Weeping Angel (17 page)

The longer Pap talked, the worse he sounded, and Frank could feel the tension in Amelia from a foot away. She gave an anxious little cough, then took a sip of her lemonade. She stole a look of indecision at Frank over the rim of her glass before hastily glancing away. Putting the lemonade down, she said with reserve, “I have adjusted to living alone, Mr. O'Cleary, but I believe most women would like the opportunity to be a wife.”

A general answer, Frank thought, spoken with humility and effectiveness. But did she really mean it? He suspected she did and felt lacking for not having achieved the title of missus herself. Well, he couldn't help her there. He'd give her use of the piano; he wasn't giving her use of his name, though Pap sure seemed intent on hitching his after Amelia's.

Frank had never seen Pap acting so much like a horny bull penned up in a pasture. His behavior bordered on pathetic. At least Pap shut up after Amelia's reply.

Amelia put the last of her things away, drank more of her lemonade, and stood there with her glass half full, looking very out of place. Frank guessed the hour close to four. Some of the stockmen came in about
now, and a gentleman guest or two from the hotel wanting to have a snort before dinner. Cobb generally left and came back near closing.

“Getting to be that time,” Pap remarked offhandedly, but with an inflection of forced casualness only Frank saw through.

Pap O'Cleary wanted to show off his piano-playing.

Meshing his fingers together, Pap stretched his arms. His joints cracked, and Frank noticed Amelia shuddered. “I'd best be warming up.”

Pap rounded the bar and stepped on the birdseed. The hulls crunched and he looked down. “Confound it.” Blustering over to the corner, he snatched up the broom and began vigorously sweeping the seeds underneath the one-foot gap of the bat-wing doors.

“Thank you for the lemonade, Mr. Brody,” Amelia said, pressing the glass into Frank's hand.

“Any time.”

She fingered the gold watch on her bodice and read the round face. “It's eight minutes after four. I'm on your piano time. I'll be going now.”

“Who counts minutes?”

“I do.”

Slipping her gloves on, she picked up her bag.

“Did you get everything?” he asked, stalling her departure. “All your busts?”

Giving him a lift of her brows, she clipped, “All eight of them.”

Frank couldn't contain a burst of laughter as he set the glass on top of the piano. “Goddamn, you can be funny.”

“Don't damn God for my humor, Mr. Brody. In all likelihood it was my aunt who instilled a fraction of wit in me. She was very skilled at repartee—dry, especially. I think you would have liked her, but I'm not sure if the opposite would have rung true. She was very selective about her company.” Amelia nodded curtly. “Good day, Mr. Brody.”

“Wait,” he said, surprised by his own voice. “I want to talk to you.”

“I believe that's what we've been doing.”

“This is about the lessons.”

“What is it you have to say?”

Pap chose then to walk up to them and sit down on the piano stool. He gave his knuckles another bone-jarring snap, curved his fingers over the keys, paused, then burst into the chorus for “The Cat Came Back.” He went as far as singing along in a baritone laden with staged emotion.

“But the cat came back, couldn't stay no longer. Yes, the cat came back the very next day. The cat came back, thought he was a goner. But the cat came back for it wouldn't stay away.”

Amelia stared at him.

Under Pap's guidance, the piano strings worked into hard chords and set a brisk melody. The loud notes left no room for Frank to speak with Amelia, so he took her by the elbow and steered her out the front doors.

Once on the boardwalk, the song didn't seem so potent. But it still was noisy, and Pap didn't let up on his vocalizing.

“I don't know what gets into Pap when he's around you, Miss Marshall,” Frank remarked. “He's normally not such a buffoon.”

Amelia made no comment on that but did address Frank with a certain amount of appeal. “What is it you needed to say to me, Mr. Brody?”

Frank crossed his arms over his chest. In doing so, the gravelly sound of discarded birdseed beneath his boots made him frown. “I hope you don't take this the wrong way, sweetheart, but I think you're going to have to tell your pupils' mothers they can't hang around. I saw them gathered in front of the Moon Rock while I was over at the Chuckwagon. Parks's wife stayed inside for fifteen minutes before she left.
Then she came out to report to Mrs. Beamguard.” Frank crossed one leg in front of the other. “Now, I'm not one to complain about women in the saloon—if they're the type of woman you'd expect to see in a saloon. But birdseed spilled on the floor doesn't make for a good impression, not to mention, that Reed woman is obnoxious.”

“When the novelty wears off, I'm sure they won't come anymore.” Amelia looked him straight in the eyes, and he felt the afternoon sunlight pouring over his back. “You wouldn't have to be concerned over this if I had the piano in my home.”

“If you had the piano in your home, you wouldn't be talking to me, now would you, Miss Marshall?” He took a step closer to her. “And I rather like talking to you.”

“Since we are talking,” she noted in a cool, impersonal tone, “I've been thinking about what transpired between us yesterday.”

“So have I.”

Her eyes brightened. “You have?”

He nodded.

After a moment's pause, she sobered and cleared her throat. “It has to be said, what happened between us must never be repeated. I wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression of me. Just because I'm accepting your hospitality doesn't mean you can take liberties on my person, Mr. Brody. I won't allow it. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal. It won't happen again.”

She seemed surprised, and a little disappointed, by his reply. “W-Well, then . . .” she stammered, making a move to leave. “I'll be going now.”

He stopped her with a hastily put together question. “When are your eager students going to play something that doesn't sound like scratches on a chalkboard?”

She cracked a slight smile, as if gaining some
satisfaction that the poor skills of her pupils bothered him. “Don't you like their diatonic scales in solmization?”

“About as much as I like popguns shot at me. Kids aren't my favorite thing in life.”

