Firefly

by Linda Hilton

  “No, I can’t take any more—”

  “I said you aren’t allowed to argue, so be quiet and don’t interrupt me again. I want you to buy material to make yourself some extra aprons, just like the one you’re wearing. The new ones will be strictly for working here. You’re ruining all your others with blood stains and extra scrubbing, and there’s no reason why you should sacrifice your own possessions. Also, I owe you for the dress I tore a couple of weeks ago.”

  Slightly panicked because she didn’t know what he was talking about, she asked, “What dress?”

  “The one that caught on the cabinet.”

  “But that wasn’t your fault,” she answered with a sigh of relief now that she recalled the incident. “I snagged it on the nail.”

  Though it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been standing so close to me, she also remembered with a little shiver.

  “Still, it was a result of your working here, and that makes it my responsibility. I don’t know much about yard goods, so if this isn’t enough for five or six aprons and a dress, just put the rest on my bill at McCrory’s.”

  He met her eyes evenly, without any of his own shyness, because he had reminded himself over and over and over and over that this was strictly business. Aprons could not by any stretch of propriety be considered a gift, especially when she clearly needed them. The dress was, perhaps, a little different, and he could almost read her thoughts as she prepared to refuse that part of the offer.

  “If you think it would appear improper, use this money to buy the dress and I’ll pay for the fabric for the aprons,” he suggested, stretching his hand with the folded bill toward her.

  She shook her head and kept her hands securely hidden.

  “No, I can’t accept it. I’ll purchase the apron material and start on them right away, but not the dress. I…I just couldn’t.”

  “Why, Julie? Are you afraid of what people will think?” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, the money still held out to her. “No one need know where this money came from. You can tell them it’s from your earnings, which in a sense it is. I can give you smaller bills, if you prefer, to make it look like you’ve saved up for it. Why must you refuse everything I offer you?”

  “I don’t. I took the gold piece, didn’t I?”

  “Only because I insisted and because it wasn’t from me. Look at you now. You’re as far back on that chair as you can get, and I’ll bet your knuckles are white under that apron because you’ve got your hands clasped so tight together.” He watched her eyes drop at once and saw the pink come to her cheeks. “Julie, the last thing I want is for you to be afraid of me,” he said softly.

  “I’m not afraid of you!” she insisted.

  “Yes, you are. Your eyes are all wide and glittery, as though you were ready to cry, and your lips are trembling, too. When I handed you that double eagle, you jerked your hand away as though my fingers were red-hot metal. If it’s something I’ve done, if it’s because of those kisses, then tell me. But tell me the truth, Julie.”

  The truth? How could she tell him the truth?

  She couldn’t tell him anything. She couldn’t speak at all. When she tried to open her mouth and once again deny her fear, not a single sound came out. The searing fire of his green gaze evaporated the lie from her lips.

  “Julie,” he whispered softly, slowly, “Tell me the truth, please? Is it because of Hans? Tell me it is, and I won’t ask further. But only tell me if it’s the truth. You don’t lie very well, you know. Your mother is much better at hiding the truth than you, but I can see through her most of the time, too.”

  He studied her, from the nervous movements of her hands under the apron to the slight slump of her shoulders. She was fighting with herself now, debating whether to tell him what he wanted to know or to try to conceal the facts from him. She met his gaze, but this time there was something new in her eyes. Fear, yes, always the fear, and curiosity, too, for she clearly wondered why he wanted so badly to know her secrets, but now there was a pleading. For what? he wondered. To leave her alone? Or does she really, deep down, want to confess it all and only hesitates because I’m not urging her strongly enough?

  He listened to the answer that came to mind but silently laughed it off.

  “I’m waiting,” he reminded her, and she did not seem startled, though they had sat in tense silence for several minutes. “And I’m not going to let you out of here until I get an answer, an honest one.”

  Somehow she must get the words out, must tell him something he would believe. But not the truth. He must not know the truth, not yet.

