“Thank you. Most interesting. You have also provided me with food for thought. I think we’re even, Mr. Elliston.”
The orchestra finished with a flourish.
“And thank you, too, sir, for the lovely dance.” Inez could see Reverend Sands making his way to her, through the crowd.
Jed bowed over her hand, for once, the gallant. “The pleasure, believe me, Mrs. Stannert, is all mine.”
Zelda woke with a start.
The lamp, turned down low, guttered. Clouds had cleared, allowing a wash of moonlight to enter through the single window and bathe a swatch of the room. A slash of silver light touched the small hump that was Lizzie’s feet under the coverlet and poured across the luxurious rug by Flo’s bed.
She heard a crash as the Murphy bed in the room upstairs was pulled down, blocking the door shut for a modicum of privacy. A low murmur of voices, a squeak of boards as weight settled into the mattress, and then a muffled moan. The moan was replaced by the rhythmic squeak-thump, squeak-thump, squeak-thump of the Murphy bed alternately smacking wall and door as a customer proceeded to get his money’s worth of pleasure.
Zelda snuggled back into the shawl, which smelled, not unpleasantly, of Flo’s signature violet perfume and her distinctive muskiness. She closed her eyes, determined to ignore the sounds of purchased joy, if possible.
An unmuffled snort caused her eyelids to snap open. Zelda straightened up in the chair, looking around, trying to identify where the sound had come from. She stared, in disbelief, as the shrouded feet in the bed twitched.
The sound again.
A definite snore.
Zelda felt as if the spirit part of her was rising straight out of her body from sheer terror. It hung below the ceiling, observing, as her earth-bound body gathered its courage, rose from the chair, and crept toward the bed.
Lizzie’s nose, which had been pointed up toward the rafters three stories up, was now angled toward the window. An unmistakable snore bubbled from the presumed-dead woman. Then, some murmured words stumbled out. “Don’t, Flo. It’s no good.”
Zelda shrieked, ran to the door, and wrenched the French hand-painted porcelain doorknob nearly from its mooring before remembering that Molly had locked it from the outside.
She pounded on the panel. “Molly! Someone! Come quick!”
A hasty creaking of floorboards, the unmistakable rasp of key in lock, and the door flew open to reveal Molly and Danny. “What the hell is going on?” whispered Molly harshly. “What’re you raising a stink about now?”
“I heard,” Zelda pointed a shaking finger at the bed, “I heard Lizzie. She’s alive.”
Molly’s and Danny’s faces looked white as masks in the moonlight, dark shadows painted the eyes as empty while silver light glazed the cheekbones.
“She can’t be.” Molly hastened to the bedside, picked up Lizzie’s hand, and let it fall. “She’s cold as death itself.”
“Look at her! She ain’t all stiff. And I, I heard her snore. And, and she talked.”
Danny, who had moved to the bed, swung around at her words, slow as a mountain pulled from its mooring, and stared at Zelda.
But it was Molly who spoke.
“You’re dreaming, Zelda. It’s a nightmare or maybe someone walked across your grave.”
“Stop that! I heard her. She was telling Flo to, I dunno, to not do something.”
Molly bent toward Lizzie.
Lizzie was mute, as if in defiance.
Molly picked up Lizzie’s arm more firmly now, held the wrist, then dropped it. “Shit.” She backed away from the bed, addressed Danny. “Go get Doc.”
“She’s alive!” said Zelda. “I told you!”
“Shut up.” Molly said, staying calm. “Danny, go. Fast as you can.” She turned to Zelda again. “I’m gonna close the door, lock it again. If something happens, just sit by her. Bring that chair over, and hold her hand. I don’t want nothing to happen if…How could she be alive?” Molly’s voice was full of wonder and disbelief. She turned to the immobile Danny and made shooing motions. “Go! Go!”
Danny lumbered out, Molly followed him. Zelda ran and grabbed Molly’s hand. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me here alone with her!”
“F’ fuck’s sake, Zelda!” Molly spoke forcefully. “If she’s alive, well, she’s in a swoon or…I don’t know! We’re gonna get Doc here as fast as we can. Just…watch her! I’ve gotta get the johns outta here and make sure the girls stay in their rooms. I’ll be back.”
The door slammed in Zelda’s face. She heard the key turn and the bolt scrape home.
