“Oh Lord,” Sophronia whispered, gripping Dovey’s hand so hard that her nails bit like teeth. “It’s Clifford in there. Jo! What can we do? Dovey, we must do something!”
“Stay calm,” she murmured. “I’ve dealt with angry men before. This is nothing new to me.”
But it was something new—new and terrible, to know that one’s dearest friend was trapped in the dark with a ravening beast. Dovey pulled her Colt from the holster on her thigh. This time, when she raised her petticoats to reveal the length of her stockings and the shape of her limb, Sophronia didn’t bother with a sniff of distaste.
Dovey crept up the porch steps on her toes and tried the door’s handle. It was locked from the inside. She returned to Sophronia’s side as another round of shouts and pitiful cries erupted inside the schoolhouse.
“All right,” Dovey said. “I have an idea.”
“You can’t shoot him,” Sophronia said, cupping her horrified face with her hands.
“Oh yes, I can!”
“You’ll go to jail, Dovey! No one will believe it was self-defense; he’s not attacking you.”
Dovey paused, her fingers locked tight around the Colt’s handle. Sophronia’s argument made good sense. She quickly scanned the schoolyard, squinting into the dusk. The building had no window on this side, but the roof of the little porch was so gently sloped that it was almost flat. That offered some possibilities. In the grass beside the schoolhouse, Dovey spotted a few gardening tools, evidently used to keep the yard: a small hand trowel and a rake with a long handle and thick iron tines.
“Get up there on the roof, over the door,” Dovey whispered.
“Me?”
“Yes, you! You’ve taken Clifford down once before. It’s time you gave him an encore.”
Sophronia seemed about to protest, until she heard Jo scream for help again—and the low, cruel thunder of Clifford’s laughter. She tugged at her skirt as if settling her bloomers into a more comfortable arrangement, then strode toward the porch. With Dovey’s help, Sophronia clambered up onto a rain barrel, then, gasping and grunting with the effort, pulled herself up to the flat roof as silently as she could.
Dovey passed her the heavy rake. Sophronia bunched up her skirt around her knees and perched above the door like a gargoyle, tense and snarling with a ferocity Dovey had never seen the woman display before—not even when railing against the evils of prostitution. Sophronia held the rake poised over one shoulder, ready to swing it with brutal force. She gave Dovey a single grim nod.
Dovey sucked in a deep breath and shouted, “The sheriff is here—and a whole posse! You’d better come on out, Clifford. There’s no escape.”
The clamor inside the schoolhouse cut off abruptly. There was the clatter of fast, heavy footsteps, then Clifford’s voice called out, close beside the door.
“Ha! A posse? You don’t sound much like a sheriff, little girl.”
“I’m not a sheriff,” Dovey said. “I’m a tax collector. And don’t you think the Revenue Service knows where to scare up a posse now and then?”
Clifford roared with laughter. “You can’t fool me, girl. I’ve spent years tracking down this thieving bitch I am obliged to call my wife. I’m not letting her go as easily as that. She owes me—with interest. I’m here to extract my due.”
Jo gave a faint whimper from the depths of the schoolhouse. Dovey gripped the Colt so hard her wrist ached.
“I advise you to come out peacefully,” Dovey shouted. “The sheriff is ready to shoot, and the least display of funny business might set him off.”
“Cops! Prove it, girl, or shut up and stop wasting my time.”
Coolly, Dovey aimed her Colt into the air and fired off a shot. The gun kicked hard in her hand, as it always did, but the roar of its discharge sent a surge of power through her body. When its echo had died away, rolling in waves down the fields and out across the Sound, there was silence inside the schoolhouse.
Then the door creaked open.
Clifford revealed himself in the doorway, and Dovey’s stomach clenched at the sight of him. Seven years in prison had changed him little. His face was still handsome enough to set any girl’s heart racing, but his broad shoulders hunched and shivered—with fear of the gun, Dovey wondered, or with the force of his own dark cruelty? When he saw no one in the yard but Dovey, small and slim, delicate as a china cup in the pale plaid of her work dress, a grin of hateful amusement twisted his mouth. He glanced dismissively at the pistol still smoking in her hand.
