The Widows

by Jess Montgomery

  “Eula came to me,” Luther says. “She wanted rid of the child, money to get out of here. Or else, she said, she’d show Daniel a copy of a map that she found in … in … Harvey’s attaché.”

  Luther looks down and Lily realizes that he’s lying. Eula had found the map in Luther’s attaché. She fights back a gag as Luther mumbles, “A map of the plans to reopen Mine Number Nine, where I planned to set up Pinkerton security. She threatened to turn it over to some organizers.”

  Marvena gasps and Lily looks at her. Cold comfort, knowing this.

  Joanne had revealed that Daniel searched the room and emerged with the candy box and folded paper. It must have been the map.

  “But then she learned she was pregnant,” Luther says. “I talked it over with Elias. I wanted to just have him help her get rid of the child, give her some money, but—”

  “Harvey’s child?” Lily asks.

  Luther shakes his head. “Hard to know, but she said it was mine.”

  Lily blurts out, “Luther, how could you? Knowing Eula might be your niece?”

  Luther shrugs. “Half. Or not.”

  There it is, in the cavalier shrug and reply. The same shrug he’d had a few days ago, dismissing his workers as inferior humans, worth only what he could use them for. That’s how he’d seen Eula.

  Marvena starts to lunge forward, but Lily gives her a hard look, stopping her.

  “I knew she’d never stop trying to blackmail Luther. She said if we didn’t do as she asked, she’d go to Daniel. I knew the only man who’d take her seriously was Daniel. But I could also see she’d be ashamed to tell him,” Elias says. “So we set up the ruse of making it look like she was just running off with a miner. And then we had Harvey bring her here. I gave her drink to numb her.…” He pauses, inhales so hard his nostrils flare. His look is defiant. “I must have accidentally made it too strong.”

  Lily stares at him, as if seeing him for the first time. Elias, a murderer of a young girl? For she knows, from all the work they did together with patients during the influenza pandemic, that he didn’t make accidents in dosing. He’d purposefully overdosed Eula. Then she looks at Luther. There is no surprise on his face about this. She tries to swallow, but her throat sticks. For a moment she’s back underwater, unable to breathe.

  MARVENA

  Marvena bolts from her spot. Suddenly she’s behind Elias, a knife whipped out of her waistband, and she grabs him by the hair, yanks his head back, and has the knife at his throat.

  Luther jumps to his feet. “I will call for my men, and you’ll be dead in minutes!”

  “Sure, but I’ll have sliced his throat by then,” Marvena says. “I’ll live long enough to watch this bastard bleed out.”

  “She’s right,” Elias whispers.

  Luther twitches forward.

  Lily says, “Don’t move from that chair, Luther. I guarantee she can take you with that knife, and I’ll swear in a court of law it was in self-defense.”

  “She’ll hang. What jury will believe two hysterical, grieving women over a businessman and doctor?” Luther’s voice coils around the room. “And the army will join my men and crush her little uprising anyway.”

  For a horrid moment, Marvena thinks, I don’t care.

  But she has chosen against vengeance.

  As if from a distance, she hears Lily’s voice. “Marvena, move the knife away from Elias’s throat so that he is comfortable telling us the rest of what happened.”

  Marvena gives her a long look but lowers her knife. She remains behind Elias, though. “Just remember I’m right here. So don’t try anything foolish.”

  LILY

  Elias looks at Lily. “Daniel came here to confront us about the fact Eula was missing. He’d been to the boardinghouse, searched Eula’s room, and found a map laying out the reopening of the Widowmaker and the plans for security in case the miners didn’t cooperate. Eula had hidden it under a loose floorboard along with her box. He’d realized Eula had gotten the map from Luther, put together the nature of their relationship.”

  Lily looks at Marvena, sees the grim expression on her face. It is all Marvena can do, she sees, to keep control. Lily isn’t sure she’d be able to, if this were Jolene these two men were discussing so cavalierly. She swallows back bitter bile.

  “Daniel started beating Luther. I finally stopped him,” Elias is saying. “If you’d have seen his face, Lily, you’d know Daniel was capable of killing him. Wanted to kill him.”