Shaking, Zelda cowered by the door a while, before finally plucking up her nerve and retreating back into the room. She gripped the chair and tentatively drew it up to the bed.
It’s okay. She’s alive. I just gotta stay until Doc gets here. I’ll tell him, then I’ll skedaddle.
Zelda gingerly picked up Lizzie’s hand, turned it over to bare the wrist. Zelda swore she could see a pulse beating slowly, under the cold, not-dead skin.
The hand twisted and gripped hers tight.
Zelda’s breath stopped.
All seemed frozen, except for the thump of the hard-pressed bed above and other random creaks of floor planks and walls.
Zelda wanted to scream, but no sound passed through her constricted throat, no air entered her fear-frozen lungs.
She raised her eyes from the cold, steel-tight grip on her hand to meet Lizzie’s signature half-mad, half-looped gaze. Lizzie’s wide-open eyes bored into hers like a miner’s drill. The hardened, malice-filled glare wavered. Then, in a slurred, but definitely Lizzie-like way, she rasped, “What the fuck’re
you
doin’ here?”
Before Zelda could respond, a blackness dropped over her head. A sudden crush banded her chest, slamming her back against the straight-backed chair.
She wrenched away from Lizzie’s grasp, clawing at the band, the darkness at her face. The band holding her tight to the chair was an arm, clamped over her breasts, pinning her upper arms, unyielding. The darkness…a damp cloth pressed to her face with a gloved hand…blocked nose and mouth.
She couldn’t breathe.
She tore at the gloved hand, her arms tangled in the shawl. Nothing moved that hand. It was as if a statue of stone held her in a timeless grip. She was vaguely aware of Lizzie—screaming? Laughing? The sound seemed far away and faint, far fainter than the heavy breathing of whoever held her to the chair, refusing to grant her the simple life-saving breath she fought for.
The pressure over her face lifted slightly. Zelda took in air in a huge gasp, cloth clinging to nose and face.
The air was sweet. Oh, so sweet. Fruity and sweet.
She was flying. Like an angel.
The creaking above her, the pressure across her chest, the rasping breathing of her assailant, Lizzie’s screams, the sweet smell, all, all retreating….
The world returned with the suddenness of a snap, dark shades striped with palest gray.
Zelda blinked, trying to figure out where she was, what had happened, until she realized that she viewed a small slice of the room, from floor level, through a tangle of hair smothering her face. The prickly rug pressed into her cheek.
She rolled her head until her nose was facedown in the pile. It smelled of earth, wet, mold, mud, and things unmentionable. Zelda slowly pushed herself to sitting, and threw up on Flo’s carpet—a gush of liquid and not much else.
It was only when she raised a hand to wipe her mouth that she saw, and felt, the dark, sticky sheen that covered it. At first, not entirely clear in her brain, she thought it was printer’s ink from the work at
The Independent
that somehow got smeared all over her hands, the front of her dress, the rug.
Her hand brushed her lips.
It wasn’t ink.
It was blood.
Zelda threw up a second time, more gag than anything else.
She shakily got to her hands and knees and saw, at eye level, a pale hand hanging over the edge of Flo’s bed.
She gripped the overturned chair, pulled her tangled skirts away from her knees, and stood.
“Oh,” she said aloud. “Oh. No.”
Lizzie lay covered and surrounded by a blackness that soaked the sheets, the coverlet, and the pillow. Her eyes protruded, devoid of sensibility. A dark gash gaped at her throat—a second mouth, laughing up at Zelda.
Zelda stepped back, and her foot trod on something hard, unforeseen. She looked down and saw a knife, equally dark.
The import of her situation struck with the force of a slashing cut across her consciousness.
She whirled around, looking for someone hiding in the shadows, someone who would have placed her in this predicament: covered with Lizzie’s blood, alone with the knife that killed her, in a room locked from the outside.
Am I dreaming?
Shivering, she grabbed the shawl crumpled in a soiled puddle on the rug. As she pulled it tight around her, something clicked, a rattle of wood.
Her hand ran mechanically over the fuzzy white wool and closed on a string of beads. She pulled. The object tore free of the grasping fibers. It was a small, white necklace—a few large beads separated at regular intervals by smaller ones. A small white cross dangled from the loop, little shiny figure of Jesus spread upon it. The image of death almost made her drop it. Instead, she gripped harder.
It wasn’t a dream! Someone was here.
Tucking the object in her pocket, she moved more confidently to the window. The latch was still in place, the glass intact.
