The Impersonator (Leah Randall/Jessie Carr Novels)

by Miley, Mary

  “You and Jessie loved horses.”

  He nodded. “We go on long rides. Just me and Jessie. The twins are too little to come.”

  “Long rides? Where?”

  He waved his arm carelessly. “Long rides. Picnics. We hunt gold in the river. We visit the Indians. We build forts.”

  “Indians? There are Indians living nearby?” He waved his arm again. “What kind of Indians?”

  “Indians.”

  “Did you and Jessie have Indian friends?”

  He nodded.

  I had wondered about Jessie running away. She was unhappy and alone. If she had run away, how did she go? She hadn’t taken her horse that day. Maybe she went on foot. If she had friends nearby, would she not have gone there first? Had the dead Indian girl come from that community? Had she been Jessie’s friend years ago? Did it matter?

  “Could we go riding one day? Could you take me to the Indians?”

  He nodded.

  I stood. “Remember, Buster, this is our secret. Like the treasure box. Don’t tell anyone about our secret, or we won’t ever find Jessie. Promise?”

  He squinted up at me and slowly handed me Jessie’s box of agates. I took it as a gesture of trust. I hoped I was right.

  “Thank you, Buster. I’ll keep them safe in her room.” Then I winked, but Buster didn’t wink back.

  18

  I retraced my steps through the woods toward the house. Henry’s fancy Packard Phaeton was sitting in the driveway. As I walked by, its owner came out the front door and ambled down the steps. Bad timing. There was no skirting him now.

  “Good morning, Henry,” I said pleasantly, holding Jessie’s box out of sight in the folds of my skirt.

  “And a good morning to you, cousin,” he replied sarcastically, mocking me with the last word. “What, not riding with the twins? Let’s see, it couldn’t be because you can’t ride, could it?”

  “I haven’t ridden in years, but I don’t believe one forgets such things. Sorry, Henry, I’m afraid it’s because I have no riding habit.”

  “A good excuse, but it won’t last long. And neither will you. Enjoy playacting while you can. The trustees’ investigation will soon expose you for the fake you are, and as added insurance, I’ve launched my own inquiry into your background. I have friends in many places, high and low.”

  I shrugged to show how little I cared. “Suit yourself. It doesn’t matter to me how you spend your money, as long as it is your money and not my father’s.”

  That barb struck sharply. His handsome face reddened. “Carr Industries is mine! And Ross’s. It should have come to us to begin with. Our father didn’t deserve to be cast aside like he was. Uncle Lawrence was sure as hell no model of virtuous living. He just managed to conceal his indiscretions from his parents.” Then his features relaxed and he chuckled merrily, switching on the charming smile. “Look at us, scrapping like naughty children. And you’re certainly no child, are you?” He treated me to a once-over that I’m sure he thought was debonair. “Let’s be honest here. I know you’re not Jessie, and it’s only a matter of days until you’re exposed. You’ll be left with nothing but a long prison sentence when we charge you with fraud. Why not let me make your life easy? I’ll give you a handsome settlement to disappear.” When I made to walk past him, his hand shot out and grabbed my arm. “No, hear me out. This charade of yours is all about money. So I’ll give you money. Just name the amount. I’ll set up a bank account for you wherever you like, all legal, proper, and risk-free. You’ll be amply repaid for all the trouble you’ve gone to in impersonating my cousin. You can leave safely, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  I jerked out of his grasp and nearly dropped the treasure box as I entered the house, taking the steps two at a time. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t follow me inside—but not so sure that I didn’t check over my shoulder. His offer rattled me more than I cared to admit. Had I been alone in this, I might have been tempted to consider it.

  I carried Jessie’s box up to my room. I wiped off the dirt and set it on the dressing table. On an impulse, I rummaged through her jewelry drawer until I found a simple gold chain. A moment later, the beautiful Bennis beads were around my neck. The necklace would be my amulet. I wasn’t superstitious, but a good-luck charm couldn’t hurt. It was something of Jessie’s, something that would protect me. I felt absurdly pleased to have it on.

