“We can’t have children, so how do you know what kind of mother I would be?”
“Of course you’d stay.” Neil is shocked at his wife’s reaction. He looks to George for support. “Mothers should stay with their children. Mine left, so why should I have done anything more than what I did? I gave her more than she deserved. I did the best I could. I paid for the boarding room—”
“That was your best?” George’s voice is like ice. His habitual amused smile, as if everything is a game, drops from his face. In its absence, there is no new expression. Only hardness, like a stone statue. “You could have found help for her here. If she needed the care of an asylum, you could have had her at the Cincinnati Sanitarium. Instead, you abandoned her.”
Neil recoils back into his chair as if he’s being snipped to pieces, one syllable at a time—snip, snip.
What is driving George? There is a story here—random compassion for others or empathy is not a George Vogel trait. Nor is sympathy for old women. Everything with George is calculated, hard, for his own purposes and gain.
It has never occurred to Lily to think of George having a past, to be driven by haunts, as she herself is driven. To her, he has always been simply a terrifying force, swooping in and out of her life, a raptor seeking its prey.
Whatever his reason, whatever his background, George for some reason is fully on Lily’s side. She hadn’t read it in his face last night, but something about the story of an ailing elderly mother, left behind by her son, struck a chord in George. Does it connect to his past—or to his own mother?
“Perhaps,” George concludes, “she was attempting to follow you, Professor Leitel.”
The air sucks out of the room at the import of this possibility—the elderly woman, alone, in the cold, ultimately barefoot, stumbling along, looking for her son. Her death a random happenstance, after all. Falling from the top of the tunnel, onto the train.
Her death having nothing to do with her connection to Hildy’s family or the past in which Thea had witnessed—and been partial cause of—the hanging execution of one of her father’s wards on the Underground Railroad. Nothing to do with the rise of the WKKK. Nothing to do with her past at the farm.
Simply a mother, looking for her boy.
The memory of the shadowy silver boy, flitting through the woods—an act of her own imagination—grasps Lily.
“No.” May’s voice is like a handkerchief clenched in a hard fist. “No. Thea was not looking for Neil. She was looking for a baby.”
Neil laughs, a high-pitched trill. “That was delusion. Her delusion, probably guilt—over being a neglectful mother! Why would she care about another baby?”
Lily shakes her head. Was Neil really jealous over his mother’s concern about a baby—real or imagined—after all of these years?
“She was so certain,” May says. “So sure. She mentioned it several times to us. There was a baby that she needed to find, to save—”
“The ramblings of a delusional old—”
“Enough!” George’s voice cuts through the room like thunder.
Abe steps in the room, stands behind Neil’s chair, drapes his hand casually over the back of the chair, his fingertips a wisp away from Neil’s neck. If Neil turns his head in the slightest, his collar, the tips of his hair, will touch Abe’s hand. Sensing Abe’s presence, Neil has stilled and stiffened.
George looks back at May. It is enough for her to go on.
“I don’t think she was delusional. I think she was remembering something—someone—important to her. Maybe important enough to search for. Maybe she wrote about it in the autobiography she was working on—before we left her at the rooming house.”
Lily leans forward on the couch, tingles dancing over her skin. Thea Kincaide had been writing an autobiography?
Neil rolls his eyes, presumably at the ludicrousness of an old woman wanting, at the end of her life, to capture as much of it as possible on paper. Who would want to read that?
Well, Lily would. Most assuredly.
Neil clears his throat and says softly, reasonably, as he might in explaining a concept to one of his students, “Unfortunately, we had to get rid of that box of papers, you know, to make moving here easier, so—”
“I didn’t get rid of that box,” May says.
Neil’s gaze strikes at her, but May sits up straighter, stiffening her spine, emboldened by George. She looks at Lily. “They are in a trunk. In the attic. You can come see them—”
“Just let her have them.” Neil’s voice twists bitterly. “I will never read them. And May, if you were going to, you would have by now. So this sheriff can have them”—he looks at George; his expression turns pleading, his voice soft and rotten with fear—“and then, we can forget that this happened?”
