Silver Lies (43 page)

Inez hurried Joey into pants and jacket and into the kitchen. She pulled on Mark’s old sturdy boots over her wool sleeping socks and tied Joey’s shoes.

"Stay here." Sands came through the kitchen, buckling on his gun belt, his overcoat hanging on his shoulders.

"We’re coming. Two of us can search twice as fast." She shoved her arms into Mark’s old greatcoat, ripping the lining in one sleeve in her haste.

Sands shot her a dubious glance, which she ignored. Inez stuffed her waist-length braid under the coat and searched pockets for gloves. He yanked open the back door.

It still snowed. Soft, silent, fast. Faint, regular depressions advanced to the alley.

"Any reason she’d go back to the house?" Reverend Sands pulled on his gloves.

"Her Bible." Inez’s heart beat hard, a hammer pounding the same nail over and over. "She left it in her bedroom. I lent her mine, told her we’d come back in the morning."

Reverend Sands started down the steps. "I never should’ve returned her key."

Inez gripped Joey’s mittened hand and hastened after the reverend.

The journey to the alley and past the intervening lots was silent and cold. Inez heard only her own ragged breathing as she and Joey floundered through drifts, struggling to catch up with Sands, and thought only her own silent prayers:
Please God, let everything be all right. Please God, not Emma.

At the back fence to Emma’s house she saw, through the scrim of falling snow, the back door hanging open like the broken jaw of some gaping beast. The shadow form of Reverend Sands hesitated on the back porch, drew his gun, and vanished inside.

Inez wavered, considered the wisdom of taking Joey any further. Dark apprehensions crowded, whispering like the falling snow. She could not retreat. Her fears for Emma forced her toward that dark doorway.

She picked up Joey, pushing his face against her shoulder. "Hold on tight," she whispered. "And don’t look." Burdened with his weight, she wallowed through the shrouded yard and up the back stairs.

Blundering into the kitchen, blinded after the dead-white world outside, Inez screamed as she collided with an unseen form. The form materialized into Sands, who crowded her into retreat. "Out. Get him out of here. Get a neighbor. Doc. The marshal."

Inez caught a whiff of something sour, metallic.

A smell she identified with panic. With blood.

Her sight adjusted to the dim interior. The kitchen was a chaos of overturned boxes, smashed china.

Inez pushed Joey toward Sands, forcing him to grab for the child. Freed of Joey’s weight, she dodged around the reverend and ran through the kitchen into the dark hallway.

To the right, she saw a slice of the parlor, trunks upended, clothes and personal objects spilling into the hall. Immediately left, Joey’s bedroom. Beyond that, the half-closed door to Emma’s room.

She shoved the door open.

A broken china washbasin, scattered books, linens.

A slashed bedtick, spilling out a wasteland of feathers.

At the foot of the bed, what looked to be crumpled bedclothes.

"Emma. Oh, Emma."

Inez cradled Emma’s head in her arms.

Blood, everywhere.

A particularly ominous patch soaked through Emma’s thin dress and petticoat, pooling about her hips and legs. Inez touched the woolen stocking hanging from Emma’s neck. The fabric, now cut away, had left angry red marks impressed on her throat.

Inez tried to untie a second stocking knotted around one of Emma’s wrists.

"Who did this to you, Emma? Who?"

Emma’s eyes were half-shut, her face blue and mottled with bruises. Inez could barely detect the rise and fall of her breath.

A thunder of footsteps pounded up the back steps and grew louder in the kitchen and hallway, accompanied by the urgent baritones and tenors of masculine voices. Inez tugged the dress down over Emma’s pale, blood-streaked calves, attempting a small measure of modesty for her unconscious friend.

The company of men descended on the room like a cloud of ravens, dark winter coats swirling about them. Gloved hands lifted Inez from the floor, away from Emma’s limp body. Inez struggled to stay, clutching Emma’s unresponsive hand.

"Mrs. Stannert." Doc’s calm rumble called her back from the edge of hysteria. "Let me do my work. There’s no place for you here right now." His voice rose to include the others. "Please leave the room."

Doc delivered her to other waiting hands and crouched by Emma. He rapidly shed his coat and began to peel off his gloves.

Reverend Sands herded everyone toward the parlor. Curly Dan and another deputy, faces apprehensive under their hat brims, ushered Inez to the parlor’s threshold and released her as if their duty and nerve ended at the doorjamb.

Marshal Hollis snaked past them and walked slowly around the room examining the shambles and pulling at his tobacco-stained mustache. When he’d completed his circuit, Inez stepped forward to block his path.

"You." She jabbed him with a finger covered with blood.
Emma’s blood.
"You find out who did this. Because if you don’t, I will. And I’ll kill him."

