* * *
A few yards from the Moonvale Hollow Tunnel, Sadie stops abruptly. Lily grabs the lead from Marvena, steps onto the track, tugs impatiently. Daylight is at last upon them, revealing dark clouds roiling in from the west. The air is plump with the scent of coming rain, rain that Lily had coveted for her garden yesterday, but that soon would scourge the scent of the dead woman’s trail.
Sadie whines, plops down on her hindquarters, immovable.
Marvena wrests back the lead. “Dammit, Lily, wait. She’s stopped for a purpose. You can’t force things along to suit yourself—”
Lily’s feet prickle at a faint tremor in the earth, her ears at a far-off pitch strained high like the whine of a trapped animal. Tremor grows to rumbling, whine to whistle. Lily, Marvena, and Sadie retreat into the underbrush.
The train rumbles into the tunnel, its thunderous progression mounting until at last the engine shoots out, the squeal of iron wheels blighting the murmurs and moans of forest critters, the sooty smell of the coal heaped in the cars smothering woodland scents.
After the train passes, the very air falls into silence, as if the forest had held its breath to endure the piercing of the train and must hold it a moment longer before trusting enough to exhale. Slowly, woodland sounds resume.
“God.” Marvena shudders. “Nothin’ much would have been left of the woman, nothing recognizable at least, if’n she’d been hit head on.”
Lily eyes the sky. Those dark clouds, schooners clipping along, eager to unload their bounty of rain. “We need to hurry.”
She reaches in her rucksack, grazing the hooded cape, and jerks back as if she’d reached into a hole and brushed a snake. She extracts the dead woman’s foot rags, lets Sadie get another good sniff. Danger passed, Sadie strains again to get on the track—into the tunnel.
“You right sure?” Marvena says. “Don’t wanna get squashed like an opossum.”
Lily recollects the schedule she’d memorized the night before. “The next train will come the other way, three hours’ time.”
They walk up onto the track. Even through the thick, good soles of Lily’s boots, the track bites her feet. How had the woman walked here in bare feet? As they enter the tunnel, Lily switches on her flashlight. The dot of light barely penetrates the darkness. Something skitters—rats, mice, maybe raccoons. She’d thought the tunnel would be devoid of life.
Focus. Perry had seemed genuinely shocked at the sight of the woman, sworn he didn’t know her. But shock and ignorance can be feigned.
A theory sends up tendrils, grasps Lily’s mind: What if the woman had been part of the WKKK gathering? Had changed her mind? Or had stumbled upon it? What if Perry had been at the gathering—either sanctioning it or trying to stop it?
What if Perry saw something that could cost him the election? And so he had killed her?
Lily places the notion aside for now. She doesn’t have enough facts.
At last, Lily and Marvena emerge from the other side of the tunnel. Lily takes a deep breath of fresh air, smiles as Marvena does the same. Lily glances back, stares into the deep darkness. She estimates the tunnel to be a hundred yards or so, short enough that she can see straight through it. Yet the tunnel had somehow felt endless.
There he is again. Shimmering. The boy she had seen earlier—no. Imagined. Now he’s running out of the tunnel, still chasing something. He grins at Lily, waves.
Lily presses her eyes shut. Sways.
“Lily? You all right?” Marvena’s voice, alarmed.
Lily opens her eyes. The boy is gone.
It’s good, good that he’s gone. No, not gone, for that implies that he was actually there. Good, then, that she’s not seeing him.
Lily says, “I’m fine.”
On they trek, Sadie confident and snuffling. After about a mile, Marvena hums an old hymn—“Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” a grim choice as far as Lily’s concerned, but then she’s distanced herself from religion, dropping in at the Kinship Presbyterian Church only often enough to keep up appearances, sending her children with Mama most Sundays. Marvena, though, has immersed herself in both unionizing and worshiping at a non-denominational Holy Gospel church with Jurgis, Nana, and Frankie, where the child sings solos.
Wherever Frankie got her gift of voice, it isn’t from Marvena, the warbling embodiment of the saying “not able to carry a tune in a bucket.” After another half mile, Marvena’s humming conspires with the sweat running down Lily’s neck to push her into itchy irritation. Though autumn pokes its nose, like Sadie’s snuffling snout, under the veil of summer’s last heat, summer is not yet willing to loosen its grip, and already the heat of the morning has burned off dew and mist, even in these deepest crevices of Moonvale Hollow’s hills and hollers.
