“I get your point.” His eyes took on a golden hue as the early rays of sunlight pressed over the bluffs. “She’s a handful, isn’t she. Poor kid.”
“Poor kid?” The liquid in my cup splashed over the windowsill. “That’s no kid—that’s Atilla the Hun in a pint-size body. Without her, the school-teaching thing would be easy. Well, not easy, but it would be doable. Literally every time I turn my back, she’s starting a fight with somebody over something. And if she’s not, she’s catching me in some corner where the remote cameras can’t find us, and she’s telling me everything I’m doing wrong.”
“She’s just looking for a friend.” He pointed to a bluebird hopping across the dusty grass. The bird’s feathers cast a flash of brilliant color as it flitted off. “Give her a little time. You’ll win her over with your charm and undeniable enthusiasm for the teaching job.” It took me a moment to decide that he was joking. By then, the part about charm had already flowed over me like warm water.
“You overrate the power of the force, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
A quizzical frown turned my way. “So why do you do that?”
“What?” I was instantly embarrassed. The Star Wars reference was probably dorky.
“Brush it off or change the subject when someone tries to pay you a compliment?” The intensity of his gaze made me draw back.
A half-dozen child psychologists would love to know the answer to that question. My mother had been merciless about therapy after my father’s death, even through my teenage years. As if there’s something abnormal about a girl who can’t let go of the father she loved and just . . . move on to a new father who never really wanted her around.
Blake didn’t need to know all that, of course. It was ancient history.
Fortunately, I was spared from coming up with an answer. The front door of the schoolhouse slammed, and the noise rattled the building. A moment later, the apartment door burst open, and Wren waltzed in like she owned the place. She was scheduled to arrive a half hour before the start of school each morning so the cameras could do a short go-live of the beginning of the daily domestic routine that Bonnie Rose and Maggie might have shared.
I glanced at the small antique clock on the shelf above my cookstove. Morning go-live was in less than fifteen minutes. I’d been so caught up in the coffee conversation with Blake that time had slipped by.
Wren was late, actually, and she was a mess. Rather than having been neatly plaited into the usual braids, her hair was a wild frizz—like Einstein after a trip through a wind tunnel. I knew that look. I’d arrived at elementary school with it many times.
Outside the window, Blake stood up, calmly checking his pocket watch as Wren raced through the room in a tizzy and slammed a fabric-wrapped bundle onto the table. “Here’s the stupid breakfast. I hope it’s better than the last time. I think that lady who lives in the Hendrick house gave us her old leftover biscuits yesterday. I don’t know why I have to pick up the breakfast stuff from somebody in the village instead of just bringing food from Crew Camp, anyway. It’s way better than this crap.”
Blake leaned in the window, pulling the string on the bundle and ferreting out a piece of bacon. “Good morning to you too, Wren.” He smiled at Wren and winked at me.
Wren ignored him completely. “You gotta fix my hair.” She handed me a hairbrush along with two blue ribbons. “I want these. And not two stupid braids either. One braid, over the shoulder, horsetail style. One ribbon at the top. One at the bottom. It’s more mature. That’s what they were wearing at the Emmys this year.”
“I’m not much of a hair fixer, can you tell?” I offered up my own as an example.
Wren rolled a scathing look my way, surveying the extravaganza on my head, which I would somehow have to stuff into the snood in thirty seconds or less. Snoods, I had discovered, were amazing things. When I was finished in Wildwood, I intended to make it my life’s work to bring snoods back into style. You could cram a tangled, dirty, frizzy thick mess into a snood, and it looked pretty good.
“Yeah, I can see that.” Bracing her hands on her hips, she filled the room with pure adolescent attitude. The lovely warmth of morning coffee time was gone. Poof.
Blake checked his pocket watch again, then stepped away from the window, since he wasn’t supposed to be there for go-live.
“Use the force, Luke Skywalker,” he offered as parting advice.
A puff of private laughter slipped past my lips, and Wren shot an annoyed look toward the window, suspecting an inside joke. “Whatever. Maybe you better go down to the claims office instead of hanging around here drinking coffee and stealing our bacon. Two guys already got in a fight down there this morning. I heard that people’ve been lined up since, like, three a.m. waiting for the thing to open, so they can get their papers and go digging for gold. I thought you were supposed to be Mr. Law and Order around here. Isn’t that your real job?”
Blake blinked, surprised, his brows darting upward momentarily. Then he walked away without another word.
“So, what do you mean, his real job? How do you know why he’s here?” I turned to Wren expectantly. Maybe I was finally going to solve the mystery of Blake Fluton, albeit through an unlikely source.
She made a show of checking her fingernails for dirt. “I look. I listen. I get around. You should try it sometime. You might learn something.” Grabbing the ribbons again, she shoved them my way. “You better fix my hair before we’re live. I can’t go on camera like this, now can I?”
