift quickly, and palm several pieces no longer than my thumb.
I return to the cot with the roots hidden in the folded shawl and do not sleep.