George’s smile returns, small, thin, slithering up his face, one-sided. “That is up to Sheriff Ross here, and what she finds in them—”
The butler rushes into the room, holding a piece of paper. He looks directly at Lily. “This telegram came to the Sinton Hotel, where the concierge had the wherewithal to send it here with a delivery boy.”
Lily jumps up, rushes to the butler. Oh God. Something about the WKKK? Jolene or Micah? Mama, Caleb Jr.?
Lily snatches the telegram from him, scans it hurriedly, barely able to breathe, her heart pounding. Then she reads it again. It’s from Mama.
Hildy taken to Hollows Asylum.
CHAPTER 32
HILDY
Friday, October 1—7:00 p.m.
Hildy stirs to wakefulness. Her stomach grumbles. She’s alone in the windowless room she shares with three other women.
The dose they—for already the nurses and orderlies blur into “they”—had given her after dragging her from Thea’s old room is wearing off, but her mind is still foggy. She feels too light, as if she might float away.
She must force herself to focus, to calculate. That’s what Lily would do.
Tears spring forth at the thought of her friend. Hildy dashes her hand across her eyes. Focus. Calculate.
Stomach grumbling: it’s past dinner.
Alone in the room: not yet bedtime. The other women must be at activity hour.
Hildy pushes her mind back: She’d been dosed for being out of her room, at the cottage. But she’d spotted the nurse’s aide Helen, who seemed sympathetic to Thea.
Hildy groans, wishing to roll over, let her mind drift back into a numbing mist. Instead, she makes herself sit up. Then carefully, she climbs down the metal ladder from the top bunk.
She’s out of the room before she realizes that she’s barefoot, wearing only a nightgown. A morbid laugh starts to rise, but—though the hallway is empty—Hildy claps her hands to her mouth. She moves swiftly down the hallway, back to the wall, then finds the exit.
Hildy stops outside, stares up at the dark sky. The moon is a sliver, a waning crescent. There would be no light to guide her as it had Thea. Hildy shivers in the cold, wishing already for a sweater. But the cold also helps her head to clear.
Focus. Calculate.
The darkness will give her cover. She’s much younger, far more fit, than Thea. All she has to do is make her way to the cottage where Thea had lived, where Helen worked, and hope to find her. Or, if she’s not still there, hide away, wait until Helen came back to her room. And there—there’s the flickering coal-oil light at the back step of the cottage.
Gingerly yet swiftly, Hildy walks across the damp lawn, her vision focused on the lamp. A rock pierces the sole of her foot and she stumbles but keeps from falling. Swallows back the urge to cry out. Keep going. One step. Another. Another.
At last, she is at the cottage. Hildy looks around. She appears to still be alone. She runs up the steps to the door. Dammit! It’s locked.
Focus. Calculate.
If she waits, others will come back. Maybe she can blend in with them somehow.…
A hand claps down on her shoulder, spins her around. A security guard. He looks annoyed at firs
t, but then a lascivious grin takes over his face. Hildy’s blood runs cold.
“Well, little miss, what are you doing out, all by yourself?” He licks his lips. Hildy looks down. Ah—a ring of keys hangs from his belt loop. If she can steel herself for another second …
“I’ll help you, sweetheart,” the guard says. “Come on down.”
Hildy remains stock-still on the top step.
The guard frowns. “I told you, get down here!”
She gives him a taunting smile.
He grabs for her, at the same time as he starts to step up. In the split second that he’s standing one-legged, Hildy kicks him as hard as she can in his groin. The guard curses, falls backward, and knocks himself out cold on the ground.
For a moment, Hildy stares at him. Oh God. Had she killed him? No, he’s breathing—just unconscious for the moment. Her hands tremble as she unclips the key ring from his belt.
The first and second keys don’t fit. By the time she’s on the third, the guard moans, coming around. Focus! The fourth, no … Ah. The fifth key slides in. Hildy turns it. The door creaks open.
“Get back here, you bitch—” the guard yells, struggling to his feet.
