Wildwood Creek (9 page)

When Maggie May slips in with Essie Jane, I pretend the sleep has taken me off. It’s clear Essie Jane told her nothing but that I took ill again.

When we’re alone again, I instruct Maggie that we’ll not be leaving the room until the
New Ila
comes to her final landin’. Then I close my eyes and wish away the snags and the wicked currents of the water, and pray we make it swift to the end port upriver.

The day passes, and then a night filled with fitful dreams. I’m running through the trees, clutching Maggie May’s hand, dragging her behind me. Her fingers slip from me then, and I feel the breathing of something fearsome on my neck. Then I’m being pushed down. I fight with all that’s in me, fight for air, fight for life, fight to be free. But the weight is too burdensome. Time and again, I wake up with screams hanging in my throat.

And then I’m lying in the dark, looking deep into it, and thinking I hear whispers. They all must be whispering by now, knowing what happened, askin’ and wonderin’ and supposin’. The captain putting his mate off the boat won’t go by without notice.

In the morning, we stop to take on cordwood. Maggie May pleads to go atop and watch, but I’ll not allow it. The captain comes to ask after me himself. I send Maggie May to the door
to tell him I’ve gone sick again. In the corridor, he’s bidding her to assure me that he has removed Mr. Grazide from the boat at the cordwood stop. There’s naught for me to worry of now. We’ll make our final port by dark today. A last dinner will be served on board, and those who choose to may sleep the night here before leaving off in the morning. Our party, departing for Wildwood, will strike away, first light.

“Please tell your sister I will hope to see her at our final dinner here on the
New Ila
,” he relays to Maggie May, doubtless knowing the doors are thin and I hear him well enough on the other side.

Coming in again, Maggie doesn’t bother repeating the message. She knows we’ll not be going to dinner.

Overnight, we pack what little we have and wash and scrub our hair in the basin, sleeping while it dries. It’s well before first light when we wake and dress, making ourselves as presentable as can be.

I’m clinging to Maggie May as we make our way up. Outside, the mornin’ air is thick with fog, the day just beginning to blow soft breath on the river. Sounds bustle all around, driving the wild beating of my heart.

Porters cry out.

Metal clatters against metal.

Iron wheels squeal, tearing the morning air as loads are brought up and down the gangplank on hand rollers.

Slaves groan beneath heavy loads. Horses whinny and snort, waiting at the docks. An ox bellows, goats bleat, a rooster crows, singing up the sun.

I lose myself in it as we come to the railing. Along the dock and down the street into town, wagons loaded with freight wait to be unloaded and transported, while empty wagons wait to receive cargo off the
New Ila
. There’s a feeling of excitement in the air, and it catches me. I see nothing of the
other passengers, and I’m glad of it. Perhaps they’ve gone on to their business already. Perhaps they’re waiting to leave the
New Ila
after her cargos have been exchanged.

Maggie May and I are to find the supply party that’s traveling west to Wildwood, but there is a great clamor on the dock and I realize I’ve no way of knowing which party should be ours.

“Come along, Maggie May.” I squeeze her hand. The fresh air and the excitement all around has got into me. I feel it, like the answer to the desperate prayers in the black of midnight.
Hope.
It moves anew, soft and silent as the morning light. “We’ll go and find our wagoner.”

We circle the deck, but goods are transferring up and down the plank, obliging us to wait until it’s clear. I let Maggie free, and she climbs onto a crate, so as to better see the town.

Myself, I look beyond it, far into the distance.

Now’s the end of Bonnie Rose O’Brien,
I promise. I gaze west beyond the town, where the countryside spills into a sky still dim enough to allow the moon and the final stars a showing. I grip the rail, lean over and close my eyes, and whisper thanks to God for bringing us here safely, for whisking us far from the shame. Surely, that is a miracle only the Almighty One could forge.

“You’re looking fine and fit this morning, Miss Rose.” The captain’s voice brings up short my thinking and romancing and praying.