  I glanced out the window before going back outdoors. Henry and the Packard had gone. I was relieved no one had witnessed our little contretemps. At least, I didn’t think so.

  King caught sight of me and bounded up. “Hello, sweetheart.” I patted his head. “I’m going for a walk. Do you want to come?” His tail wagged furiously. “All right, let’s go!”

  Just past the garden wall we plunged into the fantasy forest with its neat lines of lean, young trees planted six rows deep and offset like squares on a checkerboard. When we emerged from these sheltering boughs, the ocean panorama struck me full force.

  The sea wind whipped my hair out of its pins and stung my eyes as I squinted up and down the desolate coastal highlands, then west to a fog bank far out to sea. A hundred feet in front of me, the land dropped out of sight as if cut by a giant knife and sliced into the sea. Every now and then as the ocean heaved, I could make out jagged black reefs lurking just beneath the foam. Offshore, massive boulders as tall as the cliff on which I stood jutted from the ocean floor like sentinels guarding the coast from marauders, preventing any ships from coming near this rough stretch of coastline. Eons ago, before the sea had torn them away, those boulders had been attached to the land under my feet. It made me wonder how long before storms and surf cut off the slice I was standing on.

  The sound of waves against a pebbly beach pulled me toward the edge. King barked a warning that I could barely hear over the wind in my ears. Without getting too close—who knew if this was the morning for the edge to crumble away?—I looked down into turbulence, a sheer drop greater than the distance between the highest catwalk and the stage floor, to where a not-so-pacific ocean showed off its muscle.

  To my right, a thicket of bent coastal pines hugged the edge of the cliff. A path into the middle of it suggested the way to the beach and a better view of the northern coastline. King and I followed the trail as it led to the edge of the cliff and from there, down to the beach and the sea caves I had heard about from Oliver. The caves Jessie and Buster had enjoyed exploring. I was about to descend when I felt eyes on my back.

  I wheeled around.

  Ross stood not six feet away, his eyes blazing.

  It seemed imprudent to stand between a cliff and someone who would inherit a fortune at my death. I stepped away from the edge.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded, stuffing clenched fists inside his trouser pockets as if they couldn’t be trusted with freedom. The wind tousled his curly hair, making him seem younger. I could see exactly what he had looked like as a little boy. It wasn’t reassuring.

  “I’m taking a walk. Does that meet with your approval?” He couldn’t miss the sarcasm.

  There was an awkward moment before he spoke again, gruffly this time, like a father to a wayward child. “Don’t get too close to the edge.”

  “Why, thank you for those words of caution, cousin. I wouldn’t have realized the danger myself.” Ross shifted his glare from me to the ocean. “Never mind,” I continued, pretending he had apologized. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that, but it wasn’t your fault. I couldn’t hear you coming with the wind in my ears, and of course King wouldn’t bark at you.”

  “You shouldn’t be out here alone where no one can see you. It’s dangerous. The edge of the cliff is always crumbling away. Something could happen and no one would know you were here.”

  I didn’t bother to point out that if I were to fall into the ocean in a rockslide, an onlooker could hardly save me. I guessed the dead woman had set him thinking about death. “You heard about the body on the s
ide of the road?”

  “Yes.” He looked thoughtful. “Mr. Beckett told me yesterday. No doubt we’ll be treated to the gory details in the newspaper.”

  “Dexter has a daily?” I regretted the slip too late. But maybe Jessie had been too young to be interested in the newspaper, or perhaps Ross thought I was asking whether Dexter had a daily now, because he answered with no indication of having caught me out.

  “Just the weekly. It isn’t much. Still just a few pages of school awards, Ladies’ League minutes, and some old prospector turning ninety and reminiscing about the gold rush. A murder will be front page. Things like that don’t happen in Dexter.”

