“That girl was talking like a snake handler,” one of the miners put in helpfully, pointing at Hypatia. She ignored him regally, flipping her lace coat into more attractive folds.
Waterson was wavering. I could tell by the way he was frowning at his pencil.
Waterson’s not a bad policeman, nor even a bad man, as such things go. But he ain’t real creative, and he could probably be more assertive. Which to be honest usually suits me just fine. If it had just been the bum’s rush I might have stood back. But I suspected that if I let Mrs. Horner keep working on them, Waterson would be fixing to arrest the Misses Arcade, and I hated to see a couple of Sisters get fitted for iron bracelets.
“Excuse me, Constable,” I said, in my spunnest-sugar voice. “You might remember me. We met at the old Hôtel Mon Cherie before it burnt down. My name is Miss Karen Memery, but back then they called me Prairie Dove.” It was my old house name, and I saw him blanch a little as he recognized me. No honest cop likes polite society to pick up a hint he might be accepting favors on the side. I’d guess the dishonest ones like it even less.
I had his attention anyway, and as his frown deepened I stepped aside and moved it on to the overturned table and to the sad remains of the coffee and peach tart. “My table overturned, too, and I will testify that the Misses Arcade were nowhere nearby when it happened.”
“Miss Memery,” the maître d’ said hastily. “Of course we will not charge you or Miss Swati for your food—”
“Not at all,” I said. “Of course we’re paying.” I looked over at the mess. “Though if you could manage to wrap up a couple of tarts to go, that would be a treasure.”
Well, we was all quiet for a moment, and then Hilaria nodded definitively, as if that proved some point she had been making. Hypatia’s gaze met mine, and there was a challenge in it.
“I’ll consent to be searched for any table-levitating gadgets,” said Hypatia. “But only by a lady. It would be improper otherwise.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Horner. “I’m a lady.”
“I don’t want to her to touch me,” Hypatia said, dabbing at a wet spot on her dress. “I don’t trust her not to plant something.”
I bet Mr. Horner had enjoyed being caught between these two.
I smiled. “I’m a lady also.”
* * *
Well, two seconds after I said that, as soon as the attention was off us, Priya caught my elbow hard. I don’t think she meant it to hurt, but she’s got a grip on her, and mechanic’s calluses, and her emotions was running high. Her expression was smooth, with all her practice of showing nothing of what she felt. What she bent toward me to whisper was, “I don’t want us getting close to those girls. I would feel safer if you kept your distance from them.”
Well, of course at first I thought, how dare she tell me who to spend my time with. But then I thought she’s got a right, too, to decide who she wants to associate with.
I kissed her on the cheek, a sisterly peck I thought I could get away with in public, especially if I did it bold as brass in front of everybody as if it weren’t nothing. “You got a specific problem with them?”
She shrugged. Her downcast dark eyes seemed opaque in that light. “I would just feel safer if you kept your distance.”
* * *
Me and Mrs. Horner and them erstwhile redheads went into the cloakroom with Constable Waterson standing outside, listening through the drape over the doorway, and Mrs. Horner stood back and watched while I ran my hands over both the Arcade sisters in turn. I had learned how to do a thorough frisk at the parlor house, and I expected to find rods and whatnot under their skirts, and maybe be offered money to keep quiet, but there weren’t nothing under there but the usual bits you’d expect. Hypatia wisely had a little derringer in her décolletage—a bosom gun for a bosom that matched up with the rest of her, which was to say she had a figure of consequence. Hilaria had a set of knuckle-dusters in a garter on a thoroughbred leg, and that seemed sensible, too. I managed not to linger running my hands over Hypatia, which was an act of will, and something I wish more men would manage. I understand how it feels to touch something pleasant, believe you me, and it’s right hard to stop stroking a kitten—but even if you’re feeling something inside, you got no call to make it somebody else’s problem less’n you know it’s welcome trouble.
They caught my eye over the weapons, and I shrugged and showed ’em mine. Mrs. Horner watched with pursed lips but didn’t say boo.
We hadn’t discussed nothing: there was nothing we could discuss, with Waterson standing right by the door. But in a world where men walk around with guns on their hips and their saddles, I don’t see anything unusual about a woman wishing to protect herself. And it ain’t socially acceptable for us to strap an iron on our hip, so either we can be eccentrics like Calamity Jane or we can slide a little insurance into an inconspicuous spot.
I did notice that maybe the boning in their corsets was a little heavy for such slim young things, and there was a spot across the tummy of each one that had a kind of joint, which ain’t something that’s a regular feature of undergarments in my experience, but nothing I could have pointed to and said there was funny business. Mrs. Horner didn’t give up looking suspicious, but she looked curious, too, and I was starting to figure she had one of those minds that couldn’t let go a problem. Also, I’d reckoned out by then that she knew at least one of these two pretty darn well, and I didn’t get where I am today by keeping a checkrein on my curiosity.
Hypatia, once I smoothed her ruffles down and stepped back, laid her lashes across her cheeks and looked through them at me and said, without any attempt to muffle her tones, “You’ve lost somebody dear to you, haven’t you, Miss Memery?”