Hildy gets in the cottage door, slams it shut, locks it.
As he starts pounding on the door, Hildy runs down the hall, past a few bewildered residents, and into the common bathroom.
For a moment, she sinks to the floor, catching her breath. Helen. The resident aide. Where would she stay?
Then she remembers that earlier Helen had come out of the room across from Thea’s.
Hildy runs down the hall to the room across from Thea’s. A few residents gather as Hildy bangs on Helen’s door. Helen opens the door, looks alarmed at seeing Hildy, but the door is open far enough that Hildy can shove Helen back, slip in, shut the door. Hildy locks the door, then grabs a chair and shoves it in front of the door. That should hold off the guard and whoever else for at least a few minutes.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Helen whimpers. She rushes to a wardrobe, opens it, starts pawing through. “I’ll give back the brooches, and the shoes. They didn’t fit anyway—”
Hildy grabs the slight girl’s arms. Her head is pounding, but she has to know, has to ask before her brain is again dosed beyond thinking. “Why did Thea want to leave? Why was she so desperate?”
Helen begins crying. “There are some nurses here, in some crazy group. They want me to join, but I won’t. Miss Thea—I liked her, I did, and she trusted me. She’d heard two nurses talking about going to kill a Negro—a man—except they’d used a mean term for him, in the mines up in Rossville. They never said his name. Poor Miss Thea—she made a fuss, and she was put in solitary until she calmed down. Bound her wrists and everything. She behaved, got sent back to her nice room on probation, but she was desperate to go. She seemed to think she knew him—a fellow named John.”
Oh—those marks on poor Thea’s wrists. Fury rises in Hildy. She gives Helen a fierce shake. “Why didn’t you report this?”
“I didn’t know how many there are! Or if I’d be reporting to someone in the group with them. They were scary—I was scared—but I wanted to help Miss Thea—”
“So you helped her escape. But not without taking possessions from her.”
Helen looks down. Her voice turns sour with defensiveness. “She was prideful. Wanted to pay me. So I took the brooches—someone would have anyway sooner or later—”
“And her shoes!” Hildy screams, shaking the girl even harder.
“Please, please, stop—” the girl whimpers.
Hildy wants to, but she is so angry, angry with this girl who is so weak—weak from desire to please everyone, weak from wanting to have everything without consequence.
The shadow of the old-fashioned woman comes to the corner of Hildy’s vision. Whispers … Stop.
Suddenly Hildy does. Oh, Thea. She lets go of the girl, who stumbles backward to her bed. Hildy sobs, drops to her knees. She thought she was shaking Helen. She’d really been shaking herself.
The door bursts open; the chair goes flying. The guard who Hildy had earlier kicked stands in the doorway, red-faced and seething.
Hildy looks desperately at Helen, silently begging for help.
But Helen looks aside and steps out of the way of the shattered door.
A scream rises in Hildy’s throat, but she swallows it back and stares evenly at the guard, even as he charges through splintered wood toward her.
Whatever fate awaits her, she refuses to face it with whimpering acquiescence.
CHAPTER 33
LILY
Friday, October 1—8:00 p.m.
Abe had chosen his route well—the old Main Market Route 45, renamed State Route 7 a few years ago, east out of Cincinnati, then State Route 27 to Milford, and State Route 26 to Athens. The automobile he’s driving—George procured only the newest models—runs much smoother and faster than the automobile Lily had inherited from Daniel. There is no train tonight from Cincinnati to Athens that can hurtle her fast enough to Hildy.
Still, there are curves and bumps aplenty on this modern, new two-lane road, and Abe is pushing the automobile to go its speediest.
As he hits a bump, Lily’s hat flies off of her head. She yelps, staring at the pages rattling in her hand, under the beam of her flashlight.
“You all right back there?” Abe asks. His voice holds no concern. It simply would not do for Lily to foul his boss’s automobile by throwing up in the back seat.
“I’m fine!” Lily snaps. “This has nothing to do with your driving. Matter of fact, if you could pick it up, I’d be much obliged.”