“Well, look at you,” he said, advancing one step, then another. “Don’t I know you from somewhere, pretty little thing that you are? Put that gun down and come over here.”
Dovey snorted. She turned the gun on Clifford. Sophronia, huddled on her rooftop perch, shot a pleading glance down at Dovey. The rake trembled in her arms.
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” Dovey said. “I’d never go near a brute like you.”
“Come on, you little tart. Ease that gun to the ground. I’ll give you something else to hold.” He took another step and then paused, eyeing Dovey with more doubt, more caution.
“Don’t come any closer.” Dovey allowed her voice to quiver with fear. She shuffled backward, clutching the gun with both hands, for all the world as if her sense had fled and she no longer had any idea how to use the thing.
The display of feminine fear seemed to bolster Clifford’s predatory confidence. He chuckled deep in his throat and took another step across the porch—then another.
Sophronia swung her bludgeon with so much force that the rake whistled as it sliced through the air. It cracked against Clifford’s head as loud as a rifle shot. Clifford toppled sideways and fell in a heap off the end of the porch, too stunned even to cry out.
Jo staggered to the door, clinging to its frame. She was shaking violently; her face was puffy from Clifford’s blows, and blood from her nose and split lip dripped onto the collar of her dress. But when she met Dovey’s eye, Jo’s weeping turned to tears of gratitude and relief. Her smile was bloodied, but it was wide and amazed.
“You,” Jo said thickly.
“Me, all right,” Dovey replied. She holstered her gun and came forward to guide Sophronia down from the roof. “And her,” she added as Sophronia, back on solid ground once more, twitched her skirt into place.
Dovey stared down at the unmoving bulk of Clifford, sprawled in the grass. “We need to tie him up, good and tight. Is there any rope inside the schoolhouse, Jo?”
She shook her head, dazed. “None.”
Sophronia instantly hiked up her skirt and her petticoats.
Wonders never cease, Dovey thought wryly.
“Here,” Sophronia said. “Dovey, pick the ribbons out of my bloomer cuffs. They’re silk—silk is very strong. It ought to hold him well enough.”
Dovey did as she was told, pulling two wide, pink silk ribbons free of Sophronia’s drawers. Then she removed her own bloomer ribbons and clutched the whole bundle in her teeth. Together, she and Sophronia dragged the unresisting Clifford to the edge of the porch. They pushed and prodded him into a more-or-less seated position, pulled his hands behind his back, and knotted the silk ribbons tightly around his hairy wrists, binding him to the porch railing.
When the work was done, Dovey straightened and admired her handiwork. Clifford sat slumped and unconscious, anchored to the schoolhouse as firmly as a ship to a pier.
“What do we do now?” Jo asked. She wobbled on her feet; Sophronia hurried to her aid and eased her down on the porch step, dabbing with a handkerchief at her tender, bloody face.
Full night had come. The stars were a bright scatter where they showed through patchy cloud. From somewhere in the forest, an owl called, fell silent, then called again, from a point far away. Dovey saw that there was nothing to do now but wait. For what? she asked herself. For someone to come along who might be able to summon the sheriff, she supposed. She felt rather dull and used up, at the end of her resources and cleverness. Her only c
lear thought was that she must not leave Clifford alone. He might come around and break the silk ribbons. In that case, he might need shooting after all.
“You can’t walk any distance, Jo,” Dovey said practically. “Not all roughed up as you are. Stay put here on the step; we’ll wait until some farmer or cart driver happens by, and send them for help.”
“You’re right, I suppose,” Jo said.
Then she leaned her head against Sophronia’s shoulder and wept with a pain Dovey felt throbbing in her own heart. Dovey settled on Jo’s other side and took her hand, stroking it, kissing the cool, slender fingers.
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” Dovey said quietly. “I don’t think we’ll make it to Olympia tomorrow morning.”
