The cautious, precise pace must have been maddening for our horse, as it had been accustomed to flying across well-traveled roads at breakneck speed. Of course, the opportunity for breaking one’s neck was just as ample on this journey, especially on the occasional bit of rocky terrain where a glimpse to the side revealed a steep drop-off. As a result, our horse moved in a state of nervous agitation coupled with moments of sheer ineptitude. The only thing that fidgeted more was Phoebe, who kept up a litany of gasps and sighs and complaints.
“Are we going to a cave?” she said over her shoulder at one point. “There’s a story in the Bible about a man who lived in a cave. He was infested with demons, and Jesus had to drive them out into a herd of pigs. You infested with demons, Laurent?”
I hissed at Phoebe to stop, but she would not be deterred.
“So, what do you think it’ll be, Belinda? Where do you think we’re going to end up? California?” I felt her turning back again. “Is that it, Laurent? Are we going to get to the other side of this mountain and see the ocean? Is that your plan?”
“Just hush.” The pounding in my head was nearly unbearable, and the dryness and discomfort I’d felt in my mouth and throat had now contracted to a single sharp pain any time I swallowed or spoke. “You aren’t making this any more pleasant.”
“That’s because there’s nothing pleasant about this. In case you haven’t noticed, cousin, we’re captives. Hostages. Prisoners.” I could feel her twisting with each word, tossing it defiantly back to Laurent. “We’d be better off with Indians. Or maybe that’s what he is. A savage in disguise. Is that it, Laurent?” she shouted. “You going to tie us to a stake somewhere and burn us alive?”
“I hadn’t planned on it until now,” he said. I hated that I heard the humor in his voice. “We ain’t got much more to go, so in the meantime you’d best listen to your little cousin there and hold your tongue before I get any ideas.”
“Well, you don’t scare me,” Phoebe said. “You’re not going to kill us. We’re your key to the money.”
“Most doors only need one key,” he said. “You just keep quiet till we get where we’re goin’, and I won’t have to decide which one.”
I felt her tensing up to speak again, but a sharp nudge from my elbow poked her into silence. For the rest of our ride there was only the sound of the dense forest around us.
We had already stopped twice to rest the horses, so when Laurent called us to halt for the third time, I climbed down, resigned to a long day’s journey, when he surprised me by unloading his horse.
“On foot from here.” He winced with the effort of taking off the saddle. “I can get most of it. Think you girls are up to carryin’ this?”
“We’re your prisoners, not your mules,” Phoebe said.
She stood, passive and mute, refusing to carry even a single blanket. By now I felt on fire, burning from the inside out, and found the idea of holding the smallest canvas bag so overwhelming as to make me want to curl up with the saddle and wait to die.
“Well then,” Laurent said, “come on. It’s not far.”
Staggering a bit under the burden of his saddlebag, he set off with such confidence he must have been privy to some invisible landmark. Phoebe followed him, and I followed her, using the dark green and lavender calico print of her skirt to guide me. By now it seemed the path between my mouth and stomach was stuffed with straw. Sweat coated my face and brow, soaking under my arms and my back. I thought of nothing—not my parents, not my brother. I had no fear that Laurent might well be leading us to some place of execution. In truth, there was a part of me that found the idea a relief.
At some point the skirt stopped, and I stumbled right into its wearer, nearly knocking both of us down.
“Go on inside,” Laurent was saying. “Rest up. I’ll be back with another load.”
I looked up, thinking I must be hallucinating. The thick woods we’d been trudging through opened to a small clearing, at the center of which was a small log cabin. Phoebe stood staring, her mouth agape for a few seconds before turning to me.
“Belinda! Are you all right?”
My eyes welled with tears, and my gathering sobs burst through my burning throat. Shaking my head served only to slosh the pain from one side to the other, so I let myself fall into Phoebe’s arms for the final few steps of our journey.