  “I’ve never been around men very much,” she finally forced herself to say. “I told you before that I’ve spent most of my time taking care of my mother and Willy. I didn’t have any chance to—”

  “Oh, stop it, Julie!” he snapped. “I warned you I’d see through your lies, and this is another one. It doesn’t bother you to bandage old Gus Ernberg’s smashed thumb or put salve on Simon McCrory’s burn. Look at the way you tended Thaddeus when he was here, changing dressings on that leg wound and everything else you did for him. You talked to him and laughed with him and I never saw you afraid of him.”

  Now there was no pink blush on her cheeks, only a pallor that emphasized the warm depth of her wide eyes and the temptation of her fear-parted lips.

  He apologized at once, realizing he had done more harm than good.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t blame you for being afraid of me right now. I shouldn’t have hollered at you like that. But damn it, Julie, you can be so frustrating at times.”

  He got up from the chair and with one hand set it back where it belonged. Then, with a sweeping motion he deposited the five-dollar bill on her lap. It didn’t stay there, of course; it drifted on the stirred air and finally fell to the floor. Julie watched it for a moment, then, when Morgan turned his back, she leaned down to pick it up.

  He shoved one hand into his pants pocket and ran the other through his hair in a gesture of perplexity.

  “We can’t continue like this, Julie,” he said, still facing the far wall. His voice had returned to calm, though nothing else about him had. “If you won’t give me your complete cooperation, then I’m afraid we will have to terminate this arrangement.”

  Leaping to her feet, she cried, “No!”

  “No?” he echoed. “And why not? I can’t be forever worrying about your—”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, I swear it,” she told him desperately. She wanted to take his hands in hers and cling to him, vowing anything, anything at all, so long as he did not send her away. Telling him the horrible truth might result in the same fate, but she had no choice unless she could somehow disguise it.

  “All of the truth?’

  “Yes,” she whispered, more frightened than ever.

  Looking at him, into those clear dark eyes, she knew she could not lie. He would hate her, would cast her out with disgust, but she would tell him the truth.

  “Then let’s go in the other room where we can be comfortable at least. Is there some lemonade left? Or coffee?” he asked.

  Morgan insisted Julie sit on the sofa while he brought the lemonade, which had grown warm since she made it at noon. Still, it was wet.

  When he had sat down beside her, he said, “Well, I’m still waiting.”

  “I…I don’t know where to begin.”

  “How about at the beginning?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know where the beginning is. No matter where I start, I’m going to end up making you hate me.”

  “Hate you? Oh, Julie, I would never hate you. Never. Whatever you’ve done, or has been done to you, I wouldn’t hate you for it.”

  “But it isn’t just that. It’s what I am.”

  “You’re kind, generous, hard-working, sensitive, intelligent.” And beautiful, too, but he couldn’t tell her that. Not when she was so close to him, and so close to telling him the truth. “Those aren’t exactly the qualities a man
hates to find in a woman.”

  “It’s something else, and I wish I could find a way to tell you so that you won’t think me wicked and—”

  “You, wicked? Never. And if you tell me you are, I’ll accuse you of lying again.” He knew then that he had been right all along. She must be Willy’s mother and felt the stigma of her sin. He had to reassure her that he, at least, did not hold her to blame and that that long-ago event was nothing to continue being ashamed of.

  “Julie, you’re stalling. If no other place comes to mind, then why not tell me about Willy.”

  She looked at him with pure, unadulterated confusion knitting her brows and asked him, “What does Willy have to do with me?” No flush of embarrassment, no pale-faced admission of guilt.

  Now it was Morgan’s turn to stammer.

  “I…I thought he was your…your son.”

  He didn’t know what to expect next. A slap for his insult at the very least, or even her immediate departure. But clearly he had made a mistake. That extra bit of logic that he had ignored had been correct: If Wilhelm hated Julie for her indiscretion, he would not have lavished such attention on her offspring. Yet despite the error, Morgan remained certain that the boy had something to do with Julie’s burden of guilt.