They waited on the porch for at least three hours. The excitement of their evening had long since drained away into despair. Dovey knew that they could catch a boat back to Seattle in the morning—providing Jo was in any shape at all to limp down the hill and through the town of Coupeville—but morning was still some long way off. She’d found a few quilts in a cedar trunk in the schoolhouse—Jo used them to bundle up the children on winter mornings, when the stove was too stubborn to light. Dovey tucked the quilts gently around her friends and settled down to wait out the night in watchful silence, always with one wary eye on Clifford, who drifted in and out of consciousness as the night wore on.
Finally, though, when Dovey had begun to nod with exhaustion, she saw the dim flicker of a lantern on the road, bobbing steadily up from the town of Coupeville.
“Look,” she muttered, elbowing Jo in the ribs. “Look—somebody’s coming!”
Dovey stumbled to her feet. The quilt fell away, and the chill of night hit her with its full force, making her teeth chatter and her skin prickle. She hurried across the schoolyard, waving her arms, calling out to whomever carried the light.
The lantern paused its swinging as the bearer halted. Then it came on quicker than before. As it drew near, Dovey could make out not one figure, but three—a trio of men pressing toward her from the darkness.
Dovey’s breath caught in her throat, and her eyes stung with joyful tears. Even under the cloak of night, she recognized Virgil’s stride, his stature, the alert turn of his head. Dovey ran across the road to meet him.
“Virgil! Oh, you found us! But how?”
Grinning, he handed the lantern to one of the other men, swept Dovey into his arms for a kiss, and then produced a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “Found this on the ground outside the corral, and my fastest horse missing.”
Dovey examined the paper in the lantern’s light. It was the note Jo had sent her.
“I knew exactly where you’d gone the moment I read it,” Virgil explained. “You’d never leave Miss Carey in the lurch.”
Dovey turned to the other two men. One, she recognized straightaway. “Harmon Grigg! You’re here, too? I can’t seem to believe it.”
Virgil nodded. “When I hustled down to the docks to find a boat bound for Whidbey, I encountered Mr. Grigg there, beside himself with worry. It seems a few of the ladies at the house for fallen women spotted Miss Brandt climbing onto the back of a horse, riding double with another girl. I knew Miss Brandt must have gone with you.”
Dovey laughed in delight. “What a stroke of luck.” She peered at the third man—very tall and thinly built, with a neat black mustache and a cheerful face. But she did not recognize him. “And you—”
“Bill.” Jo’s voice cut across the darkness, laden with the weights of fear and regret—and rich with the timbre of love.
Jo limped into the circle of lantern light, leaning heavily on Sophronia’s arm. Bill reached to embrace her; she buried her bruised face against his chest, shaking with silent sobs.
“There, there,” Bill muttered. “Poor, sweet Jo. It’s all over now. It’s all over.”
Sophronia shared a secretive glance with Dovey, raising one pale eyebrow in surprise.
Dovey took Virgil by the hand. “But how did you get to the island, and so late at night?”
“That was easy enough. I’d been collecting this very afternoon on one of the local shippers. When I realized I had the need to get to the island as quick as could be, I just returned to the man and gave him back all his taxes in exchange for a ride.”
“Virgil! That’s mighty bad of you.”
“I’d say it was worth the risk,” he chuckled. “And you keep your lips sealed, my huckleberry. What the Revenue Service doesn’t know won’t hurt me.”
“Come back to the school and see what we’ve caught,” Dovey said. “We don’t quite know what to do with him.”
When they returned to the porch with the men in tow, Clifford seemed to sense their presence through his daze. He groaned and stirred, then tested the bonds on his hands with a few experimental jerks. When he realized that he could not break free, he grunted in half-aware rage, then sagged back against the porch step.
Virgil bent with his lantern, examining the bright silk ribbons that bound Clifford’s hands, the purple goose egg on the side of his head.
“You did a number on him, all right,” Virgil said. “All by yourselves?”
“I don’t see any men about, other than you,” Dovey said.
Virgil landed a quick swat on her bottom, and heat flooded Dovey’s cheeks. “I knew you were a tough one.”
“Don’t you forget it.”
