Ransacker

by Emmy Laybourne

  Now it was Sissel’s turn to blush.

  “I am usually right,” Alice said. Sissel laughed.

  It felt comforting to have things be normal and light for a moment. Family was most important, of course, but it was good to have friends.

  Reverend Neville came out and started walking around the back to the graveyard. Everyone followed in little clusters.

  The graveyard was just a cleared field, bordered at the back by the hill that ran along the north side of the town. Several boulders protruded from the earth, promising difficult digging for graves.

  At the center of the yard a long trench had been dug for the seven caskets. This seemed peculiar, but Sissel supposed that it had made more sense to build one wide grave rather than seven individual ones.

  The plain-hewn wooden caskets were already laid within the hole, a respectable distance between them. There were several great mounds of earth and stone waiting to be shoveled on top.

  The crowd fell silent and still in the presence of the caskets.

  “Come,” James said, “there’s shade this way,” leading her and Alice under one of the trees. It was cooler under the deep shade of the canopy of the tree. The green shadows felt like a balm on her strained nerves.

  Reverend Neville began a benediction. They were a bit far off to hear his words, but Sissel didn’t want to move from the tree. She saw Hanne and Owen standing to the side. From her sister’s posture alone, Sissel could tell she was upset.

  Sissel took in as deep a breath as the corset Alice had given her would allow. She willed herself to relax and think of nothing for a moment.

  She heard a humming. A strong, low vibration nearby. She dismissed it as a bumblebee. But then her fingers began to tingle and her hands twitched.

  She wanted to roll her eyes at her body’s exasperating weakness. Likely this tingling and twitching was some new, terrible symptom of some new, terrible sickness. Was she going to faint or swoon or embarrass herself somehow?

  Suddenly there was a lurch of movement in her heart. Sissel put a hand beneath her collarbone.

  A feeling opened in her chest, a great, warm sensation.

  The feeling was a yearning. Sissel’s breath caught.

  The hum grew very, very loud.

  Sissel glanced to Alice, then to James. Neither of them seemed to be noticing anything. Both were focused on Reverend Neville.

  James must have felt her glance, because his eyes sought hers, asking was she all right. She gave a weak nod, then closed her eyes, willing the strange feeling to be gone.

  Instead, the yearning called her forward. The sound grew more resonant. No longer a buzzing but a gonging.

  Sissel took a step forward, then two.

  “Sissel?” Alice whispered. “Don’t you want to stay in the shade?” Alice’s words seemed muted.

  Sissel looked at Alice and nodded. She did want to stay in the shade. She grasped at her friend’s hand. But then the feeling in her chest pulled her again and she stumbled into the sunlight. Her hands were now crawling with the prickles.

  The minister had finished blessing the first of the caskets.

  The grave. The grave was calling her. There was a warm, golden force calling to her heart from that pit of earth. It was singing, ringing for her. It was lighting up her hands, the shared light beckoning to them.

  “Oh,” she moaned. She shut her eyes, trying not to move forward, but walking forward nonetheless.

  “I think she’s not well,” she heard James say to Alice, his voice muffled oddly. She felt his hands on her arm. But she stepped toward the call. She was pushing through the mourners now, stepping on toes, surprising them all by stalking forward.

  Her hands reached out, as if she could touch it, whatever it was that wanted her so badly.

  She felt James’s strong grip on her forearms. “This way, Miss Hemstad,” he said. He made apologies to the people she was pushing past. “I think it’s the heat.” His voice came as if from a great distance inside her head.

  Then her sister was beside her.

  “Sissel!” Hanne hissed. “What are you doing?”

  Sissel saw Hanne’s mouth moving, but could not hear well.

  “Let me go,” Sissel said.

  She reached for the open grave. The minister stumbled in his prayer. James’s arms encircled her, restraining her. Villagers withdrew, gasping and whispering.

  Under the dark, sandy loam inside the graves, the force sung, beckoned, insisted Sissel come.

  “Let me go,” Sissel told James.

  She couldn’t hear her own voice over the resonant gonging from the grave.