Next, she tried the doorknob. Still locked from the outside, and she with no key. Only now, when she released her grip, the knob was covered with her own handprint, etched in blood. She roughly scrubbed at her hand with the hem of the shawl and cast frantically about the room, ever avoiding the grizzly spectacle of Lizzie’s dead and mutilated body on the bed.
It wasn’t a ghost! It was someone real, but how…?
She tried to remember the moments before her assailant pinned her to the chair and forced the cloth over her face, and darkness descended. She remembered the bed jolting away above her. Nothing unusual there. The creaking of the settling house. Creaking. Like footsteps tiptoeing across the floor.
It had been behind her, she was pretty sure. She moved to the far wall and tentatively touched the gold striped wallpaper then traced its length with her shaking finger. A painting. A chest of drawers. Another high-backed chair. Flo’s washstand. A big old clothespress.
Zelda stopped, then slowly backtracked and narrowed her eyes at the wall between the washstand and the armoire. She touched the thin, vertical line, the small bump of a break in the march of gold striped up and down, from ceiling to floor.
Was it a wallpaper seam, or the thin, almost invisible line of a hidden panel in the wall?
Miss Flo, in cahoots with a panel thief?
A confusion of voices outside the room interrupted her discovery; the turn of the key in the lock was like the rattle of a snake.
Zelda spun around just as the door flew open.
Molly stood, lantern in hand, with Doc Cramer beside her, his stovepipe hat a dead giveaway.
The lantern light threw a ghostly yellow cast over the blood-splashed bed and floor. Molly gasped. The light swung wildly. “Jesus!”
A muffled exclamation from Doc, who moved swiftly to the bed. “What have we here?”
Zelda stood, pinned by the light to the wall. “I didn’t do it!” Her voice sounded shaky and unconvincing, even to her. “Someone came into the room. Put a cloth on my face, knocked me out.”
“You little bitch!” Molly’s lamp swung wildly as she moved into the room. “You always had it in for Lizzie. She was alive when I left her with you. The door was locked. You killed her!”
Zelda, propelled by fear, went to Molly. “I didn’t! Someone got into the room, they put something over my face, knocked me out. Then, I woke up. Lizzie was dead!”
Molly stepped back, Zelda’s fear reflected on her own face. Zelda realized how crazy that all sounded, with her standing there, covered in Lizzie’s blood, the knife on the floor behind her.
“Molly! I’d not kill anyone, ever!”
Molly retreated even further into the hallway. Zelda followed her out, intent on making her listen.
Her arm was grasped from behind, and she heard Doc’s voice, usually calm and jovial, now serious and without humor. “Young lady, you best wait with me. Miss Molly, we need to involve an officer of the law and determine what happened here. I will humbly offer my services to the coroner. Perhaps while I detain this young lady, you can—”
The front door opened down the hallway. Zelda felt a puff of cold air on her cheek. Then, she heard the gruff voice of The Hatchet.
Terror tore through her. She had a sudden vision of herself behind bars, her father on the other side, shock, disappointment, disbelief crushing his features.
Zelda violently twisted away with a strength she didn’t know she had. The shawl was left behind, dangling in Doc’s grasp, shed like an unwanted skin. She shoved at Molly, knocking her against the wall with a crash that rattled the statue of Aphrodite facing Flo’s bedroom door.
Zelda gathered handfuls of skirts in both hands and sprinted to the back of the brothel. She hesitated at the back door, knobless and braced with nails pounded into the fire-weakened exterior walls. Using hands and a shoulder, she shoved the door hard. The nails and boards holding the door to the charred exterior had been meant to keep intruders from getting in, not a desperate soul from getting out. The door smashed open, bits of wood spraying.
Zelda raced out through the ruined mudroom and into the pre-dawn alley.
Zelda stopped on the threshold of her family’s cabin, panting. She pushed on her side, trying to stop the painful stitch pounding beneath the corset and ignore her screaming toes in the too-tight boots. Watching her breath form and melt in the almost freezing air, she tried to bring her disorganized thoughts into some kind of order.
Molly or someone is sure to tell Flo I kilt Lizzie. And Flo’ll kill me if’n the police don’t get to me first. Why does Flo care so much about her? She’s nothing but a whore. It’s not like they’re kin or anything.
