Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  TEACHER OUT OF SCHOOL

  Board Meeting Minutes,

  New Haven Manor September 29

  OLD BUSINESS

  New Haven executive director Michael Nilsson reported to the board that Elaine Logan set fire to the building on Labor Day (see September 8 “New Business” minutes). The fire was quickly extinguished, and no one was injured, but Mr. Nilsson explained that Elaine Logan was intoxicated, in contravention of New Haven rules; she has been warned twice before that the third episode would result in expulsion.

  The board discussed alternative placements, but Ms. Logan refused to go into a detoxification program, which all housing options similar to New Haven require. She collects a monthly Social Security check of $220; Rachel Carmody appealed to the Riverside United Church of Christ to supplement this with enough money to rent Ms. Logan a room in a regular rooming house. Ms. Logan stayed there for only three nights. She has been seen begging on Massachusetts Street and in South Park. After a long discussion, the board agreed that until Ms. Logan agrees to a detox program and commits to sobriety, we can’t house her.

  Three days ago, a Ms. Gina Haring, who is renting the old Fremantle house east of town, reported that Ms. Logan has been hanging around her property. Rachel Carmody agreed to drive out to talk to both women.

  OTHER OLD BUSINESS

  KU pathologist Bill Picking traced the recent shigella outbreak to a food handler, who has been fired for ignoring posted hygiene standards.

  Driving between the rows of sorghum and corn, Rachel Carmody felt insubstantial. The fields were dry and the crops close to maturity, but to her untrained eye the rust-colored sorghum heads and weathered tan cornstalks appeared dead. She drove this route several times in the summer when she came out to the Grelliers’ farm market, but today it looked unfamiliar, even ominous.

  The sky was the color of lead. It stretched taut above the fields, like a tent covering the prairie, keeping out air. With her car windows down—the air conditioner had failed last month, and she was trying to save money by not repairing it until next summer—the roar of the wind across the plants was so loud it drowned the radio. Although it was the middle of September, the heat still had the closeness of high summer.

  Rachel had a disturbing vision of the birds that hovered over the sorghum flying skyward and dashing their brains against the leaden sky. Teenage horror stories were compounding her dread of the errands she faced.

  The boys in her English classes, obsessed by war and horror games, often produced phantasmagoric scenes of zombies, werewolves, and other monsters in their school writing. No matter what the topic, whether fiction or nonfiction, she could count on a dozen dramas involving wizards and demons from the boys; the girls tended to write about world peace and harmony. The year the Lord of the Rings dominated the movie world, she read endless accounts of Orcs and Sauron terrorizing the world until some brave Kansas boy brought them to their knees.

  She’d just finished marking the first hundred fifty essays of the new school year on the topic “If I were in charge for a day” and found three that told her, “If I ran the government for a day, I would muster an army of Orcs to destroy all the Muslims.”

  Most kids facing that topic assumed they would be in charge of the United States, although a few wrote about running the school. Lara Grellier had turned in one sentence: “If I were in charge for a day I would oblitterate this whole sorry planet to save everyone the bother of destroying it one person at a time.”

  Rachel had marked it D, and added: “Lara, we both know you understand the assignment and that you can do better work. I don’t object to the sentiment, but to your laziness in not working it out. See me to discuss a second chance at this topic. Also, even for a one-sentence submission, use spell-check.”

  Rachel pulled over to let a dump truck pass her. Its wheels spat gravel into her windshield. How did the pioneers stand it, that vast expanse of prairie, where plants grew higher than the tallest man’s head, and land and sky and wind blurred into a ball of gray noise? Just driving through it, dust billowing around her, Rachel felt disoriented. But families like the Grelliers and the Schapens had built farms here when there weren’t roads, the women washing clothes in tubs they filled with water obtained at great hardship.

  One winter, for the church’s study group, Susan Grellier had made a presentation on Jim’s pioneer ancestors. She’d put up clippings from the old territorial newspapers on some of the great events of the day: how pro-slavery men poured into Kansas and threatened judges and killed settlers so that pro-slavery candidates won elections; John Brown and the Pottawatomie Massacre; Quantrill’s raids. Then, to show daily life against this backdrop, Susan read from Jim’s great-great-grandmother’s diary, where Abigail Grellier recounted how Mrs. Fremantle checked to see if Abigail’s linens were white and ironed.