Well, that weren’t no great stretch. Pretty near everybody has. It’s a rough old world for staying alive in. But she was a kind of pretty that went right down my spine, and I felt a little unworthy thrill as she licked that pouting lower lip and smiled at me. I’ve worked enough men to know how it goes, and I knowed I was being worked. And I love Priya with all my heart, don’t get me wrong.
But there’s only ever been Priya, and before her Belle, the girl who found me at the train station and gave me a bed for one night when I first got to Rapid City. She brought me to Madame Damnable’s in the morning, and I never knew her last name or even her real first name, and I know for a fact that she got a finder’s fee for me. But she did me a kindness bringing me to Madame, and she didn’t lie to me about what kind of an establishment it was and let me make my own decision—and she also figured out what kind of a girl I was before I knew myself.
“It’s all right to sell your blood to some man,” she’d told me, “but it’d be a damned shame to actually sell one your virginity. They don’t want it because it’s anything special to you; they just want to collect it so nobody else can’t have it, and you shouldn’t go through life thinking that’s all there is.”
And she’d shown me a thing or two I’d had cause to be grateful for since.
So I weren’t naive. I knowed Hypatia was running me. That didn’t stop it being effective, though. Especially when she said, “There’s a whisper about you. Someone hovers over you, a protective spirit. Her hair is bright, though—not dark, like yours.”
Reader, it went through my heart like a cake-testing wire, narrow and perfectly sharp. Mrs. Horner muttered something disgusted. I found myself looking down into eyes as clear and bright as polished water.
“She has a message for you,” Hypatia said. “And there’s someone with a message for your friend as well.”
I wanted to believe so bad I had to step back away from her. My mouth filled up with that hollow watery taste, and my gut went hollow, too, and just as watery.
“We’ll talk later,” I said. “If you really have a message.”
“And your friend?” Hilaria put in protectively. “She doesn’t like us.”
I didn’t even see the signal pass between them. If there was a signal. It could
have just been honest sisterly guardianship. And I wanted so bad to believe that somehow, somehow, Ma could speak to me through this petite, pretty little package.
She’ll come around, I thought. But what I said was, “You better tidy your garments. I’m gonna go call in the man.”
So I fetched Waterson in, once Hypatia and Hilaria had resettled themselves. Priya came with him: she’d been waiting by the door, too, and just seeing her warmed me, even if her face was drawn up under the cheekbones and pinched around the mouth in tiny lines. I gave her a tiny smile and turned to Waterson and said just that to him. “I ain’t found no funny business.”
He nodded. “Ladies,” he said formally to the Arcade sisters, “the hotel has agreed to settle your bill, as long as there aren’t any more disturbances.”
The sisters looked at each other while I walked over to stand next to Priya. My love crops her hair down like a woman who’s had a fever, so it won’t get caught up in gears and such. It was just an inch or two long, and it revealed all the delicate lines of her jaw and throat and cheeks and the bones of her skull, and she was so beautiful it stuck my throat closed. I thought I might die from not being able to reach out and touch her, but she smiled at me and the clamps around my heart eased open just a little and I could get a whole deep breath.
“And what do they want in return?” Hypatia asked skeptically.
“The hotel manager asked you to sign this form,” Waterson said. He held it out. “It absolves the hotel of any responsibility for any injury or harm you might come to.”
Hilaria cocked her head skeptically at Mrs. Horner. “And what about this old lady with the water glass?”
“If you avoid me, I’ll agree to avoid you.”
They traded a stare, but after a bit Hilaria nodded.
Waterson said, “You’re moving on in the morning.”
It wasn’t a question. Hypatia pursed her lips and looked at her sister. Whether they had any blood between ’em or not, they sure had the silent communication thing down. Priya and I shared a similar glance. I was thinking, Mrs. Horner is going to think I’m in cahoots with these two.
Priya . . . well, I weren’t rightly sure what she was thinking. And it bothered me I couldn’t tell.
The taller Arcade said, “We will be here until Monday afternoon. I can show you our train tickets, Constable.”
Waterson sighed. But they hadn’t done anything illegal, not that he had caught them at, and he was, as I said, a law-abiding copper.
“Stay out of Mrs. Horner’s way,” he advised, “and you’ll stay out of mine.”
The girls agreed meekly. Too meekly, if you’re asking me. But by then I was wondering again if maybe they weren’t mountebanks at all. It was possible that we’d all run afoul of the Rain City Riverside’s supposed resident ghost.
. . . And it weren’t like me at all to be having such a hard time making up my mind.
So about that story I got by way of the Professor and his acquaintance. It goes that Old Boston, the owner of the Griswold Claim in Alaska, spent him a little too much time out in the frozen wilds. Maybe he got greedy. Maybe it’s just that it’s damn hard to walk away from a hole in the ground when you’re still picking gold out of it, and oftentimes for quite a little while even after.
Anyway, by the time when he was ready to ship back to Rapid, Old Boston had gone a little weak in the head.
How one man managed the violent deaths of himself, three other miners, one bartender, and a saloon girl in the hotel bar—and the blinding of that piano player—nobody knows one way or the other, nor how he got a pickaxe into the room or what happened to it afterward. Though I heard he’d brought his ironbound trunk with him—wouldn’t be parted from it—and the trunk was smashed to flinders afterward, like an elephant had sat on it.
