Twisted River

by Kelsey Gietl

  He held her close, even as her hands moved to push him away. “It doesn’t matter,” Hugo soothed. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.”

  “It does.”

  “Only if you let it. Forget what happened this afternoon, Maggie. We have ship vouchers. Let’s steam home, and the entire voyage, I’ll do nothing but help you forget.”

  Maggie kept her head lodged against his neck. Salt stung her eyes. He was offering her exactly what she wanted—to sink into a pleasurable oblivion for one glorious week, to pretend like the last three hours made no difference between them. Except they did.

  She needed to tell him. She had to tell him. Now, before another wave of emotion destroyed her resolve, before her frail heart succumbed to what it wanted. She came here to secure Abigail’s future, and that was what she was going to do.

  “I can’t steam home with you,” she said. Cold. Unfeeling. Matter of fact. Even she was stunned at how heartless the words sounded and that once upon a time such expression would have been second nature.

  “The Atlantic is awfully wide to swim.” Hugo elicited a small chuckle with an enthusiasm that didn’t even make its way to the end of the breath. “I don’t understand,” he said slowly even though she knew beyond doubt that he did.

  Maggie Archer spoke the next words while inside Maggie Frye buckled beneath them. “I’m leaving you, and I’m giving Abigail away.”

  Hugo stiffened. “Repeat yourself.”

  Like a block of stone, Maggie forced the weight of her head from his shoulder. “When I return to the States, I’m taking Abigail to a convent in New York. She’ll be safe there. Mrs. Kisch’s friend had a cousin who gave her baby to the sisters when she fell on hard times. She wasn’t married either.”

  Hugo stared at her. “But you are married! You’re married to me!” His face went ashen, all color draining from his skin. He fisted his hands when they began shaking and lowered himself into Laurence’s desk chair. “How could you want to give away our daughter?” he croaked.

  “She’s not ours or yours. She’s mine, and I’m doing what’s right.”

  “For who? You? Not for the rest of us. I promised you—”

  “You fulfilled your promise. Abigail was born legitimate. You saved her, but you’re still trying to save me, and as my mother said, Archer women never require heroes.”

  His cheeks flared to the color of his hair. “First of all—you’re not an Archer anymore. You’re Maggie Frye. You chose to change your name; I never made you. And second—your mother’s done this to us, can’t you see? She’s gotten in your head and swirled it all around like broken eggs. Don’t you dare go back there. Back to who you were before you met me.” He leapt from the chair and circled his arms around her. His fevered breaths rattled against her ear. “I love you, Maggie.”

  “Yesterday morning, you didn’t even call me Maggie. You hadn’t kissed me or—” She flushed, radiating with the thought of his touch roaming every inch of skin with a gentle passion she had never experienced before. “—or anything else,” she finished weakly.

  “Exactly, Maggie. This morning, you said you loved me, and I can’t believe it was the same lie you told all the others.” His lips brushed her neck and her hands slid inside his jacket, around his waist, up his back. She found her lips molding to his and couldn’t understand how she arrived there.

  When he finally eased away, his lips remained inches from hers, but this time didn’t press closer. He withdrew his handkerchief from his pocket where her declaration of love was emblazoned in scarlet. “You need me to call you Mrs. Frye again? It’s done, Mrs. Frye. You never want me to kiss you or touch you again, then I won’t. You want to return to the way we were two days ago? I’ll give you anything you ask, except for this.”

  He moved towards her again, and from some abysmal pit inside her soul, she opened the door that held fast the black ugly pieces of her past. From so deep below, they raised their hands to her. None of them had been erased by one man’s tenderness; they had merely been waiting like a volcano on the edge of destruction. Uncontrollable. Regret after regret after regret. Exactly like her parents. Maggie’s cruelty wasn’t made; it was born. Stained to her forehead like the mark of Cain. Why couldn’t Hugo see it?

  She yanked the handkerchief from his hand, wadding it back into his jacket pocket. “We can’t go back. I can’t unlearn what my mother told me. My entire life I was the daughter of Laurence Archer. I was one hundred percent English. I had one whole sister and thought my blue eyes came from my mother. Now I know they’re my true father’s eyes too, and I’m not any of those other things.”

