What You Said to Me

by Olivia Newport

  “Arata may have killed a man,” Clifford said, “but his greater crime in their eyes is being Italian.”

  “Stick together and stay to the walls of the buildings,” Loren said. “Head away from the jail.”

  Missouri’s breath convulsed as a gang of men ripped the lights from the streetcar the three of them had just occupied. Others thundered down the block with lamps from other cars.

  “They mean business,” Clifford said. “They want to see what they’re doing.” He gripped his daughter’s arm so tightly he might well leave a bruise. If that’s what it took to keep her safe, he would risk it.

  No matter how far they walked or in which direction, the riot hampered any normal movement. More than once they were pressed so tightly together or against a building, their lungs scarcely found space to expand. Blocks that seemed familiar and open in daylight—or a normal evening under streetlamps—were horrific, bloated distortions of anything Clifford ever imagined might happen in the only city Missouri remembered calling her home. He could not begin to estimate the assemblage—and that was too kind a word for the intentions of this evening.

  Pressing against the tide, they gained a few yards at a time until they reached Seventeenth Street, barely advancing two blocks from where they’d first boarded a streetcar. They had no hope of another as long as they remained on Larimer, but there might be one if they could thread their way eastward to Curtis. Just when Clifford thought it was safe to let out his breath and they would find safety on the avenue that would carry them home, the sound of the crushing horde shifted. It followed them now.

  “Papa!” Missy’s terror rose again.

  The men had Arata, and they moved faster than Clifford could aspire to move in these circumstances, reaching Seventeenth and Curtis ahead of them and shutting off the possibility for a streetcar.

  “It’s only a few more blocks now,” he said. “We’ll keep trying to go northeast. We’ll get ahead of them.”

  “We don’t even know where they’re going, Papa!”

  “Yes we do,” Loren said.

  “Where?” Missy asked.

  “Don’t look. Just head for home.” Loren turned her shoulders and nudged her away from the intersection.

  “You’re coming home with us,” she insisted.

  Loren met Clifford’s eyes.

  “I’m not going if Loren’s not coming.” Missouri set her feet solidly. “Papa, you cannot think I would leave him in the middle of this.”

  “No, of course not. Loren is coming.” Clifford pushed his daughter forward again.

  “Just don’t look,” Loren said.

  “What is it you don’t want me to see?” Missouri asked, though she did not crane her neck to look.

  Clifford was not sure of the answer to her question. Whatever Loren was protecting her from would be in tomorrow’s papers. Kittie’s father would be sure of that.

  When they heard the gunshots, Loren only tightened his grip on Missouri’s hand and pulled her forward.

  “What happened to your pack?” she asked.

  “Someone snatched it three blocks back,” Loren said.

  “But that’s everything you own.”

  Loren shook his head. “It was nothing of value. Keep going.”

  The grandfather clock in the front room gonged midnight when Clifford and Missouri, grimy and exhausted, crept in the back door and paused long enough in the kitchen to wipe the worst of the night’s misadventure from their faces and arms before climbing the stairs. Surely, Clifford told himself, by now Georgina would have surrendered to her own exhaustion and gone to sleep. If she woke during the night at this point, she would find him there beside her. Loren was tucked into a corner of the stable on a bed of clean hay. Humble as it was, it might have been the best accommodations he’d seen since leaving Mrs. Mitchell’s boardinghouse. Missouri had promised breakfast at dawn.

  Over muffins, eggs, and coffee considerably after dawn, Clifford read the morning newspaper. The man Daniel Arata was believed to have killed, because he did not pay a five-cent bar tab in the early hours of the day before, was Benjamin Lightfoot, a Civil War veteran. The crowd that broke into the jail demanding Arata be handed over to them numbered ten thousand. Very few could possibly have known Mr. Lightfoot. That he was a veteran and that Arata was an Italian immigrant were the more salient facts. Though Arata had first denied killing Lightfoot and then said the mob had the wrong man, eventually he confessed. They’d strung him up, naked, on a cottonwood tree at Seventeenth and Curtis—that must have been what Loren did not want Missouri to see—before filling his body with bullets. Satisfied that they had accomplished justice, the rioters dispersed, and the police cut down the body and took it away, presumably to the morgue. Considering the nature of his crime, the newspaper estimated that the lynching saved the county between three and four thousand dollars, while the damage to the jail was only a thousand dollars.

