“But old Mrs. Ballard—” she began, and her father pinched her, and she stopped speaking.
I pretended I did not notice. “She surely could have died,” I told Dr. Fielder. “Depending on which pocket she fooled with.”
The doctor shook his head, looking admiring. “I wish I could heal like that,” he said. “No pills or ointments or injections.”
“You’d have to study as long as you did in medical college.”
“But it would save expense to the patient. And time.”
“Yeah, true. But Eli pays for it.” Eli was sitting on the chair. He was fine, but a little tired. “As it is, your patients pay you,” I observed.
“Your husband is lucky he could fix her,” the doctor said. “Might not go well for him, otherwise, no matter if it was Nellie’s responsibility or not.”
Since the doctor was right, there wasn’t much I could say to that.
Within the next five minutes, Nellie Mercer was able to walk out of our room. I expected Mr. Mercer to threaten us more, but he very politely thanked Eli and helped his daughter down the stairs. Dr. Fielder shook Eli’s hand and sort of ducked his head to me and invited us to dinner at his house. His wife would be glad to meet us, he said. Eli and I looked at each other, he lifted one shoulder slightly, I nodded slightly, and we agreed to accept the invitation.
When we were alone, Eli pulled a piece of paper out of one pocket on his vest. “This is for you,” he said. “And if she’d only opened that pocket, she would have been fine.”
I took the paper between my fingers, real carefully. “What is it?”
“This is a healing spell. It’s against our laws for you to have it. But I think you have enough grigori blood to make it work, at least some, and God knows we get hurt often enough.”
“I can’t read this.” The letters were English but the language was not.
“I wrote it phonetically.”
I guess Eli could tell by my blank look that that made no sense to me.
“I wrote it like it sounds,” he said. “Not the way it’s really spelled.”
Phonetically, I repeated silently. I read the words out loud. It was just a sentence.
“You say that and you pull out the grigori in you, it will help you heal.” Eli said this with great conviction. Probably meant he wasn’t sure at all, but he was hoping it would work.
I nodded, and tucked the paper into my repaired boot. I hoped I’d be wearing my boots the next time we got into a tight spot, not these shoes.
The afternoon was almost done, and we had only an hour to wait until we were due at Dr. Fielder’s house. I made up a bundle of our clothes, at Eli’s insistence, and we called the front desk to ask if a maid could come fetch the clothes for laundering. I didn’t recognize the voice that picked up at the desk, but a young woman in a green-and-white maid’s uniform arrived quick as a wink to pick up the clothes. She looked at us with an odd expression—half excited, half terrified. She agreed that our clothes would be cleaned and returned to us by nine the next morning.
After that, there was enough time for me to take another bath. The blouse and skirt were still fine, so I would put them on again with clean underthings. I looked at my jeans and my sleeveless shirt, which I had washed in the tub. I sighed. Eli had been right about what Dixie women wore. I hadn’t seen a single one in pants. I’d seen no white women without dresses and a petticoat, plus hose and garters, even the poor ones. I guessed I had to put the hose back on. So I shaved my legs again.
Eli ran his hand up and down them to make sure I gotten them smooth. Then he ran his hand a little higher, where no woman I knew had ever shaved. “I like that, too,” he said, and leaned over to kiss me.
“No, sir,” I said tartly. Because otherwise I’d let him proceed. “You could have a bath or shower too, and we could both feel nice for the doctor’s dinner.”
“We could both feel nice a lot sooner than that.”
“Eli. Not enough time!”
“Oh, all right. But later, when we come back …”
“Yes, later when we come back,” I said, looking away. It felt funny, talking about what we did together. Did other couples do that? Were we a couple? But there was a huge gap between us, and before I could get broody about it, I shut down that train of thought.
Eli decided to shower when we returned, so I brushed and braided his hair again, to make sure it was neat. I’d pocketed the map of Sally I’d spotted in the shoe repair shop, and I’d studied it while Eli was getting dressed.
“Tucker Street,” I said. “We go out the front door of the hotel, take a left, go south two blocks, take a right, take the next left, and we’ll be there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eli said, and kissed my cheek, quick and sweet. We set out to our first engagement as a married couple.
If people stared at us when we were coming down the stairs, if an older man shrank away so we wouldn’t touch him when we passed, well … I was used to that, and I was sure Eli was too. I suppose it was one thing to know grigoris cast magic spells, and another thing to see one work. We ignored them all. By the time we reached the sidewalk and turned right, Eli had taken my hand.
No one had ever held my hand before. Somehow people in Texoma always needed their hands free. I found it a little hot, a little sweaty, and since we were yoked we had to match our pace. But it made me feel good. The sun was setting, the air was a little cooler since it was breezy, and I thought the world was a tolerable place. Eli was holding my left hand, leaving my right hand free to draw my knife, which was a good thing.
Also, I’d put a Colt in my purse. I’m a gunnie. I just needed to have it.
The Fielders had a small house with a real pretty yard. Even in the heat, it looked green and tidy, and the flowers were blooming like hell. There was a brick walkway up to the steps leading to the front porch, which was across the width of the house. The house was painted white, like almost all the other houses in Sally. The shutters were dark green. I could not imagine having a house like this. “It’s so pretty,” I whispered.