  Those faint bruises on Luther’s face at Daniel’s funeral. The crack in the curio cabinet. Daniel’s cold, murderous look at her attacker in the alleyway years ago. Now, staring at the pitiless faces of Daniel’s uncle and half brother, Lily understood the depth of his wrath.

  “I told him Eula was fine, that I’d treated her and sent her away, and that I’d send for her to come back,” Elias says.

  “And he believed you?” Lily asks.

  “I was like a father to him.”

  Of course Daniel had believed him. For a moment, Lily gazes around the dining room. Nothing about it has changed in the nine years since she was first here. She puts a hand on the dining table. She stares down at the heavily polished surface.

  And she’s back, on this table, terrified, but staring into the deep, dark eyes of the man she’d soon learn was Daniel T. Ross, the man she’d quickly fall in love with. And he’s leaning forward, and she’s asking him something, something about Elias.

  Then it comes back to her.

  Her question: Would you trust him?

  Daniel’s answer: With my life.

  Lily forces herself to look back up at Elias.

  “So he just left after you told him that?”

  “He gave me a week. Left so angry, he forgot the map. I never saw the box. He must have left it in his automobile.”

  No wonder Daniel had been so distracted the week before his death. She imagines him coming home from that wretched confrontation with his half brother and uncle, stashing Eula’s box at the bottom of the drawer in the jailhouse.

  “He didn’t yet know Eula was dead, but I realized he’d figure it all out sooner or later,” Elias says. “Daniel was sharp, but he also could be … ruthless. I’d tried to talk him out of a career in boxing, into a career in healing; he was smart and could have been good at it, but there was some element of bloodlust in him. Maybe from his mother?”

  “Just because she was Indian?” Lily snaps. “I doubt that.”

  Elias smiles sadly. “You’re right. Daniel and Luther’s father, my brother, was a truly cruel man. I think Daniel’s boxing was a way to get out his anger toward him. But Daniel was never going to beat down the shadow of their father, Lily. At least Luther did.”

  Lily looks at Luther, the smug yet scared look on his face. No, she thinks. Luther had truly turned into a version of their father. She thinks, then, of Daniel going to visit Widow Gottschalk, and all the other vulnerable people in Bronwyn County. She fights back tears. Daniel had become his own man instead—flawed, tormented, but kind and beautiful.

  “Lily, Daniel would have killed Luther and me when he found out about the unfortunate fate of Eula,” Elias is saying. “And I knew he would have never stopped looking, would somehow have found out. I needed to stop Daniel before he could figure out what happened to Eula, before he could contact his friend about stopping Luther’s work with the new mine. Then what? Luther would have lost his business. He’s lost enough. So I made a trip to Cincinnati and called upon George Vogel. I told him Daniel had confessed plans to me to turn himself and George in to the revenue department, that he’d kept condemning records, that he felt guilty over the loss of a young woman—Eula, who was like a daughter to him—to alcohol poisoning.”

  “And when he asked you why you felt compelled to fill him in?” Lily asks.

  “I simply said as a retired physician that I was a great believer in Vogel’s Tonic, and I’d be sorry to see it go,” Elias says. His voice is as flat as his expression. “I sa
id that I was afraid of Daniel’s hothead ways, and all the lives he’d ruin if he wasn’t stopped.

  “And I told Luther to send Grayson—for him to tell Daniel to come to Rossville that morning, that we had information and wanted to talk with him about Eula. Orchestrating Tom to take the fall was not difficult. Mr. Vogel took care of arranging the rest.”

  “So nice and clean for you both.” Marvena’s words grind out through her clenched teeth. “No blood on your hands—”

  The guard drops a bit from Elias’s face. “Oh no, Miss Whitcomb, I do have blood on my hands.” His voice trembles. “I … I went out there that morning. I felt it was my duty to be there, to make sure that it was done right, that Daniel didn’t suffer too long.” Tears start down his face. “The sniper’s shot hit Daniel in the stomach. Such a wound would be painful, and take a long time, and the sniper took off running. And so I … I had to go to Daniel. And finish.”

