Priscilla took a step toward the woman but then retreated when the knife came back up. Raising both hands, she said, “I’m Priscilla Stuyvesant. And this here’s Mason—”
“—Browne,” he added.
“Mason Browne. And you’ve met Brigham.”
The one-legged man batted his eyes over to the truck, spit a wad of pitch in that direction, and wiped his mouth with the frayed sleeves of his coat.
“We won’t try to hurt you. You can trust us.”
The woman’s eyes glistened. Priscilla saw a glimpse of dark memories there—violent, pitch black moments in an already difficult life. Lips trembling, she said, “You see this all around you? This city in pieces? It is not a time for trust.”
“As Mason told you, the truck’s broken.” She stepped forward again, but this time the woman kept the knife at her side. “I fear that none of us will be going anywhere.”
Snorting, the man said, “I fix.”
“You’re a mechanic?” Mason asked.
The man smiled, flashing a half dozen orange teeth.
“He fix the wash-room machines in the school. He did that work … before the war came and we must leave home.” The woman pocketed the knife, produced a soiled yellow cloth, and dabbed her eyes. Eyes clear, her voice grew louder, more defiant. “He fix and you take us.”
“Where’re you going?” Priscilla asked.
“To sea,” the woman replied. “America. No war.”
Turning to Mason, she snagged his arm and led him a few steps away. His military posture answered her question before she even asked. “What’d you think?”
Glancing at the couple, his answer came in a low rumble. “About what? About making a deal with an old woman with a knife and an invalid old Jew? Even if he can fix the truck, it’s a long journey to Southend. What proof do we have that the hag won’t slit our throats in our sleep when we pull over for the night?”
Gesturing to the broken skyline, she answered, “How long do you think they’ll last if we don’t take them with us? They’re refugees, Mason, nothing more than the rags on their backs. From their accents I’d say they’re Czechs—”
The touch of a tiny hand on her leg drew her attention away from Mason. She snapped her head down, reacting as quickly as she would to swat away a spider crawling across her skin. The little girl stood by her feet. Her emaciated face seemed to have aged prematurely and turned her into a smaller version of the old woman. She carefully handed Priscilla the knife, curled her lips into a questioning frown, and stared up with a pair of large brown eyes.
Taking the knife, Priscilla handed it to Mason. “They’re coming with us.”
His posture softened, shoulders relaxed, and he nodded and shrugged. Then he smiled, sly and full of innocent humor, and she saw how he must have looked when he was no older than the child at their feet. “I guess they are.”
Turning, she saw the old man lean over the truck’s engine and squint, probing with his fingers, already assessing the problem. The woman came over to them. “I am Keena Krayzel. He is my brother, Tamir.”
Priscilla dropped down to the child’s level. “And what’s your name?”
The girl just stared. Keena answered, “Her name is Dara. She is my sister’s baby. We are all she has. And she’s all we have.”
Chapter 3
Sitting on a short run of concrete steps across the street, Priscilla watched the men. They were crowded around the truck’s open hood, pointing and waving fingers, voices tittering with conviction. Three hours in, with daylight beginning to fade, the truck didn’t appear any closer to being repaired.
Swearing in Czech, Tamir jerked his hand out from under the hood, craned back his head like a lion readying to roar, and shook off the pain. Turning to Brigham, he curled his top lip and said, “No tools. Hard.”
Dara stood among the men, jumping up to snatch quick glimpses of the engine. Finally noticing her, Mason reached down and lifted her onto the dented bumper. Both hands on the grill, she leaned in. Tamir ruffled her hair.
Keena dropped down beside Priscilla.
“She’s curious,” she said.
Keena nodded. “Yes. Quiet but smart. In our town there’s man who make puzzles to sell them in market. He let customers try. If they solved the first time, he gave them. He say, ‘Shouldn’t let the girl play, leave me with nothing to sell.’”
