For a second, she feels the earth dropping away below her, her legs weightless, and she feels for the first time the heavy dreadful certainty that the ripples from that barter will be never ceasing in her life—and in the lives of others.
Now she clears her throat. “What of—what of Leon?”
Fiona smirks, turns away, walks into the depot.
“He is away at private school in Boston,” says Abe, suddenly beside her. As Lily startles, a smile twitches across his lips. “Has been for a month, thanks to the generosity of Mr. Vogel.”
Lily stares at him.
“You are done here.” Abe’s twitchy smile flutters away. “Unless you’d like to help me with Mrs. Weaver’s trunk?”
Lily turns and heads back toward her house.
* * *
The two older Ranklin children—a twelve-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy—sit quietly beside Lily on the drive from the Bronwyn County Primary School, just west of town on Kinship Road, into the part of the county that flattens out into cash crop farms: buckwheat, some tobacco and sorghum, and in a few cases subsistence farms.
After they’d first left the school, Lily had tried to engage the children in conversation: Favorite subjects? Books? Friends? They’d only answered in single words or grunts, sitting as far away from Lily as possible, their grubby faces pinched with a mix of defiance and defensiveness. The boy’s hair is chopped unevenly short, the girl’s in greasy strands, nary a ribbon to hold it back from her face. A sour odor wafts off of them and their smudged, stiff clothes. Neither of them has a coat or hat, and late September’s turned chilly.
Lily’d thought she’d been doing the children a favor, saving them the three-mile walk back home, but now she realizes she’s only terrified them, that they’d likely said yes because they recognized the sheriff’s emblem on her automobile.
And so they all remain quiet for the rest of the drive, except for the girl telling Lily to turn at the “big rock” onto Forbidden Creek Run. Up a steep rise and then the narrow dirt road etched between brush and trees opens into a clearing to a small single-story farmhouse, slant roof capping the front porch like a hat brim. In the distance are garden plots, a field with a few cows and goats, a chicken coop, a barn that is small yet twice as big as the house. The barn has been freshly painted red, and the blue tin roof on the house is new. Missy, from her hardscrabble life in a deeper, farther holler, had seemingly married up and well.
And yet, despite the signs of prosperity, the Ranklin property has the air of shrinking in on itself, as if it had been salted down, like a ham. Maybe Missy had sensed it, too—the lack of sweetness about the place—as she took care of another woman’s children and ran afoul of her husband’s quick temper.
Lily pulls to a stop on the first flat stretch of yard, but not too close to the house. She wants Ralf Ranklin to have to take his time coming toward her automobile.
“Get on out,” Lily tells the children, but as softly and kindly as the words will allow. She wants Ralf to see his children first.
They stare back at her. Their wide eyes remind her of several of the asylum residents—gazes fraught with fear and uncertainty.
Lily smiles, even as she glances toward the house—the front door is creaking open. She inches her hand toward her holster. “Go on,” she urges. “I’ll make sure your father knows you’re not in trouble.”
At that, the boy opens the passenger door and tumbles out, his sister quickly following, running toward the house, until their father steps out, shotgun at the ready. The children bump into each other as they come to an abrupt halt, staring up at their father.
Lily quickly gets out of the automobile, keeping her hands spread wide but knowing full well she can quickly get to her revolver if she has to. Her heart pounds. She doesn’t want to have to. Not in front of these children. Not at all.
“Mr. Ranklin!” she hollers, keeping her voice steady and respectful. “I was at the school, needed to chat with you a bit, thought I’d give your boy and girl a ride home.”
He takes a step forward. “Ain’t no sheriffs pay a visit to chat.” But at least he lowers his shotgun a mite.
“First time for everything!” Lily calls. She gives a quick side-eye to the children, frozen in their spots, even as a big hound comes loping from around back of the house and is sniffling at the boy’s hands. “Teacher says they’re right good students. Well behaved.”
“Does she, now?”
Lily nods. The schoolmarm had said that, about these two. She’d been less complimentary about their younger half brother, seven-year-old Junior Ranklin, who’d attacked Jolene. Though she hadn’t been particularly flattering about Jolene, either.