I feel a sudden heat creep up my neck. My cheeks go flush. “Thank you, sir.” I straighten my shoulders, and I’m wondering what I would see in his eyes if I were to look, but I cannot do it. He is, perhaps, one of the finest men I’ve ever chanced to meet. And one with a good and honest heart. “I’ve caught the excitement of setting off overland, I think.”

“It’s a fine day for it.” But there’s nothing of admiration for
this fine day in his tone. Instead, it is grave. There’s a worry there. I risk a glance his way and notice that he’s looking out also. A shadow dims his blue eyes as he watches the preparations on the dock. I wonder if it’s anything to do with me, or if he is only fretting the return trip on the river. There’s been no more rain, and the water’s only gone lower. He’s a fine captain, I think, devoted to the
New Ila
and its cargo, but he cannot make it float over sand. It’s a risky venture, bringing a stern-wheeler this far upriver.

“I wish you a fine journey back.” I should thank him for saving me from Mr. Grazide, but it’s not in me to be speaking of it. “I am grateful for the help you’ve been to Maggie May and myself on our journey thus far.”

“It is your journey from here that concerns me.” I feel him looking at me now. He’s come ’round to his point, I know. This is what he’s been wanting to say to me—why he’s here alongside me now.

I fold my hands tight against my stomach inside the gloves that hide the burned flesh and the two crooked fingers.

“The frontier is an uncertain place and not a proper location for a respectable young woman alone, and with charge of a child, no less.”

I wonder then, has he not discerned anythin’ of my past? Most surely Mr. Grazide would’ve told what he had seen on my person, by way of excusing his foul actions toward me. Hangman’s noose—or rawhide loop tied to the tail of an Indian pony—it matters little in which manner scars came to be there. Both condemn me.

Yet the captain’s face holds tender concern, as if he feels a responsibility for me, even though I’m to leave his boat today.

For a moment I sink into his softness and strength, stepping into his eyes like a pool, the water flowing over me, and with it are a yearnin’ and a wantin’ I thought I had banished long
ago. I dare not entertain it. It’s the kind of hope that will lift me too high for falling. Yet it grips me hard.

I push it down deep again and lock it away. My life isn’t to be the girlish thing I’d once dreamed of. He only looks at me in such a way because he doesn’t know.

I turn toward the dock again. “We are to travel with the supply wagons, well armed, is my understanding. I am assuming there will be other settlers leaving out from here as well. The settlement is growing fast, with the finding of the gold. It is a grand opportunity for me. The children need schooling.”

The captain sighs, placing his hands on the belt of his uniform, looking down at the deck as if there might be an answer there. “You seem determined to go.”

Part of me cries out to tell him what is true—that I can see no other way for Maggie May and me, than this one—but instead, I say, “I have made a commitment to it, a signed contract with Mr. Delevan himself.”

Another breath swells his shoulders, then rounds them as he releases the air. “I have been instructed to send Big Neb along with the supply train, as well as Essie Jane. Please request of them anything you need in the way of aid during the journey. I have told Big Neb to watch out for you. He is a good man. Loyal.”

“You needn’t worry after me, Captain. Maggie May and I come from strong stock.” If only he knew what we’ve survived, a journey across the frontier with the supply train would seem a small thing.

“But I do worry after you, Miss Rose.” I chance to look at him again, and he gazes down at me. A smile plays upon his lips, but a sad one.

I’m filled with wonder and with fear. “We’ll manage well, sir.”

“James,” he says, offering his given name.

It is too familiar for two persons in our position, but I accept the name, take it in and speak it. “James,” I repeat.

For a moment, we are bound together this way, looking into each other’s eyes. I wonder what he sees, and I fear what he might discover.

Along the deck someone calls for him. Before the spell is broken, he reaches for my hand, cradles it in his palm, seems to take no notice of the crooked fingers within the glove. Or if he notes it, he cares not a bit.

Only the thin linen separates us, and I can feel him through it, a pulse beneath his skin, beneath my wrist, beneath my own heartbeat. “If it is not as you expect it to be, Bonnie, send a message to me in any port, in the care of the
New Ila
. If you need me, Bonnie Rose, I will come for you.”