Smiling, Priscilla watched Dara study the engine. The expression on the girl’s face reminded her of the precision with which her father would study an artifact, staring through magnifying eyeglasses with intense blue eyes, facial muscles taut, lips clasped tightly together. It was the same look she’d seen on his face at her mother’s funeral, the same gunmetal blank expression and penetrating eyes, more like an ancient monument carved out of stone than a living being. She remembered thinking that someday a man like her father might excavate her mother’s grave and attempt to piece together her life. She wondered if that future archeologist would be able to find any trace of their family in that buried box: the children who would mourn their mother forever and the father who never broke down and cried, not even when the phone call came and the devastating news hit his ears. He’d just thanked the hospice’s representative for letting him know, hung up the receiver, and finished reading the morning’s paper.
“Your mother’s dead,” her father told them at breakfast. “Died in her sleep. You may stay home from school today, if you wish. But just for today.”
But none of them had taken the day off, not her older brother James or little sister Katie. Instead, they trudged through the school day wiping endless tears from their faces. It was better than spending a day at home with Dad—especially, she imagined, that day.
Dara leaped off the bumper as the men took a step away from the truck. Brigham, behind the wheel, cranked the engine. It sputtered and wheezed but refused to turn over. Mason waved to Brigham to stop. The engine fell silent.
In the distance, somewhere over the jagged and torn rooftops of Whitechapel, Priscilla heard the drone of aircraft propellers and the popping of automatic gunfire. It was impossible to tell how far away the planes were. The evacuated city’s deathly silence distorted her perceptions. Echoes seemed too loud and distinct. She could only hope the Royal Air Force could keep the German planes at a distance.
“You have children?” Keena asked through a weak smile.
She shook her head in a tiny gesture, almost indistinguishable from a shiver, and said, “No.”
“No married?” Keena asked, the smile already gone.
“No,” she said, shifting her eyes to the men. “I mean, yes, technically yes. He’s … I haven’t seen him in years. Don’t have any idea where he is. With all this mess in the world, I suppose he might not even be alive. I just don’t know.”
In her peripheral vision, she saw Keena’s face drop. Raising two fingers to her lips, she kissed the knuckles, closed her eyes, and whispered a quick prayer in Czech.
“It’s okay,” Priscilla said. “We were young and I wanted so badly to get out of my father’s house. I wasn’t ready for marriage any more than he was. We lived together in a broken down apartment in Brooklyn for four months and argued every day. Then, a note on the table and his clothes were gone. I remember sitting at the kitchen table reading the note over and over. I didn’t feel angry or sad. It felt like relief.”
She didn’t tell Keena the rest: that she’d called her boss at the museum and told him she wouldn’t be in, that her husband had left and she needed the day off. He’d agreed, said his condolences, and told her to take all the time she needed; the fossils and artifacts would wait for her. Hanging up, she’d felt a twinge of regret for lying to her boss. She didn’t need the day off. She could have performed her job perfectly fine. But no, she stayed home and cried. Not for the husband who left or for herself, now alone in a bed two-times too large. She used the day off to mourn her dead mother properly, not holding back tears in a classroom, but in her own bed where she could let th
e grief spill out. Finally, years too late.
“You know where is here?” Keena asked, pointing down the street. “Is where the murderer—they call him Ripper—he killed the whore.”
She’d heard of the Ripper slayings on American radio and read more explicit accounts in the pulp newspapers but had retained only the brutality of the crimes, not where they had taken place. “Down there?”
“In alley,” Keena said, her voice dropping down into a whisper. Imitating a long knife with her hand, she ran her fingers across her throat. “He lure her out and cut her up, like this—”
Craning her head, Priscilla could see only a few feet into the alley before the shadows became impenetrable. The sound—the voice—she’d heard in the truck’s bed returned to her ears, only a memory now but just as wicked and frightening. She folded her arms across her chest and felt gooseflesh under her fingertips.
“Back there, he leave a message for police. It say, the juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Keena said nothing more, but her words hung in the air, as if staying to fill the quiet of the city street.
It was getting colder.