Her expression grew subtly serious. “You dislike children?”

“I have no feelings either way. They remind me I was little once.”

“We all were.”

“Yeah, but my childhood was fleeting.”

“How very awful for you,” she said softly. “What happened?”

He was uncomfortable with the sympathy in her tone and mad that he'd allowed her to maneuver their conversation onto a topic he'd only discussed with Pap. And that had been hard enough. The moods were rare that he spoke about the orphanage and Harry.

“There are some subjects, Miss Marshall,” Frank said, his palm on the door's frosted glass, “that are better left undiscussed.”

He pushed the door in and damned himself for bringing up old memories—however elusive. He recognized the fact that, for whatever reason, Amelia Marshall could bring his childhood memories to surface. A very dangerous feat to a man who prided himself on not needing anyone.

What he did need, however, was to concentrate on the do-si-do girls. The upright piano wasn't enough. Charley had said he'd been able to pack the place when his girl had been dancing to a banjo and harmonica. First thing tomorrow, Frank would send an open telegram to several papers advertising for saloon girls. He disregarded Pap's warning about the town women not going for the idea. He'd been doing what he wanted to up until this point, and no one had slung any fire and brimstone at him.

He had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

A
melia sat at the table in her formal dining room, hands clasped on her lap, and a hot dinner of one pork chop, boiled red potatoes, and garden peas in front of her. She'd put a fresh-cut bouquet of fragrant pink peonies in the center of the table with two paraffin candles in glass candlesticks.

The pendulum on the black walnut regulator moved to and fro, counting out the seconds. When the striker hit the gong bell five times, she withdrew her flatware from her damask napkin. She aligned the knife to the right of her anemone-patterned semi-porcelain ware, the fork to the left. Opening the bleached linen square, she smoothed the napkin on her lap, picked up her fork, and began to eat her meal.

Alone.

Amelia didn't care for Saturday evenings. The unmarried ladies fortunate enough to have gentlemen callers were taken on sunset picnics or to a restaurant dinner at the Chuckwagon. The men at Reed's sawmill never came to call on her; men didn't ask her if
she wanted to go on a twilight buggy ride, or to have One-Eye Otis slice her a piece of vinegar pie. Instead, she had a pork chop on Saturday nights and ate in unaccompanied silence.

At least on Sundays she felt included. For the past two years since her aunt Clara had died, she'd eaten her Sunday suppers with Narcissa and Cincinatus. The couple had been the first Idahoans she and her aunt had met upon reaching Boise.

Amelia and her mother's sister, Clara Davenport, were newly arrived from Denver, and her aunt had been uncertain where they would settle. She'd decided to make the capital city their roosting spot while she studied prospective areas within the state to relocate. They'd met the Dodges in a Boise dining room; Cincinatus and Narcissa spoke of a small town to the north called Weeping Angel, that would be celebrating its founding on the Fourth of July. The couple had lived there for a year and had told her aunt it was still quiet, quaint, and had a reverend who could preach a mean streak.

Aunt Clara said that was just the type of town Amelia's mother had wanted for Amelia.

So Amelia and Aunt Clara had come to Weeping Angel and stayed at the Oak Tree Hotel while a house could be built for them on Inspiration Lane. Aunt Clara thought the street name befitting a home for her sister's only child.

Amelia pushed her peas around on her plate, thinking about her mother. Ida Marshall had died six years ago and had been a staunch Methodist. A singing Methodist—that denomination of pious people prone to vocalizing their way through the gospel. Amelia couldn't remember her father. He'd died when she was five and they lived on their farm in Lone Rock, Wisconsin. The details of his face had faded, and with no pictures of him, she wouldn't have known him if she passed him by in heaven.

Lifting a glass of milk to her lips, Amelia drank. The clock kept its steady beat; somewhere in the rafters, the house creaked.

Amelia reflected her childhood hadn't been really sad after her father died. From the farm they'd moved to Larimer Street in Denver to live with Aunt Clara and the two elderly ladies, the Wooten sisters, her aunt cared for.

Smiling in recollection, Amelia set her glass down. She'd liked the Wooten sisters, Cille and Cea, after she'd gotten used to them. They'd smelled like thyme and mint, glycerin, and rose vinegar. Amelia was given the task of making the sisters' beds each morning, and the toilet bouquet of old ladies lingered on the bedclothes. As she grew older, kitchen duties were added to Amelia's chores.

Although Amelia and her mother weren't well off, Amelia couldn't remember ever lacking for anything throughout her adolescence. The Wootens lived comfortably and shared their monetary security with those who resided in the house. Not through cash compensation—for Amelia and her mother were never paid—but by their prosperous surroundings.

Though Baptists, the Wootens loved singing and music as much as Ida Marshall. The sisters insisted Amelia take lessons, and for the next ten years, every Wednesday Miss Lovejoy came to instruct Amelia promptly at three o'clock—to the delight of Cille and Cea, who on those Wednesdays took their tea with musical accompaniment. It was only after Amelia's mother fell ill with chronic bronchitis, that Miss Lovejoy stopped coming, fearful of Amelia's mother's disease.

Sighing, Amelia took up her knife. The sisters both died in their seventies within two months of each other during the spring of 1890. Their house and their holdings had gone to Aunt Clara and, in an indirect way, to Amelia. For it was the Wooten money that
built the very house she lived in now. It was the Wooten money that had kept her sheltered and financially secure after Aunt Clara passed on.

But it was the same Wooten money that was running out.

As Amelia put a small piece of meat into her mouth, she almost wished she could go back to her childhood when worries were not as pressing, when the worst thing to happen to her was Horace Button teasing her in primary school because she lived with smelly old ladies.