Lily’s anger over the ridiculous situation reflames, but Mama’s voice reminds her: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. And, Can’t go wrong, complimenting people’s babies.
“She does. Says they’re good with their chores at school.” Lily picks her next words carefully. “Probably have some chores here, too.”
Ralf looks at the children. “You heard the sheriff.” He works the words around a plug of tobacco in his left cheek, then spits, as if spitting out the very notion of a woman in such power.
As the children run toward the porch, Ralf sets aside his shotgun. They stop before him, and he kneels, scoops them up in a big hug. Lily inhales sharply at the unexpected moment of tenderness and almost looks away to give them privacy. But she catches herself. This is a man who Daniel had repeatedly warned about smacking his second wife, Missy. And the schoolteacher had admitted, after Lily pressed, that Junior, Missy’s boy, had shown up to school several times with bruises around his eyes and lips—markings the other children didn’t have.
Ralf releases his children and gives them a kindly smile. “Bumper crop of string beans out back. A mess of ’em will make a right tasty supper.” The children drop their books on the porch, dash around to the back of the house, the dog at their heels.
Lily exhales slowly, relieved that the children are out of the scenario.
Ralf strides quickly toward Lily, until he is a few feet before her and she is forced to look up to keep her eyes on his. His face is rough and ruddy, his nose thickened and pockmarked, his eyes rheumy.
Lily lowers her hands, puts her left one near the fold of her skirt that only partially covers her holstered gun. Though he’d left his shotgun on the porch, it’s more’n likely he carries a gun or knife in his pocket, a sight she’d seen a few times, men who think they are so impervious to misadventure that they don’t even bother with holsters.
“Don’t think you’re going to haul me in on Missy’s say-so,” he says.
“I don’t. I can only bring you in on formal charges. There aren’t any at this time.”
“Then where’s Missy?”
“She’s not here?”
“Been gone five days, now. Kids see Junior at school, but he won’t tell them where he and his mother are staying.”
Well. That’s a surprising bit of news. “I do not know where she is. I came out here to talk with you about Junior. And my daughter. Seems Junior hit my daughter.”
“Yeah? Way the other two told it last night at supper, she hit him.”
“In self-defense. I don’t care if you have a problem with me being a lady sheriff. Vote for my opponent. But tell your boy to stay away from my children. The teacher admits that Junior comes to school with bruises, so I’ll be keeping an eye on him—and your other children—and if I see signs of abuse, I’ll be filing my own charges against you.”
Ralf steps forward and it’s all Lily can do to keep herself from stepping back. “I don’t hit my children.” While his breath doesn’t smell of shine, Missy had complained that he often drank—and became more violent. For a moment, Lily considers returning with backup, searching and finding his illegal stash or home still, and hauling him in on those charges. Then she thinks of the children, who’d been glad for his embrace. How gently he’d sent them out back, to pick a
mess of green beans for supper. And she turns his words over in her mind. She’d assumed Ralf had hit Junior—but what if it was Missy? Taking her own anger and frustration out on her boy? If she hadn’t had him, she could more easily leave Ralf. Having the boy complicated her situation. And while Ralf might tolerate her smacking her own son, he wouldn’t put up with her hitting his children by his first wife.
“Where’s Missy?” Ralf asks.
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“Don’t know? Don’t know?” Ralf’s voice turns mocking, and he pokes her sheriff’s star hard, sending her stumbling back. “Some sheriff you are!”
Lily quickly regains her stance, plants her boots wide. “Touch me again, and I’ll bring you in on assault charges.”
Ralf laughs. “You think you can take me on?”
“Yes.” She puts her fists on her waist, doesn’t reach for her revolver. She quickly assesses: a swift kick would knock his feet out from under him, and from there she could quickly flip him to his stomach and cuff him.
Then what? She couldn’t leave the children here. She’d have to take them back to town, too, away from their home and their hound dog and their mess of green beans for supper, and find a place for them to stay, and eventually Ralf might be released, or if Missy presses charges after all, emboldened by him being in jail, they’d probably end up in an orphanage. If Missy doesn’t even really want her own son, she won’t want her stepchildren.