The truck’s engine whined and coughed as the men gave it another try. Brigham slapped the dashboard as he mumbled, “Com’on com’on com’on.”
With a sudden bark, the engine rumbled to life and the men cheered. Mason clapped Tamir on the back, nearly upsetting his one-legged balance, and said something about owing the old man a beer. Tamir wore a wide, proud smile as he told them, “I do. You see? I do. I fix.”
Brushing herself off, Priscilla pushed off the concrete and headed over to the truck. Keena followed a few steps behind. A jolt of paranoia shot through her as an image flickered in her mind: Keena pulling a second knife from her coat and sliding it around her, a flick of her wrist and her throat opened in a spray of blood. Could Tamir move just as quick against Mason? In a country at war, was a truck worth more than three lives?
Shooting her head around, she saw that Keena was still a few feet back, face blank, hands in her pockets. Still facing backward, she felt herself run up against a small body. Refocusing her attention downward, she exhaled. Dara wrapped both arms around her leg and stared up with a beaming, innocent smile. With a slight lisp, the little girl said, “It work now.”
“Yes.” It was all she could think to say.
“We go now?” Dara asked.
Mason dropped a hand on her shoulder. “Exactly a point we need to discuss, Miss Stuyvesant.”
“You can call me Priscilla.”
“I can. Something I can’t do is fit five adults and a child into that truck’s cab. I figure we can squeeze in four with the kiddie on a lap, but that’ll still leave one out.” Mason pointed to the tail of the truck. “When you opened the bed before, was there enough room for a passenger?”
The voice returned to her again, haunting and alien. The thought of riding inside the bed, locked in the dark with that voice droning, sent a chill clamoring up her spine.
“I dunno, it wouldn’t be comfortable,” she said, trying to conceal her discomfort with the idea. Her performance must have failed because Mason gave her a quizzical look, silently asking her what was wrong. She shook her head. “I don’t know if it would even be safe. The load could shift and—”
“I go,” Tamir said as he hobbled up behind Mason.
Mason turned. “You’re sure? It’ll be dark and cramped.”
The old man nodded and pointed to stump. “Need less room.”
The muscles lining Priscilla’s stomach wall tightened. She couldn’t imagine spending even a moment in the cargo bed with that voice, let alone hours. She studied the old man’s face and saw that he was resolute. He’d go. And anyway, they couldn’t leave anyone behind. Who else would be willing to stash themselves away in a dark, claustrophobic hole?
“Okay,” she said, agreeing to everything her body was protesting. Her stomach muscles grew even tighter, as if to punish her for capitulating. She wrapped her arms around her midsection to relieve the pressure. It didn’t help.
They walked to the rear of the truck. Mason threw open the doors. The available space was barely wide enough for a child. A single crate jutted out from the left, providing a narrow ledge as a seat. Mason and Brigham helped Tamir up and into the cargo bed. The old man wiggled into place, somehow squeezing in at an angle that would have impressed a sideshow contortionist. He didn’t complain.
Handing him his crutch, Priscilla asked, “Are you sure you’ll be okay? It’s a long drive.”
Tamir smiled. “Is good.”
She didn’t see any good in it at all.
Chapter 4
The truck crept down the country road as the sun dropped behind the horizon and the shadows lengthened until they strangled out the last of the daylight.
“Owney had an interest in a girl from the restoration wing. He’d always take this long, winding path through the building at lunch call so he could catch a glimpse of her working,” Brigham said in a voice barely louder than the engine’s uneasy rumble. “All of us down on the loading dock, we’d make good fun of it, ask him when he was going to ask her out for dinner or tease him that we’d heard she was dating ol’ Teasdale. He’d turn brighter than the cross in the Union Jack. But he never got angry with us, no matter how much we gave it to him. He was always smiling before long, always in cheer.”
Brigham sat flush to the passenger’s side door on her left, head flat against the window. On the other side, their thighs touching, sat Keena, and on her lap, bundled up, slept Dara. Mason drove.