  Hugo’s hands flew to her face, reining her in with trembling palms. “No, Maggie, no. You’re wrong. No ancestry changes who you are or what we are. I have a marriage license to prove it.”

  “No piece of paper makes a loving marriage, Mr. Frye. I have my parents to prove that. All three of them.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Your opinion doesn’t matter in this case.”

  “You can’t take Abigail,” Hugo stated. “Leave me if you want, but she stays. I’m her father, Emma. How selfish can you be?”

  Maggie drew away, his hands falling flat as hers drew tight against her sides. A pain caught in the center of her stomach. “My name isn’t Emma.”

  “I—what?” Hugo stuttered, then he blinked slowly and folded his arms. “I didn’t intend to say that, but I’m not taking it back. Emma would have done the same thing you’re doing. I appear to have a partiality towards selfish women.”

  So, she thought, he does see what’s in me. In the end, no man could possibly overlook it.

  Her entire body ached. If only a chasm would open to swallow her whole. “We have a contract, Mr. Frye, but I can’t stay another six years. I thank you for taking me in, and I’ll thank you for giving me a quick divorce.” She yanked off her wedding ring. “Here. This is yours. Or was it Emma’s after all? It was obviously never mine.”

  Hugo quieted. “It was my mother’s.”

  “Your mother? But we weren’t even really married. Why would you give me something so valuable?”

  He sighed, a deep morose exhale as though he only now realized their arguing went against his usual desire to avoid conflict at all costs. “No one would believe our ruse if you didn’t have a ring. I couldn’t afford one, and this was all I had. I wrote into the contract that I would get it back so I knew I would.”

  “But this marriage was a ruse. It was a way for us to forget our mistakes, cut our losses. To try to let go. But we haven’t, have we? If we keep Abigail, we’ll never be free. I’ll always be shackled to the memory of where she came from, and you would see me every morning and wish another woman was in my place.”

  He stood stock still and seemed all of his five-foot-three. He took a step back, curled the ring inside his fist, and sank onto the sofa. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am?” Surprise wasn’t a strong enough word, nor was it an accurate sentiment for how she felt. She didn’t want to be right. Never had she wanted so much to be proven wrong.

  Hands clasped upon his knees, Hugo stared into the cold fireplace. “Why did you never ask if I found Emma in Utah?”

  “Because I’ve ruined lives by asking the wrong questions, and I didn’t want to ruin ours.”

  “I wish you would have.” His eyes slid closed, his body unnaturally still. For once no fingers in his hair or harried expression on his face. “I found the city, and I found the hotel, all I couldn’t find was her. For weeks I searched, asking every soul in town and all the while somehow managing to keep the truth from Henry. There was no Adeline McClay; no one had even heard of her.” He opened his fist, flipping the tiny ring against his palm. “Damaris called it ‘a dead lead.’ A thousand miles for nothing.”

  With an extra beat of her heart, Maggie claimed the chair across from him, and she could barely say the words. “So, she’s still out there?”

  “Yes,” he murmured. “She’s still out
there.” He stared at the ring, his thumb gently stroking the petite diamond. They could never be a real marriage; that much was now painfully clear. Hugo’s desire for the truth was as ravenous as Maggie’s once was aboard the Höllenfeuer, and just as surely Emma’s betrayal would hold him to the flame until it burned him apart.

  “We’re a perfect match,” she told him in jest the day they married. Except they weren’t.

  He cuffed the ring again and raised his chin to meet her gaze. “Do you know why I married you, Maggie? You were honest. You said you were no good. You warned me from day one. You didn’t want me and you didn’t think there was any reason I might want you—my sadder but wiser girl. But eventually, I still found myself in love despite never wanting to walk that path again.”

  He peered up at her, more regret in his eyes than that which Maggie held in her heart. It was the most reckless thing she had ever done, wanting a man whose heart belonged to another as surely as she had always vowed never to belong to anyone. But how she wished that she could have him—him, his family, and Abigail. Abbie was Hugo’s little bee, her father’s joy, the only thing in this world Maggie might have done right. How she wished she could seal herself off again now like she had so many times before.

