I went up the stairs as silently as I could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When I reached the landing, which looked out on the back of the house, I saw Eli through the large window. He was balanced on a ladder, and he was sawing at the rope that dangled Travis Seeley from the thick tree branch. When the rope severed, Eli lowered the body to the lawn, his magic making it float down gently … more or less. When Travis’s corpse lay on the ground, a cloud of flies flew up in agitation.
Eli scrambled down the ladder and threw up.
I eased up the remaining stairs. Behind the first closed door, there was another set of stairs going to the attic where Juanita Poe had seen the chest. That’s where I wanted to go. But before I did that, I had to make sure this floor was clear.
A guest bedroom was first. It was bright and dustless and empty. The next bedroom was for the son of the house, and there I had more luck.
A man I assumed was Holden Ballard lay in the large bed. His blood had seeped through the bandage around his chest. He was in bad shape, which pleased me. Harriet had stabbed him on the upper left, aiming for his heart. She’d almost made it. He might die yet. Ballard looked terrible, his color bad, his gray-sprinkled hair all rumpled. His sunken eyes opened just a bit when he realized someone was there. “Where is my mother?” he said. “Where is Myra? Or Juanita? Who are you? Hand me some water.”
“No.”
His eyes got all the way open in a hurry. “Dammit, give me some water, woman!”
“No.” This was the man who had gotten my friend Galilee pregnant by raping her. This man was why she’d had to leave her parents and begin a new life in a new country.
“How does it feel to be in pain yourself?” I said, with some curiosity.
“It hurts, dammit. What do you think?” He shifted around a little, trying to get comfortable. “Who were all those men downstairs? I called and called, and no one heard me.” He was angry about that. “For that matter, who the hell are you?”
“I’m a friend of Galilee Clelland.”
Holden Ballard’s face was blank for a minute. Then he said, “Galilee. I remember her. Where did she go?”
“She made you a daddy.”
He looked confused for a minute. Then he looked disgusted.
That pretty much sealed his case.
I heard footsteps behind me. Two people.
I whipped around and found I was pointing my gun at Hosea and Reva Clelland. They were not the people I thought I’d see, and I was glad of it. “You got here just in time,” I said.
“You come here the same reason we did?” Hosea was a little wheezy from the stairs.
“Hosea, Reva, take this woman’s gun,” Holden Ballard said. He sounded almost as wheezy as Hosea, though he was a good thirty years younger. His wound was killing him, but not fast enough.
“Not too likely,” Reva said. “We come to kill you.”
“It had crossed my mind, too,” I said, and smiled at the old couple.
“You hold down his hands, we’ll put a pillow over his face,” Hosea said.
“I’d just as soon shoot him,” I said. “That way, you can say you came out to help him and found him dead, if you have to.”
Holden struggled to sit up. He was making all kinds of noises, but we ignored him. His ideas didn’t count.
“Or here, sir,” I said, holding out the gun to Hosea. He hesitated, and in that moment Reva took the gun and turned to the bed. Though I think it was a lucky shot, Reva killed Holden Ballard with one bullet. He was a mess afterward, but she didn’t even flinch.
“Oh, thank you, Lord,” Reva said. “That I lived to see this day.”
That’s where Galilee had gotten her quickness and her grit.
The two old people stood there for a long moment, amazed they’d got vengeance for their daughter.
When Reva and Hosea could move, they made their slow way out onto the landing. Reva handed my gun back as she passed. “Can you two do me a favor?” I said. “My friend Eli is around here somewhere. Last I saw him, he was cutting down the hung man. Can you watch the front in case someone else comes? I’ll need to know. I have to go up to the attic.”
“Yes, we’ll sit on the front porch,” Hosea said, his arm around his wife. “Won’t no one surprise you.” He and Reva started down, step by step.
I figured Eli would have been startled by the shot and come a-running, but he didn’t show. I didn’t like that.
After a moment of waiting, I went up the attic stairs. They were broad. The servants could carry big things up or down. But the boards were plain, no carpet or rail, and the stairs were steeper.
There wasn’t a handrail. I hugged the left wall, carried one of my guns in my right hand. I kept my eyes focused upward. I was wavering on the edge of something, scared I’d fall. I’d seen a woman walk a wire once, strung between the grocery store and the jail. It had made a big impression.
The attic door was open. Light came through the unshuttered windows. Dust motes floated around lazily in the glow.
I mashed myself against the wall, staring in. There was no movement in my range of vision, but there was a corner of the attic I couldn’t see. As silently as I could, I stepped across the landing and scanned the other side. Nothing.
It occurred to me, way too late, that I should have questioned Holden Ballard about the chest, how he’d gotten it. Too late now. And he wouldn’t have told the truth, anyway.
I took a small breath and stepped into the room. And stopped dead.
In Texoma, we used everything till it broke. When it broke, we used the parts. But I saw that in Dixie, people like the Ballards put all their broken or outdated stuff into the attic. They thrust the smaller stuff against the walls where the roof was the lowest. The bigger stuff was in the middle. The room was jam-packed.