Suddenly Sadie farts.
Lily coughs. What has Marvena’s cousin been feeding the hound? Something fouler than skunk, by the odor.
Marvena laughs.
Lily glares at her.
“You wanna talk about it?” Marvena asks. “You’ve been itchy and irritable since we set out. Why’n’t you speak plain ’bout what you’re all puffed up over, like a broody hen?”
“You really want me to interrogate you right now, about why in the hell you didn’t tell me you’re working to integrate the union?”
“So Jurgis told you about that, huh. Well, I reckoned you’d be on the side of integration.”
“Dammit, of course I am! Plenty of folks won’t be. And that’s gonna lead to tension.” That hood in her rucksack. Lily realizes that her temples have been throbbing ever since they’d found the grotesque thing. “Looks like it already has.”
“I ain’t told you because there’s been no trouble.”
Lily lifts an eyebrow. “You mean to tell me everyone’s just fine, working side by side.”
“Didn’t say that. Said there’s been no trouble.”
“I’d say this hood indicates trouble.” Lily gives her rucksack a vicious poke. She’s not foolish enough to think the WKKK is going to stop at rituals around a fire. All those boot and shoe prints signified momentum.
Marvena opens her own rucksack, pulls out a pipe, lights it as they walk. “You don’t know that it’s related, Lily.”
The smell of pipe tobacco—comforting, savory—wafts over to Lily. Her eyes prickle. Daniel’s tobacco had smelled like that. “You don’t know that it’s not related. Word that the mines, union, are integrating, I can’t believe there’s been no trouble in Rossville—”
“None so far!” Marvena snaps. “Folks know that there is plenty of work. That if Wessex can keep up, compete, it’s better for everyone. And they also know that the Immigration Act has limited folks from bringing over kin that might take up picks in the mines.”
Lily nods. The 1924 act was, at its heart, a national origins quota—limiting the number of each nationality allowed to enter to equal 2 percent of that documented in the 1890 census—in effect cutting out many people from Eastern Europe. She’s read heated debates in newspaper editorials and falls on the side against the act. Even in remote Bronwyn County, life constantly changes and rearranges.
“All right,” Lily says. “Why not leave well enough alone in the union?”
“You really think the rightful protections of unionization belong only to some?”
“No! Sometimes it’s better to be pragmatic.” Lily thinks of steady, even Hildy. She understands being practical. “How are you going to get folks to accept—”
“This ain’t a new idea. You’ve never heard tell of Richard Davis?”
Lily shakes her head, as she carefully steps over a thick tree root.
“Well, he was a Negro born in Virginia—the very night before old Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He grew up near here—Rendville, over on Sunday Creek. I been reading some of Richard’s old letters to the United Mine Workers Journal.” Marvena’s tone turns a little prideful. When Lily had first met her, Marvena couldn’t read. Lily had helped her start to learn.
“He started writing those letters after the Great Hocking Valley Coal Strike back in ’84, and they’re about the need for all working brothers, as he put it, to unite against a different kind of slavery—being beholden to low wages and unsafe working conditions with few or no other choices. What does it matter what we look like on the outside if’n the people with power are happy to work any of us like we’re Guibo, a mule who’s more’n likely treated better than people in the non-union mines—”
“I’m on your side on the question of the right of workers to unionize—remember?”
“Well, anyhow, Richard was one of two Negro men at the meeting to establish the United Mine Workers of America—back in ’90. And after that, he was on the Executive Board for two years, in ’96 and ’97. So the union has a history back to its founding of letting—”
“So Richard was accepted without any backlash? No repercussions later?”
“Well now, I ain’t saying that.” Marvena eases around a thorny bush. “Just that the fella I’m working with—Clarence Broward, who was sent here from the union—is following in Richard’s footsteps. And so far, there’s been no trouble—”
Lily sighs. “You can get so fervent, Marvena, that sometimes you don’t see the practicalities of a situation.”