  “That man thinks the moon and the stars of you,” Reuben told her once. Long before Maggie wanted Hugo to want her, long before she even knew herself.

  “Even if that were true,” she had argued, “the problem is that the moon and the stars are both beautiful, and yet completely unobtainable. What good is loving something if it’s impossible to hold onto?”

  For Maggie, the stars would never shine so brightly again. But for Hugo, maybe someday they could.

  A great tightness ripped at her chest, threatening to heave itself from her lungs in a torrent. She could feel grief pricking behind her lids and with a mighty shove, pushed her anguish aside. “You’ll continue to search for Emma, won’t you?”

  Hugo nodded and the motion held all the angst of carrying a mantle too heavy for his shoulders. His fingers ran along his neck then through his tousled hair. “Only,” he said. “I’m afraid that finding her won’t matter if I’m still in love with you.” He slid the ring into his breast pocket and stood, peering down at her with fresh determination. “But doubt is an old man’s game, Maggie. You’re young, so don’t doubt this decision.” He bent low to kiss her cheek. “I’ll file the paperwork when I return home, and we’ll put the past behind us.”

  She nodded. “Thank you. I’ll come for my things when I return to the States. Please take the children on an outing?” Henry, Molly, Isa—those children so dear to her heart—seeing them again would ruin all resolve.

  Hugo paused beside Abigail on his way to the door, watching soft easy breaths rise and fall within her chest. He wouldn’t hold her or kiss her goodbye. It wasn’t worth the risk of waking her and hearing her cry or worse, seeing her smile.

  The door lay half open when Maggie called to him to wait. Hugo abruptly closed it and marched back to kneel before her. Her breath stilled when he gripped her hands in his own, staring up at her with matching saucers of equal parts hope and despair. He shifted until his chest pressed against her knees, holding her hands in her lap as though at a kneeler praying. “Yes?”

  She anchored her gaze on their clasped hands, refusing to meet his eyes. “When we met, I meant to ask you my father’s infamous question, only I never did. I suppose I didn’t expect it mattered so much with you, although I can’t exactly say why I thought as such.” She thought of how many times her father asked her which day she would redo. Every time she replied, “Every day I constantly fail at what you want me to be.” Except that if Alois Schweitzer asked instead, she would wager her life fit quite neatly within his expectations.

  “Except now you think it matters?” Shaking his head, Hugo drew all ten fingers through his mess of hair as he stood. “I think you already know the answer.” Tipping one finger under her chin, he offered her the same half smile as the day they met. “Take care, Miss Archer.”

  In four quick paces, he exited the room and with the click of the door, ended their marriage.

  With a roll of her shoulders, Maggie wiped both palms across her cheeks and strode to her daughter, clutching Abigail to her with the realization that if Laurence Archer asked her today, her answer would be the same as Hugo’s.

  This one.

  FORTY-TWO

  Reuben could still fix this. The question was, how?

  Taking a notepad from his jacket pocket, he propped a shoulder into the Archers’ entry doorframe and flipped through his brief observations since their ship docked three days ago.

  “Our readers like international scandal,” Smithson said the day before he left for England. “Get me some of that.”

  Oh, he had scandal. He just couldn’t print a word of it.

  How had so much happened in so short a time, and how was he—again—powerless to change it? Laurence Archer finally left Reuben with a blessing, and he couldn’t even use it. He finally knew how deep his own father’s defense of him had gone, and there were no opportunities to express his gratitude for it. He couldn’t change Maggie’s paternity any more than he could Abigail’s. And even after fifteen letters, he still couldn’t influence Beatrix towards reconciliation with her daughters.

  He realized it was a ridiculous endeavor when he penned the first word from his desk in the newsroom. He sat with only the night sky for company and replayed Tena’s gut-punching words, “Sometimes I wish we’d never met him.” Never before had he felt more responsible for someone’s unhappiness or more uncertain how to fix it. So he clung to the only other words he could, the call to action she didn’t even know he heard.