  Sitting at the crossroads south of the tracks, Rachel noticed a small, hand-lettered sign pointing left to the OPEN PRAIRIE DAIRY, OPEN DAILY 10 TO 4. She knew the Schapens lived close to the Grelliers, but she’d never known exactly where they were. She craned her neck, looking for the Schapen house, but the sorghum field and high grasses in the ditches blocked any of the buildings from her view. Every now and then a car came north down the county road and turned toward the dairy.

  Junior Schapen had been a tiresome boy, the worst kind of student: ignorant, unprepared, and arrogant. He’d assumed that his status on the football team exempted him from classwork, and Rachel had endured more than one belligerent visit from the coach, demanding that she raise Junior’s grade from an F to a C. When she compromised on a D, she’d felt filthy for betraying her own sense of integrity; even so, the coach had treated her to another tirade, as had Junior’s father, dressed in his deputy’s uniform, and nearly threatening her with arrest for messing with Junior’s chance to go to college: even Tonganoxie Bible College, where Junior ended up, had some minimal admission standards.

  When she saw another Schapen on her class roster this fall, Rachel had been dismayed, but at least at first blush Robbie seemed like a different kind of boy, skinny, shy, interested in poetry.

  “If I were in charge for a day, I would make everyone stop what they were doing to sing a song, any song, not in harmony or unison, just sing. By the time they finished singing, they would be so filled with happiness, they would stop trying to hurt each other.” He had appended a second page, called “A song I wrote”:

  Her hair shone silver

  Under the prairie sun.

  Her lips burned with fever

  As she lay alone at night.

  Her tears gleamed

  Like diamonds through the mist

  When they laid her poor dead soldier

  Laid him in the dust

  “Please tell me, is this any good? Is it okay to rhyme mist with dust?” he had added.

  It was derivative, a country-and-western song, but it had some grace as well. She’d wondered idly who he was writing for, who he was too shy to show his song to. Rachel’s experience of adolescents was that they wrote about the particular, people or things they knew, not abstractions.

  Chip was the only Lawrence student who had died in the war. From the poem, Rachel wondered if Robbie had a secret crush on Janice Everleigh, Chip’s old girlfriend. Janice was studying business systems, whatever that meant, at a community college in Kansas City. She still came to the high school’s football games, driving Chip Grellier’s old Nissan and draped in his baseball-letter jacket.

  Rachel had always thought Janice was too superficial for someone like Chip Grellier, and surely even more so for a boy like Robbie, with his hankering for poetry. Now, sitting at the crossroads with the Grelliers in front of her and the Schapens to the left, Rachel wondered if Robbie had been writing to Lara Grellier. They must have grown up together out here, gone to that boarded-up little school she’d passed at the turnoff from Highway 10.

  Rachel was frankly worried about Lara. Until this fall, Lara had always been part of a crowd of ki
ds, both in Sunday school and at high school. She’d been a leader in the church youth group, a good student in school, the kind of bright, fresh-faced girl who made adults smile. Since her brother’s death, she’d dropped out of choir, didn’t come to Sunday school, and was doing abysmal course work.

  Lara had been working the Grellier booth at the farmers’ market in town last Saturday. Rachel went up to the table just as another woman asked Lara how her mother was.

  “My mother? Don’t you mean Chip’s mother? Susan Grellier has taken to her bed. I haven’t seen her for days.” Lara’s face blazed with a scorching anger, the kind of anger kids use to suppress tears. “She’s stopped eating. Maybe she’ll starve to death.”

  Since the start of school, Susan had been in church only once. She’d appeared emaciated, her face white under its bridge of freckles, her red-brown mop of curls limp and unwashed. It looked to Rachel as though Jim had practically carried her into the pew.