The whole story’s whopperjawed either way, if you ask me. It’s not like such a story needs a lot of work to be scandalous enough to be interesting, given all those murders and then a suicide. And the Rapid City Republican said he left a note as read: “I just don’t want to do this anymore.”
That’s one reason it’s a mite challenging to argue with. I wondered what Priya thought about it all, though, and I wondered if she’d ever even heard about the murders or if she believed in haints.
I found out quick enough. As soon as she had a moment’s privacy with me—in a drawing room hung with ivory velvet flocked wallpaper and green marble tables with those little cat feet—Priya caught me by the elbow, put her mouth close to my ear, and said, “I don’t know what you’re getting us into this time, Karen, but I wish you would have discussed it with me first. I told you I weren’t comfortable with those two! I asked you to do one thing, and you went behind my back and did another.”
I jerked back and looked her in the eye. She was frowning at me, dead serious, and Priya usually had a little bit of a sparkle. “It ain’t like I had a lot of opportunity to consult.”
She looked at me and sighed. “We shall discuss it once we are home.” She smiled a little, and it got wicked. “Or possibly in the morning.”
I took a deep breath and said, “I was thinking of us staying at the hotel tonight after all. After the show. Just to, you know. Sort of keep an eye on things.”
She blinked at me. I’d stunned her dead, which didn’t happen often.
“It’ll be late after the show, and it’s a ways home, you know—”
“I do not think that is perhaps the best idea.”
Some horses take a firm hand on the rein. And some toss their heads up at the slightest pressure, and got to be negotiated with. I’m enough of that second kind that I forgot, for half a second, that Priya’s not even a fractious filly. She’s more like a mule: she’s smart and she knows she’s smart and you don’t just got to negotiate; you got to convince her she understands the whyfors of what you’re up to and how it’s in her own best interests—and yours—before she’ll sign on.
If I’d been thinking straight at all, I would have said something else but what I did. “I won’t have anybody in Rapid thinking I’m a mountebank. I need to find out what is going on here. And I’m worried about those girls, Pree.”
“Those ‘girls,’” she said, “are as old as we are. Older.” She shook her cropped dark head. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the one who was spinning you the line about your poor dead mother wanting a last chat, would it?”
I got my back up, and I knew she saw it happen. Because she wrinkled up her mouth and said, “I knew going into this partnership that you would be chasing down every varmint and bringing home every lamed critter in the county. But this isn’t a broke-wing sparrow, Karen. It’s a stinging wasp. And what’s more, you’re offering to stand me up on our wedding night.”
I opened my mouth to protest. “I’m not standing you up—”
“I am not staying in this hotel tonight,” she said, with finality. “It has tables overturning and those girls you’re so worried over are running some kind of a flash lay you and I do not begin to understand. What was under their skirts?”
I glanced around us to make sure nobody was within sight to listen and all the doors was closed. Sullenly, I said, “The tall one’s got a knuckle-duster in her garter.”
“And what else?”
Technically, it wasn’t under her skirt, but I knew chopping logic with my sweetheart was not going to buy me anything I wanted to invest in right now. So I told her about the derringer. Priya cocked her head in that listening way that means she’s thinking harder and faster than I can ever keep up with. She didn’t make no fuss at all about me putting my fingers down a strange girl’s bosom, though. She just said, “No lifting poles? No tiny engines or mechanicals?”
I shook my head. “Not that I savvied.”
“That surprises me.”
“Surprised me, too,” I admitted. “So everything I said to Waterson was the plain truth, if not the detailed version.”
“I’m glad you did not lie to Waterson.”
Then she said, “Now come home with me, Karen, please. You are my wife. I do not like it when you put yourself in danger, and you should not make decisions without consulting me.”
What she’d said bounced once before it stuck, I think, and started to soak in. Because I stared at her, blinking, for at least a second or so before what she said made any bit of sense to me.
And then I didn’t believe it. Sure, she wore the trousers in the family, except for when I was horsebreaking, but that was because she liked wearing trousers and I didn’t, in particular. I remember thinking real clear and slow that if I had wanted that kind of treatment I could have married a man and had a lot less hassle. And then I felt myself get cold, which don’t hardly happen, and I turned my shoulder to her and told her to suit herself and that I would be along home in the morning.
“Karen,” she said.
I just shut her out. I didn’t answer fast because I was biting my lip hard to keep from shouting at her.
“If that’s the way you feel,” I said finally, “you go on ahead. You ain’t my husband and you ain’t the boss of me, Priya darling. I got work to do here tonight, and I aim to do it.”
She stared at me. I know ’cause I could see it out of the corner of my eye, though I wouldn’t look at her straight. I was too het up, and anyway I was afraid if I did I might start crying.
I was sending Priya off to spend the first night in our own little house alone, and I felt terrible about it. I could tell by the way her neck straightened and her chin lifted up that she felt terrible about it, too. But she was coming over stubborn as is her way, and as for me I was so sore about that “wife” comment that I didn’t even know what I was kicking at; I was just kicking.
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