  Lily sees Elias as he had been that morning, bringing her the news: Daniel’s been found. The blood on his jacket. She imagines Elias, standing over Daniel, delivering the second, fatal shot to the chest, imagines him overtaken for a moment, holding Daniel to him the way Tom had held Alistair. Or does she just want to believe Elias had this shred of tenderness, even in the midst of his cruel action?

  “You will fry for what you’ve done!” Marvena cries.

  Elias shakes his head. “We will deny that we’ve said any of this,” he says. “The earrings can be explained away.”

  “But I know that Daniel was shot on the way to Rossville, not from,” Lily says.

  “Can you prove that?” Luther asks. “Or will it be your word only?”

  “Well, there’s the telegram you received from Mr. Vogel.”

  “Are you really willing to take on Vogel? Plenty of men have tried and failed.”

  “We’ll say—”

  “Who will believe you? Two hysterical women?” Elias says. “Now, Lily, I know you think I’m a monster right now, but eventually I’m confident you’ll understand. I had to take the most expedient action. To save Luther from his brother. To save the company my own brother built. Really, to save Daniel from his own temper. Who knows who he’d have taken down with him if I hadn’t stopped him. I didn’t have a choice.”

  No choice? The words startle Lily, ricochet through her being.

  Lily hears Marvena gasp quietly beside her and inhales slowly, willing herself to stay upright, to not let the heat of fever and loathing wrest this moment from her.

  She says, “Oh, Elias. We always have choices. Daniel told me that, first thing when I met him. And you taught me that, too, Elias, when we worked side by side during the influenza epidemic. Who we tend to first, who we let die while trying to save someone else. How to choose with a firm hand, a steady eye. You had choices. I’ve chosen, too. You underestimate George Vogel, his ruthlessness, how much he valued Daniel. How much he’d despise being duped and used. And I’ve received a telegram myself today.”

  She pulls it out of her pocket, glances at it, and then tosses it to Luther. “Go ahead. Read it out loud. And I think you really ought to keep this one.”

  Luther picks it up and stares at it for a long moment. And then, voice shaking, he reads out loud: “‘Gratitude for your affirmation of D’s loyalty. Assuming yours is as strong as his, I am now ever in your debt. I await your command. Please advise.’”

  He looks up at Lily. “‘I await your command.’ What the hell—”

  “It means I can send him your name. Elias’s name. Both names. And he’ll arrange things. I’ve no doubt he’ll follow through, especially since he knows you kept his March 22 telegram and thought you might be able to hold it over him. Elias is right about that—it was foolish. And George has now lost a loyal man in Daniel. I’ve met him twice, seen how he operates. Had more conversations with his man Abe Miller than I would ever want. I’ve no doubt he’s capable and willing to have both of you taken out, when you least expect it, just as you tricked him into doing with Daniel. He hates being tricked.”

  Lily hears soft crying. Marvena. She’s lost her daughter to men upon whom she can take no direct vengeance in exchange for the right to organize. In her way, she’s given her life for the miners ever much as John Rutherford had.

  But Lily can’t look at Marvena now or comfort her. If she does, she may lose her will to see this through. So she keeps her gaze steadily on Luther. “You can choose, Luther, to live with the threat of Vogel—anytime I give him the nod—but still, live. And in exchange, give Marvena all she wants.”

  “I can’t.… I have managers, too. They’ll never agree.” He looks away from her.

  “I think you’ll find a way,” Lily says. “You can choose to punish talks of unionization, push aside safety practices, let this community fall into battle, let perhaps hundreds more men get killed, maybe think you’re a hero for a little while, triumphing over the evils, as you see it, of organization, but—” She suddenly strides across the room, grabs Luther’s face, jerks it up so he has to look at her, has to see she means every word she says. “Just remember that if you don’t agree right now to negotiate, Marvena and I will be escorted from here, and I will go to Kinship, and I will meet with Abe Miller, and it will never matter how far you go from here. Somehow, George Vogel will find you after I send the message: ‘Luther and Elias Ross.’”

