Sisters (25 page)

"They're the ones Miss
Willard speaks about. Two women who went off together to a valley in
Wales where they could live together. I don't know how long ago it
was, quite a long time, I think. All kinds of famous people visited
them and admired the way they loved one another."

"No one thought their
behavior was... scandalous?"

"I seem to remember
Miss Willard saying their parents had objected at first, but the
strength of their attachment was so great that finally the parents
relented. Wordsworth was one of the notables who visited them. He
even wrote a sonnet about the beauty and purity of their love.

"I don't know the
poem. Tell me about it."

"I don't remember the
words. It just makes them seem like angels."

"Why was Miss Willard
talking about the Ladies of Llangollen?"

"Oh, it wasn't part of
her regular presentation, but somehow the subject came up, and she
acknowledged how common it is for women to love one another. She has
her own special friend in Anna Gordon, you know, the quiet lady who's
always with her, but she cited the Llangollen ladies as the most
conspicuous example. And she talked about the remarkable friendships
Margaret Fuller had."

Suddenly Sophie knew what
she'd been trying to think of ever since she'd read the letters at
Amy Travers' house. That peculiar novel of Henry James', "The
Bostonians" it was called, and it had been serialized in The
Century Magazine last year. Everyone had whispered about it,
scandalized that James would satirize a gentle philanthropical lady
like Elizabeth Peabody. But Sophie hadn't been surprised by that so
much as by the passionate relationship James had depicted between two
of the women reformers in his book. How could he so openly set forth
such an attachment? And why was no one buzzing about that? "Sometimes
these... friendships are quite passionate," she said to Lydia.

"Decidedly so."

"But still, no one
sees anything wrong--"

"Oh, no, of course
not!" There was shock in her voice. "These are women. The
flame they nurture has no heat or smoke. It's a sublime kind of
ardor."

So that explained why
James' female lovers hadn't scandalized. Quite the contrary, society
encouraged such pairings in the belief sex couldn't be involved, not
where nice women were concerned. With women, attachment couldn't be
physical, it had to be spiritual and pure. It was immortal,
uplifting, beyond the flesh. "Helen and Amy Travers...?"

"Ah, yes," Lydia
answered. "Theirs was one of the most beautiful friendships I've
seen."

Sophie was startled to
realize she had lived so set apart from other women that she had
failed to recognize a way of bonding together obviously central to
many of their lives. But if her experience had blinded her to some
things, it had made her clear-visioned about others. Society as a
whole might conclude that women were sexless creatures, but she knew
otherwise. And she also knew that claiming a relationship was not
erotic, thinking it could not be, would not keep it from being so.
Oh, doubtless such convictions dictated limits one could not go
beyond without without destroying the myth. There could be no tearing
off one's clothes and lustily hopping into bed, not if one would
preserve the love-religion. But the loving words and the warm embrace
were permitted, and the kiss before sleep, the arousal gentle enough
so that its nature would not have be acknowledged.

There were no limits on the
emotions which might explode out of such a relationship, however.
Ecstasy, jealousy, rage, all were possible, perhaps even heightened
by the dampening of physical passion. Amy Travers might well have
reacted violently when Helen refused to go away with her. She could
have come to the Stevenson home in a fury, found Helen working at her
desk on the landing, and bitterly confronted her. Helen had stood,
and they had argued. And Miss Travers had reached out with those
oddly childlike hands to force Helen into understand what she would
not otherwise see. Only, the hands were stronger than Miss Travers
had thought, and the beloved more fragile, and Helen had fallen.

It so easily might have
happened that way--but how could she be certain? Someone had left the
house right after Helen's fall, but that was the only real clue she
had, wasn't it?

Suddenly another thought
occurred. If Amy Travers had pushed Helen down the stairs, surely it
would have altered her subsequent behavior. She was not a hardened
criminal. If she were guilty, she would act guilty. And did that
explain her behavior on the porch when Sophie had unexpectedly
dropped by yesterday?