Hollis scratched one end of his ragged mustache. Inez’s finger had missed his coat lapel and left a small red blotch on his sheepskin vest next to the badge. His tight green eyes focused beyond her. "Reverend. You was first on the scene, right?"

"That’s right." Sands skirted an overturned box to stand by Inez.

"So what’s
she,
" Hollis jerked his chin toward Inez, "doin’ here?"

Inez spoke up. "Since your response to our request for help yesterday was less than overwhelming," she could hear the deputies behind her shifting uneasily on their feet, "Mrs. Rose and her son stayed at my house last night. We thought it would be safer. When we awoke this morning, Mrs. Rose was," she faltered, "gone. We came here looking for her."

"Uh-huh." The marshal’s narrow face thinned further with contempt. He chewed harder, glancing from Reverend Sands to Inez and back again.

Inez realized that her undefined
we
invited any number of speculations. Some, no doubt accurate.

Marshal Hollis looked around, as if searching for a place to spit. He finally brushed past Reverend Sands and muttered, "We’re talkin’ later. Alone."

The marshal went out the front door. A moment later he was back, wiping tobacco juice off his chin. "You take that outta the room?" He pointed.

Inez looked down at Emma’s Bible, clutched in her hand. The leather cover of the book was splattered with dark spots. "She came back for this."

He snapped his fingers and held out his hand. Inez reluctantly gave it up, adding, "She reads to her son every morning—" She broke off, aghast that Joey hadn’t even entered her mind until that moment.

Reverend Sands squeezed her shoulder gently. "He’s at the saloon with Abe and Bridgette."

Hollis flipped through the pages perfunctorily then handed it back to Inez. "Guess the young’un might need this," he said gruffly. "Curly, take Miz Stannert home. And Miz Stannert, I’ve got questions for you, too, so stay there ’til I come lookin’ for you."

The thought of sitting alone in her house was more than she could bear. "Marshal," she said with equal coolness, "I’ll be at the saloon with Joey."

Hollis grunted. Inez took that for consent and began to pull on the gloves she’d hastily stuffed into the pockets of the oversized jacket.

Reverend Sands made a move as if to leave with her.

"Nope, Reverend. You stay. You an’ me, we gotta talk."

Sands squeezed her shoulder once more. He and Hollis then moved to the far side of the room, hands clasped behind their backs, voices low, shutting out everyone else.

999

Bridgette sat next to Joey at the saloon’s kitchen table. "Tish. Eat. Your mother would want you to keep your strength up."

Inez watched by a tray of clean dishes, shot glass in one hand, towel in the other.

Joey looked at the fingers of dry toast stacked log-cabin style on the plate before him, his silent misery plain for all to see.

"That’s right," Bridgette said, as if by merely looking at the food he could draw sustenance from it. "Eat one, there’s a lad."

Inez shook her head, picked up the tray, and carried it to the barroom.

Abe turned from counting whiskey bottles. "The boy eatin’ yet?"

"No. Nor talking. He hasn’t said a word since he asked…" She bit her lip too hard, then rubbed it with her knuckles. "‘Is mama going to die?’"

Abe’s pencil paused above the inventory list. "What’d you say to that?"

"I told him, ‘If there’s a God in heaven, she’ll live.’"

"Let’s hope you’re not settin’ him up to be a nonbeliever."

"Emma’s got to live." Inez began arranging the glasses on the shelf under the bar. "Do you know what her last—well, almost last—words were to me?" She didn’t wait for his response. "She made me promise to look after Joey if something happened to her. To raise him as my own. Not that I’ve done such a bang-up job with William." Panic rose in her throat. "I can’t do it, Abe. She’s got to live."

"You’ll do what you got to do and when you’ve got to do it, Inez."

"Emma’s at the hospital. Doc said he’d come by tonight after Joey’s asleep. I’ve never seen him look so grim. Oh Emma. Oh God. Abe, if you’d seen her." Inez flinched from the memory of Emma crumpled on the floor, smeared in blood. "I can’t imagine who would do that. Some animal. Worse than an animal. A monster."

Crouched below the level of the bar, she rested her forehead on the smooth mahogany edge. The dark hollow underneath smelled of wood polish, whiskey, and dust. "That dolt of a marshal better catch who did it. And they better string him up."

Abe’s footsteps echoed on the raised plank floor. "Hope he catches the right man." His tone was dark. "Emma’s no fallen flower of State Street. Folks’ll be hollering for a necktie party, the sooner the better. The town is still all riled up over Stewart and Frodsham, and they were just a footpad and a lot-jumper. The law won’t have a chance."

Inez remembered the midnight lynchings that had occurred a block away just before Thanksgiving. "In this case, Abe, I’d cast my vote with the vigilantes for swift justice at the end of a rope."