“If you don’t stop talking to me like that, you can.”
“Whatever.”
“You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.” I had the sisterly urge to take the blue hair ribbons and use them to somehow tie her mouth shut. It really seemed wrong that a face so cute could spew such a constant stream of ugliness. “You know what, Wren? If you wouldn’t insult people and boss them around and snap at them all the time, they’d like you a lot better.”
“I don’t care.” A narrow-eyed look came my way as she turned her back to me. “Now fix my hair. Hurry up.”
“Everyone cares if people like them.”
She swiveled fully then, blinking at me, her lashes finally holding at half-mast. “You care too much if people like you.”
“Maybe you can just figure out the hair for yourself, then. Since you’re so smart about everything.” She was sucking me in, pushing every button, and I knew it. This kid understood the psychology of insults better than anyone I’d ever met.
Then, for a fraction of a second, there was a flash of emotion in that freckled face—vulnerable, wounded, needy. “Well, maybe if my stupid mother wasn’t totally out of it this morning, my hair would be done already. There isn’t anybody else but you, okay?” The faintest quiver teased her mouth, the muscles straining in her neck.
Suddenly, I was an eleven-year-old girl, struggling to do something with my ridiculous hair that wouldn’t get me laughed at in school, my mother too busy with new babies to worry about it.
A wave of sympathy came in, powerful and unexpected. “How about a snood? I have an extra one.” Wren shrugged, looking down at her hands, and I added, “Snoods are very mature.”
When the cameras in the room went live, Wren and I were fixing hair—a lovely, pastoral scene between sisters in the soft morning light, sweet as a dusting of powdered sugar.
As I smoothed her tangled locks and worked to twist and cram them into the snood, she chattered brightly about 1861 life, how interesting the school lessons were, the challenges of living without running water, and how much work it was carrying buckets, which to my knowledge she had never done.
Irregardless, she hammed it up for the cameras, waxing nostalgic about the absolute darkness of the night sky here and the fact that, in the wilderness, neighbors were forced to depend on one another. Back home, she didn’t even know her neighbors.
“Isn’t it fun spending so much time with your neighbor? Like sharing coffee in the morning and things. Isn’t that awesome?” Sh
e turned toward the camera, flashing her baby blues in total innocence.
“Mmm-hmn.” I yanked the hair harder than I needed to, attaching the snood into place.
“Ouch!” She giggled good-naturedly.
“Done.” I grabbed my own snood and rolled and stuffed my hair into it. “You look adorable.”
“Thank you.” Voicing the little nicety clearly hurt. Thank you was one of Wren’s least favorite expressions.
We ate breakfast while she chattered on about life in Wildwood, offering lines that were far beyond the scope of an eleven-year-old. Her mom had clearly been rehearsing with her.
As we finished our go-live and gathered our things for school, I motioned to our reflection in the wardrobe door mirror. “Behold, the magic of the snood. The solution for bad hair days, antique-style.”
“Great, now we look like twinsies.” Things were back to normal now that the cameras were off. “This stupid thing itches.”
“I could take it out.” Really, really fast. I could.
“Well . . . it’s already done now.” On the way out the door, my pretend sister stopped one more time at the mirror to admire her snooded self.
Chapter 20
ALLIE KIRKLAND
JUNE, PRESENT DAY
The school day was typical enough. Pretty good at times, something of a zoo at others. School hours were shorter than what would probably have been normal in the actual town of Wildwood. As usual, we ended with lunch pails around a wooden table outside. Two cameramen with handhelds stood nearby, and a grip held a boom mike overhead as the kids reviewed their lessons.
When they drifted away to play stickball, Wren was, as always, not invited to participate on either team. Typically, she wandered off behind the cedar trees to hide from the cameras, pretending to be headed to the outhouse.
Today, however, she followed me back into the school and sulked in a corner as I finished cleaning up and put things in place for another day. This afternoon, I needed to do laundry, a monumental chore, but on a teacher’s salary, I couldn’t afford to have it done at the bathhouse, and after only three days live, every bit of my daily wear felt sweaty, crusty, and disgusting.
“Why don’t you get in on the stickball game? I’ll go out there with you, if you want,” I suggested.
“It’ll mess up my costume. You don’t have to try to get rid of me, you know. I’m not hurting anything in here.” She rolled a petulant look my way.
“Never mind, then. I just thought you might have more fun outside.”
“Stickball is stupid.” A little sneer, and her head fell back against the wall. “Where’s the dumb zookeeper? I wanna get outta here. I need a soda. Now.”