"Lydia," Sophie
said, "you've helped me so much. I have just one last question,
a rather peculiar thing perhaps you can explain. Yesterday, I stopped
by Miss Travers' house, and it was quite clear she didn't want me to
come in--or even see in her house. Why would that be?"

"Have you ever been in
her parlor?"

"No," Sophie
answered hastily.

Lydia nodded. "Amy has
a hair wreath on the wall. It's Helen's hair, of course, and Helen's
picture is framed in it. It's quite unusual, very large. I've never
seen one like it. It's quite... arresting. We're all used to it, of
course. We expect it. But she may have thought it would startle you."
Lydia smiled gently. "And she would have been quite correct,
wouldn't she?"

Walking was still painful enough the next day so that Sophie chose to
use the cane, but with it she could get around fairly well. She made
her way down from the landing, then through the hall, the drawing
room, the dining room, the rear hallway, and the kitchen to the back
door. Then she went back to the front hall and followed another
route, the one through the library and back hall to the kitchen and
back door.

So, there were two ways
someone could have fled after Helen's fall. Through the library was a
little shorter distance, but the library door was usually closed, and
opening it would take time. The routes were probably equally
attractive, but having established that, what had she proved? She
grimaced in frustration. "Nothing," was the answer, and she
didn't know how to go about finding "something." She
thought of Monsieur Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe's detective. He would
notice some detail--perhaps a window which appeared nailed shut, but
really wasn't--and then with ratiocination alone, he would deduce
every other detail of what had happened. But I, though Sophie, am
not, unfortunately, such a trained observer. And real life is not,
unfortunately, so amenable to logic.

Mrs. Syms appeared to let
her know the carriage was ready, and the housekeeper walked with her
down the front steps and watched closely while the boy who was
driving helped Sophie into the phaeton. Once settled, Sophie directed
the boy to the Clarion office. She might be puzzled about how to
gather information about Helen's death, but she had an idea where to
begin when it came to Jake Rodman. She was going to see the young
reporter who had interviewed her. She had first thought about going
to see the sheriff, but rejected that idea when she remembered
something James had said the day she'd arrived, something which
implied the sheriff was enlisted in the cause of the Stock Growers'
Association. But the young reporter wouldn't be hampered by such
allegiances, and there was the additional advantage that he knew who
she was, really knew. She wouldn't have to waste time getting him to
take her seriously.

The Clarion was on
Seventeenth Street, just down from the opera house. It butted up
against Meanea's Saddlery, and the sharp tang of printer's ink hung
in the air with the rich, male smell of leather. Sophie stayed in the
carriage while her driver went into the Clarion office. He came out
with the young reporter, who was putting on his hat as he came
through the door. "Mrs. Dymond, nice to see you again so soon. I
knew that article hadn't run yet, but you'll like it when it does.
Sometime this week--"

"That's why I came. I
thought perhaps you could help me."

"Sure, be glad to.
What can I do?"

"There's a man who's
been bothering me--"

"Here in Cheyenne?
Bothering you?"

"Very much so, and
what I want is to find out something about him. I thought you might
be able to tell me one or two things."

"Better than that, why
don't I have a little talk with him, if you know what I mean."

"No, no. Just tell me
what you know about him. His name's Jake Rodman."

"Jake Rodman... Jake
Rodman... you know, that sounds familiar, but I just can't..."

"He's a detective for
the Stock Growers' Association."

"Oh... oh..." The
young man took a step backward, and for a moment he seemed
speechless. "Uh... uh... you know, I really haven't been here
very long, and I don't know too much. You better talk to my boss."
With that he fled back into the Clarion office.

A moment or two later, a
short stocky man came out of the newspaper building and approached
the carriage. He had fair skin permanently burned by the sun, small
eyes, and a paunch which he emphasized by walking with his thumbs in
his belt loops, thus pulling his trousers low enough so that the
whole white-shirted expanse of his belly protruded above them.
"Virgil says you're lookin' for some information," he said.

Virgil. She had not known
the young reporter's name before. "Yes, that's so. I'm trying to
find a little background information on someone."

