Lily refocuses on Hildy and tries again, softening her voice. “I’d like it if you could come by sometimes to help with the children.”
“So you can rest!” Hildy says, brightening.
Lily nods but thinks, So I can track down Daniel’s killer.
Hildy leaves and Lily finishes dressing, thinking that at least her morning sickness has passed. She’s glad she hasn’t told Hildy or Mama of her pregnancy. Both would harp at her to rest so much she’d never get them to let her be and she’d never get a chance to start her search.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Mama and Hildy already have biscuits in the oven and the children settled at the table with glasses of milk.
“Mama!” Jolene cries, running to her mother.
Lily hugs her daughter close and then Micah. What will these children remember of their father? What will she tell the new child of the father he—or she—will never meet?
“Don’t Mamaw and Aunt Hildy’s biscuits smell good? Can we have black raspberry jam?” Jolene asks.
That had been Daniel’s favorite.
Seeing the flash of pain across Lily’s face, Mama starts, “We have apple butter—” but Lily stops her with a small head shake and moves swiftly to the back porch. She shoves the door open and the loud squeal makes her jump. Dammit, Daniel had said—Oh. Oh.
Lily steps forward, lets the door slam shut behind her. Another squeal.
She notes the jonquils; one of the buds has just started to open, a yellow dash against the gray stone of the jailhouse. She opens the cellar door and heads down.
Standing before the jar-laden shelves, as if she’s come to them in supplication, she wants to remember her first moments down here with Daniel, when he’d built the shelves. And yet all she can think of is how people are forever digging in the earth to put things in, seeds and the dead, or to pull things out, potatoes and coal.
Only two jars of black raspberry jam remain amid the bounty of other canned fruits and vegetables. She picks up one of them and heads back up the cellar stairs only to find Fiona Weaver—the wife of Daniel’s top deputy, Martin—stepping out of the jail cell.
Fiona and Lily aren’t friends; they tolerate each other because of their husbands’ bonds of friendship and work as sheriff and deputy and because they’re in the Kinship Woman’s Club, a book and good-works club of the town’s finest matrons. At the monthly meetings in the parlors of hosting members, Fiona and Lily have often crossed each other over the years—Fiona against women’s right to vote, Lily adamantly for. Fiona against unionization, Lily for. Why, Daniel would be startled to hear the vehemence with which she defends it, remind her that as the half brother of a coal company owner and as sheriff he walks a fine line—
Lily gasps, catching herself. The mask of judgment that usually stiffens Fiona’s face melts away to pity. It’s an expression Lily can’t bear. She snaps, “What are you doing here?”
Fiona stops, eyes widening. “Martin asked me to come over and tend to a prisoner he brought in day before yesterday. Martin didn’t want you to worry the day of the funeral.”
Hope surges in Lily’s heart. “The one who…”
“No, no. Mr. Marshall again.”
“Oh.” Just one of the regulars who goes moon-howling wild each paycheck.
Fiona is saying, “… he’s been discharged, but I thought I’d finish cleaning.”
“Don’t start measuring for new curtains just yet,” Lily says. Fussy, prim Fiona—bringing meals and cleaning out chamber pots?
A flash of hurt, and then Fiona’s usual mask returns. “Don’t worry; I don’t want my husband taking the sheriff’s job. He has a perfectly good business!” She means Martin’s shoe store in Kinship.
“Course, he’d likely be more careful than to get himself shot—” Fiona stops at her own forward words. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean…”
Lily gazes past Fiona, up the rise to the hen house. Last summer, Daniel had come home black eyed. The prisoner—a man who thought he should be free to discipline his wife any way he saw fit—had not only a black eye but also a broken nose. The idea of a prisoner being able to overtake Daniel was almost laughable.
Daniel hadn’t gotten “himself shot.” Someone had murdered him.