  Clifford folded the paper once and then again. No one else in his household needed to read the gruesome details. Certainly not Missouri. Certainly not Georgina. If Corah and Lity heard them from Kittie, he could not prevent it, but they need never know their father and sister had nearly been trampled in the riot.

  And they must not know about the man who’d slept in the stable.

  He caught Missy’s eyes and offered a half smile to her blanched expression.

  “I’m going downtown today,” he announced to Georgina. “The city is considering some decisions for addressing the issue of all the unemployed men, and I’d like to hear what they have to say.”

  Georgina eyed him. “Where’s your money clip?”

  “On my nightstand. Empty.”

  “I’m sure you’ll have some good ideas to contribute. I know you care about the men.”

  “Thank you. I’m just going to check on the horses first.”

  He kissed Georgina on the cheek, nodded at Missouri, went out the back door, and strode down the side of the vegetable garden to the stable. Loren peeked out from around one corner. Clifford waved him out with a tilt of his head, and they fell into a quick pairing of pace away from the house.

  “The relief camp is opening not a day too soon,” Clifford said.

  “Though perhaps a day too late,” Loren said. “I can’t thank you enough for taking me in last night. I’ll find someplace to go tonight.”

  “I think we’re past that,” Clifford said. “What would I say to my daughter?”

  “What will you say to your wife?”

  “I’ll figure that out. She likes having a carriage, but the truth is, she rarely uses it anymore. And she sends Lity to the garden. She prefers using the front door. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Mr. Brandt, I don’t want to make things complicated.”

  Clifford looked at Loren out the side of his eye. “You already did that when you stole my daughter’s heart. But I know who you are, Loren. Everything is complicated right now. You wouldn’t do anything to hurt Missouri. Georgina will see that eventually.”

  They strode a block in silence.

  “So the relief camp,” Clifford said. “Eight hundred men, they say. Hopefully it will help quell some of the violence starting to foment.”

  “Maybe last night wouldn’t have happened if they’d opened the camp sooner,” Loren said.

  “They’re promising employment for some of the men on city projects.”

  “It won’t be enough. Not nearly. And once word gets out about a camp and jobs in Denver, miners from all over the state will head here.”

  “That won’t solve anything.”

  Loren shrugged. “This is far from over.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The whop of a door slamming before he even got in the house startled Nolan. Then he spied the green bicycle propped against the porch, beneath the open living room windows on the front of the house. It was nearly three in the afternoon. He hadn’t expected to find Tisha anywhere in the neighborhood when he came home from Denver
a few hours early. Drew was staying over a couple of nights, and they’d planned a few hours of cooking together. And there might be some singing.

  Shenanigans, Jillian called it. But so far she’d never not smiled all the way through an episode of the Drew and Nolan Show.

  Tisha stomped down the porch steps on the side of the house.

  “Tisha, we need to talk about this.” Jillian stood framed in the doorway.

  “You decide what you need,” Tisha said, “and I decide what I need. And it’s not this.”

  Nolan met Tisha at the bicycle, and his fingers gripped one side of the handlebars. “What’s going on?”

  “Just make sure she signs off on my hours, okay? And let go of my bike.” Tisha yanked her bike out of Nolan’s grip. “I worked hard to win this bike in that stupid eighth-grade science quiz contest so that at times like this I could get away from the adults in my life who think they’re so brilliant but actually aren’t.”