A
LLIE
K
IRKLAND
M
AY
, P
RESENT
D
AY

R
andy regularly referred to my costume diaries as “works of art,” and Phyllis and Michelle jokingly dubbed me
Wonder
Girl
.
If I did say so myself, the costume diaries were extraordinary, thanks to hours and hours spent in the university library. Over the past six weeks, I’d been slipping in there every chance I got, and each time I arrived, Stewart had a pile of carefully selected research material waiting for me. He’d taken it on as a personal project, almost an obsession, and he did know his way around the dusty book stacks, as well as all the far-reaching online resources available via the library network. We made a rather spectacular, if odd, research team, and it hadn’t taken us long to determine that Kim was right about the target site for the docudrama. It was Wildwood. I, quite wisely, hadn’t revealed that fact to Kim.

Stewart had compiled so much material about the settlement itself that I’d finally taken all the extra copies and given them to the research crew upstairs, where the historical experts and admins in casting were creating biographical journals that detailed the life history each participant would be stepping into. Even Tova seemed a little less flinty toward me
now. Clearly, she respected Randy’s opinions—either that, or I had helped to make her look good with the upstairs crowd. In any case, it was a win.

“I think I’m wearing her down,” I whispered to Kim when she came in for her final fitting. “I’m convinced that she hates me a little less every day.”

Kim’s giggle reverberated off the walls of the small dressing room. “Well, I guess that’s a little victory.” She angled a narrow look toward the door while wiggling carefully out of the cotton blouse and knife-pleated skirt that had just been fitted to her—a work dress she would wear at the bathhouse. “But I still say, you should just let me wait for her out in the parking garage. You say the word, and this Texas gal’ll open a can of whup-up on that skinny woman. I’ve ridden horseback over every hill and valley south of Austin. I know places to hide the body where
nobody
will ever find it.”

Our laughter filled the room as I carefully moved the costume to a garment cart.

“That thing makes me look huge, by the way.” Kim curled her lip at the costume. “I’d hang around and rib Randy about it, but Stewart came by again. He had some new materials, and he really wanted you to see them
today
. I told him you had to work late, so you couldn’t go to the library. He was pretty disappointed, so I thought I’d just go pick the stuff up and bring it home. By the way, you’re a pooh for keeping secrets all this time. He told me you two figured out
weeks
ago that I was right about Wildwood.”

“Kim, don’t ask him to smuggle stuff out again. Last time, you made him a nervous wreck. And I didn’t tell you about Wildwood because I knew this was exactly what you’d do—get all obsessive about it. When you board the bus to head for the set with the rest of us, they’ll give you your character journal and the whole mystery will be solved, any
way. Why not just wait? Think of it like a . . . a Christmas present.”

“I peek at Christmas presents, thank you. Doesn’t everybody? And Stewart is enjoying himself. All this research is the biggest thing to hit his life in forever—look how into it he is.” Kim finished dressing, and we left the room.

“He’s
too
into it,” I told her as we walked down the basement hall together. “I’ve told him, like, three times that I’m done with the costume diaries, and I really don’t need any more research material. With work and finishing classes for the semester, I don’t have time to read anything extra.”

“I would’ve read it.” A plaintive frown came my way as we stopped outside the costuming room to deposit the garment cart. “If you weren’t such a pooh-head secret keeper.”

“Yeah, whatever. More like keeping you out of trouble. I do not want to end up in the woods alone this summer.”

Kim put on a happy face as she poked her head in Randy’s door. “You’re gonna put super-stretchy spandex in my costume, right, Randy? Like built-in Spanx, okay?”

A few gray hairs escaped Randy’s ponytail and fell down his thin cheeks, surrounding a smirk. “You’re about a hundred and forty years too early for spandex, sweetheart, but I do have a period-appropriate alternative for you.”

