“Over to the loading platform,” the marshal said. “Train should be coming in about twenty minutes from now.” The men maneuvered the casket toward the railroad station.
I guessed there might be someone besides Mr. Stanfield who had died in Hillyard in the last few days, but probably not someone whose body had to be sent off on a train overseen by a lawman. It had to Mr. Stanfield’s body in the casket.
“Hello, Mabel.”
I spun around. Fannie stood in the shadows of the blacksmith shop watching the men carry the casket away. Standing beside her was a tall blond boy with a narrow, serious face. He looked about sixteen years old and wore an old stained coat and faded denim trousers. They were not the sort of clothes worn by people like the Dunns. Will Sims, I assumed.
“Will, this is Mabel,” Fannie said. Her nose and eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. “Let’s tell her.”
“No,” Will said. “Why? How will that make it any better?”
“Because she won’t tell,” Fannie said. “We made a deal, remember? I’ll tell about her if she does.”
If Fannie had told Will about our deal, it meant she’d already broken her part of it, and the self-conscious look Will gave me confirmed it.
“This is different, Fannie,” Will said. “It’s too big, and it’s nothing to do with her.”
“But I want a grown up to know,” Fannie said. The words were childish, but the nature of her news, I suspected, was not.
“I’m really not the right grown up to tell,” I said.
Her mouth drooped and quivered like little Jane’s did when she didn’t get her way, and fresh tears spurted from her eyes.
“Come on, Fannie,” Will said gently. “We can handle this by ourselves.” He took her arm and led her away.
Chapter Ten
A LINE OF red-faced boys sat in the back row of the third grade classroom. They seemed to be holding their breaths and exerting some sort of internal pressure.
“What on earth are you doing?” I asked.
“Make them stop, Miss Chumley,” Sarah cried. “They’re trying to blow air out their eyes. Oh, make them stop.” Her voice quavered as tears flooded her eyes. “Their eyes will pop out!”
Stone-hearted Minnie laughed. “Let ‘em. They’ll have to go to the blind school in Spokane.”
Jackie released his breath with a whoosh. “Is that true, Miss Chumley?” he asked with an air of scientific inquiry. “Could we really pop our eyes out, from the inside?”
Who would have guessed my knowledge of anatomy would be insufficient to teach third grade? Still, it seemed a reasonable assumption to me, and Mrs. Dunn had advised me to act as if I knew the answer even if I didn’t.
“Absolutely,” I said. “And I won’t allow it in my classroom. Keep your eyes in your heads, children, and let’s return to our lesson.”
Thanks to Mrs. Dunn’s preparations, the lessons were proceeding smoothly enough. It was the children themselves who baffled me. They seemed to be good children. Now that they had been told not to pop their eyes out, they were willing to obey. But who would have thought such a rule would be necessary?
“Sit still, Jerry.”
“I am sitting still,” Jerry said with complete sincerity, while simultaneously bending sideways to peer into his desk, dropping his pencil, scratching his bottom, and kicking the back of the desk in front of him.
“Stop talking,” I told Celia.
“I’m not talking, Miss Chumley. I’m just telling Joan not to hold her pen like that ‘cause one time I did that and I got ink all over my dress and it never came out and my mama got so angry.”
“That is talking, Celia,” I pointed out. “You’re talking right now.”
“But I’m not really, Miss Chumley. I’m just explaining about how I was telling Joan about her pen.” She was as sincere as Jerry. How could I convince a child to stop doing what she didn’t realize she was doing at all?
It seemed to me, as I cast my mind back to when I was their age, that my classmates and I sat as still and mute as corpses all day. Was my memory faulty, or was my understanding as skewed back then as theirs was now?
I glanced at the clock and at the times listed on the lesson plans Mrs. Dunn had written. I was appalled at how slowly the day was progressing.
“All right class, it’s time for your reading lesson. Please take out your books and open them to page 150.”