The features of the cabin evolved as my eyes adjusted to the dimness. A little cookstove stood in one corner with a coffee pot perched on top and various pans hung above a long wooden box that ran nearly the length of one wall. On the other side of the stove was a water barrel half as tall as me, and a little washstand with a blue speckled bowl. In the middle of the room were two straight-backed chairs and a table with dishes stacked neatly on it. Two narrow cots completed the room’s furnishings, and a more welcome sight I had never seen.
“Here.” Phoebe helped me shrug out of my coat. “You need to lie down.”
Under any other circumstances, the thin mattress covering the stretched canvas would have been unacceptably primitive and uncomfortable, but I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the finest goose down.
Phoebe touched my face and furrowed her brow. “You’re burning up.”
My teeth were now chattering, and I curled my body to find some measure of warmth. She unlaced my boots and pulled them off before covering me with a blanket that smelled of pine needles and tobacco.
“I need some water,” I said.
“I know. There’s none left in the canteen, so we’ll have to wait until Laurent gets back.”
I nodded. I could wait. And until then, I could sleep.
I woke up to tea.
“With honey.” Phoebe moved a spoon around in a tin cup as I sat up.
“Where are we?” I managed to croak after the first warm, sweet swallow.
“I’m not sure.” She leaned forward, whispering. “He’s right outside, chopping firewood or something. I think he’ll let us go once you’re well.”
“Go where?”
“What does that matter? Anywhere away from here. He’s dangerous, Belinda. A killer, remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“I’m sorry. But you should see him now, out there chopping those logs. Single-handed, you know, what with the wound and all. I just hope he doesn’t decide to take that ax to us and—”
“Phoebe! You’re being ridiculous.”
“Even so, your falling ill might be the best thing that could have happened.” She leaned even closer. “I don’t think taking prisoners factored into his plan. Mark my words. We’ll rest here for a few days until you get better, and then he’ll throw that door wide open for us.”
I glanced over at the door which was, at that time, wide open. Dusk was falling, and I heard the rhythmic sound of an ax splitting logs just outside.
“I don’t think we’re prisoners anymore.” I took another sip. “I think we’re guests.”
Just then Laurent walked into the cabin, his arms full of kindling, which he took to the wood box by the stove.
“She awake?” he asked without turning around.
“Yes.” Phoebe had been sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs, having pulled it alongside the bed. Now she stood, seeming a presence equal to his in this small room. “Not that you care. What she needs is some food.”
He tugged his gloves off and dropped them on the table before crossing over to the cot and sitting in Phoebe’s newly vacated chair. When he reached his hand toward me, I felt no compulsion to shrink away. Placing the back of his hand gently on my forehead, then cheek, he said, “She’s burning up.”
“My, my,” Phoebe said. “Thief, murderer, and doctor. How fortunate for us to be in such capable hands.”
A shadow fell across Laurent’s face. He looked away from me, stood, and headed back to the door.
“I got a cookfire goin’ outside. Got some beans warmin’ up out there. Should be ready in a while.” Then he left, shutting the door beh
ind him.
“You should be more careful, Phoebe. It can’t do us any good to make him angry.”
“Oh no, my darling cousin.” Phoebe resumed her place beside me. “That look on his face? That wasn’t anger. That was shame.”
For the next hour or so I lay on the cot, drifting in and out of awareness, watching Phoebe inspect every nook and cranny of the room. My throat continued to burn, and I felt as if my entire body were covered with a thin layer of fire. At some point I convinced Phoebe that my virtue would remain intact if I took off my dress, as the sweat-dampened material and constricting seams made the garment nearly unbearable.
“You suppose old Laurent has a nightgown hidden around here?” Phoebe asked, poking through a long, flat trunk she’d discovered under one of the cots. “Like maybe this was grandma’s house, and he’s the big, bad wolf?”
I smiled weakly.
“Or maybe,” she continued, pawing through the garments in the trunk, “this was the cabin he built for his lover. He built it here, high up on the mountain, so he could hide away with her.”