  Even the experimental farm, which Lara had shown off when Rachel came out in June to buy early tomatoes, was suffering. The sunflowers, heads all facing east, bowed under the weight of their seeds. The field was full of blackbirds, rising and swirling as they attacked the seeds, and the plants looked bedraggled, as if they weren’t getting enough water.

  “Your car break down? Oh, it’s you, Ms. Carmody.”

  Rachel squawked. She’d been so lost in thought she hadn’t noticed the man approaching the car. After a moment’s panic, when she tried to figure out if she could drive away with him leaning into the car, she realized it was Blitz Fosse. She hardly knew him, except as the man who cleared the teachers’ parking lot during heavy snowstorms. She knew he sometimes worked for the Grelliers, but she hadn’t recognized him out of the context of school.

  She smiled weakly, her heart still pounding. “I’m avoiding some hard errands, that’s all.”

  “They must be hard: I watched you sit there for ten minutes, looking like a kid called to the principal’s office.”

  “Yes, I’m a terrible coward.” She knew he was teasing, but she spoke seriously. “I don’t have the right skills to be a teacher. I love poetry and literature, but that’s not enough—you have to be able to stand up to abuse and backbiting. I don’t like having to fight people.”

  “Being able to hit people between the eyes is an overrated skill.”

  “If I were as strong as you, maybe I’d believe that.”

  “If you were as strong as me, you’d have a different set of problems. Every John Wayne wannabe tries to push you into a fistfight.”

  She finally smiled. “Okay, I can believe that. Are you spending a lot of time with the Grelliers? I’m worried about Lara.”

  “I work for Jim every year until we bring in the corn. Repairing equipment for the school board is something I do between harvest and planting, not the other way around. Didn’t you know that?”

  She shook her head, ashamed at her own ignorance. “I’ve lived in Lawrence for twelve years, but I’ve never figured out how to tap into the communal gossip spring.”

  He jumped back to her previous comment. “Worried about Lara how?”

  “I’m her Sunday school teacher as well as her English teacher. She’s not coming to church, which is between her and her parents, but she’s doing close to failing work in most of her classes, and she hasn’t kept her appointments with me.”

  “I wondered, way she’s been carrying on. Of course, the whole family’s in trouble—you know that if you know them from your church.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him squarely. “Last week at the farmers’ market, Lara said her mother stopped eating. How is Susan functioning out here?”

  He hesitated. “It’s not my business to pry into their business,” he finally said. “If you want to talk to Lulu—Lara—I’m not sure she’s home. I could be wrong, but I thought I saw her take off across the fields awhile back. If you want to talk to her folks about her—well, Jim’s carrying a heavy load right now. If Lulu is screwing up, it’ll just be one more thing he probably can’t do much about.”

  “I like him, too,” Rachel said. “I have to see Gina Haring, anyway. She’s upset because a homeless woman she sort of befriended is hanging around her house.”

  His thick brows shot up in surprise. “Why should you drive all the way out here because of that? Let Haring sort it out—she’s capable of just about anything, from where I look.”

  “Oh, she’s sort of a problem child. Not Gina, the woman. Elaine Logan. I’m on the board of a home where Elaine was living; we had to throw her out because she was setting the place on fire. Not on purpose—passing out while smoking. We feel some responsibility for her.” She mustered a smile. “Congregationalists don’t support a cult of the Virgin Mary, but I’m beginning to think I was dedicated at birth to Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. I’m tired of it, but I agreed to talk to Gina. I’m hoping that between us, we can come up with some inspiration about Elaine. Afterward, I’ll stop back by the Grelliers’. If Lara’s back, I’ll have a word with her about her classes.”

  His dark face relaxed into a grin. “No wonder you’re looking like a dog facing a burning hoop. Angry teenager and an ice queen in the same afternoon. That does take courage. Even if you were as strong as me, you couldn’t punch your way through those encounters. Still, you don’t mind people knowing you’re afraid, so you’re already ahead of the game.”

  He stepped back into the road, hesitated again, then leaned once more through the window. “Lulu needs to know how proud Chip was of her brains.”

  He slapped the roof of her car and waved her on her way.

