“What…what happened?” Emmie asked him, trying to keep her teeth from chattering.
“Soldier did what Soldier does,” Willie replied. “Don’t ask me how. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know how.”
Emmie continued to stare at the mess in the snow, and the wind through the trees made her think of whatever it was she’d seen back on Waterman Street. “But Soldier’s still in bed,” Emmie whispered. “She hasn’t left the room.”
“You really shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “You’re gonna get sick. You’re gonna catch your death of cold. Haven’t you ever heard of pneumonia?”
“But she never left the room.”
“Yeah, well, she’s a talented lady,” Odd Willie nodded and stood up, dusting snow off the seat of his pants. “Stop looking at it. That ain’t nothing a kid like you ought to see,” and he took her hand and led her back towards the motel. When they got to the room, they found Soldier in the bathroom, awake and vomiting into the toilet bowl.
Stop thinking about it, Emmie tells herself. Forget you ever saw it. Forget you ever saw anything at all.
“He’s still not fucking answering,” Soldier says and throws her cell phone at the dashboard. It beeps loudly, bounces off the vinyl, and lands on the floorboard at her feet.
“It’s your decision,” Odd Willie tells her.
“Hey, if it were my motherfucking decision, asshole, we’d be all the way in goddamn Mexico by now.”
“Then we’re going in?”
“What the fuck do you think?”
It’s a dream, Emmie tells herself. The worst dream anyone’s ever had. And she watches the bright February day, the clean morning sun sparkling off so much ice and snow, the wide blue sky above the rooftops of Providence finally coming into view. She thinks about the black-skinned woman in the desert, and wishes that she knew the way back to her.
They stopped at the Cumberland Farms on Reservoir Avenue because Emmie said that she had to pee, and, she said, if they made her wait any longer, she’d end up wetting both herself and the car seat. “I have a weak bladder,” she lied, so Odd Willie cursed and pulled into the parking lot.
“If they’ve got it, grab me pack of Black Jack gum,” Odd Willie says, and Soldier tells him if he wants fucking chewing gum he can damn well get it himself. Then she leads Emmie inside, out of the cold and into the stuffy, crowded warmth of the convenience store. The air stinks of disinfectant and bad coffee, and something about the shadowless white wash of the fluorescent lights hurts Soldier’s eyes even more than the sun, even though she’s wearing a cheap pair of sunglasses Odd Willie picked up for her in Uxbridge. Her confrontation with Ballou and the fire thing beneath Woonsocket has left her half blind and headachy, and she squints behind the black plastic lenses, squinting through stinging, watery eyes. People at the counter turn to stare—curious, prying, unwelcome eyes for the battered, sunburned woman and the disheveled eight-year-old.
“I’m hungry,” Emmie says.
“Yeah, well, you can eat later. We didn’t stop so you could get something to eat.”
“But as long as we’re here—”
Soldier gives her a little push, and the woman at the register frowns and shakes her head.
“In and out,” Soldier says, hurrying Emmie down one of the narrow aisles towards the restrooms all the way at the back of the store. “You said you had to piss. Do it, and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Emmie snatches a bag of ranch-flavored corn chips off one of the racks.
“Put that right back where you got it,” Soldier tells her, but Emmie’s already opened the bag.
“Is that your plan?” Emmie asks and pops a triangular chip into her mouth. “To starve me to death so you don’t have to take me home?”
Soldier looks over her shoulder, and the staring people up front are still watching them. So is a man one aisle over. When she turns back to Emmie, she’s gone. The restroom door clicks shut, and Soldier sighs and decides to give her three minutes alone. She turns to face the plate-glass windows and there’s Odd Willie, waiting outside in the car, singing along to whatever’s playing on the radio and slicking back his hair with his pink comb; he probably couldn’t be any less inconspicuous if he set his head on fire.