She’s already more than fully obliged to George—first for bringing Neil to her, then for sending one of his men to retrieve Thea’s autobiography, and now for Abe driving Lily as speedily as possible through the night to the Hollows. George, with a flat smile, had even promised to send along a telegram on Lily’s behalf to the institution.
But none of this—or Abe’s tire-tilting driving style—is what inspired Lily’s yelp.
It’s Thea’s writing. Lily has quickly skimmed the first sheath of pages—long, overwrought descriptions of Thea’s time on the stage, sights she’d seen in various locations, lovers she’d had. Now, finally, fifty pages in, Thea’s writing turns to her childhood, as if she had to work through the gloss to finally have the courage to turn to the root of who she was.
And what she had to say—riveting.
THEA’S HANDWRITTEN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, PAGES 42–58
My father gave me his compass that last night.
I believe it was meant to placate and comfort me, for I had been begging and crying all day to go with him to see off John and Garnet—who were, Mama said, to be the last of the escaped slaves we’d help along the Underground Railroad, for Daddy’s activities over the past few years in this regard made her nervous for our own safety.
I had taken a particular liking to them, I suppose because they stayed with us the longest. I’d brought them food for weeks where they’d hidden, far back in a cave known only to us and a few others, down a windy path on the other side of the crick that ran behind our cabin, up the hill from the Stanehart Hollow Friends Meeting House.
Chicken and corn pone and soup beans and sometimes I’d take extra biscuits for myself, but hold them back, and make a mash of butter and sorghum to spread in the middle—as much a sweet treat as breakfast.
I’d been hearing Mama and Daddy fighting more of late. Mama thought it was too dangerous to go on offering asylum to the escaped slaves. More and more bounty hunters were coming through, looking for escaped slaves who had made it across the Ohio River and into the deep hilly forests of southeastern Ohio—into freedom, if they avoided bounty hunters, who, by law, could return the escaped slaves to their owners and receive good payment for doing so.
Plenty did not sanction helping men and women on the road to freedom—even those in our Friends gathering, who thought it would be best to receive e
nlightenment and blessing for ourselves alone as true stewards of the Word. Daddy grumbled that listening for the “still small voice” was for more than that, for us to help those in our community, and that didn’t mean just the Friends. That meant anyone whose path we came across.
Still, Mama argued that it would be better to follow the law, to keep our heads down.
Daddy said he had been keeping his head down in prayer, and the law of the Lord was above the law of Man, and what good comes from enlightenment if not applied to right action?
Mama snapped back that he wouldn’t ask that if he had grown up as she had—poor, hungry, in the deepest hollers. Daddy, who had moved to Kinship with his family soon after the town’s establishment, came from wealthier beginnings—his father, my granddaddy, was a blacksmith, after all. My uncle Claude had stayed in Kinship, but Daddy, always restlessly seeking the divine, had joined the Friends group, and he became a farmer—preferring even a hardscrabble life in nature to the busyness of a town like Kinship.
I longed for happier days, when Mama and Daddy mostly got along—though truth be told, I don’t remember Mama being happy often, and after Daddy’s death, well, she never was happy, even when she found relative ease with my stepfather, Mr. Adam Dyer.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Tired of hearing them argue, I tucked the compass in my pocket, and took big slices of ham and green tomato pie—with Mama’s seasonings and some sweetening, it tasted close to apple—out to the cave. Plenty for John, a big man, and for Garnet. I was only seven, but I knew what the big bulge in her belly meant, even if I didn’t fathom yet how it came to be. She was going to have a baby—any minute.
That’s why Daddy wanted to keep them hidden for a while longer—so Garnet could have her baby safely with us, and be tended to by Mama and some of the other women. And she’d need John—though he was not the father—to protect her. That kept them with us longer than previous runaways, and so besides bringing them food, I tried to get them to tell me stories of their lives on the run. They wouldn’t—and now I don’t blame them. So I brought a book to read to them, because I didn’t have stories of my own, and from there started to teach them a little bit about reading.
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