by Loretta Ross
Wren studied it. It showed Maybeth, dressed like a hooker, standing on a street corner. There was a post for a street sign, but the sign itself wasn’t visible. In the background there was only the corner of a large building, made of faded red brick, a part of one curtained window visible. There was nothing identifiable that Wren could see. There was a fire hydrant, a cracked sidewalk, and a small section of cross street with one building visible. That was some kind of business, but any sign it might have had was out of the picture and its windows were obscured by a blue and white striped awning.
“Okay … ?”
“So I found her from this picture,” Death grinned, clearly pleased with himself.
“How?”
“Well, first of all, look at the building in the background. Not the one with the awning, the one right behind her What do you see?”
“Um, bricks?”
“And?”
“Uh, part of a window.”
“Good. And?”
“A curtain?”
“Right. And what kind of brick building has curtains in the window? Usually?”
Wren thought about it. “An apartment building?”
“Right! Now, this particular apartment building is pretty old. You can tell by how worn the bricks are. And it’s not in a residential area. It’s sitting right up against the sidewalk and that other building in the background is clearly some sort of business. Apartment complexes in small towns tend to be located in residential areas and they tend to be set back away from the road, with landscaping around them. So, it’s not a guarantee, but I’m betting this is more likely to be either in the city or in one of the larger towns.”
“Okay, but that still leaves a lot of room.”
“Right. So, now look at the fire hydrant.”
“It’s a fire hydrant.”
“Very good! Notice anything else?”
“… it’s weird colors?” The fire hydrant was black and yellow with a green cap.
“Exactly! Now, I don’t know if you know this or not, but there’s actually a national color scheme for fire hydrants. The color of the cap signifies the available water flow rate. Most small towns can only supply less than 999 gallons per minute, so they get red or orange caps and usually they just paint the trunks red too and are done with it. This has a green cap, so it can deliver 1,000 to 1,499 gallons per minute. That suggests a city and goes along with what we’ve already figured out by looking at the buildings in the background. But then I ask myself, why a black and yellow trunk?”
“And did yourself answer you?”
“It did. See, myself knows, because my grandfather and brother were firefighters, that there are any number of reasons why fire hydrants get painted different colors. Some towns have their own color scheme, so do some neighborhoods. On Italian Hill, in St. Louis, for example, the fire hydrants are painted the color of the Italian flag.”
“Okay, but how were you supposed to find out who had yellow and black hydrants?”
“I’m a detective. I detected.”
“Meaning?”
“One of the most common reasons fire hydrants get painted odd colors is because students from the local school paint them their school colors. I see black and yellow—black and gold—and I think Tigers. I tried Columbia first, because of the University of Missouri Tigers. They do have some black and gold hydrants, but they’re painted in tiger stripes, not just plain colors. So then I started checking smaller cities. Sedalia and Warrensburg both have high schools with tigers for mascots. I started with Warrensburg, because it was closer, took this picture up and started showing it around the fire stations. Firefighters do maintenance on fire hydrants, so I figured if it was in their area, there was a good chance one of them would recognize it. One of them did. He gave me the exact address and then I just drove around until I found her.”
Wren leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “You know, you’re really something. Pretty and smart too!”
He leaned his forehead against hers and sighed, oddly dejected in what should be a time of triumph. “Once upon a time I used to be strong, too.”
She rubbed his back. “You’re still strong.”
“Not strong enough. I got lightheaded just from kissing you. That’s twice now I’ve let Declan Fairchild walk away.”
“Okay, first of all, he didn’t ‘walk’ away. He ran away like a scared little girl.”
“You were throwing spears at him.”
“It was just one spear, and that was just the first time. The second time he was definitely running from the wrath of you.”
“Maybe.” He sighed. “You know what happened to my family, Wren. I can’t help but be a little bit paranoid. It really bothers me to think that I might not be able to protect you if you need it.”
She had no answer to that and they sat for several long minutes in a companionable and not altogether happy silence.
“Teach me hand-to-hand combat!” she suggested suddenly.
“What?”
“Hand-to-hand combat. You’re a Marine. You know that stuff, right? So teach me. Maybe you won’t have to worry about protecting me so much if you know I know how to protect myself.”
Death thought about it. “I suppose I could do that,” he allowed. One corner of his mouth tipped up in a sly grin. “Do there have to be clothes involved?”
Wren grinned back. “Clothing,” she assured him, “is entirely optional.”
_____
They were driving south, the hour getting late, classic rock playing softly on the radio, when Wren spoke suddenly.
“I don’t want to go back to my house tonight.”
Death looked over at her. All the dash lights were on his side of the car and he could only see her shadowy outline against the lighter darkness of the side window.
“Why not?”
“Declan Fairchild. He knows where I live. I’m so tired of being afraid of him. I just want one night, just to sleep without having to worry.”
“I could take you to a hotel?” he offered.
“No,” she said instantly. “I don’t want to stay in a hotel. Could we go back to your place?” she asked, and his heart dropped, dread rising into his throat to choke him. “I could sleep on your couch. That’d be fine. You know, I don’t even know where you live.”
