… where there were alligators. I was so shocked it took me a moment to say alligators to myself. Three of ’em.
Eli didn’t slow down, he ran right among ’em. I plunged after him. We were moving so quick, and in the heat and sun the alligators were slow and drowsy. That was going to change any second, because two people flying through was guaranteed to rouse ’em. I found I could run a lot faster than I’d thought I could. So could Harriet, because she passed me.
Two of them were small, one as big as I’d ever heard of. But the three gators might as well have been a score. The big one bellowed.
“I have a plan!” Eli called back to me.
Oh, I was completely at ease now. It better be a good plan. Did Eli’s magic work on animals? Reptiles?
Since Eli’s legs were longest and he was in the lead, I figured he was in the least danger. I dodged the snap of huge jaws and leaped over the fourth gator (I hadn’t even seen it!) as it was twisting to bite. I noted Harriet veering away from the bank into the strip of woods and I wanted to follow, but I took off like a deer after Eli.
The gator came after me for a little bit, and I found I could run even faster. In fact, I could leap over a fallen tree, and the gator could not. That tree saved me, I figured.
When I caught up with Eli, he was bent over gasping for breath. When I looked down, I could see why he’d stopped. It was a drop of five feet down to the dark water. I couldn’t hear any movement behind us, though I listened as hard as I could over Eli’s rasping breath.
“Harriet?” he managed to say.
“Somewhere behind us,” I said, with just as much trouble. “Why the hell did you … ?”
“If they’re following us, they’ll run into the alligators too,” Eli said. “Only now they’re all excited. The gators, I mean.”
I felt a little bad about Clete.
In a couple more minutes we had gotten our breath back. We started walking parallel to the bayou. “What now?” I said. “Since you’re the man with the plan.”
“I’m all out of plan,” Eli confessed. “That was all I had, getting away and having a chance to think.”
“I reckon now is the time for the thinking part of it.”
“You’re not hurt?” He bent to look into my eyes. “Nothing to worry about.” Bruises, scrapes. Little things. I’d feel like hell tomorrow, but right now I was fine.
“Go back for Harriet?”
I thought about it for a few seconds. “No. We got her out of the Ballard house, which was more than she deserved.” We were talking in spurts, because we were walking fast.
“True.” Eli stared up into the blue sky. “Here’s what we can try. We work our way back to Sally and find refuge with either some of the black people who are for rebellion, or we can go to the Fielders.”
“Or we can steal a car and get the hell out of here.” That was my very own idea.
“But we haven’t finished our job.” Eli said that with this real elaborate patience, like I was dumb.
“I got the bones as close to Sally as I could get with the train blowing up!” I was mad now. “That was my job, and I did it! If someone who knew what was in that crate hadn’t blabbed, none of this would have happened!”
“Ssh, ssh,” Eli said. He was looking at the way we’d come. Alligator alley.
I heard a shriek, faint and far away. And yelling. And gunfire.
“All right then,” I said. “We can’t go east, because the nearest town is twenty miles away and we have nothing. I have my guns. My clothes are back at the hotel. I got no money. I’ll bet you don’t, either.”
Eli patted his pockets. “Not much.” At least he had on his grigori vest.
“The bones were last in the Ballard attic. I guess they’re still there. We don’t know if Holden Ballard will live or die from the knifing. If he dies, we might be okay. There might be enough hoorah for us to get out of Sally.”
We were in big trouble, isolated in a place where everyone’s hand was turned against us—everyone who was powerful, that is. And the people who weren’t powerful, that was a little chancy, too. They were terrified of failure. I could understand that. But they’d wanted the bones, they’d got the bones, the Holy Russian Empire was willing to back them to some extent, and if we didn’t leave, we had to come up with another plan.
I was in favor of getting out while we could. My mission was over.
But Eli’s was not.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Our return to town took three times as long as it should have. We were both tired and aching, we had to stay off the road and in what cover we could find, and we were thirsty. I knew better than to drink bayou water, because it was full of alligator shit. No, thank you.
I’d seen enough of that bayou to last me the rest of my life. Which might not be very long, given the situation we’d put ourselves in.
Finally, we reached Sally. We’d decided we’d go to our hotel, openly, because … we needed our stuff. And we had to find another car, if that was possible. It was lucky the first person we saw at the hotel was John Edward. He was shocked to see us coming to the back door.
“Didn’t sound like you, the man hanging on a tree at the Ballard place. But I was worried,” he said, low and quick. “You go up our stairs, the servant stairs. You got your key?”
Eli did have our key, which was one good thing.
John Edward scouted the stairs and unlocked the door to our room so we wouldn’t have to stand there, exposed.
“They’re after us?” Eli asked, after we were safely out of sight.
“Nobody knows what-all is going on,” John Edward said. “People are saying Miz Ballard’s dead, man got hung behind her house, trackers going through the country with dogs. Those two white folks missing from the other hotel. All the people who worked out there are in town hiding with kin.”