“Look,” Lily says. “I don’t want to haul you in. But I can’t let you attack me. Missy keeps wanting me to give you a talking-to. If I see that she’s been hurt, I’ll have to haul you in even if she doesn’t file a formal complaint. The teacher said your boy defended his attack on my daughter because he thinks I’m too weak to stop you from hitting his mother. So we now have witnesses—your son and the teacher. Consider this a fair warning—and a suggestion that you and Missy work out whatever’s eating you, peacefully.”
Ralf glares at her but backs up and folds his arms across his chest. “Never had trouble with Arlene.” His eyes water up at simply saying the name of his first wife. “Man oughta be able to discipline his woman if she gets outta line.”
Lily swallows back the inclination to admonish that Missy is his wife, as well as her frustration with the knowledge that many men and women would agree with Ralf’s view.
“You tell her to get back home,” he goes on. “And I bet I know where you can find her—with that Margaret Dyer. Or at least she’ll know where Missy is.”
Before she can catch it, shock registers on Lily’s face.
“That’s right. Missy’s joined some women’s group that the Dyer woman’s leading. Missy’s gotten these ideas that she can tell me what I can and can’t do.”
“This women’s group—did Missy tell you the name of it?” Lily holds her breath, expecting Ralf to say, The WKKK.
Ralf shakes his head. “She didn’t go into that detail, ’cause I didn’t want to hear the other crazy ideas she started spouting. Didn’t want the kids hearing them, either. Forbade her to keep going to meetings, but Missy won’t listen.”
A door slams. The children, entering the back of their house with their mess of green beans. Lily looks past Ralf at the simple yet neat farmhouse, trying to settle and sort out this much bigger mess. She doesn’t support Ralf’s drinking to excess, yet she’s found Prohibition frustrating and nearly impossible to enforce, an endless drain on resources.
She definitely doesn’t support the stomach-turning principles of the WKKK, yet the group has the right to free assembly and free speech, and she can’t stop them from meeting—or recruiting vulnerable women like Missy—until they violate the law. That’s assuming the group Missy’s joined is the WKKK. Just because the group had gathered at the old Dyer farm doesn’t prove Missy’s involvement—the farm is abandoned, isolated, and could be used by anyone as a meeting area. For all she knows, Missy has connected up with Margaret and is trying to get in the Woman’s Club. There are certainly enough ideas bandied about at those meetings that Ralf most likely would disapprove of.
“You got any kin, nearby?” Lily asks.
“A cousin, on up the road,” Ralf says. “You got a beef with her, too?”
“Need to know where your children can stay, if I need to take you in. I’ll let your wife know you miss her—and your son. If she comes back, mind you keep your disagreements civil.”
Ralf gives her a long, hard look, then strides back to his front porch. He stops, turns, looks back at Lily.
“I prob’ly never should have married Missy. She was too young—not just in years. She’s simpleminded. But pretty. And I … well. I reckon you can understand, Sheriff.” At last, Ralf uses Lily’s title without irony. “I wanted a whole family again.”
He stoops to carefully pick up his children’s schoolbooks and goes into his house.
CHAPTER 18
HILDY
Thursday, September 23—7:00 p.m.
“You don’t have to stay, Hildy. I don’t think anyone’s coming tonight—”
“No, I’m here now. And I, I need to talk with you.” Hildy finally stops sweeping the same spot in Rossville’s one-room schoolhouse, around the coal-fired stove at the back, that she’d been sweeping for the past hour.
Olive gives Hildy a long, annoyed look. Olive has been irritable with her all day—and no wonder. Hildy had shown up at the schoolhouse, on the far edge of Rossville, at 10:00 this morning.
After running from Merle’s grocery, she’d rushed to her automobile—well, her daddy’s old automobile—and started it up, and driven as fast as she could to Rossville. On the hairpin turn on Kinship Road, between Widow Gottschalk’s house and the house where Daniel Ross had grown up, she’d nearly overturned her automobile.