  EPILOGUE

  LILY AND MARVENA

  Four Months Later, August 2, 1925

  LILY

  Mama asks, “Are you sure you’re all right to go?”

  Lily glances up in the dresser table mirror at Mama. Lily finishes pinning up her hair. “I’ll be fine.” She turns in the chair. “Besides, how could I miss Marvena’s big day?”

  Mama allows a rare wide grin. “Not just a big day for her. For the miners, for Bronwyn County.” She adds, a mite too enthusiastically, “And on your birthday, at that!”

  Twenty-seven. Half a lifetime. Ten years since the day she’d met Daniel.

  “Yes,” Lily says when Mama clears her throat, nudging for a response.

  A flicker of worry erodes Mama’s grin, and Lily wishes she could overcome the flatness in her expression and voice just to ease Mama’s mind.

  After her and Marvena’s encounter with Elias and Luther, Lily gave an interview to the Kinship newspaper in which she stated that after investigating she realized that her husband had been killed on the way to Rossville to pick up Tom Whitcomb, so clearly Tom was not Daniel’s killer—but that she doesn’t know who it could have been. When pressed, she delivered the only cover story she could come up with. Perhaps Daniel stopped another driver, likely one passing through our county on Kinship Road, for reckless driving, and the other driver then shot him and drove away? It will remain a mystery.

  She’d recalled that such a fate had befallen another county sheriff, several counties away a few years before. Of course, she hadn’t questioned the story then, and no one was questioning her similar story now.

  Then Lily spent several weeks recuperating from fever, alternately tended to by Mama, Hildy, and even Nana, visiting from Rossville. All agreed that Lily suffered from the same thing that racked Alistair, illness from being in the foul water in the Widowmaker tunnel. Sometimes one or the other of them would say it’s so strange … too bad … that Elias and Luther suddenly left Bronwyn County. Lily has no clues as to where they’ve gone, but it doesn’t matter. She wants nothing to do with either of them, and she knows, as she warned them, that if she gives the word George Vogel will put his network to use and find them.

  Before leaving, Elias put the farmhouse and land in Lily’s name. This is not something she asked for, and she only learned of it when she received notice of the deed transfer. She’s put it up for sale and will donate the money toward building a proper school in Rossville, one not controlled by Wessex or any future company bosses.

  Now Lily forces a smile to her face, stands up, says, “I’ll be down in a moment.”

  But being al
one brings her no peace. She can’t bring herself to tell Mama or the others that nothing physical ails her, that there’s simply no tea to cure her restless, fallow heart.

  MARVENA

  Backstage at the Kinship Opera House, Marvena sits on a stool, counting off on her fingers the points she wants to make.

  One: providing safety measures not only keeps the worker population healthy but also ensures loyalty and saves costs in the long run.

  Two: providing a fair pay system not based on company scrip—

  And then Marvena drops her head to her hands. This is ridiculous. The points she’s tried to come up with for her big speech sound so stilted. Even silly.

  In the four months since their meeting with Luther and Elias, she’s been grouchy and touchy, even though she’s gotten all she’d hoped for. The Pinks have left Kinship and the county. After agreeing that the Mine Workers of America could hold a public forum on the merits of unionization, Luther quickly sold Ross Mining to Wessex Corporation at a low price with the written stipulation that Wessex would honor the miners’ right to decide for themselves whether or not to unionize.

  The men have gone back to work in all but the Widowmaker mine, which Wessex has permanently shut down. Wessex management has spent time listening to what the miners know about these hills, about searching for new coal seams, but safely and without rushing just for profit. And they are sanctioning a vote for the men to decide on whether or not they want to organize a Mine Workers of America local chapter in Rossville. A few men, enjoying the better treatment from Wessex, are backpedaling on pushing for the vote—why have a union, and answer to those strictures, if management offers fair treatment?—but most are for it.

  And yet … she isn’t getting all she’ll ever want. She won’t get back Eula. Her beautiful, strong-willed Eula. The men who’d orchestrated her death, and then Daniel’s, all walk free.