“What now, Soldier girl?” the Bailiff asks, and Soldier spins around so fast that she almost trips over her own feet. The Bailiff is standing only a few feet away, standing there between her and all the people at the register. He’s wearing a gray corduroy suit with a silk vest the color of ripe raspberries, bright yellow galoshes and a wool hunting cap with the left earflap pulled down. He grins and picks at his teeth with a pinkie nail.
“You look ridiculous, old man,” Soldier says and takes a step back. “You look like a goddamn circus clown.”
“Have you perhaps been anywhere near a mirror lately? From the looks of it, Old Ballou must have put up quite a struggle.”
“Yeah, well, he’s dead,” Soldier says, and the Bailiff flickers and almost fades away entirely. Then, in an instant, he’s back again. He stops picking at his teeth and nods his head once or twice.
“And Saben? How’s she doing on this fine winter’s morn?”
“Why didn’t you tell me what we were walking into?” Soldier asks him, and the Bailiff smiles again and shrugs his broad corduroy shoulders.
“Soldier, dear. You know the refrain. Ours is not to question why—”
“Bullshit,” Soldier hisses, and the Bailiff holds an index finger up to his lips.
“They can’t see me, you know,” he says. “Perhaps you should keep your voice down.”
Soldier glances around the convenience store, staring back at the half dozen or so people who apparently have nothing better to do than stand around in Cumberland Farms gawking at strangers. The woman behind the register points straight at Soldier, then leans forward and whispers something to the moonfaced man who’s just set a box of Slim Jims and a six-pack of bottled springwater on the counter, and he laughs out loud.
“Since when did minding your own damned business cease to be an option?” Soldier shouts at them, and the cashier immediately stops whispering and goes back to pushing keys on the register. The moonfaced man snickers, covers his mouth, and stares down at his shoes.
“You’re still a paragon of subtlety,” the Bailiff snorts and pulls a white handkerchief from his breast pocket. The edges are embroidered with tiny bluebirds, and he blows his nose loudly.
“Saben’s dead. I killed her, too,” Soldier tells him. “We’ve been trying to call you all morning.”
“I’ve been occupied,” the Bailiff replies, then stuffs the soiled handkerchief back into his pocket. “As you may know, there’s been some trouble with the alchemist’s daughter. Do you have Saben’s little brat?”
“She’s taking a piss.”
“How precious. When she’s done, bring her to me. You and Master Lothrop, please bring her to me at once.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“No,” the Bailiff says. “I suppose I haven’t, have I? And perhaps I never shall. We’ll just have to see which way the wind blows, as they say.”
And then the air before her shimmers and the apparition of the Bailiff dissolves, leaving behind a smell like cinnamon and castor oil.
“Fucking bastard,” Soldier whispers, suddenly dizzy and nauseous, a tinfoil aftertaste in the back of her mouth, and she figures that’s probably the Bailiff’s doing as well. She leans against a sturdy cardboard ziggurat built of red-white-and-blue cartons of Pepsi-Cola, and the things that Saben said to her the night before come rushing back….
They’ve stolen so much from you. You don’t even fucking know the things they’ve taken away from you. Your whole life is lived in a fog they’ve spun to keep you ignorant.
Soldier takes a deep breath, swallows, exhales, and then looks at the restroom door. It seems farther away than it did before, and one of the fluorescent bulbs overhead has begun to buzz and flick
er.
Listen to me, Soldier. You think he didn’t know exactly what Ballou was doing? You think he believed you’d ever be coming back to Providence alive?
“Time’s up,” Soldier says, and she quickly traces a protective symbol in the air with her left hand before she goes to retrieve Saben White’s mongrel daughter.
Emmie’s sitting on the closed toilet lid in the Cumberland Farms’ women’s restroom. She chews the last of the salty corn chips, wishes she had something to drink, and crumples the empty Mylar bag. The woman named Soldier has started knocking at the door, trying to get her to unlock it, trying to draw her out. Emmie drops the crumpled bag to the gray tile floor and then kicks it hard with the toe of her boot; it bounces off the restroom door and rolls under the sink.