  At least Nolan now understood why an otherwise savvy, modern teenager was so attached to a mode of transportation most kids abandoned by middle school. Nolan watched her pedal furiously for a couple of seconds before shifting his attention to his daughter and climbing the steps. “I guess there’s a story here.”

  Jillian threw up both hands as they went into the house together. Drew met them in the living room wearing a white apron over his jeans and T-shirt. She went right to his arms, and after a brief hug she plopped into the sofa.

  “It was horrible, Dad. I was horrible.”

  “That wasn’t the way I heard it.” Drew sat beside Jillian and took her hand.

  “Smells good in here. You started without me.”

  “Just raspberry turnovers for dessert,” Drew said.

  Nolan glanced at the dining room table, once again coopted by the St. Louis files, but in a more disheveled state than he’d expected, considering the care Jillian had taken to sort and label everything—and how cautious he’d been not to disturb the system when he transferred everything to the kitchen for yesterday’s party.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Let’s start with she showed up three hours late,” Jillian said, “and wouldn’t answer my texts or take my calls. “Drew and I couldn’t make any plans.”

  “It was all right,” Drew said. “We had time we didn’t expect to talk and catch up just hanging around here.”

  “Sure, I guess. But how did I know she was coming at all?”

  “I guess you didn’t,” Nolan said.

  “So, fine. She shows up at noon. I figured we’d have more space to work if we moved everything back in here. The nook in the kitchen can be cramped.”

  “I would agree. I should have helped you do that last night.”

  “The point is, I waited for her to help because I kept thinking she’d be here any minute. For three hours. And then she wasn’t being careful about it at all. I tried to just let it go, Dad. I did. I know she had a horrible weekend. But everything I asked her to do just made things worse. I couldn’t let everything go, could I?”

  “You didn’t say anything unreasonable,” Drew said. “She was pretty sensitive.”

  Jillian shook her head. “I’m embarrassed you saw that. In my head, I knew I had to be delicate. But my frustration got the best of me, and the words that came out of my mouth—well, they weren’t always what I meant to say, but I had to say something unless I was willing to just start the whole project over again by myself. In the middle of the night. Every night. And make up work for Tisha to do during the day.”

  “Do I dare ask who slammed the door I heard?” Nolan said. The doors between the kitchen and dining room and between the kitchen and the hall swung. No one could slam them. And he doubted Jillian would have let Tisha near her office.

  “The powder room,” Jillian said. “She asked to use it and stayed in there fifteen minutes. When I asked if everything was all right, she barked at me and stayed another ten. Then she came out, slammed the door, and went straight out the front door.”

  “You saw the rest,” Drew said.

  Nolan dropped his briefcase into a chair. “I’m going after her.” The Mertenson mediation continued to be fruitless. Clark and Joanna hadn’t opened up on Saturday night. If anything, those failures fueled Nolan’s determination not to let Tisha’s situation fall apart as well.

  “Dad, she could be anywhere,” Jillian said.

  “She hasn’t been gone that long.” Nolan jiggled his keys. “She’s on a bicycle—a bright green one. I’ll spot it parked, or someone will have seen her.”

  “Do you want help?” Drew reached behind his waist to untie his chef’s apron.

  Nolan held up a hand. “You stay here. But Jillian, when I get back, I want to sit with the two of you.”

  “Drew and me?”

  “Tisha and you.”

  “To make her understand, right?”

  “To find common understanding.”

  Her green eyes widened. “You’re talking about a mediation.”

  “Please promise me you’ll be here.”

  She hesitated a few seconds and then nodded.

  Nolan went out to his truck and backed it out of the driveway. Other than her family’s home or the Canary Cage, he knew nothing of where Tisha might go. She might go home during standard business hours if both her mother and grandmother were working. Her great-grandmother was the one who provided most of her daily care, and as far as Nolan knew, Tisha’s relationship with her wasn’t as hostile as the others. But she was a fifteen-year-old girl glued to her phone, and it was the height of summer. She’d told Maddie Vasquez she liked to hang out with her friends, and she went somewhere when her mother threw her out or when she just wanted to leave. Chances were that home wouldn’t be her preferred destination in the middle of the afternoon. Perhaps it was time he knew more about where she spent her hours away from home anyway.