I could not read Eli’s sideways look. He’d lived in the San Diego palace, so to him it was probably the same as the hovels we’d seen in Ciudad Juárez. “I like it too,” he said. I relaxed. Eli rang the doorbell once.
Dr. Fielder—Jerry—opened the door. “Please come in,” he said, standing aside with a sweep of his hand. “Millie! Our guests are here!” he called, turning a little toward the back of the house.
Millie Fielder hurried into the living room. She was wearing a blouse and skirt similar to mine, but in a golden brown print. It really suited her dark hair and eyes. Over her skirt she wore an apron, which had seen some use. She became aware of it the same moment she shook my hand, and she looked mock-horrified. “I never remember the apron!” she said. “Excuse me.” She untied it and bundled it under her arm. “Pretend you can’t see it,” she told Eli.
“See what?” he said.
“That’s a relief.” She smiled, and you had to like her when you saw her smile. Millie wasn’t exactly a pretty woman, but that smile was a wonder. “Please have a seat, and I’ll bring you all a drink. Wine or bourbon?”
“Bourbon for me,” I said. “Eli?”
“For me also,” he said, taking a seat. He gave me a complicated look. I realized I was supposed to offer to help Millie in the kitchen. “Can I give you a hand?” I said quickly. “I’d love to see your kitchen.”
Millie looked a little surprised, but she invited me to come with her with another wonderful smile.
The floors were polished wood scattered with throw rugs. We went from the living room into the dining room, then to the right of a fireplace and through a swinging door into the kitchen. I stared around me at the gleaming countertops and the oven with a cooktop built in on top of it. The sink was white like the stove and the refrigerator. The floor was linoleum, a dark green. There was a big wooden preparation table running down the middle with a white painted chair pushed up under it.
Millie had her back to me while she poured our drinks, but she whipped around as if she thought I’d been mocking her. She relaxed when she saw my face. “You mean it! But I figured … when Jerry told me your husband was a grigori, I thought you must be real rich.”
“Not me,” I said. “Not us. We haven’t been married long,” I said, after another pause. “In case you wondered. What about you two?”
“Oh, for four years,” Millie said. She tried to sound like it was nothing, but she turned her back to me again and began pouring into the glasses. Her back was stiff. What did this mean?
“You must have been real young.”
“ ’Bout your age, I figure. You aren’t twenty yet, are you?”
“No, a few months until then.”
“When I say we’ve been married four years, most people say, ‘And no babies yet?’ ” Millie said, her back still to me.
“Not my business,” I said, surprised.
She stopped pouring and halfway turned. “Really? Because everyone else on God’s green earth believes it’s their business.”
I shrugged. “Not me.”
“Thank you,” Millie said.
“Quite a few women don’t even want any,” I said, when I should have kept my mouth shut.
Astounded, she gazed at me blankly. “Like who?”
“Prostitutes,” I said. “And people with an illness. And people who just aren’t crazy about babies.”
“You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” Millie said, after a second of silence.
“That means I said something wrong.” I couldn’t figure out what it might have been.
“Not at all,” Millie said. “Can you get the kitchen door? I can handle the tray.”
Very soon we were sitting in the living room, Eli and I side by side on the couch, and the Fielders in matching armchairs, a table between them. Its surface was mostly taken with a pile of books, leaving just enough room for their glasses. It was almost dark outside, and the bugs were battering the screen doors. The wooden doors had been left open for the breeze, which almost amounted to nothing now.
I took a cautious sip of my bourbon, and it was good. I was working, and I would not finish this glass, but I could savor a sip or two. Jerry and Eli were chattering away, while Millie vanished to do something in the kitchen every few minutes.
I was quiet for the most part. I felt like I was visiting another world. Jerry was asking Eli a lot of questions about healing magic, and when that conversation had run its course, Millie asked me how Eli and I had met.
I glanced at Eli, who was looking like he wanted to hear the answer. Okay. “He and his partner Paulina hired me to guard them on a trip to Mexico,” I said. “I’m from Texoma.”
The Fielders looked a bit stunned. “And you guarded them?” Jerry asked slowly, as if he was feeling his way through a jungle or something.
“I did.”
“How?”
“Oh, I’m a gunnie.” They looked blank. “A shooter,” I explained. “That’s my job.”
They didn’t seem to know what to make of that. “You shoot people,” Jerry said very cautiously.
“I do. If they attack whoever or whatever I’m hired to guard. Not for fun.” I wanted to make that clear.
“Lizbeth is famous,” Eli said, and damn if he didn’t sound proud. I smiled right at him.
“Are you armed now?” Millie asked.
And then the gun was in my hand. “Yep,” I said. And it was back in my handbag.
“We aren’t going to go after your husband,” Millie said teasingly.
“We got the walk back to the hotel,” I said, matter-of-fact.
And there was another one of those weird pauses. Eli kissed my cheek, just when I was feeling pretty bad.
Millie stood, still looking at me like a half-dead bird her cat had dragged in. “Supper must be ready to go on the table,” she said. She kind of braced herself. “You want to give me a hand, Lizbeth?”