I felt helpless for a minute. Then I recalled the size of the crate. The chest could not be much smaller than the crate. It had only slid around inside a very little. So I set to searching. All the stuff in the attic blocked the light.
Since I needed all the help I could get (Where was Eli?) I pulled the string dangling from the lightbulb in the middle of the room, the point where the ceiling was highest. Then there was light, but there were also deeper shadows. And for a minute, the bulb rocked back and forth, and it looked like everything was moving, just a little.
I had to make myself stand still. I wanted to get out of this damn house. I took a deep breath and set my jaw.
Chairs, both grand and plain. A chest of drawers … or two. Old trunks, very dusty and square. A long, cracked mirror with its own stand. A battered bookcase, two children’s desks.
I realized I was gasping for air, and made myself still my breathing. What was wrong with me? I was looking at old furniture! Then I caught up with my sense and glanced down at the floor. Two sets of footprints, both man-size, approaching one particular spot and returning. Both sets of tracks led to and away from a big sheet of canvas draped over a group of things. I carefully placed my own feet by the prints and that was where I ended up, just as I’d suspected. I flipped back the canvas sheet, and there, pushed up against a discarded wardrobe, was the chest. It was the only thing that wasn’t dusty.
There was a half-dried puddle of blood in front of it. I thought instantly of the dead man on the couch downstairs. Who could have killed him? Holden put the trunk up in the attic before Harriet had gotten to him with her knife, which had been yesterday. This blood was fairly fresh, and the man on the sofa hadn’t been lingering long. That kind of wound, you don’t last more than a couple of hours.
Holden had not killed the man on the sofa. I tried hard to figure it out. But my brain was a tangle.
I knelt to deal with the lock on the trunk. But the lid opened with my first pull. I was looking down at a mess of cloth. Maybe once it had been fine stuff, and I could tell it had been blue. Now it was rotted. There were wads of it on either side, and what looked to be a single fold in the middle. I lifted it
as careful as I could.
And there was Moses the Black.
Over the bones lay what had once been a short sword. There was blood on it. I caught my breath in a gasp.
The bones were ancient, but I could tell they’d been those of a big man.
Jammed in beside the bones was some kind of paper. It might once have been a Bible. Or almost anything. I reached in and touched a leg bone with one fingertip. This man had been a real person before he’d been a saint. He’d been a killer, like me.
I felt very strange. I made myself stand up. I had to push off a vanity table with a broken drawer. I propped myself against it. Something else was in the attic with me, and it was not happy.
“I don’t want to steal your remains. I want to take them to the people in town who need you to lead them.” I was talking to a chest full of ancient bones, but it didn’t feel strange.
Next thing I knew, the bones and sword were gone and a man was standing between me and the trunk. He was big and very dark. I didn’t know when I’d sunk to my knees, but I had a terrible hard time not bowing my head.
“Who are you?” he said.
If thunder could talk, its voice would be like his. Though this man—this saint—had died in Africa, I guess one language is universal. The language of death.
“Moses,” I said, struggling because my lips were numb. “I’m one of the guards who brought your chest to Dixie, as a …” I struggled with how to say it. “As an inspiration for the black people here. They’re treated a lot like slaves.”
I forced my chin up. I looked into his terrible face. Something inside me relaxed. He was a fighter. I was a fighter.
Moses had long black hair mixed with gray, and a full beard. I didn’t know if he’d straightened it somehow, or if his hair was naturally less curly than I was used to seeing on black people. Though a robe or tunic covered his chest and his legs to the knees, on visible skin he had scars from here to glory. Sword and knife wounds, looked like.
“Your bones were stolen from my crew,” I said. “I was the only one able to look for you.”
“Talking a lot,” Moses the Black said.
I looked up at him sharply. I thought something you should never think about a saint. “I figured you might want to know why you were so far from Africa,” I said in a real pointed way.
“There is no home for me anymore,” he said, in a way I decided was a bit more civil. And a little sad.
“Your home is everywhere,” I said. “You’re a saint.”
It was like a bass drum laughed. Boom, boom, boom, low and slow. “I am? Whose misguided choice was that?”
“The Russian church,” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
“That came after you died.” It didn’t seem polite to mention his death, but I figured he was used to it.
“I stayed,” Moses the Black said, as if he’d just remembered. “I stayed when the marauders were coming. Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what marauders were.
“Now you’re here, I wish you’d help,” I told him.
“Petulant child,” Moses said.
I bit the inside of my lip. I wasn’t a damn dictionary. “Desperate woman is more like it. There is chaos in town.”
“Is this your town?”
“No. I live in Texoma. We’re in Dixie, the town is Sally. We got here on a train.”
“You guarded my remains?”
“Yes. But the train wrecked, and I got shot, and my boss got his throat cut, and Charlie died. Maddy still ain’t—isn’t—good to walk, and Rogelio was a traitor. My friend the grigori showed up—he’s on your side—and now I don’t know where he is.”
“I understood almost none of that.”
“Can you come talk to two of your people on the front porch, and then we can go into town to help ’em out? I’ll give you a ride if you need.” Maybe he could fly. “I’m gonna run and look for Eli.”