“Because her parents didn’t approve,” I added, ignoring the pain of speech.
“Yes, of course.”
She had evidently found something to her liking and dropped the garment in her lap. She snapped the latch on the trunk and pushed it under the cot again before helping me to my feet and holding me steady as I stepped out of my skirt and petticoats. I shrugged out of my blouse, but decided decorum insisted that I wear my chemise.
The garment she’d pulled from the trunk was a shirt, made of the softest pine green flannel. It felt wonderfully comfortable the minute she dropped it over my head, and I hugged myself once my arms found their way into the cavernous sleeves. The hem of it dropped just to my knees, and I was grateful for my long stockings to fill in the gap.
I climbed back into the cot and closed my eyes.
“He wasn’t a killer back then,” Phoebe continued. “In fact, he had a promising career as a …”
“Painter?”
“Do you see any art in this place? No, not a painter. A carpenter.” “But her father was a banker.”
“Exactly. And the only way they could be together was to get her far away from her father. So he left one spring, came here, and built this home with his bare hands.”
I heard her take a few steps. Opening one eye, I saw that she was draping my soiled dress over the back of the other chair.
“But when he went back to get her …,” I prompted, once she was sitting down again.
“When Laurent went back to get her, she had just been married to the son of her father’s partner. That started a murderous rampage. First his lover’s husband, then anybody who got in his way of building—well, stealing—the fortune that might gain him the respect he never had.”
“Nice story.”
My eyes flew open at the sound of Laurent’s voice. He stood in the doorway, holding a black cast-iron pot with a towel wrapped around its handle, looking the least murderous as I’d ever seen.
“How much did you hear?” Phoebe asked.
“I came in when I was murdering my lover’s husband.”
He set the pot on the table and stirred the contents with a long wooden spoon. Steam was rising up from it, and soon the cabin was filled with a deep, delicious aroma.
“Sorry, girls, but the real story ain’t half so excitin’. I share this place with my brother. Our pa was a trapper. Nothin’ romantic about it.”
I’d never seen Phoebe so flustered. Flushed, embarrassed, she twiddled her fingers in her lap for a few minutes before gaining her composure.
“So, you gonna eat first or feed your friend?” Laurent said.
“Go ahead,” I told her.
Laurent set the bowl at the empty place at the table, motioning for Phoebe to bring her chair back to its place.
“Well now,” Phoebe said. “Won’t this be cozy? Just the three of us trapped here.”
“Nope.” Laurent filled another bowl. “I plan to get you girls out of here first chance I get.”
15
I’d grown up on stories of enchanted cottages tucked away in deep, dark forests where innocent girls were lured to their doom. When I was ill as a child, Mother would sit by my bedside and read them to me for hours on end, holding my Brothers Grimm book at an angle so I could see the illustrations of wide-eyed children huddled behind woodpiles as they outwitted ogres. In the days that I languished in and out of fevered sleep, Phoebe did much the same for me. The only difference was that, in her stories, the heroes weren’t anonymous princes or woodcutters, but Del and Chester, riding to great adventures in the Wyoming wilderness. She told tales of their imagined exploits, making them ford raging rivers or pull children out of raging fires. They battled Indians, foiled bank robbers, or found rocks of gold littering the beds of mountain streams.
The climax of each yarn was the dramatic rescue of us. If Laurent happened to be listening, Phoebe took great delight in narrating a violent confrontation wherein Del held Laurent at gunpoint while Chester swooped me up in his arms and carried me out of the cabin and down the mountain where a stagecoach was waiting to take us back to Belleville.
“Chester doesn’t carry you?” I asked once, managing a faint smile.
“You’re smaller. And sick.” Then she leaned closer. “Besides, he can swoop me all he wants later.”
This made me laugh, just a little, but enough to send me into a coughing spasm that threatened to split my head open. Even Laurent, sitting at the table drinking coffee, smiled and shook his head before getting up and walking outside.