“How do you know that what we found is a backlash? Mayhap it ain’t related. There was the one hood, so maybe that has nothing to do with anything. Jurgis says—”
“Jurgis!” Lily practically spits the name. “Jurgis says!” As Marvena recoils, a part of Lily screams at herself to stop. “I thought he took direction from you. When did you start taking his views as gospel? Since going to his church? Since he’s practically moved in with you?”
“I know you miss Daniel.” Marvena’s voice is wobbly—a rare trait. She clears her throat. “Lily, I know it’s been hard—”
The hurting part of Lily lashes out, a whip snapping fast. “What do you know of how hard it’s been?”
Marvena’s face blanches, tightens, into white-hot fury.
Lily stops, both her words and her stride. Horrified at herself for what she’s said. She reaches for Marvena. “Oh God, Marvena, I—I’m … sorry—I—”
But Marvena has turned back toward Sadie, now pulled taut as an overly tight string on a dulcimer, plucking forward, no longer humming.
* * *
By Lily’s estimate, they go on nearly two miles before Sadie follows her nose off the railroad track. Sadie pulls them through brush and brambles that snag their skirts, branches that snap back into their faces. Lily pauses to catch her breath and stares back at the winding way they’ve followed—but there is no discernible path. Brush and bramble and limb have already closed back over their steps, indifferent, as if they’d never passed through.
When Lily turns back around, Marvena and Sadie are out of view.
“Come this way!” Marvena calls. “Toward the big sycamore!”
The sycamore means they’re near some creek or another water source, perhaps an underground stream. Lily hopes it’s not a creek—if the woman had crossed a creek, that would make Sadie’s work harder.
Lily makes her way over. There is no aboveground stream. Lily smiles at that, and at Sadie happily accepting bites of sandwich from Marvena, who’s settled onto a rock like it’s an easy chair. Hunger wrings Lily’s stomach like a washrag, and a wave of light-headedness sends her staggering into the tiny, dark clearing.
Marvena rolls her eyes. “Come have a sandwich. Your gut’s growling so loudly, poor Sadie prob’ly thinks a cougar’s coming for us. Grab a pawpaw for me, won’t you?” She jabs her forefinger in the air and Lily glances behind her at a pawpaw tree, so laden with abundant green fruit that the boughs nearly sweep the ground. The fruits are camouflaged by the large green leaves. Without Marvena, she would have missed this gift from the indifferent forest.
Lily grabs two ripe fruits, her mouth watering just from the feel of them. She brings a pawpaw to Marvena, who keeps her eyes on Sadie even as she hands Lily a sandwich.
Lily sits on a stump, tucks into her sandwich—ham, butter, greens, between sliced corn pone, so good that Lily finds herself offering up a spontaneous silent prayer of gratitude. Mama would be pleased at her prayerful attitude. Well, while she’s being godly, she might as well apologize. Lily looks up at her friend. “Marvena, I’m—”
“Do you reckon the woman stopped here for a meal?”
No outright apologies, then. “I hope so.” Lily bites into the pawpaw, carefully sucking fruit off the seeds, which she spits out, then relishes the custard-like creamy fruit, sweet and a bit peppery.
“So, how’s Hildy seemed to you lately?” Marvena asks.
Marvena’s question catches Lily by surprise. “Fine,” Lily says. “Why?”
“I reckon you know Hildy is tutoring, with Miss Olive at the Rossville schoolhouse?” Marvena keeps her expression in check.
What is she getting at—or is she making conversation? But that’s not like Marvena. Slowly, Lily says, “She mentioned it to me this morning. She won’t be able to continue after she marries Merle Douglas. For the best, really.”
A flash of guilt strikes Lily—she’d been so brusque with Hildy this morning, as she’d been with Marvena earlier.
“Is it? Hildy seems right happy when she’s tutoring, and I don’t reckon a fella who would want her to be happy would want her to stop.”
“It wouldn’t be proper.”
“Proper? You of all women, worrying about what’s proper—”
“Hildy isn’t like us.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“She needs protecting. She’s always been a little shy, not too confident—”
“I don’t know; I’ve seen her hold her own—” Marvena grins. “Even when tutoring a tough nut like me—or my brother.”
