by Dianne Day
‘‘Maybe not.’’
I swung myself on my crutches around to the back of the buckboard. The problem was, I could not put much weight on my legs and therefore could not climb up into that high seat. In any situation where I couldn’t get the crutches under me, my only option was to use my arms and drag the rest of my body along behind.
As I’d hoped, the back panel of the buckboard swung down, giving access to its short flatbed. I said, ‘‘I can squeeze in back here.’’
Norma shrugged. ‘‘Suit yourself.’’
The other wives had already said goodbye to me, leaving me alone with Norma; she had brought the buckboard and mule around to the front of my cabin, which had the advantage, for our purposes, of facing away from the Big House.
I let down the panel, then pushed and pulled and rolled myself into the flat space of the wagon bed. But I’d had to let my crutches drop to do it. I waited to see what Norma would do. Damn, I hated to ask for her help!
There was no alternative, however. ‘‘Norma, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to hand my crutches up here to me.’’
‘‘Oh all right,’’ she agreed ungraciously. When she’d handed them over, she slammed the panel shut.
‘‘Thank you.’’ I bit my tongue to keep from saying any more. I would have liked very much to ask why she’d agreed to drive me at all if she felt that way about it, but I didn’t dare. I was presuming too much on her apparently sparse charity already.
Sarah had given me a little suitcase that contained my one and only dress which she or Tabitha had mended, plus a few more items of clothing the sisters had made for me out of the goodness of their hearts. I was wearing one of these, a nice, sturdy, plain dress of blue cotton flannel with a small white collar and buttons down the front. To keep me warm, for the nights were now very cold, I had an old cloak, probably of military origin, made of heavy, scratchy navy-blue wool. No hat. Not a single one. No purse. No means of identification, as none had been found with me and none provided since.
I am not at all fond of hats, but as I settled as best I could in the back of the buckboard, using the canvas suitcase as a buffer, I would gladly have taken the ugliest hat in the world if it would keep my ears warm.
Norma did not ask if I was ready. By the time I’d gotten as comfortable as it was possible to get, she had turned the wagon and was clucking to the mule. He was an ugly animal, sure-footed but powerfully slow.
This was going to be a long trip.
The sun was low in the sky as we left behind the little meadow where Melancthon Pratt’s household nestled in isolation. Soon Norma had turned the buckboard onto what was a poor excuse for a road. I suppose the mountains were magnificent, if one has a fondness for mountains; I, however, am more enchanted by the ocean and watery views, which seldom—except in California—have mountains attached.
The buckboard did have some kind of spring mechanism that absorbed some of the bumps of the ride; at the same time it squeaked quite a lot. I had to raise my voice in order to speak to Norma. Reluctant though I was to try to engage her in conversation, I felt I must do so because I knew nothing about where we were, and somehow I had to survive. Starting out lost would put me at a major disadvantage.
‘‘Norma,’’ I called out, ‘‘what are these mountains called?’’
‘‘Wasatch,’’ she replied.
I asked her to spell it, realizing too late that she might not know how. But she did, so that was not the problem it might have been. I breathed a sigh of relief and explained to her my need to know more of the geography, the names of things, where we were in relation to the towns I recalled the railroad line passed through.
She relented enough to tell me that the Pratt family’s meadowland was called Hagar’s Glen. She named Tabbyune Canyon as we crossed it, and then the patient mule began to pull our buckboard up higher and higher into the mountains. The Wasatch. I repeated the name to myself several times.
I have said I do not particularly like mountains, but really it is more than that. Mountains make me nervous somehow; I do not have the slightest idea why, and it is something I forget when I am not actually in some mountain range or other. As the sun went down, producing purple shadows all around, and the already brisk wind increased, my nerves went zinging along my arms and down my spine.
We kept going up and up, higher and higher, and this did not seem right to me. Provo, I remembered, was at the base of the mountains. We had gone through Provo and then the train had begun to climb. I recalled that distinctly. So if Norma was taking me to Provo, shouldn’t we be going down?
I moistened my lips. Anxiety makes one’s mouth dreadfully dry. ‘‘How many miles to Provo?’’ I called out.
Norma’s reply floated back over her shoulder—she hadn’t once bothered to turn her head. ‘‘I don’t know in miles. In days, with this mule, it takes three.’’
She could hardly be taking me to Provo, then. I was dismayed. I had thought that was where we were going, because she had spoken of Provo as a place to shop, as if it were just down the road.
After a while the road entered a narrow defile, a natural passage through the rocky terrain. It was almost entirely dark now. I began to understand that Norma too must be nervous. She was going to some lengths to get rid of me, and she could not help but have an unpleasant trip back home in the dark after she’d left me off . . . wherever she chose to let me off.
The defile seemed to go on forever. ‘‘Where are we now?’’ I asked.
‘‘Going through the summit. You don’t get much of a view this way, it’s prettier to go over the top, but this is faster.’’
‘‘I see.’’ I thanked Norma for the explanation, but she had not finished.