  In the short time I had been standing there, the fog had moved toward land, fingering a distant promontory that curved out into the water to the north of us where moments earlier sunlight had sparkled. It would reach us soon enough and the morning would be ruined for exploring.

  “It’s a treacherous place,” he said finally. “Out there, I mean. As I well know. You remember how much we used to sail?”

  If this was a trap, I thought I could handle it. Oliver had mentioned that the boys spent a lot of time on the water—in truth, sailing was a Carr family passion—so I could reply with confidence, “Yes, and I hated it because I got seasick so easily. But I thought you just sailed around the bay?”

  “We were supposed to stay inside the bay, but we used to slip out and sail along the coast. We had some close calls.”

  “That was unwise, especially considering what happened to my parents.”

  “You’re right, of course. They don’t call this the Graveyard of the Pacific for nothing.”

  “There were that many shipwrecks around here?”

  “Untold numbers, all along the Oregon coast. This area”—he swept the air with one arm—“this part of the West Coast was first explored by Sir Francis Drake during his circumnavigation voyage in 1579. Did you know that?”

  I wouldn’t admit my ignorance and so said nothing. He didn’t seem to notice. The lecture continued.

  “The Europeans were certain that there was a water route to China through North America, the Northwest Passage, which, of course, there isn’t, but Drake thought he’d found it at the Juan de Fuca Straits. That’s the waterway between Vancouver Island and the United States.”

  “I know where the straits are.”

  “That’s right, I forget you’ve traveled a bit,” he said condescendingly.

  “I’ve even read a book or two.”

  He didn’t miss the testy tone of my voice. “Well, you can’t blame me for wondering. You haven’t had any education in the past seven years.”

  “I didn’t need a classroom to learn. Besides, there are lots of important things schools can’t teach.”

  Ross was not one to let my peevishness ruin a good lecture. He continued as if there had been no pause and, to be honest, what he said was interesting.

  “There were probably no other Europeans hereabouts for two hundred years until Captain James Cook in the HMS Resolution mapped the whole coast from California to Alaska. When he left North America, he returned to Hawaii where he was murdered by the natives in 1779. You know what I like most about Captain Cook?”

  “What?”

  “He died trying to stop a fight between his men and the native Hawaiians. Not many people try to put a stop to the ill-treatment of the natives. No one around here.”

  An odd comment. Curious to hear more, I plopped myself down on the grass next to King who was stretched out at my feet, a move designed to encourage him to continue and continue he did.

  “Not much happened around here until gold was discovered in 1849 and hundreds of thousands of get-rich-quick dreamers poured into California and Oregon from all over the world. The problem was that suddenly there were thousands of people—mostly men, lots of Chinese—and no law enforcement except a gun. The Indians got the worst of it.”

  “The real Wild West.”

  “There were dozens of tribes in Oregon before the white man came—the Killamook, the Tututni, the Coos, the Nestuccas, the Kalapuyan, the Umatilla, and so forth. They lived in villages along the rivers. Unfortunately, that’s also where the gold was. When they resisted being run off by greedy miners, they were slaughtered. Most white men subscribed to the belief that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.”

  It began to make sense to me now, why Indians all over this country were treated so badly and lived in such miserable places nowadays. They had occupied all the best land and were driven off to the worst. I thought of the dead Indian girl. “Are there many Indians left in Oregon today?”

  “Not a lot,” Ross said as he sat down beside me. “Those that weren’t murdered died of white man’s diseases, like smallpox or measles. In the 1850s, after the Rogue River Wars, local tribes were forced onto reservations for their own protection, or so said the authorities. But these reservations were located on land that would not support them, so they starved to death.”

  He sent a furtive glance in my direction to make sure I was paying attention before he delivered the coup de grâce. “As a matter of fact, in the course of my research, I discovered that we are sitting on what was once part of the Grand Ronde reservation where local Yaquina and Alsea Indians were squashed in with a dozen inland tribes marched here at gunpoint. Originally Grand Ronde’s population was about four thousand Indians. By the turn of this century, there were fewer than five hundred left.”