It didn’t take long for Harmon and Virgil to locate the sheriff—it seemed the man became quite easy to find in the middle of the night, when he took to his bed. A police wagon arrived, its back high-walled and set with iron bars, and Virgil helped the yawning sheriff load Clifford in like a sack of growling potatoes.
The sheriff tipped his hat to Dovey and Sophronia. “Resourceful ladies, you two are. We’ll handle this brute from here. He won’t give you trouble again.” Then he turned to Jo. “Miss Carey, I’ll need to speak with you—to understand what all this fellow has put you through. It will help your case, when he faces a judge for sentencing.”
Jo nodded and said meekly, “I understand.” She could not meet Bill’s eye, and Dovey squinted at the pair of them in the lantern light—Bill’s concern obvious and tender, Jo shyly deflecting his touch, his gentle words. She never told Bill that she’s a married woman, Dovey realized. I wonder what he’ll do when he sees how it all stands.
Sophronia had been whispering apart with her minister, but she broke off and approached Virgil, twisting her hands nervously in the folds of her skirt. “Mr. Cooper, do you think the captain of your borrowed boat will be up for another journey tonight?”
“To where?” Virgil asked.
“To Olympia. I believe we can get there by the morning.”
Dovey glanced down at her own rumpled and soiled dress, and patted her wild tangle of hair. “Just as we are? Sophie, you’re mad!”
“Yes,” Sophronia insisted. “This may be our last chance to convince the legislature to debate the bill again and reverse their decision of last November. We have to take the chance. If it means standing before the legislature just as we are, then so be it.”
Still Dovey hesitated. She knew Sophronia had not given up her plan to deploy suffrage like a weapon, to strip Seattle’s working women of their livelihoods. But as Dovey stood shuffling in the grass, Jo came forward and took Sophronia’s hand.
“Let’s do it,” Jo said. “If suffrage has any hope left, this is it. The vote could change everything for us.” She glanced toward the wagon, its iron bars gleaming dully in the starlight. “Everything.”
Poor Jo—just look at her. Dovey bit her lip as she stared at Jo’s blood-crusted lip, her shiner eye. The vote might be the only thing that can get her out of this mess with Clifford and Bill.
“All right,” Dovey said. “I’ll do it for you, Jo. Only let’s get moving. Olympia is a long way off.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
PROPER
It was Sophronia who led the way up the steps to the entrance of the Te
rritorial Capitol. The man who guarded the door was not the same friendly fellow who had welcomed the suffragists with such enthusiasm months before. This man scowled at their bedraggled appearance, and huffed a short laugh of disbelief.
“We are expected,” she said loftily.
The women had done their level best to put themselves to rights aboard the Folly, a small, rickety little steamer with one Spartan cabin that had let in the wind and damp the whole long way from Whidbey Island to Olympia. They had helped one another brush the dried mud from their dresses, but ample evidence of rough use still clung to their skirts and sleeves. They had smoothed one another’s hair using only their fingers and a canteen of fresh water, and Sophronia and Dovey tenderly cleaned the blood from Jo’s face. But there was nothing to be done about her bruises, which had grown more livid overnight.
When the Folly had docked in Olympia, two hours after sunrise, they’d helped Jo hobble down the ramp to the dock, and Bill gave her his arm to lean on as they made their way on foot toward the capitol building. But Jo and Bill had exchanged no words, as far as Sophronia could tell. She was tense with anxiety on Jo’s part, and fearful they would miss their chance to speak despite all they’d done to reach Olympia on time.
The man on the door folded his arms and gave a grunt of skepticism. Sophronia was not inclined to be intimidated. She knew she belonged in that building—in the legislative chamber itself. With the deep, soul-soothing conviction of absolute righteousness, Sophronia knew she had come to the point of her mission at last. She would not be turned away now.
“Ms. Anthony is already presenting,” the man told her. “You can’t go into the chamber; you’ll have to wait in the hall outside.”
“Our presence is vital inside the chamber,” Sophronia replied. “We must be admitted.”
“Well, you won’t be,” the guard snarled. “The hall outside—and nowhere else.”
Mercer Girls Page 38