Fiona puts her hand gently on Lily’s arm. “Let the men sort it out. It’s not our place—”
Lily pulls her arm away. She’s supposed to be the quiet, demure widow awaiting news, only the news that’s considered proper for her to know? Well, she’s done that long enough. “I’m making it my place. Go home and tell Martin that I expect to hear from him by the end of the day. The name, at least, of the prisoner who supposedly killed Daniel.” Lily holds out her free hand, palm up. “Give me the keys!”
Fiona returns the ring to Lily.
* * *
After breakfast, Lily tells Mama and Hildy that she needs to go on an errand and steps quickly out into the mudroom, putting on her coat and hat before Mama can nag at her about a widow customarily staying at home.
Lily walks briskly past the courthouse and heads toward Kinship’s town square, bordered by the train depot and old canal towpath and the opera house on the east and Douglas Grocers—Mama had sold Daddy’s business this past winter to a loyal longtime employee, an older bachelor—as well as Kinship Inn and the bank on the west.
Kinship Inn, a three-story brick building with a sweeping front porch and imposing columns, is overrun by Pinkertons. The proprietor is staunchly anti-union and, it’s rumored, accepts payments from Luther to house his hired guns. That a speakeasy is hidden in the basement of the building is a poorly kept secret.
There will be talk among her fellow townsfolk—what was the sheriff’s widow doing at the inn? Only a day after his burial? But Lily squares her shoulders as she sweeps past the doorman, who stares as he holds the door for her.
Inside, she blinks to adjust to the dim gaslights. At the front desk, Mr. Williams studies her over his wire-rimmed glasses, perched precariously on the tip of his thin nose, which is still swollen and bruised from the beating he’d received at the hands of the prisoner who’d so taunted her just before Daniel’s been found.
“Mrs. Ross, my condolences,” he says. “How may I help you?”
“I’m looking for two men. One is a Pinkerton, Harvey Grayson. He came to see Daniel the night before Daniel’s murder. He is the one who told Daniel to come to Rossville to pick up a prisoner. I thought he might know something about this prisoner, something that might shed some light on my husband’s death.”
Mr. Williams flinches at Lily’s bluntness, then offers her a patronizing smile. “Oh, I see. Well, dear, shouldn’t Deputy Weaver be the one doing the asking?”
Lily holds his gaze, unblinking. He can either answer the question or try to remove her by force—not a spectacle he’d care to create, she’s sure.
The man sighs, flips open a large leather-bound ledger, peruses. Finally, he looks up at Lily over his glasses. “He checked out. Last night.”
The day of Daniel’s funeral. Yet she had seen him outside the church, pulling away the miner who had cried out to her. “Did you yourself see him leave?”
Mr. Williams shakes his head.
“Any idea where he might have gone?”
“Some of the Pinkerton men stay in company or management housing in Coal Creek. Or it’s possible he was reassigned by his company to another town.”
Lily considers: If she contacted the Pinkerton Agency, would someone tell her where Harvey had been sent? Unlikely. The organization is known for working outside the law, thus its appeal to men like Luther. And she’s a woman with no authority.
“Well, when did he take up lodging here?” Lily asks.
Mr. Williams looks back at the ledger. “Eight weeks ago.”
“That’s long enough that he surely got mail here.”
“He might. I don’t study where our patrons’ mail comes from, Mrs. Ross.”
“Could you see if he left a forwarding address? O
r if he has any mail that he didn’t pick up?” It is a long shot, but if he’d left behind a letter from a hometown she could track down the sender and find out from that person where Grayson might have disappeared to.
Mr. Williams turns, looks in the numbered slots in the case behind him. Then he looks back at Lily. “No mail left behind. No note with a forwarding address. Now, if that is all—”
“I did say I’m looking for another man. Abe Miller.”
At the mention of the name, Mr. Williams trembles enough to send his glasses sliding off even his swollen nose. He doesn’t bother to pick them up.
“Mrs. Ross, I—I don’t think you want—”
“Oh, but I do want. Tell Mr. Miller that Lily Ross came calling.”
“I don’t think that’s wise—”
“Tell him,” Lily says. “He’ll be unhappy if he finds out I asked you to and you didn’t.”