He left us alone quite a bit—sometimes for hours—once coming back with a rabbit he’d trapped. For the rest of the afternoon he sat outside on a log next to an open fire while it roasted on a spit. I still hadn’t recovered much of an appetite, so I had just one small piece of the meat shredded into a steaming bowl of bean broth, but I watched as Phoebe and Laurent sat at the table, tearing into it with gusto.
For just a moment, Phoebe forgot her antipathy toward Laurent and complimented his cooking. He smiled and said the secret was in the slow turning of the spit. And I, in that moment, escaped the circumstances that brought us all together and took three breaths of perfect peace.
On the fourth night I woke up drowning. Freezing cold, surrounded by total blackness. Soaking wet.
Phoebe had told me earlier that day about the mountain lake just over a ridge behind the cabin. It was a steep climb down to it, she’d said, but at the bottom was a giant pooling of melted snow, the clearest and cleanest water she’d ever seen. So this, finally, was how Laurent was going to dispose of us. After a prisoner’s final meal of roast rabbit, we were simply tumbled over the ledge, left to sink, suffocating, to the bottom. I flailed my arms, searching for Phoebe—surely he would have tossed us in together—and opened my mouth in an illogical gasp for breath.
To my surprise, breath came. Then another. In a matter of seconds, the whole room was illuminated, and Laurent’s shadow fell across the wall as he touched a match to the kerosene lantern on the table.
“You’re not drownin’,” he said.
“What are you doing in here?” Every night since we’d arrived, Laurent had slept outside next to the campfire.
“I heard somebody screamin’ about drownin’.”
There was a hint of irritation in his voice, but something indulgent too. He brought the lantern over to me, knelt down, touched my face, and smiled.
“Your fever’s broke.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Well, that’s a good thing anyway. Want some water?”
I nodded. How could I ever have thought I was underwater, given the dryness of my mouth?
Laurent took the lamp back to the table, turned the wick down, and poured a cupful of water from a glass jar on the table. He brought this over to me and waited until I was sitting upright before handing me the cup. The first sip was so cold it almost burned, but then my throa
t felt immediate, cooling relief, and I took long, even drinks until it was gone.
“Thank you.” I handed back the cup and lay back down.
“Get those covers up around you,” he said. “Don’t want you takin’ another chill.”
I heard a clatter as he opened the stove, and I watched him lay wood and kindling within it. He dipped a long stick down the chimney of the lantern and transferred the flame to the stove, blowing gently to fan it before closing the little door. That done, he pulled out one of the chairs and settled himself at the table, resting his head in his hands.
“Aren’t you going to go back to sleep?” I whispered.
“In a minute,” he said. “Let me get the fire burned down. Don’t want no sparks.”
“Would it be all right if I went over and sat by the fire for just a while?” I asked. The clamminess of the bed was nearly unbearable.
He got up and moved to the chair farther away from the stove. I swung my feet over the side of the bed and stood, my legs shaky with disuse. I hadn’t taken more than five steps without leaning on Phoebe’s arm since walking through this door. It took a while for the heat of the stove to penetrate the chill of my soggy shirt, and as I drew my knees up to my chest, curling up on the chair, I got a whiff of my own sour smell and wished I had something clean to change into.
“Feelin’ better.”
“Yes,” I said, taking his words for a question.
“Think you’re fit to travel?”
“Maybe in a few days. Right now I’m wondering if I’ll be able to make it back to the bed.”
Laurent simply nodded and continued sitting very still, looking down at the table.
“I guess it’s a good thing you brought us here.” Only Phoebe’s faint snoring—a familiar and comforting sound to me now—punctuated the silence. “Why did you?”
“I don’t know.”
It was my turn to sit quietly, full of questions but in no hurry to get the answers.
“I never meant to kill nobody,” he said after a time.
“You told me that before.”
“I told you I didn’t mean to kill your ma. I’m tellin’ you now that I never set out to kill nobody.”
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