She’d driven cautiously the rest of the way, until at last she came to the top of the hill and saw Rossville laid out below, a collection of humble buildings, pinned down by a coal tipple, in the holler below. Joy lifted her heart. Tom.
Then dismay overcame her as she drove down the hill and into the coal-mining town, past the scant miners’ houses lined up like a necklace strung around the base of Devil’s Backbone, the mountain that held the coal that had teased the town into being.
Of course the men were at work in the mines. With all the others, Tom would have taken his lunch pail with him and not come back out until after work ended.
Turn; go back; apologize to Merle; don’t act so insane; be reasonable, a voice had thrummed in her head. Yet on she’d driven, heart pounding.
Olive and the children had all stared at her as she burst into the schoolroom, out of breath as if she’d run miles, though it was only her thrumming heart that made her gasp so.
When Olive rushed over, asked if anything was wrong, Hildy had said no, she’d come early to help with … with—she’d paused, then stuttered awkwardly—anything that might make tonight’s tutoring session easier.
Olive’s gaze turned from alarm to concern. This was not one of the two evenings per week for tutoring.
Hildy forced a smile to her face, brightly chirped, It will be a special extra session tonight! Then she’d turned to the students, focusing on Alistair—Tom’s son—and said they should be sure to tell their parents about the extra session.
Even to her own ears, Hildy sounded manic—almost hysterical—and she knew she’d alarmed the children, who nervously looked at one another.
Olive had rapped a ruler against her desk and announced that Miss Hildy would be helping students that day and they should be respectful. To Hildy’s surprise, the day went quickly, and she’d enjoyed working with the children on their numbers and letters. At the end of the day, she had caught Alistair gently by his shoulder as he went out, and gave him a long look. Don’t forget to tell your father, she’d said.
Now Olive says, “Hildy, I don’t think anyone’s coming to this extra session tonight, and I know it’s not me you really want to talk with.”
Olive’s pit
ying gaze grasps Hildy from across the room, makes her look down. Oh. So Olive has figured it out. Does everyone in Rossville know? Tom had suggested as much two nights before, and now—given Hildy’s announcement of a special tutoring session—Olive must think she’s here to throw herself at Tom.
Well, she does want to see Tom, but there’s a more pressing matter.
Olive sighs. “I’m closing up the schoolhouse, and going home. You should, too.”
“No, wait!” Hildy snaps.
Olive looks at her, startled.
Hildy sets aside the broom and crosses over to Olive. “I’ve learned that there’s a WKKK group in Bronwyn County. I think I know who the leader is—Margaret Dyer, the wife of the man running against Lily for sheriff. I don’t know for sure, but some things she said today make me suspicious. And Olive—she was asking about you. And Clarence.”
The blood drains from Olive’s face. She staggers back, sits down hard in a chair.
“What … what did you say?”
“Nothing, really. Just … that you’re a good teacher, that there are no laws against—”
“Oh God, Hildy, do you really think such people care about the laws—or my goodness as a teacher? Did you confirm that … that … Clarence and I—”
Hildy shakes her head, hard. “No! Of course not.”
“Are you sure there’s a WKKK group here? How do you know?”
“There was going to be an editorial in the Kinship Daily Courier from an anonymous member of the WKKK. I only learned about it because, well, a woman died over in Moonvale Hollow Village, hit by the train,” Hildy says. She swallows hard. “In the same general area of my daddy’s old hunting shack.”
Alarm grows in Olive’s expression as Hildy continues. “I’ve been helping Lily find out who she is—and we did. It turns out, she’s a distant cousin of mine. Her name is Thea Kincaide. She used to send me postcards.… Anyway, she’s older and she’d been gone a long time, and ended up at the Hollows Asylum, but got out somehow, and wandered all the way over to Moonvale Hollow, and fell, or maybe was pushed—the sheriff isn’t rightly sure yet—from the top of the tunnel over the train, and before Lily figured out all of that, I wrote up a notice and made a sketch of her, and took it to the newspaper. To have space to run it, the editorial had to be bumped. Margaret Dyer made references that sounded so much like the editorial, and asked about you. I’m not sure how or if it connects, but the Dyers used to live over in Moonvale, and—Olive?”
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