I snort-chuckled, knowing what he had in mind as he crossed the room. I was already laughing by the time he presented her with a corset. “The nineteenth-century alternative to spandex. Wear it with pride.”

Brows knitted with concern, Kim investigated the hooks in front. “Well now, this’ll be like putting ten pounds of taters in a five-pound sack. Do you have a bigger size?”

Randy turned the thing around, showing her the laces in back. “It comes with a dual-expansion slot. But don’t worry, Kim, you’re smaller than you think. And once you get this
thing on, you’ll look like Vivien Leigh in
Gone With the Wind
. Or Melanie Wilkes. Wasn’t Melanie a blonde?”

Kim gave Randy an adoring look. “I love you. That’s the best thing a man has said to me in forever. If you weren’t already married, I’d be after you like a hen on a grasshopper.”

Randy chuckled. “Well, now, there’s an attractive picture. I’ll let Miranda know that she has competition for my affections.” Randy had a wife on the West Coast somewhere, but like many couples in the industry, they didn’t end up working in the same city very often.

I felt a little sorry for him. After growing up in a household where my mother and stepfather ate in different rooms, watched TV in different rooms, and most often slept in different rooms, I’d made up my mind that if I ever did find somebody, I wanted the kind of marriage where we actually did things together in the course of a day. Normal things, like coffee in the morning, a surprise sack lunch in the middle of the day, a trip to the park just because the weather was nice, evening talks beneath the moonlight. . . .

It was all just a dream, a fantasy, but it was a nice fantasy. I couldn’t help clinging to it, no matter how impractical it was for a girl like me. Given my lack of luck in the dating world, it didn’t seem super plausible, but it was good to believe that someday it would just . . . magically . . . happen.

I turned to walk Kim out, and all of a sudden, there was Tova, standing behind her in the hallway looking morose, as usual. My stomach dropped, bounced off the soles of my shoes, rebounded somewhere into my chest, and then sank into place again, which was my usual reaction to Tova.

Her icy, narrow eyes slanted back and forth between Kim and me. “And pray tell, what are
you two
doing loitering around here together?”

“Fitting.” I pointed to Kim, so as to make it clear that this
was a legitimate visit, and I was in no way breaking the rules, nor would I ever
dream
of it.

Tova studied each of us head to toe, taking in everything from the frosted tips of Kim’s hair, which would have to be dyed back to the natural color before we moved to the set in less than a week and a half, to the measuring tape strung around my neck and Phyllis’s favorite fabric scissors protruding from my pocket. I’d picked them up in the fitting room to return them to their normal place. One of the Costume Department’s requests was that I quell the daily tide of clutter and misplaced materials, so things could keep running in maximum overdrive.

Tova turned her attention to Randy. “Wren Godley will be here at 3:45 for her final fitting. Apparently the child was sick this morning or some such. I do not know why her mother has my number rather than yours, but now you have been told. Please make sure to give her your card so she will have the correct contact when next they have an issue with keeping their appointments.”

“Will do,” Randy answered, then flipped through his schedule to see who could handle the fitting. “We’ll work her in somehow. I’ll call upstairs and tell the guard to let her come down when she gets here.”

Tova’s cell phone rang, and she left without another word.

“Well, I’m gone.” Kim gingerly set the corset inside the door as Randy slid into his office chair and rolled toward the phone. “I’ve got a couple errands to run yet this afternoon, and also a guy called about the ad I put on Craigslist for my truck. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll buy it, and I won’t have to pay the insurance and the payment over the summer.” Kim had devised a clever plan to sell her current vehicle, since she wouldn’t need it for the next few months. In the fall, she planned to use the savings, plus her earnings from the docudrama, to buy a new set of wheels.

“See you at home later—but if you’re meeting the guy about your car, make sure you do it in a public place, okay? Maybe you can get someone to go with you. Creepy people troll those online lists.”

“Yes,
mother.
” She finger waved over her shoulder on her way down the hall. “Don’t work too late. Maybe we can go out and celebrate the sale of my truck tonight.”