“There are Ethiopians on the front porch?” Moses the Black rumbled. He now looked as solid as I did.
“Yes,” I said. “Descendants of slaves.”
The big man followed me down the stairs and out the front door. I could hear his footsteps. I could not hear him breathing. He was barefoot, but he carried the sword in his right hand. It wasn’t real long or real skinny.
Pretty much the size of blade that had caused the wounds of the unknown man on the sofa.
I could not imagine the bones forming together and making the man, scraps of iron creating the sword—surely a monk had not been buried with a sword?—in time to kill the human man standing over it. That was outside my world.
Reva and Hosea were sitting in the rocking chairs only white people had ever used before. They seemed quite comfortable until they looked up to see my companion, and then they slid out of their chairs and onto their poor old knees. Maybe fear is a joint lubricant. Moses looked down at them and his stern face softened.
“My children,” Moses rumbled. “Do you know me?”
“We know you are a holy man,” Reva said, after a cautious pause. “I’m sorry, we don’t know your name, sir.”
“I am Moses the Black,” he said.
“Oh!” she said. Reva seemed too overcome to say anything more. But her husband said, “This white lady came to help us, and now her friends are dead. She almost got killed. Please, sir, let her keep healthy and help get our community out of this mess we’re in.”
I appreciated Hosea’s kind words while I pulled on my boots. But I was so anxious about Eli that I couldn’t stay, even for a saint.
While the three talked, I eased down the steps and around the vast house. The sky was darkening. I saw the leaves of the trees and bushes stirring. The same breeze, which promised rain, also brought me the terrible reek of Travis Seeley’s body.
I turned to look up at the house. No faces at any windows. The fields to either side of the house were flat, empty of anything taller than cotton. And I couldn’t imagine Eli, for any reason, returning to the bayou, which was the only cover in sight.
Except the cabins.
I had to get near to the body after all.
The ground was hard and dry, and there were so many scuffs and prints under the tree that trying to pick out Eli’s seemed useless. But I held my hand over my nose and mouth while I tried to make out what the prints were telling me. Finally, I picked out one toe mark I was pretty sure was Eli’s. Then I followed it. There went Eli, away from the body, walking on the dirt path that led to the whitewashed cabins. The cabins had been made to look pretty, with their paint and pretty flowers, but they didn’t even have running water. There was a pump smack in the middle, a bucket lying on its side underneath.
Why would Eli go out here?
Maybe he’d heard something, or seen movement where there shouldn’t have been any. I could search each cabin, one by one. Or I could try something else.
“Eli!” I called. “Eli! I found the chest. Moses the Black is here.”
The door of the second cabin jerked open and out Eli came, not of his own choice. He was shoved. Sarah Byrne was hiding behind him, and she had a gun to his back.
Ah. This I understood.
“Listen, Lizbeth!” Sarah shouted. “I’m getting out of here! This Eli is going to drive me to town, and then I’ll let him go. You won’t see me again.” She leaned out from behind Eli, just a sliver, to see how I was taking her proposal.
I shot her through the forehead.
“You got that right,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I could tell Eli was glad to be rescued because his shoulders kind of sagged.
“How the hell did she get the jump on you?” I said. I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him, so I didn’t do either.
“After I got through being sick, I saw there was a pump out here, and I wanted to wash out my mouth,” Eli said. “Next thing I knew, there she was.”
“You m
issed a few things.”
“Did you say Moses the Black was here?”
“He came out of the trunk.”
Eli stared down into my face. “He … manifested?”
“If that’s what you call becoming a real person with a real sword, yes.”
“Where is he?”
“On the front porch, talking to Reva and Hosea.”
“Galilee’s parents?”
“Yep. They came out here to kill Holden.”
“Holden Ballard.”
“Catch up, Eli! Yes, Holden Ballard. Remember, Harriet said she got him with her knife?”
Eli nodded. He was still looking at me kind of doubtfully, like he wasn’t sure if I was making all this up.
I never made stuff up.
“So Holden’s dead now. And I went up to the attic, and the trunk was still there, and I opened it.”
“And his bones?”
“Were still there. And a sword, about in the same shape as the bones. And what used to be a book or a scroll. Writing, anyway.”
“He has the sword?”
“Yes.”
“What about the book?”
“I don’t know.”
We walked around the house. I had wondered if Moses would disappear just to make me look a liar, but he was still there. The sword was in a scabbard at his side. I hadn’t noticed that before, the scabbard. Hosea and Reva were still on their knees.
Eli stopped dead.
“I guess we’d better kneel,” I muttered, and down we went. On the gravel driveway, this was not comfortable. With a lot of effort, I met Moses’s eyes, which were deep as wells and just as dark. The wind picked up around us, and loose strands of Eli’s hair whipped around his face. His braid was coming undone.
“Saint Moses, this is my friend Eli, a wizard of the Holy Russian Empire.”
Moses didn’t say anything.
“The Russians found you, remember? Brought you here?”
“Stand. This makes me feel ridiculous.” His big hands reached down to Hosea and Reva, and in a jiffy they were up.
I scrambled to my feet, giving Eli a side look to make sure he was doing the same.
A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose) Page 20