  She didn’t slap him, nor did she get up to leave. She merely smoothed the loose strands of her hair back from her face.

  “No, Dr, Morgan, he’s not. I suppose I should be angry for your assuming he was, since it assumes a great deal that is not kind about me, but the truth is not far from it. Willy is indeed my brother, born exactly as I told you. And, as I told you, I was not there when he was born. Neither was my father. He was out looking for me.”

  “You ran away from home?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I eloped.”

  That came as a shock, but Morgan quickly recovered. She must not still be married, if she was now engaged to Wallenmund, but of course anything was possible when people came west.

  “I wasn’t allowed to socialize very much, even though I was at an age when it seemed every other girl was getting married. Papa said I was needed at home, because of Mama expecting the baby.”

  He tried to imagine her loneliness. Comparing it to the fun he and Amy had had, he could understand why Julie wanted to escape.

  “I met Ted Sheen in the post office one day, and he offered me a ride home. I knew I shouldn’t accept, but Ted was so handsome, and I had never had anyone offer me a ride before. Somehow, Papa didn’t find out and Ted came to see me again, even though I told him not to.”

  A shudder swept through her, drawing her arms around her as though a cold wind had chilled her to the bone. Morgan felt a chill himself, in the pit of his stomach. It was the same when he held the scalpel just before cutting into human flesh.

  “We had a little barn behind our house, more like a shed because we didn’t keep any livestock, and I met Ted there every night for a week, just after dark. I was so afraid I’d get caught, and so was he, but it seemed we just couldn’t help it.”

  She paused and began that nervous twisting of a corner of her apron.

  “Your father caught you, didn’t he.”

  “Yes. There was a storm coming, so I told Ted to spend the night in the barn until the storm was over. I was trying to close the door quietly, but the wind took it out of my hands and banged it against the side of the barn.

  “Next thing I knew, Papa came screaming from the house in his nightshirt. He called me names, and when Ted tried to explain, Papa wouldn’t listen. Then Mama cam outside, too, crying and begging Papa not to do anything foolish. He wouldn’t listen to her either, and finally he pushed her away so hard that she fell. I went to help her, but Papa pushed me away, too.”

  “That’s when your mother went into her labor, wasn’t it.”

  Julie nodded. The apron corner twisted tighter.

  “She yelled something about the baby and getting a doctor. I wanted to help her, I really did, and I tried, but Papa wouldn’t let me near her. He said it was all my fault. Finally, Mama started screaming, and Ted told me to come with him. I was so frightened that I didn’t know what else to do.

  “We ran all the way into town to get Ted’s horse from the livery stable. He took another for me, too, and he told me he left money and a note for it so no one would think he stole it. He said we’d ride to the next town and get married that very night and then we could come back to Rinton and live like proper people so Papa couldn’t ever say anything bad about me again.”

  Morgan wanted to interrupt her, to offer her some comfort, some strength, but he knew that she had to make this confession on her own. And she seemed to draw her own strength from the experience, as though this unburdening did indeed lighten her load.

  “Ted found a minister to marry us, and I was so excited then that I almost forgot to be afraid. I was getting married. A man had wanted me enough to make me his wife. Me, skinny, ugly Julie Hollstrom who was taller than almost every boy in town.”

  “Julie, you aren’t ugly. I can’t imagine that you ever were.”

  “Well, I was, believe me. But it was nice for a while to think that I wasn’t. And Ted really had married me. We were going to go back and tell my parents, but we never made it.”

  Her voice dropped and she shivered again, so violently that Morgan slid closer to her and put his arm around her for warmth even in the hot afternoon. She had comforted him when he poured out the black bitterness from his heart; now he did the same for her.