Dozens of little heads disappeared as the students scrabbled in the storage compartments of their desks. Large white bows bobbed above the heads of the girls. Some of the bows were stiffly starched and pristine, others limp and poorly knotted, but every single girl had one. It seemed to be a uniform of some sort, much like the boys’ caps, though the caps were not allowed in the classroom. The caps were of two types, baseball caps and railroad derbies. The boys had divided themselves into two groups, for which the caps seemed to be badges or symbols of some kind.
“Page 150,” I reminded the class as books landed on desks. “‘Somebody’s Darling’ is a poem from the Civil War—”
“Miss Chumley, Annie’s looking at me. Tell Annie to stop looking at me.”
I sighed and looked at the clock.
THE AFTERNOON PASSED more quickly than the morning. The students helped me learn their routines. A spelling bee and an arithmetic game were followed by geography. They were learning about maps, they told me, and were allowed to use paint. At two-thirty they stampeded out amidst a crumpled mess of paper, spilled paint, and open paste jars, and finally, it was time for my last class of the day. I climbed the stairs to the second floor where the classrooms for the upper grades were located.
The first thing I noticed upon entering the seventh grade classroom was that the white bows were smaller and less numerous. Many of the girls had already lowered their skirts and looked like young ladies, but the boys didn’t differ all that much from the third graders.
Guy sat up straight when I entered the classroom. He smiled, pointed, and nodded to his friends. I recognized Russell Gordon Walker and Dewey Murphy, whose essays I had reread the night before. Russell nodded, but Dewey only dropped his head onto his folded arms to hide his red face. Poor Dewey.
Carrie Hennessey sat in the front row. She didn’t bother with starched bows, but instead still wore her two braids held together with a ribbon. Her dress was faded, and her stockings drooped. She watched me closely, her face expressionless. Of course she was normally solemn. I knew that from the day at the confectionary, the day Mr. Stanfield came in and addressed me as Mrs. Jones. Mr. Stanfield’s death was tragic and terrible, but at least in this I benefited from it. The only person in Hillyard who had known me as Mrs. Jones was dead. Unless, of course, Carrie had heard him.
“Good afternoon class.” I placed my lesson plans on the table in front of the room. “My name is Miss Chumley, and I’m your new geography teacher.”
They already knew all about it, I could tell. Thirty-four pairs of eyes watched me intently, some eagerly, some nervously, some friendly, but none openly hostile. Somewhere between third and seventh grade, they’d learned to sit still, for they barely moved a muscle.
I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Dunn told me that you are studying imports and exports. Our lesson today is about the exchange of raw materials for finished goods. Can someone tell me the difference between the two?”
A tall girl in a dress too fancy for school raised her hand. “Mrs. Dunn said you would grade our essays? Have you?”
Grade them? “Er, no, Miss...?”
“My name is Olive Parsons, miss.”
“Thank you. No, Olive, I haven’t quite finished grading your essays. I’ve read them, of course. Today we are going to discuss raw materials and finished goods. Who can give me an example of a finished good?”
Guy waved his arm frantically.
“Yes, Guy.”
He stood beside his desk. “An automobile is a finished good. A motor engine can pull with the force of up to twelve horses and can go ten
miles an hour on smooth roads. That’s why we need better roads from here to Spokane. My dad says someday they’ll have to make roads everywhere so people can go places in automobiles, but my mom says we’ll always need horses to get over the mountains. I think my dad’s right, don’t you, Miss Chumley?”
“That’s not what Mrs. Dunn said,” Olive protested. “Mrs. Dunn said they’re expensive and dangerous, and I think so too. Besides, why would anyone want to buy his own engine when there are trolleys and trains that go wherever you could want to go?”
A chorus of protests from the boys erupted at this. Russell Gordon Walker’s voice, deeper than the rest, dominated. “That’s not so, Olive. With a train, you can only go where the tracks are laid.”
“Well, with an automobile you can only go where the roads are,” Olive said.
I thought she made a good point, but I realized I had done the one thing Mrs. Dunn had warned I ought never do—I’d lost control of the classroom.