“Um, yeah, well … you know. That’s kind of a problem.”
Her head came up, he sensed more than saw her tipping her face in his direction. He could feel the puzzlement. She glanced into the back of the Jeep. It was too dark for her to see anything, but Death knew that she would have seen earlier what was back there, sleeping bag, air mattress, duffel bag of clothes, crate of food and toiletries. She had a sharp eye and a quick intellect. He waited for her to figure it out, for the disgust and condemnation. But, when she spoke, there was only warmth and concern in her tone.
“Death, have you been living in your car?”
“It’s not a car, it’s a Jeep,” he deflected lightly.
“So that’s a yes.” She sounded like she was going to cry.
He reached over and found her hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “It’s not so bad. Believe me, I’ve stayed a lot worse places.” A cellar in Afghanistan came to mind, rasping for breath, his chest on fire, trying to keep Barlow from bleeding out and wondering how the hell they were ever going to find their way home.
“We can go to my house,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“No,” he shook his head. “No, I think you had a good idea. Hang on. I’m going to show you where I’ve been staying. Fairchild will never find us tonight.”
They were still several miles out of East Bledsoe Ferry, on the west shore of Truman Lake, when Death flipped on his blinker and pulled off the highway onto a lane so overgrown it was practically invisible.
“What is this place?” Wren asked, speaking for the first time in minutes.
“Well, once upon a time this was a real road.” The Jeep jounced and bounced along deep ruts. “Never a v
ery good road,” he admitted. “I drove it a few times with my grandpa, back when I was a little kid. It was a back road from Bristow to Grant’s Crossing. It had the worst hill you’ve ever seen—practically vertical, with a long, narrow bridge at the bottom, over the Barker arm of Tebo Creek. It was a horrible bridge, one-lane and rusting out. I swear there were holes in the driving surface and you could see the water running underneath.
“Anyway, once the lake came in they took out the bridge and the water filled up that whole valley, so now this is just an old dead-end trail.” He pulled to a stop at the brink of a hill, with trees thick around them, and the lake glinted briefly in the headlights before he switched them off and killed the engine. “Nobody comes here. It’s not a good place to fish because it’s too hard to get down to the water, and the road doesn’t go anywhere. I like it though.”
He got out and went around to open the door for her, then left her standing on the hill, looking out over the water below, while he got the air mattress and bedding out of the back.
He’d slept out under the stars here before, so there was already a place smoothed for the mattress, free of stones and other obstructions. He opened his sleeping bag and spread it on the mattress, then put a blanket over that, folding it back so it would be easy to slide under.
Wren was shivering slightly, rubbing her arms. “It is beautiful,” she said, “but didn’t you ever get cold?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted, “but only because I was alone.” He wrapped her in his arms and held her against him, then drew her toward the bed he’d prepared. “Come on, sweetheart. It’s been a long day.” They crawled under the covers and cuddled close under heavens that glistened with the light of a billion trillion stars. The ancient earth sang them the oldest love song of all, writ of crickets and tree frogs and night birds calling, of wind sighing in the leaves and water moving rhythmically against land in the darkness.
When Death awoke in the rosy dawn, Wren was curled warm beside him. Her head rested on his shoulder. Her red hair was splayed out across the pillow. Shafts of early morning sunlight lanced across the water, setting the whitecaps glittering and gilding the tops of the tallest trees.
For the first time in a long time, he felt like he was living in a state of grace.
thirteen
“Forty-eight.”
“Fo’ty-eight.”
“Forty-nine.”
“Fo’ty-nine.”
“Fifty.”
“Fiddy.”
“Now what do you say?”
Bitty Sam, the smallest Keystone, tipped back his head and shouted at the top of his impressive lungs. “READY OR NOT, HERE I COME!”
The staircase in the main hall was base. He and Death had both been hiding their eyes against the newel post, a large golden head bent over a smaller one, while Death helped him count. The ex-Marine stepped back now and patted the four-year-old on the back as he launched himself off in search of his siblings and various degrees of cousins.
“Isn’t it kind of mean,” Death asked when the boy was out of sight, “making the littlest one be ‘it’?”
“We’ll help him if he needs it,” Leona said, unconcerned. She and Wren were uncovering and cataloging the pictures and artwork on the walls. “Better than letting him hide. He’s so little, last time he was missing for three days before we found him giggling in the bottom of the laundry hamper. Might still be missing if we hadn’t had to do the wash.”
“Really?” Death stared at her, aghast.
She gave him a long, level look. “No.” She turned to Wren. “He’s pretty, but he’s gullible.”
“It’s a fair trade,” Wren grinned. She uncovered another framed piece of artwork in the entry hall. “Oh, Death! Look. It’s our favorite artist.”
He crossed the room to peer over her shoulder. “I like his other artwork better. This is one of his political cartoons?”
“It must be. Something about Maryland. Not sure I understand it.” It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a mighty tower. One of the foundations stones was emphasized and was clearly the outline of the state of Maryland. “Oh, I see. Sort of. The tower must be the United States and the foundation is a map of the original thirteen colonies.”