“The man that got hung is the missing man,” I said. “The woman ran back to town with us, partway, but we’ve lost sight of her.” We had to talk to John Edward, but I wanted to get in the bathroom so bad I was almost crying. “And Mary Ellen Ballard is dead.”
“Oh my Lord.” John Edward’s eyes were wide, and I could not be sure what he was thinking.
“John Edward, now is the time,” Eli said. He was using his serious voice, the one that pushed you to act.
John Edward looked terrified. He took some deep, ragged breaths, and then he said, “Yes. I see that.”
“Are you sure the relics of Moses the Black are still in the attic?”
“Before she ran away from Miz Ballard, Juanita went back to the attic. She says the trunk is still up there. It has to be the right one.”
It had been galling to have to leave the object of our search when we’d actually been at the house, but we couldn’t have carried that trunk on our scrambling, running, gator-ridden trip to Sally.
I told Eli and John Edward I was going to clean up and they could keep talking if they wanted to. I grabbed what I needed out of my bag and the closet. I was really glad to have clean clothes. A clean bathroom. A bed with clean sheets. Not that I’d get to sleep in it.
It was a huge relief to shut the bathroom door behind me. I sat on the toilet with my hand over my face for a long moment. Then I started the water running.
I knew my day wasn’t done, as much as I wanted it to be.
Eli stuck his head in the door as I was climbing out of the tub. “We have company,” he said. “You need something?”
“I got all my clothes.” My real clothes.
When I came out in my jeans and boots, feeling like myself, Jerry Fielder was sitting in our room.
“… whole town is ready to blow up, like the train,” he was saying. He stood when I appeared. “Lizbeth,” he said.
“Dr. Fielder … Jerry. I hope your wife is well.”
“She’s pretty upset just now. I wish I’d gotten her out of Sally before today.”
I looked a question at Eli. He shook his head just a trifle. Jerry Fielder did
not know what had just happened at the Ballard plantation. Eli wasn’t going to tell him, and I didn’t know why.
I heard a scream outside in the street. For the first time, I wished our window overlooked the front.
“I’m sorry now that we talked to your representative,” Jerry Fielder said. “When he first came to town and had such careful conversations with a very few people, I should have known …”
“You should have known that drastic change doesn’t come about without turmoil and bloodshed.” Eli looked … serious.
“I didn’t count on all hell breaking loose,” Jerry said, and now he was turning angry and bitter.
“This cause is a noble one, backed by our church,” Eli told him in a low, steady voice. “A noble cause doesn’t mean all the people who will benefit are noble. Or that the process of achieving our goal will be painless.”
“This town will go up in flames!” Jerry said between his teeth. He was wound so tight he might explode.
I wanted to leave the room, go to the window at the end of the hall overlooking the street, to see what was happening. But I did not dare to. I was locked in on Jerry. He didn’t sound exactly level-headed. He and Eli were focused on each other.
“First off, maybe all hell needs to break loose here,” I said, to break the glare-down. “When people are held down like this, they’re going to rise up. Bad stuff will happen. There isn’t any sweet, reasonable way to do this.”
“This violence didn’t have to happen,” Jerry said, almost snarling. “I thought the bones of a saint would make the change … peaceful. We only have a rumor about the bones of Moses the Black, and everything is going to hell.”
Eli didn’t know what to say.
“What do you want?” I asked. Get it over with.
“I want you to bring the damn bones to town to see if you can calm things down.”
As soon as Jerry Fielder left, I went to look out. For the first time, I noticed how quiet the hotel was. I didn’t think there was anyone left who would have heard Jerry, even when he’d raised his voice a bit.
The hush was eerie, especially since there was so much noise outside. Since we’d come in the back way, we hadn’t registered what was happening on the main street. I saw whites running down the sidewalk throwing their luggage into their cars, driving away like they were possessed. The reason? The street was sprinkled with little clusters of men armed to the teeth. Some clusters were white, some were black. None were mixed.
As I watched, a brawl started. Neither of these groups was carrying guns—yet—but there were rocks and two-by-fours and iron palings and baseball bats.
I didn’t need to watch them slug it out. And they’d be running home to get their guns soon.
I went back to the room and nodded at Eli. “Bad outside,” I said. “Jerry was right. All hell is breaking loose.”
“We have to go back out to the Ballard place. We have to get a car.”
“I know where one is.”
“How so?”
“There’s a man out on the front sidewalk, dead, right by a car with its door open. I’ll get his car keys.”
Before Eli could object, I ran out of the room and down the stairs. I had my gun in my hand and I looked both ways before I ran out to the body. Keys were still in the dead man’s pocket, which was a stroke of luck.
The car was well-kept and old, an early model of the Celebrity Tourer that Eli and his late partner, Paulina, had rented for our trip to Mexico. It was a luxury car, with a panel in the roof you could fold back. That had already been done.
We piled in with all our possessions. We were not coming back to the Pleasant Stay. “You drive, I’ll shoot,” I said.
Getting to the road we’d followed before was not easy. For a while we were followed by a crowd of armed black people, who were ready to kick some white butt. I didn’t blame them. There was no way for us to explain we were on their side.