  Nolan fastidiously observed the speed limit as he cruised residential neighborhoods. In fact, he drove as if every block were a school zone with hordes of young children present, crawling down the street looking at porches, garages, sheds, fences, sides of houses—anywhere that might make a good parking spot for a bicycle. He alternated north of Main Street and south, moving west to east. If he didn’t find her on this side of Cutter Creek, he’d cross at Eastbridge, close to Tisha’s neighborhood, and work his way back toward the west on that side of the water.

  On the east end of town, on the far side of the athletic fields the schools shared, in the middle of a knot of midsize Victorian homes painted in hues of blue and beige with white accents, sunlight glinted off the green bike leaning against a chain-link fence.

  Right after this episode, Nolan would advise Tisha to invest in a lock.

  He pulled up as close to the bike as he could, opened the rear of his truck, slid the bike in beneath the topper, and locked it in.

  Then he approached the house and rang the bell. Inside, a dog went wild.

  A teenage girl, dark hair and dark eyes, answered, listing to one side to curl fingers through the black lab’s collar. “My parents aren’t home, so whatever you’re selling …”

  Nolan smiled. “Not selling. Looking. For Tisha Crowder.”

  “Who is it?” A boy came around a corner. Unmistakably, he was related to the girl. Same hair. Same eyes. Same cheekbones.

  “I’m looking for Tisha,” Nolan said. “I know she’s here.”

  “Um, stalking creep weirdo. Whoever you are, go away.” The girl started to close the door.

  “I’m her lawyer.” That was close enough to the truth, and it got the attention of the sibling duo.

  The boy stepped forward, nudging his sister aside, to square off with Nolan. The protective one. The one Tisha came to see. The boyfriend Brittany knew nothing about. The person she ran to when she had nowhere to go.

  “What do you want with Tisha?” he asked.

  “Attorney-client privilege,” Nolan said. “She can tell you later if she wants
to, but I’m not going to. Just ask her to come out here, please.”

  The boy nodded to his sister, and she went up some stairs. The dog offered one last round of territorial assertive barking before following.

  Great. The boyfriend Brittany knew nothing about entertained Tisha in an upstairs room with no adults on the premises.

  The girls thundered back down the stairs, and Tisha came out on the concrete stoop, closing the door behind her.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m inviting you to come back with me to my house for refreshments and conversation.” Nolan smiled.

  “You’re weird, you know that?”

  “I’ve been told.”

  “Whatever you heard, there’s another side to the story.”

  “Thus the conversation.”

  “Not interested.”

  “I can sweeten the deal with fresh raspberry turnovers coming out of the oven as we speak. I hear you like”—he waved one hand—“raspberry things.”

  “Still not interested.”

  “Would you like a ride home, then?”

  “I have my bike.”

  “No, I have your bike.”

  Tisha’s glance scudded to the fence. “You stole my bike?”

  “Fortunately, I have the legal services of a very good lawyer, and I’m sure I can get off.”

  “You really have my bike?”

  “I really do.”

  “And you won’t give it back to me unless I go with you for this ‘conversation’?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “Isn’t that extortion or something?”

  “It would be a shame to have your current legal circumstances still on your record and keeping you out of a good law school someday.”

  “Are you trying to intimidate me or just making a stupid joke?”

  Nolan did not break from her glare.

  “You don’t seem like the intimidating type, so I’m going with stupid joke,” Tisha said. “But then I didn’t take you for the stealing type, either.”

  “I watch a lot of crime shows on TV.”

  “Somehow I think that’s a lie.”

  “Let’s just call it an exaggeration.” Nolan pointed. “I’m parked right over there.”