* * *
Back home, Lily goes straight to the jailhouse, the better to avoid Mama’s glare and pestering questions. Lily drapes her coat over her chair, starts the small coal stove for heat, and sits at her desk. There’s the card she’d written up on the day of Daniel’s been found, the card about the Pinkerton who’d been so grotesque, who’d taunted her about bringing in a miner. She stares at the name: Harold Johnson. Martin had left a brief note that he had discharged the man; Mr. Williams did not wish to press charges.
Of course. The Pinkertons represent good business in Kinship.
Pushing the note and card aside, her hand trails to the bottom drawer. Daniel’s drawer, where he kept the notebooks she’d filled with his dictation about cases. Once, she’d teased him that he should take his own notes in the field and he’d teased back—Isn’t that partly why I hired you as jail mistress? It was true, he didn’t care for writing, had rarely written her even during the Great War, whereas she’d written him nearly every day.
But Marvena had seemed sure that Daniel would have taken notes about anything he found out about Eula. The notion doesn’t fit what Lily knows of Daniel, but then the relationship with Marvena doesn’t, either. Might he have kept a separate notebook about cases he didn’t want her to know about—cases like Eula? Lily reaches in, pulls out the notebooks. She’d bought a batch of them long ago at the general store, when Daniel first became sheriff in 1918, notebooks with brown parchment covers, and written his name and the dates on the front. There is, she sees, just one notebook she hasn’t labeled. She opens it. Nothing is tucked inside, and the pages are all blank, waiting to be filled.
She sets it aside and starts going through the others, desperately fanning through past entries, suddenly possessed of the notion that somewhere in notes about past altercations she might find a clue as to who the escaped prisoner was.
Nothing.
The altercation Fiona had referred to had been with a farmer. Another time, Daniel had been shot at by a drunk in town, but the drunk had missed. There had been no direct threats from anyone in the mining community. Daniel had been a popular sheriff, easily reelected.
Lily realizes they’d all simply come to assume Daniel would be fine, come home each day safe and sound. Though at first she’d been disappointed that Daniel had changed his mind about joining her father in the grocery business after the war, she’d eventually come to not only accept but also love their life, Daniel’s standing in the community, and her work as jail mistress.
Staring into the now-empty drawer, Lily catches sight of something shoved to the back, meant to be hidden by all those notebooks. A flat, long box—Lily recognizes it instantly as a See’s candy box. Daniel, though, has not bought her a box of chocolates since last Christmas. Was he waiting to give her this, a gift of appeasement for the past week’s tension?
Lily pulls the box out. She lifts the lid and inhales the lingering scent of chocolate, but the box doesn’t contain candies. Inside, there’s a simple hair comb, a few teeth missing. A few blond hairs—lighter than Marvena’s, Lily notes—entwine the tines. Two buttons. A needle and thread. A piece of gold foil, from one of the chocolates, carefully folded to preserve the embossed design. A bird’s feather. A pretty rock—pink quartz. An old Indian arrowhead.
And a little doll.
It’s one of Daniel’s funny handmade ones. But this one’s dress is from a scrap of material she does not recognize—pale blue cotton, patterned with tiny red flowers. She stares at the doll, at the dress of unknown provenance. It is not Jolene’s.
And this is not a collection of a man. Or of an older woman. It’s a young woman’s collection—a young woman still on the brink of childhood. The kind of collection she would have made just a few years ago.
Eula’s?
Had Daniel gone looking for Marvena’s daughter as promised and found only this?
She inhales deeply, suddenly unsure of how to breathe properly. Her gaze falls on a wooden chest in the corner, used to store extra sheets and thick blankets for the winter and a few old pairs of pants and shirts; sometimes men are brought in filthy and covered in their own sick.
The chest is deep, with sufficient layers for hiding small items. Notes for cases he’d rather she not know about? She’s never suspected such, but then, she’d never anticipated a woman like Marvena was part of Daniel’s life. The notion is sufficient to launch Lily from her chair to the chest. She lifts the heavy wooden lid, frantically pulls out blankets, shirts, pants, vigorously shakes each one, loosens nothing but lint, drops the items to the floor.