A sinking in the pit of her stomach told her that she was missing something. That for some reason or purpose she couldn’t fathom, the whole of God’s wrath was going to be visited on her for something she didn’t even do. But it didn’t matter the whys and wherefores. Zelda knew that she had to find a way out of town. Or, given that it was inching onto daylight, a place to hide for a while until she could figure how to sneak out.
Reuben’s always at me about runnin’ away and gettin’ married. But I don’t want to leave Pa here. It’d just be him and the idiot twins.
The thought of her father being at the mercy of her two brothers twisted her guts more painfully than the stitch in her side.
She opened the reluctant door as quietly as she could. The overpowering smell of rotgut liquor hit hard. She tiptoed in and paused by the two snoring, farting lumps by the stove, trying to decide which twin to trust.
She finally settled on Zeke, as he had always been the one, more so than Zed, to being tractable to taking orders and who tended to show more dutiful obedience to their pa.
Zelda leaned down, whispered “Zeke!” and put a quick hand over his mouth. A muffled snort and a quick thrash were her reply. She avoided the swinging arm and whispered, more urgently, “Zeke. It’s Zelpha. I’m in big trouble. Now don’t you yell none, I’m gonna take my hand away.”
The thrashing stilled. She could just make out the gleam of his open eyes in the pre-dawn light. She tentatively removed her hand, and he sat up, whispering, “Zel! What’s goin’ on?”
She waved away the powerful fumes emanating from him. “One of Flo’s girls, Lizzie, got kilt. And they think I did it.”
“Hol-y fuck-in’—”
“Shhhh! Lissen, I need somewheres to hide. And I need you t’ keep quiet about this. I hope no one comes up here, but please, if they do, don’t let ’em question Pa. It’d break his heart if he learnt about me at Flo’s.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll do what I can. What about your lover-boy?”
She thought about Reuben. “I gotta tell him. Jeez, maybe he oughta go with me. If the law comes up here and sees him…”
“Hey, they’s gonna be innerested in you, not him.”
She bit her lip, not convinced. “Maybe.”
“Asides, without you workin’, we’re gonna need ev’ry cent—his and our’n—to keep us in grits,” pointed out Zeke. “Shit! Who’s gonna make the grits?”
“Don’t worry ’bout that now. Just…where kin I hide?”
“I got the place. The closed-down shaft over yonder. Y’know, the one we’re diggin’ through. You kin use that rickety ladder, and you got two ways in or out. Here in the shack, or through the shaft.”
Zelda frowned. The thought of going underground made her skin crawl. “I don’t like closed-in places, Zeke. Asides, how do I get out through the hole in the shack floor if someone comes down the ladder? The entrance is under my trunk, and I’d have t’ pound and holler.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll fix it. I’ll move your trunk and set a board an’ that rug there instead so’s you can move it easy. Asides, it’s only for a couple days. I’ll betcha no one’s gonna care ’bout what’s-her-name. Liz? I’ll go into town and keep an ear out. If I don’t hear any business about it, you kin clear town. Mebbe set up a crib in Denver and you kin send us money?” he sounded hopeful.
“That’s a ways down the road, Zeke. Just help me hide for now. I don’t want Zed knowing about this.” She stepped over Zed’s unconscious form to reach the tin box that served as their pie safe. Taking a rag from the meager pile of clean cloths, she stifled the small voice of conscience—
who’ll do the wash whilst I’m gone?
—wrapped up a few hard-as-rocks biscuits, some cheese and jerked meat, and grabbed the long kitchen knife.
Zeke stopped her. “Here.” He thrust his bowie knife into her hand, sheath straps dangling. “Take this pig sticker. You kin use it for the biscuits or if’n there are rats.”
She recoiled.
“Naw, just kiddin’, Zel. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of ya.” There was a new note of authority in Zeke’s whisper, a brotherly tenderness Zelda couldn’t recall having heard before.
“Lookee here.” Warm wool, redolent of Zeke, settled on her shoulders. “Take my coat. It ain’t so cold for me. I’ll bring more clothes later. And here’s my canteen.” He handed her a leather flask. The material felt damp and sticky at the same time to her fingers.
“Let’s go, afore the cock crows,” he added.
He opened the door. A slice of dawn slid in through the crack.
Hugging food and water to her chest, praying that she’d done the right thing in trusting this brother and that no harm would come to her family as a result of her bad luck, Zelda slipped out the door and followed Zeke.