No sooner had we gone fast enough to lose them than we were surrounded by a white group coming around a corner just as we passed through an intersection. They were angry because they were sure we were fleeing. “Stay and fight!” screamed one man, waving a rifle in our direction.
“This is depressing,” Eli said.
That was not the word I was thinking of, but it was that, also. “At least we got away.”
A brick hit the hood and bounced to the ground.
“Spoke too soon,” I muttered, and Eli sped up.
I’d been threatened and chased. Someone would pay for the tension that was making my muscles tighten and my nerves hum.
When I saw a man running straight for the car with a burning bottle in his hand, I popped up through the roof and shot him. Lucky I did. The bottle blew up in his hand when he hit the ground.
Eli yelled. My gun going off had been a complete surprise. He hadn’t seen the man coming, he’d been concentrating so hard on driving.
And that was why he needed me.
Eli was more alert to our surroundings after that. “Group coming up on the left,” he said, steering closer to the curb on the right. I was up and pointing both guns at them before he finished. It was a group of black men and some women, too.
“It was her,” one of the women shouted, and I recognized the maid, Myra, from the Ballard place. “She’s good.”
And they all halted in their tracks, and let us go by.
“Did she mean ‘good’ as in ‘good shot,’ or ‘good’ as in against the forces of evil?” Eli said.
“Don’t know, don’t care. As long as they held back.” All of a sudden I felt how tired I was. It had been a long, long day and it was not yet over. We were on our way back to the Ballard house. I dreaded it.
At least some things I’d feared came to nothing. When we turned into the driveway, the men who’d tracked us were gone. The lawn and driveway were marked with the tire tracks of several cars or trucks, and there were footprints everywhere. A dog had been all over, I could smell the scent of its markings. There was a sad air hanging about the huge house.
“My car is still here,” Eli said, wonder in his voice. “They didn’t disable it.”
“No one was around to tell them whose it was,” I pointed out. “We can take it back to town when it’s safe to go.”
I got out of the car quick, keeping my eyes on the house. But no one appeared. The windows were empty.
We approached the porch slowly. Eli’s hands were up, and so were my guns. Mary Ellen Ballard’s body was no longer there. The wooden front door was still open. I pulled the screen door handle, and it made a terrible screech as it opened.
Eli made a quick step inside and to the right. I followed him, going to the left, letting the screen door bang shut behind me. Anyone alive would know we were in the house by now.
The wide hall had a chandelier hanging down. There were shadows everywhere. There was a dark red carpet with a pattern, there were a few upholstered chairs, a small table or two. A long mirror. I’d never been in a house this big and fancy. All I felt was gloom.
Nothing stirred. After waiting a long moment, we wandered through rooms as big as my house. One was real fancy, so I guessed it was the company parlor. A bathroom, but with just a toilet and sink, no tub. There was a dining room, I could tell from the furniture. There was a smaller room I decided must be a sitting room for the family itself. There was a big kitchen, a pantry containing a refrigerator, and a locked closet.
“Should I break it open?” I whispered. Then I wondered why I hadn’t just asked out loud.
“No, it’s for the family silver,” Eli said, and I noticed that his voice was pretty low too.
Out the kitchen door on the north side of the house, there was a plain back porch where wooden chairs served for the help when they were shelling peas and so on. There may have been more, but that’s what I saw. The last room I entered was a study, or library, or office.
“I’m going outside,” Eli said from the hall, as if he’d spotted something that needed his a
ttention. “Find the chest.” I only nodded, not even turning to look at him. I wanted to keep my eyes ahead. There was something bad in this house.
I heard his footsteps fading away, sometimes muffled on the carpets, sometimes loud on the polished floor. I took off my own boots. I hoped nothing could hear me coming now.
The doors were all open, and most of the windows, too. In the study, the only sound came from the blessed breeze. It made the curtains ripple and it flipped at the corners of the papers on the study desk. Lucky there was a paperweight to hold ’em down. At the other end of the same room, someone had lowered a wounded white man onto a couch, removed his boots, and carefully placed those boots where he could see them.
But this man would never pull on his boots again. His face was slack and empty. I bent over to look at him, saw he’d died from a knife thrust to the belly. Made by a big knife, maybe a machete. The wound wasn’t new. This wasn’t the overseer Travis had killed.
His eyes opened, giving me the shock of my life.
“Watch out,” he said. “Watch out.” And he was gone for real.
My heart was thudding so hard I had to hold on to the edge of the desk. He was the fifty-ish man who’d been on the train in our car, watching us.
I gave the study a quick search. Nothing I found made any difference to me. Eli might find the letters of interest, but I wasn’t about to take the time to read.
I spared a glance for the dead man, who was still dead, before I looked at the clock. With a dart of alarm, I realized I had not seen or heard from Eli for maybe ten minutes.
Yet something in the silence of the house made me not want to call out.
I was torn between running out to look for him and doing as he’d bid me. I reminded myself that Eli was as capable of defending himself as I was.
A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose) Page 19