Priscilla could see exhaustion in Brigham’s face, every muscle weighed down by the day’s events, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, lips never quite closing. He needed sleep, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to, not until he’d come to grips with Owney’s death. She wanted to say something—he seemed like a nice guy, or he must have been a great friend—but she’d heard all those lines at her brother’s funeral. James had been shipped home from Europe in a crate—a crate. She knew there were no sympathetic words that could possibly lessen the hurt. It was better that she stay quiet.
“He was too shy, y’know, to say anything to her. Didn’t think he was good enough, I guess. I doubt she knew more than his name, if that. Then one day she comes in to work and she’s got a ring on her finger—this finger here—the engagement one. None of us on the dock had the heart to tell him. Wanted to, as a good friend would, but couldn’t. Too hard. So he goes to lunch and takes that weird route of his through the building. I watched him go.”
A single round tear welled up in his right eye, large enough for Priscilla to see the truck’s headlights reflected. It broke free, tumbled past his lashes, and streamed down his face. Wiping it away, he finished his story. “He got to the lunchroom after a few minutes and sat down next to me. Had a look on his face like his mum had died. And he looks over to me and I freeze, my fork raised, peas spilling onto my plate, and I can tell he knows that I know already. So I say, ‘I’m sorry,’ but he shakes his head. ‘It’s just how fate has it,’ he says.”
Chest heaving, Brigham released a deep, wet sigh. “He believed in that sort of thing, fate. Maybe I did, too, to one extent or another, but not now. Not after today. There can’t be any plan to all of it, can there? Not when a guy like Owney who never owed any man a pence—not saint nor sinner, no one—could get killed like that.”
Driving, Mason tensed, clearly wanting to contradict him, but he, too, knew enough to remain quiet. She was sure Mason didn’t believe in fate any more than she did, but the look in his eyes told her he did have faith in a divine plan. She was thankful for Mason’s restraint; at the moment, she doubted if Brigham would have seen the difference. Scrunching up her face into a sorrowful smile, she said, “Try to get some sleep.”
He let out a quick, subdued laugh. “Right.”
Through the broken windshield the highway was barely visible, yellow-tinted headlights illuminating two short cones of gray asphalt; everyth
ing else was black. The moon and stars were hidden under a sky full of smoke and soot and clouds. She imagined the truck as a pinpoint of light on an endless black slate.
When Mason spoke, his voice came out crackling, the voice of a man forty years older. “The engine’s running, but we’re leaking fuel something awful. The harder I push on the pedal the more we lose. That’s why we’re barely covering twelve kilometers an hour. There’s a government petro station up ahead a mile or so. We can fill the tank and buckle down for the night.”
“We don’t have to stop.” Brigham sat up straight. “I can drive.”
That had been the plan, the original plan: three trucks driving straight to Southend, no stops. It no longer seemed reasonable. Too much had happened, a few hours drive had already taken most of the day, and they were all far too tired. The US Freighter docked at Southend would wait for them, even if it meant another day in port. Brigham was in no condition to drive, they all knew it. He did, too. Neither Priscilla nor Mason had to say anything. Brigham slouched back down against the door. The argument died before it was born.
Mason steered the truck off the highway and into the petro station. It was unlike any Priscilla had seen before, nothing more than a parking lot, two tanker trucks, and a handful of military Jeep Willys. As they parked alongside one of the tankers, a soldier rushed to their door. Mason fumbled with the paperwork in his shirt pocket before winding down the window and handing it over.
Keena’s eyes hardened and her mouth tightened at the sight of a man in a uniform. She pulled Dara closer to her chest.
“A full tank, sir?” the soldier asked.
Mason turned off the engine. “Please.”
There were dark blotches on the soldier’s jacket.
“Is it raining?” Priscilla asked.
The soldier scanned the sky. “It’s not rain, Miss, not most of it, anyways. Bombs build up the winds something terrible. Things get lifted up and carried around for a while. The sewers are all torn up ‘round town, I’m afraid.”
Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror Page 4