As she continued to speak, a bitter tone crept into Norma’s voice: ‘‘Father knows all these cuts, long and short. He won’t go over a mountain if he can go through it, no matter how narrow the path is or how much it twists and turns. Take the low road—that’s what he always says. In fact, Carrie, that’s how Father found you.’’
‘‘What? You mean you don’t believe that story about the angel?’’ At this particular moment, with walls of rock looming dark on either side, Norma’s disbelief in angels was not the good news it otherwise might have been.
‘‘Angel or no angel, that’s as may be. All I’m saying is—and I’m not the only one says it, mind you, all us wives have talked about this amongst ourselves—if it wasn’t for Father’s insistence on always taking the low road, he likely wouldn’t have been anywhere near the bottom of that canyon when your train wrecked. Which would’ve been too bad for you, of course, but it would have saved the rest of us a lot of trouble.’’
‘‘Your point is well taken,’’ I said, biting my lip. Her bitterness stung me to silence.
After what seemed an interminable time, from the left I heard sounds of rushing water. We were at last coming out of that passage through the rock, and all of a sudden there was quite an astonishing drop on the left side of the wagon. I closed my eyes. I know mules are the most sure-footed of creatures, and I know they learn the ways of their beaten paths so well that this mule most likely could find its way home alone if need be.
Not much consolation, that. The Devil must have put it in my head.
I decided to pray. I no longer cared exactly where I was, or what names humans had attached to this rock or that gorge or the other farmstead we passed by. I only cared that Norma would not put me out on the side of this mountain to die, that she would take me instead to some safe, if temporary, haven.
My prayer was brief. After all, there was something more practical I could do. When she reached a flat place in the road and paused to light the oil lamps and set them in place on either side of the buckboard, I seized my chance.
‘‘Would you rather I put that money in a bank for you some place closer than Provo?’’ I asked. ‘‘I hadn’t realized Provo was quite so far away.’’
‘‘Provo would be better. It’s the only good place aroun
d here to buy anything,’’ Norma said. She looked at me silently for a moment, and though it may have been a trick of the lamplight, I thought I saw her expression soften.
‘‘You would still do that for me?’’ she asked.
‘‘Yes, of course I will,’’ I assured her. ‘‘The circumstances have changed slightly, but you are still doing what I asked you to do. You’re helping me to get away. A promise is a promise.’’
Norma clucked up the mule again and we lurched onward.
After a couple of miles she said, ‘‘When do you suppose you can do it? By Christmas?’’
‘‘That depends on two things.’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Today’s date, and where you are taking me.’’
15
IT FELT GOOD to be doing something that would most likely have a positive outcome, even if that outcome was something so simple as getting his and Meiling’s baggage off the train at the right stop.
Michael hadn’t been able to find the porter he’d paid to put their things off at Provo—the man was probably tucked up behind some curtain somewhere sleeping, just as the whole train seemed to be behind doors or curtains sleeping—and although at first that had been bothersome, now he was glad. Glad because to be taking care of things himself felt far more rewarding.
That is, it would be once he found the damn bags.
He wasn’t likely to find the bags unless he first found a lantern—the inside of the baggage car was black as Lucifer’s heart, he couldn’t see a blasted thing.
Michael stood to one side, still in the connecting area, and looked back the way he’d come. On some trains the baggage cars were attached at the rear, but not on this one. Here the baggage was stowed in the first two cars behind the locomotive and the coal tender. The sound of the great steam engine churned loud in his ears as he peered through the small rectangle of glass in the door of the passenger car through which he’d just come.
He didn’t see anyone. Didn’t sense any movement. He waited.
From time to time as he made his way cautiously from car to car, he had felt as if he were being followed. But it was probably only his imagination, only tension; every trick he knew to make a follower show himself had failed, and there weren’t many people on the planet who could succeed at following Michael Archer Kossoff undetected.
Hill Ramsey, maybe. If Ramsey was back there, Michael wanted to lure him out.
That was why he’d looked into the baggage car, then ducked aside without entering and allowed the door to close by itself as if he’d gone on through. Now he waited patiently amid the roar of the engines and rushing air, counting the seconds as they passed by.
At one hundred and eighty—that is to say, three minutes—Michael was convinced he had not been followed after all. Through his nose he exhaled the breath he’d been holding in a bit of a snort just audible over the noise all around, rubbed his hands together, settled his jacket on his shoulders with a semi-shrug, and was ready to proceed.
He opened the baggage car door again, and this time he went in. He struck a match, a tiny orange flare in the murky black, which settled to a small but steady glow. Then he looked around: no lantern hanging up beside the door, curse it.
Three matches later, he spied a lantern where some lazy railroad employee had left it, on top of a trunk a third of the way into the car. He squeezed down a narrow aisle that had been left to provide room for shifting bags and trunks around, grabbed the lamp, and lit it with another match.
Ah, that was better.
Or was it?
The lamplight cast Michael’s shadow up behind him in a monstrous distortion. He moved; this monster moved. It was eerie and distracting. His own shape kept drawing his eye away from the task at hand, which was to find one particular upright steamer trunk and two large leather suitcases—the latter of reasonably handsome quality and appearance, if somewhat scarred from frequent use.