“Open the door,” Soldier whispers. “We don’t have time for this.”
Emmie shakes her head no, even though Soldier can’t see that she’s doing it. She went into the restroom planning to escape through a narrow window, just like she’s seen people do in movies. But there aren’t any windows in this restroom, narrow or otherwise. There’s only the toilet and sink, the mirror above the sink and the gray tile floor. She flushes the toilet again so she can’t hear Soldier, and for a few moments there’s only the gurgling sound of water racing itself around and around the porcelain bowl.
Six days ago, she sat in Kingston Station with Deacon, waiting for the train that would take her to see Sadie, waiting for New York City and a week without homework, a week of museums and galleries and food that Deacon won’t eat and all the other sights and sounds and tastes and smells of the city. Only six short winter days ago, but it seems like it must have been weeks and weeks. And the things that have happened since she boarded the train, since she noticed she was being watched by the woman with the Seal of Solomon tattooed on her hand, have changed everything forever, and nothing is what it was. She’s beginning to understand that this is permanent, this shift, that there’s no going back, no matter how hard she pretends it’s only a dream. Saben White, the girl from the attic, the black-skinned woman in the desert, Soldier and Odd Willie—all of them have torn her loose somehow from everything that was real and true before, and now this is what she has instead. All the hours since Saturday morning and Kingston Station have made her someone and something else, and she’s not even sure she knows what she means when she says that she wants to go home.
“Emmie, open this door,” Soldier says, louder than before.
“No,” Emmie replies flatly. “Go away. Leave me alone.”
“You know I can’t do that. Now open the damn door.”
Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll…
“I can find my way home from here,” Emmie says. “I can walk or call Deacon to come get me.”
“I’m not going to keep asking you….”
Emmie flushes the toilet again, drowning out Soldier’s voice. She stares at the silver knob and the restroom door that’s the same shade of gray as the floor and tries hard not to think about the bleeding, folded thing lying in the snow behind the motel. Odd Willie took it deeper into the woods before they left and burned it.
“I don’t want to be in this story anymore,” she says, but then the door opens easy as you please, just like she hadn’t bothered to lock it. Soldier steps into the restroom and shuts the door behind her.
“How did you do that?” Emmie asks her, much more angry than surprised. “I locked it. I made sure that I locked it.”
“Listen, you smart-mouthed little runt,” Soldier says, and, behind her, the door locks itself again. “I don’t have time for this crap. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know and what you think you know, but, right now, it doesn’t fucking matter one way or the other.”
“Stop yelling at me,” Emmie says very softly, and then she looks down at the gray tiles and pointy toes of Soldier’s thrift-store cowboy boots. “You don’t have any right to yell at me. I did exactly what she told me to do. I brought you the snow globe thing, because she said you’d die if I didn’t, and now I just want to go home.”
“Emmie, I can’t expect you to comprehend what’s happening. Hell, I don’t understand half this shit myself. But I haven’t got time to hold your hand and coddle you. I need you to do what I tell you to do and stop being such a pain in my ass.”
“I know that you and Willie are lying about taking me home. You killed my mother, and now you’re going to kill me, too.”
Soldier squats down so she’s at eye level with Emmie. “Listen,” she says. “It’s not up to me, whatever happens to you. I’m not going to lie and tell you that I wouldn’t kill you if that’s what I was supposed to do. But the hounds put you where they did for a reason, and if I hurt you I’d be interfering with their plans, and that, Emmie Silvey, would be the end of me.”
“Maybe I understand more than you think I do,” Emmie says. “Maybe Pearl and that woman in the desert told me things about you that even you don’t know.”
“Then maybe you should be so kind as to unburden yourself and fucking enlighten me.” And Soldier sounds more than pissed off now. She sounds like Deacon did the night that Sadie left them. She sounds dangerous.
“I’m not getting back into that car with you,” Emmie tells her and then looks away again.