  “I planned to write Mother hundreds of letters about every way she was wrong. Everything would be different. But in truth, nothing changed. At least nothing except me.”

  No matter how honorable his intentions in writing Beatrix, he should have known that blasted woman would turn a gesture of goodwill into one of ill merit. Tena had never looked at him in quite that manner before. Although her furious words certainly indicated anger, her demeanor suggested disappointment more than anything else. She believed he let her down—again—when all he wanted was the opposite.

  A black taxi slowed to a stop outside the front gate. Reuben recognized the driver, Jeremy Grimes. Now in his early fifties, Mr. Grimes began his taxi service during the carriage heyday then exchanged for a motorcar in 1909. The driver had spread his fair share of rumors in regard to Florence Radford’s mental illness, and his sons bullied Mira at every turn.

  Returning to the near-anonymity of St. Louis never sounded so good.

  The Archers’ front door opened, and he fell backwards into Hugo carrying his Brownie and nothing else. Reuben glimpsed an empty hallway as Hugo closed the door behind him. “Where are the girls?” he asked.

  “Not coming with me,” Hugo said. “Neither are you. I’m collecting my bags from Mrs. Smith and heading home.” He nodded to Mr. Grimes who now held the rear door open for Hugo to climb inside. “Rail depot, please, sir.” Reuben only managed to hop in the other side before the taxi pulled away from the curb.

  “We obviously need to talk,” he said.

  Hugo faced the opposite window. “I have a train to catch.”

  “Without your wife or your child?”

  Mr. Grimes’s chin quirked up as he failed to disguise his eavesdropping. Reuben couldn’t care. The man could take news of their endeavors wherever he wished. They wouldn’t be around to bother.

  Hugo ran his hands over his worn pant legs. “Mr. Radford, you need not worry about your article. You’ll get your photographs. You’ll keep your employment.”

  “Seems odd,” said Reuben, ignoring his comment. “Usually it’s Maggie who does the running away.”

  “I’m not running. I’m riding to the ticket office and catching a train to London. Then I’m going to collect my luggage and sail very calmly back to St. Louis
.”

  “Without your wife?” Reuben repeated. What in the world happened in Laurence Archer’s study? That morning, Mr. Frye still seemed as entranced by Maggie as every other man, and now he was fleeing like a frightened alley cat.

  Hugo leaned forward to tap Mr. Grimes’s shoulder. “How far to the depot?”

  “Quarter mile.”

  “Delightful. Drop me here, please.” Handing the man a coin, Hugo flipped the handle before the motorcar fully stopped. The door swung wide over the walk. “Safe travels, Mr. Radford.”

  Reuben jumped out to other side, rounding the auto to face Hugo as he closed the door. He waved to the driver. “Mind your own business, Jerry. I know you have plenty of it.”

  Frowning, Mr. Grimes sped off around the corner.

  Hugo crossed the street, leaving Reuben to give chase. His extra inches allowed him to catch up easily. “You’re running away from Maggie,” Reuben insisted. “Don’t argue, because I know the gesture. I’ve done it myself, and heaven knows how often Maggie did. Yet this time she stayed and you’re leaving. What is wrong with you?”

  Hugo’s pace quickened as the railway station came into view. A black engine stood at the ready beside the platform, passengers scuttling in and out of the adjacent station building.

  Reuben grabbed Mr. Frye by the arm, halting him before he ascended the platform. “She loves you, Hugo. She does.”

  “Why?” Hugo asked. “Why would she care about me at all? Unlike you or Mr. Halverson, I’m not very sophisticated. Look where she came from, why should she have to settle?”

  Reuben pinched his nose between his fingers. “Listen, if I had a glove right now, I’d slap you with it. You’re supposed to be the smart one here, a decade older than me, so wise up. I’m supposed to be the hothead who acts like a confounded fool when I get angry.”

  “But I am a fool, Mr. Radford. This cloud of doubt hangs over us, and I’m partly responsible. I don’t want her to have any misgivings, any more wonderings of what life could have been. She gets a do-over, and she should take it.” His expression bled. “Convince her to keep Abigail. She’ll listen to you.”