“Sure.” I hopped up and followed her back into the kitchen.
Millie got a roasting pan with a chicken out of the oven, and I held the platter while she eased it on. The juice went into a gravy boat. The mashed potatoes went into a bowl. The snap beans into another. And the rolls came out of the oven and went into a basket. The butter dish came out of the icebox. “This is it,” Millie said. “I made a chess pie for after.”
“It looks great and it smells wonderful,” I said honestly. I hesitated, and then I said, “You know how people always ask you why you don’t have babies? People who don’t know the business, they always want to know how many people I’ve shot.” Not that I’d ever met many people who didn’t understand my line of work. But it had happened.
“What do you tell them?” Millie was fascinated.
“I tell them as many as it took to do my job,” I said, and we began carrying the food through the swinging door to place on the dining table.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Since Eli and I had only had ice cream for our lunch, we were very enthusiastic about Millie’s cooking. And it was fun to talk to people we didn’t have to lie to … or at least, we didn’t have to lie to them much. Millie told me about her ladies’ group at the church, and her gardening, and her elderly mother who lived two houses down. Jerry talked about going to medical school in Boston, and how living in Brittania and talking to its people had changed him.
Eli talked about wizard school (though the Holy Russians called it some fancier name than that). I hadn’t been in school of any sort since I was sixteen, and old to still be learning. I stayed quiet, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in what they were saying. I just couldn’t imagine myself doing any of those things.
Millie said she’d been to two years of teacher college before she’d left to marry Jerry. “And you?” she said to me.
“My mother taught our school,” I said. “I left when I was sixteen and started work. That’s what kids in Texoma do.”
“And you went right into shooting?”
“Yes. I was taken on by a gun crew pretty quick, because I was good and had the grit to do the job.”
“What sorts of jobs did you take? Typically?” Jerry said.
He was trying hard to make it sound like I was a normal person, which I’d always felt until I’d come to Dixie.
“Typically,” I said, savoring the word. “Well. We guarded farm people fleeing from Mexico to New America, most often. The Mexican government had taken their farms, and they wanted out. We guarded shipments that had to go from Texoma down to Mexico, and ones that had to come back up. We took up the bounty on some bandits, once or twice.”
“Took up the bounty?” Jerry asked.
“Tracked ’em down and shot ’em.”
He gave a decisive nod, to cover his startled reaction. “Someone has to do that,” he said. “Lots of action, then.”
My turn to nod.
“And you still work for this crew?”
“They are all dead, but me.”
Nothing to say after that.
“Who wants some pie?” Millie asked with a bright smile, maybe not as real as her previous ones. “It’s chess, my grandmother’s recipe.” She vanished to the back of the house, but after a moment—during which I thought I heard a dull noise—she pushed open the kitchen door enough to poke her head out. “Jerry, grab some plates and come help,” she said. “Excuse us just a minute, y’all.”
Jerry leaped up to stack some plates. He looked worried, to me.
When we were alone, I turned to Eli. “Sorry I made ’em so uneasy.”
“It was the questions. If they’d asked me what I did with my magic most often, it would have been j
ust as awkward.”
I don’t know what I’d hoped for in socializing with the Fielders, but maybe it wasn’t this. I should have known.
Someone rang the front doorbell. My gun was in my hand before the chime had finished. I altered the way I sat on the couch so I could cover the door.
Jerry sped through the dining room, hurrying, looking unhappy. Millie appeared, her hip propped against the swinging door to the kitchen, a dish towel in her hands. She was frowning. Easy to see callers after dark were not the usual.
Millie said, “Lizbeth, could you give me a hand?”
I knew she wasn’t asking for help with the dishes. I tapped Eli on the shoulder to tell him I was taking the gun. Millie held the kitchen door so I could scoot through, purse under my arm. Then she went to the sink to run cold water, soaking a clean dish towel she’d snatched from a drawer.
Millie was not the only person in the Fielder kitchen. A girl, Negro and wearing a maid’s uniform, this time gray, sat hunched in the wooden chair, her hands over her face. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not, but she was doing plenty of trembling.
“I hit her,” she said. Then she said it again. “I hit her.” The girl didn’t seem to know how she felt about that. She sounded kind of numb.
“Oh, yeah? Who’d you hit?”
She uncovered her eyes and looked up at me, startled. She didn’t know I’d come into the room. “I hit Mrs. Moultry,” she said. “She pinched me again, and I slapped her.”
“I’ll bet she was some kind of surprised.”
“Lizbeth, can you go listen at the door and tell us what’s happening out there?” Millie had come around the table with the wrung-out towel, and the girl accepted it and put it to her face.
I tried to remember how much noise the kitchen door made—not much, I thought. I pushed it open very gently and listened to the men at the front door.
“My mother isn’t in her right mind anymore, Jerry. She’s getting worse. We saw her pinch Willa May,” a big man was rumbling. “Oh, I’m sure it hurt some. But Mama doesn’t know what she’s doing, and we hired Willa May to take care of her. Willa May hauled off and slapped Mama in the face, and then she ran out the back door.”
A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose) Page 11