"One of the Stock
Growers' detectives, Virgil says. Whatcha need information like that
for?"

"I'm Sophie Dymond,
Mr...?"

"Coover's the name."

"Mr. Coover, I'm the
publisher of Dymond's Monthly, and I still write for it occasionally.
I'm in Cheyenne visiting my ailing grandfather, Joe Martin, and while
I'm here I'm working on an article. That's why I'm asking questions."
At Coover's unexpected interruption, Rodman's "bothering"
her seemed too vague an excuse for checking into his background. But
if she kept falling back on the story she was writing, she thought to
herself, someday soon she was actually going to have to work on it.

"So, what're ya
writin' that you want to know about Jake Rodman?"

She hesitated, beginning to
resent the questions. "About the conflict between the
homesteaders and the cattlemen."

"Whose side ya on?"

"No one's side."

He gave her a cynical look.
"Mrs. Dymond, I seen your type before. I know what the story'll
be like. People like you don't get what it's really like out here.
You come out here from the city with your namby-pamby sentiments
about how we should treat rustlers and you don't know what it's like
out here."

"I said homesteaders,
not rustlers."

He spit into the dust.
"Comes to the same thing mosta the time."

"I guess it's clear
whose side you're on, isn't it?"

"Where I am is on the
side of the law. That's not an easy thing out here, but if this
territory's gonna grow and progress, we gotta have it. I'm on the
side a whoever's gonna help keep the law."

"Men like Jake Rodman,
then?"

He shrugged.

"Does the Stock
Growers' Association pay you too, Mr. Coover? They advertise in your
paper, perhaps?"

His tiny eyes narrowed.
"Look, we don't need some fancy lady comin' out here from the
big city to mind our business for us. We don't need you, Mrs. Dymond,
and we don't want you. It's time you figgered that out." He
turned on his heel and walked back to the Clarion officer. Through
the window, Sophie could see him pick up the telephone and ring the
operator.

She was so angry, she took
a moment to calm herself before directing the driver to take her back
to the Stevensons'. Fancy lady! The gall of him, of all of them. For
just a moment she wished she were a man. She imagined the
satisfaction of hauling Coover up by his shirtfront, hissing at him
through her teeth, then shoving him away so he sat down foolishly in
the dust.

But there was another way
to exact revenge, a more effective one, really. She'd write the
article, since that's what seemed to upset them so much. She'd really
do it, not just talk about it or use it as an excuse. And she'd put
everything in it, not just her conclusion, but everything that had
happened, all the attempts to frighten and intimidate. She might as
well, she thought. Since they believed she was going to, they would
be coming against her with full force anyway.

Back at the Stevenson
house, she gathered some paper, sat down at Helen's desk, and thought
about where to begin. She wrote a paragraph, read it, reread it,
crossed it out, and tried another. No, that wasn't right either, she
decided after a few sentences. What was wrong? Usually the words came
more easily than this. Perhaps she was trying to write from too
personal a viewpoint; perhaps she needed to distance herself further
from the subject. She sat back for a moment and found herself
studying the satinwood inlays in the desk. She shut her eyes and
could smell the faint, sweet odor of beeswax polish. Helen's desk.
Helen. Why was she letting herself be distracted from the matter of
Helen? Someone had pushed her sister down the stairs--she was sure of
it. And yet here she was--

Screams interrupted her
thoughts, the high-pitched agonized wails of a child. Bumping against
the desk, she pushed back the chair, gathered up her skirts, and ran
down the stairs, hardly noticing the pain in her ankle. Where were
the screams coming from? Outside, but where outside? She threw open
the front door and stood on the porch listening, straining to listen.
Down the street, just down the street.

She flew to the front gate,
ignoring the curved walk and the pain in her ankle. She unlatched the
gate and looked down the street. There, down there, just by the
telephone pole, someone was lying on the ground. She ran down the
board sidewalk toward the crumpled figure, adn as she neared, she saw
it was Esther, not lying on the ground, but hunched over, and not
screaming now, but moaning, the knuckles of her hand jammed in her
mouth, her face distorted with pain.