  “How did my father come to own reservation land?”

  “In 1887, the federal government decided to allot individual Indians with specific acreage rather than have the land owned communally by the tribe. Once that happened, they were easily cheated out of most of their land. Then in 1901, the government declared the remaining reservation land surplus and sold it to the public. Over the years, the reservation shrank from seventy thousand acres to about four hundred.”

  “So my father swindled the Indians?”

  “Not directly. He bought this land from a speculator in 1910. The speculator swindled the Indians.”

  I reminded myself that Lawrence Carr wasn’t really my father, but I still felt like a thief. I didn’t want to own land that had been stolen from its rightful owners. “This is the topic of your research, isn’t it?”

  “Obviously.”

  “And where are the Indians now? Nearby?”

  He began tossing pebbles over the cliff and the motion focused my attention to his hands. I couldn’t help but notice an unusual band around his wrist, a thin bracelet made of leather and beads. White, yellow, and blue beads, like those the dead woman wore. A shiver ran down my spine. Had Ross known the girl? His fingers were long and slender, his nails short and neat. Strong hands, and capable. Capable of what?

  “Grand Ronde reservation still exists, southeast of us. A few Indians live there. Others live at the edge of towns like Dexter where they work in packing plants shucking oysters or canning salmon. Some weave baskets. I talk to the ones with the longest memories about the old days.”

  I did some quick subtraction in my head. “If the first prospectors came in the 1850s, someone seventy-five years or older might remember that.”

  “Several do remember. And some can relate what their parents had to say about life before the white man came, before the wars and relocations to the reservations. I am incorporating those first- and secondhand accounts into my thesis, which is about the cultural changes of the local tribes in the initial years of contact. The Indians old enough to provide eyewitness accounts won’t be around much longer and their knowledge will be lost forever unless I record it now.”

  “The dead woman had black braids and shell beads. I think she was an Indian.”

  He eyed me with interest. “She was. That’s why no one is much bothered about her death. No one in town, that is. She has family on the Grand Ronde reservation.”

  “Oh, dear. How—”

  “I went into town and talked to some Indians I know. The girl had come to Dexter
a few months ago to find work. She must have found something because she sent money home a couple times, but no one at the cannery knew her. She may have been headed home when she was killed.”

  “You mean she got into trouble and was running back to the reservation for safety?”

  “Possibly. Some Indians trust me enough to talk to me, but this stuff is touchy, and when all’s said and done, I’m still white.”

  So that’s how he knew. He’d been playing detective, poking into places the local constabulary should have been investigating. Did he have more than a scholar’s interest in the Indians?

  “Did you know the dead girl?”

  He gave me a queer look. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “No.”

  I had the feeling he wasn’t telling the truth, but the lecture had come to an end. We sat a while without speaking, the air around us alive with nature’s own voice. Cormorants soaring effortlessly on updrafts called to their mates nesting in the cliffs below, crickets warned of the oncoming fog, and the endless rhythm of the surf washing the shore provided the backdrop for our thoughts. Life could be unfair in vaudeville too, but overall, it was better than in the civilian world where hotels didn’t rent rooms to Negro or Asian or Indian performers and many eateries and speakeasies refused to serve them. I’d been turned away from places myself when my group included someone the owners found objectionable.

  “Are there any books about this Indian history?”

  “None written in words of one syllable.”

  I stood and brushed the grass off my skirt. “Have it your way, Ross. I’m through trying to be nice.”

  “Acting nice isn’t going to convince us you’re Jessie.”

  “Has it occurred to you that I don’t have to convince you? My grandmother and uncle are convinced, and the trustees will give their final approval as soon as their investigation is finished. That’s all that matters, although I admit to being pleased that the twins and your mother believe me.”