“It probably made more sense at the time. Like I said, I like his other work better.”
Wren smiled and blushed.
“So do I,” Leona offered, voice wry. “So, by the way, does Mother Weeks. I really would avoid her if I were you,” she told Death. “She gave poor Roy a finger hickey on his butt that will be sore for a month.”
“You showed those letters to Mother Weeks?” Wren asked.
“I personally didn’t. We decided to scan them into the computer so we could keep the originals in a controlled environment and still, ahem, study them. Somehow she got hold of a copy.”
“There are copies?” Death asked, interested.
Leona grinned. “I’ll get you a printout. Though I’d be very disappointed to think you needed help coming up with ideas in that department.”
“Pretty sure he doesn’t,” Wren said, voice sly.
Leona raised her eyebrows. “A perfect man after all?”
“Well, we’re getting there, I think.”
Death, who had the feeling they were talking over his head and wasn’t sure if he should like it, moved to the next frame, undid the straps holding the cover on and eased it loose. “This is another of his,” he said.
“Well, he was an ancestor,” Wren said. “It makes sense that they’d have lots of his artwork around the place.” She came over to study the new picture. “Oh, this one I think I get. It’s about the War of 1812. Or the buildup to war, probably.”
The second cartoon showed a British naval vessel on the high seas, flying the Union Jack and with the officers and crew standing proud at attention in their fine uniforms, but the ship’s reflection in the water showed the officers brandishing whips over a chained crew of bedraggled men in ragged, Revolutionary War–era American uniforms. The flag in the reflection was a tattered rendition of Old Glory.
“I think I remember something about that,” Death said. “The British were boarding American ships and forcing the sailors to serve on British ships. British-born sailors, I think, and some Americans who had never been British got caught up in it. The Brits didn’t recognize their citizens’ right to emigrate and become nationalized Americans, so when they needed sailors to fight their war with Napoleon, they took them off American merchant ships.” He gave Wren a cheesy grin. “Do I get an A in history, Teach?”
Wren had moved on to the next picture. “I’ll give you an A+ and a gold star if you can explain this one to me.”
He went over and stood behind her, resting his chin on her head. “Buncha guys acting girly?” The third picture showed a tailor—obvious from the pins in his clothing and the tape measure around his neck—holding up an animal skin to a man dressed like Daniel Boone while a second frontiersman held another animal skin up in front of himself and admired himself in a mirror.
Wren shrugged. “I know men in the early nineteenth century wore elaborate clothes, usually. And trappers and explorers and whatnot didn’t. So, I’d guess old Obadiah was making fun of somebody, though I couldn’t tell you if it was the frontiersmen or the male fashion plates. I’ll have to remember to ask Doris about it. She’s our art expert. We’re just uncovering these for her.”
Death moved on. “This one’s plain enough,” he said. In the last picture on the east wall a group of men in fine suits and white wigs were milling around a conference table, lining up to sign some sort of document. Though the men were all smiling and shaking hands, they were also all holding knives behind their backs.
“That’s plain?” Wren asked.
“Sure. It’s politics. Two hundred years and it hasn’t changed a bit. Well, except they have more teeth when they smile now and they’ve traded the knives for semi-automatics.” He looked around. “Is it just me, or is it way too quiet in here considering th
e number of kids we turned loose?”
“It’s not just you,” Leona confirmed grimly. “If those little monsters aren’t up to something, I’ll eat my best hat.”
Leona had brought over seven small Keystones, ranging in age from four-year-old Bitty Sam up to eleven-year-old Levi. Her instructions to them had been simple and straightforward: Stay on the ground floor; Stay out of the pantry, with its dangerously rickety shelves full of strawberry jam; Don’t break anything.
Death found Bitty Sam in the bathroom, kneeling in the bathtub and peering up the faucet. “Anyone in there?” Death asked him.
“I can’t see no one. It’s awful dark, though.”
“Yeah, I bet. Why don’t we go look somewhere else?”
He tucked the toddler under his arm like a football and carried him out into the hallway, where they met Leona dragging nine-year-old Matthew along by one arm and scolding him furiously.
“I swear! You have as little sense as your grandfather! You’ve got that filthy stuff all over your clothes and you put your dirty feet on the racks—”
“Hey!” he protested indignantly. “You can’t scold me for it gettin’ me dirty and me gettin’ it dirty. That ain’t fair!”
“Isn’t fair,” she corrected. “And I can scold you for anything I want to scold you for. I’m the grandma. What would you have done if someone had turned it on, hmm?”
“Got out when it got hot?”
“Don’t you sass me, boy!”
“You hid in the oven?” Death asked with a grin.
“It was a good place. Nobody found me.”
“Gramma found you,” Bitty Sam told him. “You ‘it’!”
“She wasn’t playing. That don’t count.”
They found Wren standing bewildered in the middle of the morning room. This room was lightly furnished with delicate furniture. The tall secretary was too narrow to hide even a child. The two sofas were too low for anyone to crawl underneath and the chairs and coffee table were too open. There were no closets or cupboards, only a bay window with a boxy window seat, the window covered with light, gauzy curtains.