“Sounds good,” I said, but I should have known better. As always, the afternoon became a blur of phone calls, meetings, and general panic. In the end I had to cover the Wren Godley fitting, of all things.

Randy literally shoved her costumes into my hands and said, “Here, deal with this. She’s been fitted. Her wardrobe shouldn’t need anything but fine adjustments. Just pin the hems.”

Wren, I quickly discovered, did not fit her gentle-sounding name. At. All. She was a tiny redheaded, blue-eyed terror. The sort that gives redheads a bad name and makes it tough on the rest of us.

Checking her wardrobe took twice as long as it should have. While I worked, Wren wiggled, whined, complained, and blackmailed me for cookies and sodas from the break room. Her mother was constantly in my way, commenting, advising, and insisting that Wren’s costume should be designed so as to best accentuate her features. Having previously had small parts in several Austin-based plays, little Wren was a star in the making—at least according to her mother. I finally determined that Mom was more than a little over the top and possibly on a high dose of medication, and she had some sort of personal connection with someone on the production who had pull.

By the time she walked her soda-bloated eleven-year-old down the hall and out the door, I was convinced that parenthood would never be for me.

When I finally left the Berman, it seemed like days had passed since I’d been home. Trudging up the stairs to our apartment, all I wanted to do was climb into the shower, wash off the grime from crawling around on the floor, and sink into bed. Unfortunately, I had finals to study for this week.

A dark form suddenly appeared above me at the top of the stairs, and I gasped and staggered back a step before realizing it was only Stewart.

“You scared me.” I exhaled loudly and started up the stairs again.

Adjusting his backpack, Stewart plodded past without glancing my way. “You shouldn’t leave pizza boxes outside your door, Allie. It attracts vermin.”

“Sorry. That must’ve been Kim. I’ll get her to clean it up.” At this point, I couldn’t count how many times Stewart had flagged us for stairwell offenses.

“I took them to the trash for you. So you wouldn’t be in violation . . . if they spot-check the stairwell areas.”

“Thank you, Stewart. Sorry about the pizza boxes.” But he’d already headed for the parking lot.

When I opened the apartment door, Kim was sitting on the sofa with a stack of cash beside her and her laptop balanced on her knees.

“What’s all this?” I asked, though I was afraid to know.

“I screwed up.” She didn’t bother to look at me but remained bent over the laptop screen, wildly scrolling. “There’s food in the kitchen. Oh man, I screwed up so bad. Stewart’s going to kill me.”

“If you mean the pizza boxes, I saw Stewart on the stairs. He actually carried them down to the trash in case there was a
spot check
.”

“Don’t mention
Stewart.
If he finds out . . . oh man.” She slapped a palm to her forehead, pulling upward until she
had the bug-eyed look of a Pekingese dog with its topknot rubber-banded too tight. “It was just a CD pack of audio recordings that were made back in the thirties and forties—interviews with people who’d lived through the Civil War period, I think. I remember putting them in my truck, and I thought I brought them back into the apartment before I met the guy who answered the Craigslist ad. I know I did, but they’re not here. Stewart just came by to ask if I’d given them to you, and I lied and said you were listening to them.”

She cast a miserable, guilt-ridden look my way. “I didn’t mean to. I just panicked. You know how seriously Stewart takes things. I must’ve accidentally thrown the CDs away when I cleaned all the junk out of my truck at the car wash. And I even called down there, and they’d already had their trash hauled away. So now I’m trying to figure out if there’s anywhere I can buy copies.”

I walked to the table, set my stuff down, and rested my head against the divider wall. “Kim, you lost some of the things you convinced Stewart to smuggle from the library? Please say no.”

“I’ve got it under control.” She huddled closer to the computer. “I remember the name—
American Voices
. University of Nebraska. I’ll replace them, and nobody will ever know the difference. Don’t worry, okay? Heat up some of the leftover pizza and come sit down. I’ve gotta tell you about the guy who bought my car. We sat out in the parking lot talking for
three hours
, and then we ordered pizza and talked some more. I think I’m in love.”