  She must have it. She reached forward. She would find it, she would hold it.

  Sissel broke free at the edge of the grave, and she bent her knees to jump.

  James hauled her away.

  “No!” she cried. “Please!”

  Mercifully, the force overpowered her and the world went dark.

  CHAPTER SIX

  James stalked into Peavy’s Mercantile and General Stores, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  The bang made elderly Mrs. Denmead jump. “Heavens!” she shrieked.

  “James! What on earth?” said Peavy.

  James wheeled around.

  “Apologize!” he commanded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” James amended. Then, “Father.”

  “Not to me! To Mrs. Denmead.”

  James took a breath. “I am very sorry, Mrs. Denmead.”

  Mrs. Denmead, usually crabby and demanding, thought about this for a moment. “It’s a difficult day, James. I could slam a few doors myself.”

  She gathered her parcels, stopping to give him a little pat on the arm as she passed. “It’s a strain on the nerves. The business with the fires and the church this morning,” she said. “It’s just a strain on the nerves, son.”

  James nodded. “I shouldn’t have slammed the door. I’m truly sorry.”

  She gave him another pat on the arm.

  Peavy waited until she had tottered down the porch stairs before laying into James.

  “Jesus, boy. Get ahold of yourself,” he said.

  Russell Peavy was a man of considerable bulk, most of it belly. He had pudgy features, shaggy hair, and bushy eyebrows that allowed him to seem soft. He was genial and pleasant for the customers, but once they were gone, the smiles dropped and Peavy looked shrewd, cold, and sharp. James had seen the transformation hundreds of times, but it always made him feel wary.

  “What’s eating you?” Peavy asked, leaning on the counter with his arms spread wide.

  James shrugged. He turned his back to Peavy, fiddling with some sacks of beans that had shifted sideways on a shelf. He was worried about Sissel. Sincerely worried.

  After her strange spell, James carried Sissel to the doctor’s offices, Owen and Hanne hurrying next to him. Sissel weighed nearly nothing in his arms. It was like carrying an armload of laundry.

  Dr. Buell pronounced Sissel’s episode a clear-cut case of nervous exhaustion. Sissel’s health had not been good before the fire, and the shock of it was traumatic to her nervous system. She simply needed to rest, he had assured them. She would be just fine. Buell dosed Sissel with laudanum to sedate her, as Hanne paced in the small space and Owen stood twisting his cap.

  James had then driven them home in the store’s delivery wagon. Hanne sat in the bed of the wagon, near Sissel, who slept the loose-limbed sleep of the drugged the whole way home.

  Now James walked through the store into the back room. Peavy followed.

  James shucked his jacket and hung it on one of the nails driven into the wall for this purpose.

  “It’s damn hot,” James said. “How’s Rollie? Any word?”

  “How do you think? He’s flat on his belly in a burned-out field, watching the Hemstad farm through his goddamn field glass. He doesn’t get to dress up and nance about, pretending to be some well-off s
choolboy.”

  Peavy poured himself a cup of cold coffee from the pot on the stove.

  “I hear your girl tried to throw herself into a grave,” Peavy said. “You gonna get around to telling me about it, or do I have to get my news from old Mrs. Goddamn Denmead?”

  “It was during the funeral. She started acting funny. Dr. Buell says it was nervous exhaustion. I’m sure he’s right, after all that’s happened.” James didn’t want to tell Peavy how strange and alarming Sissel’s behavior had been, didn’t want to hear the nasty things he’d doubtless say about her.

  Peavy walked to the door and hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his pants, rocking on his heels. This action always precipitated a long, nostalgic lecture.

  “I was one of the first detectives Mr. Pinkerton hired—”

  “Yes, I know,” James said. “You were there to guard President Lincoln during the war. That’s where you got that scar on your back. We’ve all heard it—”

  “Grisly work. Years and years of dark dealings. Only a few jobs that didn’t end with me sticking someone in the ribs or pulling a trigger.”

  James sighed and rested his head back against the plank wall.