Some time later, Michael realized he would have to move on through this car and into the next. The stacks of suitcases and rows of trunks were arranged, front to back, in the order they were expected to be unloaded. In this car, therefore, all the tags were labeled with the names of towns west of the Mississippi. A few Salt Lakes, a couple of Provos, and then towns with names like Grand Junction, Carbondale, Denver, Lincoln, and plenty of others he’d never heard of. Not a single damn Chicago in this whole damn car.
The train lurched and some of the bags shifted, but nothing fell.
What was that all about? He was instantly hyper-alert.
It was probably nothing, some inconsequential hitch, which at any rate was not repeated as the train continued on.
Michael had slipped a bit before regaining his footing. Now he noticed the lantern teetering close to the edge of the stacked suitcases where he’d put it down. Just as he put out a hand to steady it, one particular shadow caught his eye.
Michael made a sound low and deep in his throat, an involuntary growl. That shadow had moved, he was certain of it.
With infinite slowness he crept in the moving shadow’s direction, silently as a stalking cat. Yet when he got where it had been, there was nothing there. Nothing but a black gap between two trunks, just large enough for a man to hide.
Challenge, or keep silent?
It was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Michael shrugged as elaborately as he could with only one good shoulder, intending anyone who might be watching him to think he thought he’d been mistaken. And maybe he had.
Time’s wasting, he thought.
He went back to where he’d left the lantern and moved on up to the front baggage car. As he passed from one car to the next, the train sounded its whistle through the night; he’d become so accustomed to its intermittent, lonely wail that for the most part he didn’t consciously hear it anymore.
Not good, not good at all.
Michael shook his head as he entered a second car full of trunks and suitcases and valises and boxes and bags, all shapes and sizes, not arranged in any particular order that he could see, except he felt certain most of them were destined for Chicago.
While scanning rapidly in search of his own bags, which he was sure he would recognize, he wondered how many things he might have missed during the last couple of days simply because he’d become so used to them that he wasn’t seeing them. Like the train whistle he didn’t hear.
In his business he couldn’t afford to do that, not ever.
Michael left off lecturing himself a few moments later, when he found what he’d been looking for. He began shifting things around in order to make a path for himself; he would have to take their three items back to the other car, where the pieces labeled for Salt Lake City were stored. His suitcases were one thing, but Meiling’s trunk was going to be a problem.
Not to mention that some poor person was going to end up waiting on the platform at Salt Lake with no luggage because Michael had stolen his tags, and as of this moment was busily relabeling them with his own name in black grease pencil.
Click.
Michael’s head snapped up. This close to the locomotive engine it was hard to hear small, discrete sounds, but he’d heard that one: the distinctive click of the railroad car’s door latch disengaging. He was ready, he’d been expecting this. The moving shadow had been not just a shadow but a person, and that person had followed him.
He set the lantern on the floor for greatest stability. The last thing he wanted was for it to be knocked over in the fight that was going to be taking place at any moment. The safest thing to do would be to put it out— that way he’d know it couldn’t cause a fire. But then he’d have to fight in the dark, and he wouldn’t be able to see the face of his assailant. He couldn’t have that. He had to know who it was. Who was good enough to have stayed on his tail undetected all this time.
When things started to happen they happened fast and furiously, just a few too many yards away, in the midst of too many shadows cast by that lamp on the floor. Michael could
not see clearly.
Initially he didn’t understand. He was disoriented and confused. He had expected to be attacked, but he was not attacked; it was something else entirely, something totally unexpected.
A rushing, whirling black thing flew into the railroad car, spinning and turning so quickly he couldn’t tell if it was human or animal. There were thumps and crashes, blurs of motion, a guttural swear word he couldn’t make out, followed by the unearthly howl of someone in a lot of pain . . . and then silence.
Through all this Michael Kossoff stood untouched.
Shockingly still.
Unmoving but not unmoved.
Then the black figure appeared in the narrow space Michael had cleared; tall, long-limbed, and strange, it came walking toward him. Was there something familiar in that walk?
No, not really, but—
But he had seen another figure dressed in black like this, not exactly but very much like this, a couple of years before. And in Japan, even before that. Ninja. All in black: body, feet, hands, black silk scarf wound round the face and neck, everything covered but the eyes . . . and even those eyes were black. They shone in the lamplight like obsidian.
The figure reached up and loosed the scarf at the back of its head, slowly unwrapped the black silk, and let it fall.
Michael said, ‘‘Meiling.’’
She bowed, unsmiling. ‘‘I most humbly beg your pardon. Without your knowledge or permission I have been your shadow tonight. I have done this so that there will be no more foolish questioning of my ability in this regard.’’
Michael was still too stunned to know what to say, so he did not say anything. Meiling? Meiling had done what so few could?
‘‘I have incapacitated the miscreant. For the moment he is in too much pain to move. But I suggest if you wish to question him, it should be done right away.’’
I knew all too well what money of her own would mean to Norma and I thanked God for having the means to offer that enticement, as without it I very much feared she would have dropped me in the middle of the street. This poor excuse for a town was called Hiram, and it was about as attractive as its name.