Lily should be pleased for all of them. Last year, she’d seen firsthand how shamed Marvena felt that she wasn’t able to read letters from Daniel—letters that eventually led them to Benjamin Russo, who works in the Bureau of Mines and who was able to help them.
Instead, Lily is miffed. Sure, she’s been busy. But Hildy hadn’t mentioned her volunteering until this morning, and Marvena hadn’t told her about it, either. What else had they not bothered to share?
She’s being petulant. Rather than say anything else she’ll regret, Lily folds up the waxed paper—Marvena will want to reuse it—and silently hands it to her.
They set back out, and minutes later Sadie whines and strains to go up a footpath that’s opened steps away from the pawpaw tree. They follow Sadie to a narrow gravel road.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Marvena exclaims.
“I don’t think that’s the idea,” Lily says.
CHAPTER 10
HILDY
Wednesday, September 22—9:00 a.m.
Hildy hurries on a back way from Lily’s house to the newspaper office. The direct path would take her past Merle’s grocery on Main Street, and today Merle is expecting her to come into the grocery to learn how he wants to stock the shelves and track inventory. She’s been working a few days a week as his helper at the register, a task that is simple enough, but that she finds herself resisting. Every time she goes in, she has to push aside the thought of how the grocery had once belonged to Lily’s father, had been meant to pass on to Roger.
Now she carefully carries in one hand the notebook, in which she’s slipped her sketch and sheriff’s notice, and covers her mouth and nose with the other. This alley, which cuts behind the Kinship Inn, reeks of alcohol and trash and even human waste. She steps carefully around a puddle, though it hasn’t rained here.
Disgusting, and yet behind her hand she’s smiling. She feels, suddenly, important, powerful. Like she’s on a secret mission for Lily—and for the dead woman. Merle and Mother would not approve, but recklessly, Hildy thinks, So what? For after her mission is complete at the newspaper, she will drive back to Rossville, find Tom, make up with him, make him give her mor
e time to talk to Merle and Mother. They have done nothing wrong, after all, and she wants to let them down as kindly as possible.
She stops short at the sight of George Vogel emerging from the hotel’s back entrance—George, the powerful attorney and purveyor of Vogel’s Tonic, which barely followed the rule of the Volstead Act for alcoholic content for medicinal purposes. What is he doing here? He lives in Cincinnati, but reports of his mob ties have reached even the local newspaper. Surely he didn’t come here for some illicit poker game.…
Emerging behind him, a brazen tilt to her chin that nonetheless belies defensiveness, is Fiona Weaver, the widow of Deputy Martin Weaver, who’d died in the line of duty in the conflict in Rossville the year before.
With them are several other men—bodyguards—and George’s right-hand man and enforcer, Abe Miller.
Hildy recognizes Vogel from newspaper articles and Miller because he had come to Daniel’s funeral, then lingered in the months that followed as Lily settled into her role as sheriff.
She must tell Lily that they’re here—and that Fiona is involved with George. Hildy lowers her gaze, hurries past them, heart pounding—then realizes, they haven’t even noticed her. She might as well have been one of the alley mice.
By the time she’s back out on Main Street, Hildy’s resolve is already faltering—and not from being able to scurry past the great George Vogel and Fiona Weaver unnoticed. Her giddiness wilts as she thinks about telling Lily about this, imagines Lily brushing aside this news as gossip. Why hadn’t Lily told her that the sheriff’s office and jail will move to the courthouse?
There’s no use in wondering. She knows why. Lily thinks Hildy will marry Merle soon—and their friendship, already waning, will wither as Lily follows her unconventional path and Hildy takes the conventional way—not side streets and alleys.
Around another corner and there’s the Kinship Daily Courier, in a narrow building near the end of the street. Inside the office, she finds Seth Robertson, reporter for the newspaper. He’s leaning back in his chair, feet on desk, hat on face, with a burning cigarette dangling between his lips. If she were a bettor—like the men at the illicit poker games in the Kinship Inn’s basement speakeasy, which Lily, like Daniel before her, prefers to ignore—she’d bet he’d come directly to work from a long night at the speakeasy, and give fifty-fifty odds he’s going to either set his hat brim on fire or let the cigarette drop to the pile of paper on his desk.
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