  “Here’s the surprise of it all. After all my deeds and misdeeds, I find I truly enjoy playing shopkeeper.”

  Peavy chuckled, looking out into the shop at the well-stocked shelves.

  “We’re lucky our Baron’s got such deep pockets. Money no object and all that. Look at what we get to work with. This might be the best assignment I’ve ever had.”

  Bankrolled by the Baron, Peavy had bought the store fully stocked from the previous owner, a rheumy fellow named Zagaruyka. The building had sleeping quarters upstairs and a cookstove in the back room, with access to a community well right out the back door. Not only this, but the store served as the town’s post office, which made monitoring the Hemstads’ mail easy.

  In addition to Peavy and James, there were only two more men on payroll. Rollie, a Pinkerton from Chicago, was on surveillance. He had bought an abandoned mining claim on a tract of land only a mile and a half away from the Hemstad farm, and posed as a prospector.

  Rollie had weathered the fire deep in the belly of the defunct mine. He monitored the farm with binoculars, and mostly reported being extremely bored.

  The other man on the job was an old friend of Peavy’s, Tyrone Clements. Clements was a tall, slovenly man whose face rested perpetually in an expression of dull malice. He lived at the boardinghouse, pretending to be a day laborer, and served as Peavy’s eyes and ears about town.

  Rollie and Clements were supposed to remain unnoticeable to the Hemstads. It was Peavy and James who were allowed contact, hired to play their parts carefully and well.

  “You know I love this damn store now,” Peavy said. “We have three kinds of suspenders, James. I’ve just signed up a new line of farm equipment. I may have you and Clements build a lean-to to display it.”

  Peavy removed a tin of chewing tobacco from a pocket in his vest and stuffed a pinch into the pouch of his cheek.

  “What are you saying, sir?”

  Peavy turned and fixed James with his bright, dark eyes.

  “My point is that it’s easy to fall in love, son. It’s easy to dream of going straight and joining the community, as it were.

  “But remember, the James Peavy your Sissel knows is a sham and a lie. She don’t know you’re just a bellboy. And before that you were just tenement scum, doing all sorts of filthy business to get by.”

  He laughed.

  “She thinks you’re going to college! To be a lawyer!”

  James looked past Peavy, out the door. Here in the West, it seemed a new world. It was easy to forget the dark and the stench of the slums of Chicago. His handsome, lying father, Conway Collins, cheating immigrants from their coins at the train station. His mother and aunt Elena, doing dirty, low work and drinking the money away. Always drunk, always crying on him, begging for him to help.

  The job at the Palmer House had been his first step out. It had been so hard to get clean enough so his neck wouldn’t get the stiff white collar of his uniform dirty. He’d bathed, scrubbing himself down in the alley next to the building where he and his parents lived. Buckets of cold water and a whole bar of store-bought soap. Limp laundry on lines above blocking the sunlight.

  James looked at his fingernails. They were clean. He meant to keep them that way.

  His head snapped up as Peavy set his coffee cup on the table and leaned in close.

  “Look here, I’m determined to train you to be a fine detective,” Peavy said. “I know you come highly recommended from Chicago, et cetera, et cetera, but I’m telling you—you’ve got a lot to learn. Your heart’s in the wrong place, son. Hell, your heart has no place in this business whatsoever.

  “Now, I’d like to hear your full account of what transpired this morning at the cemetery, and don’t leave a detail out, not a fart, not a sneeze, not a fly landing on a clod of horseshit.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sissel lay outside, near the barn, on their one straw tick. She was wrapped in a wool blanket given to them by the Ladies’ Aid Society. It was checkered red and black and had come, she had been told, from the Hudson’s Bay trading company, all the way in Canada.

  Her family was talking, gathered around the small campfire a few paces away.

  She woke to residual calmness from the laudanum. Even when she remembered the call of the grave, she was able to consider the issue with detachment.

  What had happened to her? Was it hysteria? She had felt a power beckoning her. She had been compelled by some force outside her.

  Could it be madness? Was she losing her mind now, after a lifetime of physical weakness and debility? No one else had heard the strange call. Madness seemed the only logical explanation.