“That’s enough, boys and girls.” My voice was not as deep as Russell Gordon’s, but I brought forth all the force I could muster, and the children looked my way. “Raw materials. We’re going to discuss raw materials. Who can tell me the raw materials that were used to make the desks in this very room? Olive, please go to the board and write a list.”
By the time I headed home after the last bell, I was more tired than I had ever been in my life, even more tired than my first night on the train, when I barely slept. I was hungry, for it hadn’t occurred to me to bring food with me, and my wrist ached from writing on the blackboard all day. A light snow fell and swirled about my boots as I walked home. The fatigue caused by scrambling to stay ahead of the students all day made me careless, and my steps home took me directly past the marshal’s office.
“Excuse me, Miss Chumley.”
I looked up. The marshal stood in his open doorway buttoning his coat. “I’d like to speak with you, if I may.”
My heart leapt to my throat and nearly choked me. “I—ah, ah, I’m actually in a bit of a hurry to get home. I’ve been teaching all day.”
“I’ll walk with you.” He closed the door behind him, joined me in the road, and lifted the books from my arms.
I tried to calm my racing heart. He wouldn’t carry my books for me if he was going to toss me into jail, would he?
“I understand you knew Mr. Stanfield,” he said.
“Me? Oh no.” My voice shook. “I met him on the train coming out here, but I didn’t know him.”
“You knew him better than anyone else in town, it appears. Tell me what you know of him from your time together. Anything at all that you can remember.”
I kept my head down, my eyes on the road, as I thought. This would require a careful rearrangement of the facts. I’m Miss Chumley, I reminded myself. “He was already on the train when I boarded.”
“Where was that?”
“North Dakota,” I said. “Minot.” I had that much information from the real Miss Chumley, but I prayed he would not ask the name of the station. “It was the middle of the night when I boarded, and I met him the next morning. We sat across from each other on the train. We spoke a bit and learned we were both headed for Hillyard.”
“Did he say anything about his plans once he got here?”
“He told me he worked for the railroad,” I said. “He wanted to work with the town on incorporation. He thought he could help the town incorporate and keep the railroad happy too. Is that why he was killed, Marshal? Was it someone against incorporation?”
“It may have been that, or perhaps a trolley striker’s bullet went astray. It may have been something completely different, but I intend to find out. What else did you talk about?”
“He spoke of his wife and daughters. One of them was nearly my age. Perhaps that was why he was so kind to me. He bought me an orange.”
“Why did he buy you an orange?” He leaped on my statement as if it were suspicious.
“I don’t know. I think he was worried about me.” I raised my wrapped hand. “I’d fallen and hurt my wrist. That’s all.”
He squinted at my lip, and I knew he was thinking about its swollen condition when I first arrived. He would ask now how I hurt it, and he wouldn’t believe a fall on the train.
“Miss Chumley! Miss Chumley, wait up a minute, will you?” a voice behind us called. We turned. Mr. Dunn ran up, his boots slipping on the snow. “I’m very sorry, Miss Chumley. Marshal Mitchell, you’re here too. Good. Just as well. I hope you had a pleasant first day of teaching, Miss Chumley?”
“It went very well, thank you.”
“What’s wrong?” Marshal Mitchell asked.
“Nothing, probably, except, ah, you haven’t seen Fannie, have you, Miss Chumley?”
“Fannie? No, I haven’t,” I said. “Is she missing?”
“No, not missing, no. At least, I don’t think... That is, she hasn’t come home from school, and her mother checked with a friend of hers, and it appears Fannie didn’t go to school today at all.”
“Oh dear.” I wondered if Will Sims had missed school too.
“I know she likes to keep secrets,” Mr. Dunn said. “And she likes to pretend she’s older than she is. I thought perhaps she might have confided in you, Miss Chumley. Do you have any idea where she might be?”
I thought she probably ran off with Will Sims to get married, actually, but I couldn’t admit to knowing that. They’d want to know how I knew and why I didn’t speak up sooner. “No. No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Did she take anything with her?” Marshal Mitchell asked. “Have you checked her room?”