  “It was raining and a long time until morning when Papa and the men from Rinton found us. They said Ted had stolen the horse from the livery stable, that he was a horse thief and should be hung. They said they hadn’t found any money or note in the stable, and I hadn’t actually seen him do it. I should have lied, I should have told them I saw the note and the money, but maybe even that wouldn’t have done any good. Papa was an important man in Rinton, and the others all believed him.”

  She took a deep breath before continuing, and her voice dropped even lower, but Morgan had no difficulty hearing her. In a way he wished he had, but then again, once he knew the truth, he could not bear the thought of asking her to repeat it.

  “When they found us, we were resting under an old oak tree by the side of the road. Papa said Ted was guilty, so they hanged him from the tree right there.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The long lashes descended, closing her eyes to remembered sights, but that could not stop the flood of hot tears. Nor could the tears halt the words.

  “I begged and I screamed and I cried, not just trying to stop them but to cover up the sound of what they did. I shut my eyes, but nothing drowned out the sounds. And nothing stopped him. My father killed my husband.”

  She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, then took the handkerchief Morgan offered her. He said nothing. There was nothing he could say.

  Wilhelm Hollstrom was a monster beyond anything Morgan could have imagined.

  Julie went on in a frozen, numb little voice. “It was morning when we got back to the house. Willy had been born during the night, and the doctor didn’t expect either him or Mama to live.”

  “And of course your father blamed you,” Morgan said stiffly, biting down the anger, the hatred, the nausea. “Oh, God, Julie how could he? That’s cold-blooded murder!”

  “No, no. He believed he was right. He was protecting me. And later on a man came to town who said Ted had stolen a horse from him, too. Papa told me all about it.”

  “Then he lied.”

  “You don’t know that. You weren’t there.”

  Yet he did know it, as surely as he knew the sun would come up in the east tomorrow, as surely as he knew Julie was entirely blameless. Gentle, trusting, lonely Julie. To think of her witnessing a man’s death, a brutal, horrible, senseless—he failed to find sufficient words to describe her nightmare ordeal. And in the grief and shock that followed, she had believed anything her sadistic father told her.

&nbs
p; Morgan curbed his rage with effort, because he knew it would do Julie no good.

  “I think it’s time to clean up around here so you can get home,” he said quietly.

  “Not yet. I’m not finished.”

  “Oh, yes, you are.” He moved his arm to get up, but Julie’s hand went to his knee, innocently and yet insistently, and he was paralyzed.

  “You said you felt better when you had told me about Amy,” Julie reminded him. “Please, give me the same chance.”

  He could not refuse her, not when her eyes as well as her voice pleaded with him. Replacing his arm around her, he pulled her closer. Very gently, he stroked those fine, loose hairs at her temple, smoothing them back with a rhythmic caress. Nothing, he knew, could soothe her or ease the pain, but perhaps this gesture would mean something.

  Julie sniffled and blew her nose on his handkerchief.

  He listened, and he saw. Her descriptions were brief, but her voice, the tense shivering of her body within the semi-circle of his arm, filled in the details.

  It began with Katharine’s slow recovery, compounding the guilt Wilhelm had already piled on his daughter. And later, he claimed that her behavior had shamed and humiliated his family so much that they had to leave Indiana.

  “I met Hans shortly after we settled in Minnesota. He wanted to get married right away, but Mama needed me at home, and there was no room to take Hans in, too. He had no job and all he knew was farming, so six years ago he set out for Arizona, where he said he would get rich and send for me.

  “He hadn’t been gone but a few months when I met Stephen. He was a salesman, with dark hair, bright blue eyes…”

  “A real smooth talker, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes, he was,” she added ruefully.

  “You were young, Julie. You had no one to tell you traveling salesmen have the morals of a jackrabbit.”

  “But decent men never so much as looked at me!” she exclaimed. “Mama said I should try not to look so nice, that that was what attracted the wrong men. I started wearing the spectacles then, but it didn’t help.”