  Sissel tried to close her eyes and go back to sleep. She wanted to return to the blissful haze of the medicine Dr. Buell had given her, but the conversation among her siblings and Owen wouldn’t let her rest. They were talking about her.

  “I’m inclined to believe the doctor. Dr. Buell is a good physician, and he knows Sissel’s case well,” Stieg said.

  “You weren’t there, Stieg,” Hanne said.

  “It must be nervous exhaustion.”

  “No,” Hanne said. “I told you. She tried to jump into the grave.”

  “Could it be she had a fainting spell?” Stieg asked.

  “I don’t know what it was! I’ve never seen anything like it,” Hanne said.

  Stieg spoke carefully, after a long moment.

  “In that case, Hanne, we must trust the doctor.”

  Hanne sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “She will be fine,” Knut said. “She just needs some sleep and good food.”

  “Well, I don’t think living here, out of a barn, is doing her much good,” Hanne said. “We must figure out what to do next, and where we go.”

  “We should move her to town,” Stieg said. “I would like for her to be close to Dr. Buell.”

  “We could look for a place to rent, perhaps,” Hanne said. “How much money do we have?”

  “Not much,” Stieg said.

  “How much?”

  “Three dollars and some change.”

  “Three dollars?” Hanne said. “But how can that be?”

  “I’ve been paying down our debts,” Stieg said. “I am to be paid soon, and we had run up some costs at the store.”

  “How much do we owe? I thought we were doing all right,” Owen said.

  “Altogether,” Stieg said, “we owe two hundred and forty-two dollars.”

  Owen whistled.

  “Over two hundred dollars!” Hanne exclaimed. “Stieg, we can’t owe that much.”

  “I took out a small loan from the store,” he said. “I hadn’t meant to tell you. I thought I would just repay it when I got a bigger school.”

  “What was it for?” Hanne said.

  “It was for the
medicine for Sissel, from when she was so ill last spring. The medicine from London,” Stieg said, keeping his voice low. “The iron bitters and the lung tonic, they were more expensive than I told you. But it did do some good—”

  “Oh, Stieg,” Hanne said, her voice strangled and tight. “How could you?”

  “I would do anything to help our sister, Hanne. You know that.”

  “And so would I. But to do it without asking us was not right.”

  Sissel remembered the vials of bitters, each one glass, sealed with wax. One hundred of them packed in cotton wool. They had looked plenty expensive, though Stieg had played the cost down at the time.

  Tears came to the back of Sissel’s eyes. She had griped and complained endlessly to Stieg about how bitter the medicine was and how it burned her stomach. How ungrateful she’d been!

  “You should have told us,” Knut weighed in. He was seated near the fire, stroking Daisy’s back.

  “I know,” Stieg said. “I’m sorry.”

  Hanne began to portion out beans onto their new, donated china bowls. The bowls were painted with a pattern of dainty blue roses around the edge and looked extremely out of place at their scorched campsite.

  Her silence spoke of how angry she was.

  “I felt bad, Hanne, for how little I was able to get for the last of the gold our aunt gave us,” Stieg said. “I should have traveled to get a better price. To San Francisco, if need be. If I had gotten a better price for the gold, we could have afforded the medicines easily. I’m not excusing what I did, only trying to let you see the emotion that influenced me.”

  “It’s bad news, Stieg. We’ve lost our home and the crop. Pal is gone. And Sissel is sick. Very sick! Now you tell us not only are we out of money, but we are in debt!”

  The siblings fell to silence. Hanne passed the bowls around. Sissel wiped away the tears from her eyes, careful to remain unnoticed.

  “Well, I have an idea how to make some money,” Owen offered. “About two weeks ago I had a letter from my friend Hoakes. He said he’d backed out of a job. He was headed to Texas, but he wanted me to know he’d recommended me for the job, in case I wanted it. A ranch not too far from here, the Bar S, is gearing up to drive around fifteen hundred beefs down to Helena. It’d be nearly two months’ work.”