“No,” Mr. Dunn said. “Not yet. I’ve been rushing around looking for her. I didn’t think to look at her things.”
“I’ll walk back with you,” Marshal Mitchell said. He dropped my books into my arms. “We’ll check her room. I’m certain we’ll find some indication of where she might be. Good evening, Miss Chumley. Thank you for your help.”
“Good-bye, and good luck, Mr. Dunn. Maybe she’ll be home by the time you get there.”
Mr. Dunn was too distracted to do more than nod. I watched them disappear into the falling snow, assaulted by conflicting feelings of relief and guilt. I could narrow Mr. Dunn’s search for his daughter considerably if I told him about Will and my suspicions about Fannie, but I was grateful that Fannie’s disappearance had diverted Marshal Mitchell from his questioning of me. Once again, as with Mr. Stanfield’s death, I was blessed by the misfortune of others.
Oh, Fannie was probably on her way home at that very moment, I decided, plagued with worry once she realized how late it had become. She’d be in some trouble with her parents, but it would be through her own doings and none of mine.
I shrugged off my guilt and trudged home.
I NEARLY FELL asleep at dinner that night, I was so weary. I would have skipped it altogether, but I felt starved from having no lunch. I ate in silence and let the talk of the table flow around me. Much of it was about the trolley strike and what everyone intended to do in Spokane when the strike was over. After dinner I made arrangements with Ida Mae to provide me with a bit of lunch each day for two dollars more a month, then dragged myself to my rooms.
I really wanted to take a hot bath and go to bed, but it was too early for that. The bathroom order had been established. Cora and Jane went first, Grace and Trissie second, and I would go last, when the bath mat was soaked through and the water from the tap had grown lukewarm. It wasn’t worth waiting up for. I would take a cold sponge bath instead.
I removed the combs and pins from my hair, shook it out, and stretched my neck with relief as the weight on the back of it eased. I poured water from the pitcher into the washbowl, and was unbuttoning the front of my shirtwaist when I heard a rap on my sitting room door. I quickly buttoned up again, moved through the sitting room, and opened the door. Grace stood in the doorway, and Trissie peeked around her shoulder.
“Mabel, may we have a word,” Grace said. Her vo
ice was hushed, for her, and she peered down the hall left and right as if worried about being overheard.
I forced my tired bones to stand straighter, on guard for her next words, and stepped back. What reason could Grace have to hush her voice with me unless she’d tumbled onto one of my secrets? Both women entered and I shut the door.
Grace looked around and said, “Still moving in, I see. You’ll want to get some nice things to put about, doilies and such, to make it homelike. You should step over to see our place. The rooms are the same, reversed of course, but they don’t look anything like this. Trissie will embroider some antimacassars for your chairs. Just for show, of course. You won’t have any gentleman callers.” She laughed.
I glanced at Trissie. She nodded and smiled.
“Thank you,” I said.
Trissie touched Grace’s arm and sent her a meaningful look. Grace gave a nod and said, “I’m getting to that, Triss. Mabel, we have here in Hillyard a group of women, women like you and me, that meets now and then for a private gathering. Just for talk about what interests us.”
“Women like you and me?”
“Yes, old maids and spinsters and women who work for a living. Career women, aren’t we? Oh, Trissie ain’t a spinster, of course, but she’s with me. There’s no talk of husbands or babies allowed. Just us and our lives and jobs. We’re meeting this Friday at Adelaide’s. Can you come?”
“At Adelaide’s house?”
“Well, it’s her uncle’s house, actually, but he don’t go upstairs anymore. There’s a big room up there on the top floor that we use for our salons. We call them salons, like the Frenchies.”
“We’d be so pleased if you could join us,” Trissie said.
Her soft voice surprised a smile out of me. She smiled back, and I didn’t feel I could refuse after that. Besides, Adelaide would be there, and intelligent conversation with working women sounded intriguing. I’d been one for an entire day, after all.
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