Disappointment shoves her back to her desk. She grabs up the rustic doll, stares at it as if it might suddenly offer answers to the questions spinning in her head. Where else could she look? She knows every nook of their house.
Oh. The chest in the attic. Where they kept her old wedding suit, his old army uniform. She hasn’t looked up there for years, though occasionally Daniel went up to pack away items for her—their Christmas ornaments, the crib, which would need, come to think of it, to be brought down and cleaned up for the baby, a task Daniel would do—no, would have done.
“Lily?”
She whirls around and sees Martin in the doorway of the jailhouse. She quickly drops the box in the drawer, knees the door shut, suddenly protective of the little box. The other man with Martin is Tanner Riley, chief of the Bronwyn County commissioners.
“Please tell me you’ve found the prisoner who killed my husband.”
“Oh, Lily,” Martin says. “I’m so sorry, but—”
“A name, then!”
Martin’s frown makes his usual baby face look older than his twenty-eight years. “It’s Tom Whitcomb. Marvena’s brother.”
Lily stares at him. Speckles dance over his face, and she blinks hard and inhales slowly, to keep herself centered. Then she says, “How long have you known?”
“I went to Rossville this morning, Lily. Several Pinkertons and miners confirmed it.”
So Luther truly hadn’t known the prisoner’s name yesterday when Marvena showed up. No doubt he’d have thrown the name at both of them.
“And why was Mr. Whitcomb arrested in the first place?”
Martin and Tanner exchange looks: surprise at Lily’s cool questioning.
“The Pinkertons we talked to say roughhousing. But Tom has been known to talk organization, even at work. You know how Luther feels about that. Daniel, too. That is—” Martin stumbles over his words. “How he—how he felt.”
Oh yes, Lily thinks. She knows well Luther’s strong opposition to unions. And on that he and Daniel had been agreed—until last fall. The Widowmaker collapse had shaken Daniel’s belief that Luther’s anti-union stance was right. He had loved his father-in-law dearly and had mourned his death caused by trying to rescue the trapped miners. Of late, he had talked with her privately about coming out against Luther in support of unionization—of what that would mean to him and how that might impact their family. Many of the shopkeepers in Kinship—including Martin—side with Luther on this matter, for while Luther lives with Elias on the farm, oth
er managers live in Kinship. Then, too, the coal company keeps the railroad busy and the railroad employs many men in town.
“Well then, has anyone talked with Marvena Whitcomb?”
Martin stares at her.
“The suspect’s sister? Might she know something of places her brother is likely to hide?”
Again, Martin and Tanner exchange looks.
Tanner clears his throat. “We—we aren’t sure where she lives. We asked in Rossville, but none of the miners or their kin would admit to knowing.”
Lily gives Martin a hard look. “She mentioned that she’d talked with Daniel about her daughter. That’s why she came to this house. She must have felt pretty confident he would help her, to come to his house.” Our house. “Surely he knew where she lives?”
Martin glances away as his face reddens “Well, yes. But … I never went with him to her cabin. Just saw her once, in Rossville.”
“I see. Please tell me that at least there’s still a manhunt for Tom Whitcomb.”
Tanner says, “Now, Lily, there were plenty of resources expended the first days, but by now the prisoner is surely long gone. It’s hard to track a man in the hills—”
“No manhunt?” Lily grabs Martin by the arm. He looks at her, startled. “Then have you talked to Rusty Murphy? The farmhand who works for Ada Gottschalk? Surely someone has thought to ask what he observed, what he might know?”
Tanner looks perplexed at the suggestion, but Martin looks back at Lily. “I tried. But the man’s run off as well.”
A missing prisoner—the supposed killer. A missing Pinkerton—the one who’d come to tell Daniel to pick up Tom. A missing farmhand—the first person to find Daniel.
The Widows Page 7