“Yes, you will, little girl, even if I have to drag you kicking and screaming all the way.”
“But I did what she told me to do. I brought you the star. I brought you the star so you could stop that monster.”
“And now you’re going to do what I tell you to do.”
Emmie squeezes her eyes tightly shut, silently counts to four, then opens them again, something Sadie taught her, a trick to settle her mind whenever she’s too scared to think clearly.
“I saw the way all those people out there looked at us,” she says, turning to face Soldier again. “If you try to make me go with you, I’ll tell them all that you kidnapped me and won’t let me go home. I’ll tell them you’re a murderer.”
Soldier shakes her head and smiles, a resigned and weary smile that seems to bleed away some of the fury in her battered face, and for a second Emmie thinks that maybe she’s won the game, that maybe Soldier’s finally had enough, and now she’ll get up and leave Emmie sitting on the toilet. That Soldier and Odd Willie will drive off in their stolen car, and Emmie will never have to see either of them again.
But then Soldier pulls a big black pistol from the waistband of her jeans and holds it only a few inches from Emmie’s face.
“You’re a smart girl, and you know what this thing is, right? You know what I do with it?”
Emmie nods, her victory dissolving in the dull glint of the restroom light off the barrel of the gun.
“You do that—you start telling people things about me and Odd Willie—”
“And you’ll kill me,” Emmie says.
“No, I won’t kill you. But I will have to kill everyone else in here, every last person who hears what you say. And everyone who sees me killing them, I’ll have to kill those people, too. Men, women, children—at this point, I really don’t give a rat’s ass. And all those deaths, every one of them, will be because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut, Emmie. Now, you tell me, do you want that on your conscience? Do you really, truly want to have to think about that fucking day in and day out for the rest of your life?”
“You’d do that?” Emmie asks, though she already knows the answer.
“In a heartbeat. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ve done worse things.”
“Are you proud of that?”
“You should wash your hands,” Soldier says instead of answering her question. “You’ve got that Frito crap all over them. I’ll give you a minute to wash up.”
“They weren’t Fritos,” Emmie tells her and looks down at her fingers, dusted with salt and the ranch dressing–flavored powder. “The horse is dead,” she says. “From here we walk.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Soldier a
sks, returning the pistol to its hiding place.
“I thought maybe you might know,” Emmie replies, then gets up to wash her hands.
“Why are we going to the museum?” Emmie asks from the backseat of the Malibu. She’s sitting directly behind Odd Willie, putting as much space between herself and Soldier as possible. It’s the first thing she’s said since Soldier led her from the restroom back out to the car. “This isn’t even a very good museum. Mostly, they just have a lot of old junk.”
“I thought that’s why people built museums,” Odd Willie snorts. “To have someplace to keep all the old junk.”
“You’ll see, Emmie,” Soldier says and flicks a cigarette butt out the car window as Odd Willie comes to a stop directly in front of the museum building. It seems worn and out of place in the city park, like some peculiar temple to the Victorian scientific enterprise, maybe plucked from the streets of nineteenth-century Paris and meticulously reassembled, stone by stone, in Providence. The steeply pitched roof is covered in black shingles, and the yellow-pink granite facade is decorated with bas-relief Corinthian columns and elaborately carved acroterions. There are stained-glass windows set deeply into the semicircular arch above the entrance, dormers higher up, and a great clock tower front and center.
There are no other cars in the parking lot, and no sign that the museum’s even open.
“It’s not the museum we’ve come for,” Odd Willie says and kills the engine. “It’s where the museum leads.”
“The museum leads to the Bailiff?”
“Like I said, you’ll see,” Soldier tells her.
“I heard your stepmother’s some kind of witch,” Odd Willie says. “If that’s true, she must have told you that things aren’t always what they seem. Never judge a book by its fucking cover and all that. So, you might see a run-down, rinky-dink little museum, but me, I see a passageway, a secret avenue—”
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