  Twenty-Three

  WITCHES’ BREW

  A BATTERED BLUE FORD stood in the Fremantles’ drive, but when Rachel went to the kitchen door she didn’t get an answer to her knock. She stood for several minutes, listening, thinking, at least she’d tried to see Gina, she could turn around now. But after knocking twice more, she pulled open the door and stepped into the kitchen.

  The room was almost bare, as if Gina never ate or cooked. An enamel table, its white surface chipped and creased with knife scratches, stood under the window. It held only a handful of ripe tomatoes and the big cappuccino maker, which Rachel had heard about from Lara Grellier back in the spring when Lara was still a lively, engaged teenager. An old-fashioned industrial clock, dating to Mrs. Fremantle’s days as a bride, seventy years ago, ticked loudly in the still room in counterpoint to a drip from the rusted kitchen faucet.

  “Hello?” Rachel called. “Gina?”

  There were five doors in the kitchen, two leading outdoors and three into the interior. Rachel had been in the house a few times before, most memorably when Mrs. Fremantle let Susan Grellier run a tour of its Civil War history. What stood out in Rachel’s mind was not the layout of the house, but the mud-floored cellar, where Una Fremantle and her children hid from Quantrill’s raiders in 1863.

  Rachel started with the door farthest to her left. This led to the dining room; she stuck her head in and called hello again, more boldly this time. When no one answered, she tried the second door, which opened onto the cellar stairs, a set of planks, really, roughly nailed into steeply rising open stringers.

  Rachel shut the door quickly, remembering all too well the giant spiders from the tour she’d taken. “Harmless,” Susan had assured her, but Rachel didn’t believe any spider the size of her palm could be harmless.

  The third door led to a narrow stairwell, where chunks of plaster had disappeared from the walls, exposing the lath. Rachel heard a scrabbling sound, like papers being dropped, or mice running through leaves. She wondered if Gina were up there, sitting silent, waiting for her to leave.

  Her face grew hot. How dared Gina call, demanding help from New Haven’s board, and then hide from her? She turned to leave, but had a sudden vision of herself offering houseroom to Elaine Logan, not out of charity, but out of cowardice, because she hadn’t been able to face Gina Haring. She laughed nervously and started
up the stairs, pausing halfway to listen again.

  “Hello!” she shouted. “This is Rachel Carmody, Gina. You asked me to come out here, remember?”

  This time she heard a kind of thud, something being dropped. She ran the rest of the way up. The long hallway at the top offered another array of doors. She turned to her right and started flinging them open. The rooms beyond hadn’t been used in months, maybe years, judging by the thick dust on the floors and furniture. A narrow-gauge model train covered the floor in one of the side rooms, but it, too, was heavy with dust. Only the master bedroom showed signs of use, the unmade bed presumably the place where Gina slept. The floor in here was more or less clean, but you’d have to dust every day to keep up with the dirt floating in from the fields and the gravel road. The house showed no signs of someone who dusted every day.

  Gina had left a blue-striped nightshirt in the middle of the floor. It looked expensive, like all Gina’s clothes—combed cotton, maybe, or silk—something Rachel couldn’t afford. She almost bent to pick it up, then thought Why should I be her maid and moved on through the closet that connected to another unused room, this one stacked high with old magazines and papers. A limp tarlatan prom dress hung from the closet door. Here the dust had been disturbed by someone—Gina?—sorting through the boxes of papers. She’d dumped ones she didn’t want on the floor.

  Rachel left the room through a far door, past a door leading to the steep attic stairs. She called up the stairs and even climbed a few risers, but the heat up there shimmered down on her, at least twenty degrees hotter than the rest of the house, and she saw wasps at the top, like small parachutes floating on the currents of hot air. Not even Gina would hide from her up there.

  As she turned away, she suddenly thought of Elaine Logan. Why hadn’t that occurred to her sooner? Gina might have left the house, gone into town with some friend, which would explain why her car was in the yard and she wasn’t home. Elaine could have walked in, helped herself to the house. It would be totally typical of her, and typical of her as well to think she should run off and hide when she heard Rachel calling.