“She should be here any minute.” The production assistant was late coming to get the kids. Just yesterday we’d been reminded of the need for them to travel with a handler until they were back in their parents’ care. A team of massive draft horses had spooked and careened through the set, nearly mowing down a little girl who didn’t see them coming. It was a quick and almost tragic lesson in the dangers of nineteenth-century life.
Wren wandered through the schoolhouse door and onto the porch, scuffing her shoes against the rough wood.
“Hello! Holy cow!” Suddenly, she was jumping off the porch and running toward town. A moment later a completely foreign sound split the air, the noise out of sync with 1861.
A siren? I’d barely registered the thought when the two cameramen with handhelds and my entire group of kids bolted up the street, dodging wagons, pedestrians, confused cast members on horseback, and various dogs and cats that wandered the set.
I dashed after the kids, yelling, “Stop! Hey! You guys, stop! Now!” What were the cameramen thinking, letting the kids take off? “Hey! I said, stop!”
But no one was listening. We’d reached the edge of the chaos near Unger’s Store before I caught up and started gathering my students into a group off to the side. The noise of the sirens had brought everyone in the village running. Nearby, horses balked and tugged their reins, loose chickens ran for the cover of crawl spaces under buildings, and two dogs got in a fight. A team of paramedics was coming down the hill from crew camp with a stretcher.
Nick’s mom spotted us and hurried over to help with the kids.
“Mallory, what’s going on?” I stood on my toes, trying to get a glimpse over the crowd, but all I could see were dresses, hats, heads, and people whispering. In the distance, the sound of another siren slowly grew louder.
Between two shoulders, I caught a flash of someone dragging a man to his feet by a set of handcuffs. Was that Blake standing over the man? The crowd shifted, and I couldn’t see anything.
Wren climbed onto a pile of crates to get a better view. “Whoa! The set medic has a guy on a body board thingy in front of Unger’s Store, and he’s, like, all bloody!”
Mallory leaned close to me. “I didn’t hear all the details, but there was some kind of fight outside the land office this morning—something about claims. Security broke it up. They sent the guys away to cool off, but then the two of them got into it again this afternoon. By the time it was over, one man came after the other with a bowie knife, right in the middle of the set. This whole thing is way too authentic for me, especially with kids around.” She rested her hands on Nick’s shoulders with a look of concern. “If it’s like this after only a couple of days . . .”
“They’re messing with peoples’ minds. That’s what they’re doing.” Kim had threaded her way through the chaos and found us.
“It’s seriously creepy, watching motives change.” Mallory took in the crowd, perhaps wondering how she’d write about this as she documented the Wildwood project. “A week ago everyone was just excited to be here and to learn pioneer skills. It was all about neighbor-help-neighbor, about building a community. Now all anyone I interview can talk about is how fast they can get their claim staked and start looking for gold, and who’s going to find it. The people who have town jobs—the ones who were thrilled during the training period because they get the more comfortable places to live—are mad now. They want a chance at the million dollars in ore. It’s nuts, and to tell you the truth, even though all of this will make an interesting story, I’m not sure I’m ready to report a modern-day gold rush. For now I think I’ll just take Nick back up to crew camp and hang out. He really doesn’t need to see all this.”
“I don’t blame you.” I looked at the rest of the kids, now trying to climb atop the crates with Wren so they, too, could get a look at the bloody man being prepared for medical transport. “I think I’ll take the kids back to school and wait until the street clears, then walk them up to crew camp if the production assistants haven’t come for them by then.”
“I’ll help you,” Kim offered.
We gathered the kids and herded them down the street with Wren offering everyone a blow-by-blow of what she had seen. The others were wide-eyed, listening.
“That’s enough, Wren. Everyone doesn’t need to hear all about it.”
She crossed her arms and stomped ahead of us, sulking when the other kids finally took off toward the school building in a loosely orchestrated footrace.
I moved closer to Kim, hugging my arms, a chill crawling over my skin despite the heat of the day. Suddenly, the atmosphere in Wildwood felt oppressive and strange. Dangerous. “What happened up there? Did you see any of it?”
Kim pushed her bonnet back, scratching her head. “I didn’t see it, but I heard two guys got in a fight over gold claims. One of them actually pulled a knife, which was pretty stupid of him, because the other guy had a rock pick. Anyway, the one guy almost beat the other guy into oblivion. Your neighbor pulled him off and did a takedown on him in the street.”
“Blake?”
“Yes, Blake. He probably saved the guy’s life. Well, that’s what I heard anyway. When I got down there it’d been over for a while. On-site medical was tending to the one guy, Blake had the other guy cuffed on the porch, and the county sheriff
was on the way, along with the ambulance.”
“That’s awful.” I thought about what Wren had said, about preventing fights at the land office being Blake’s job.
Kim stopped walking before we reached the school, her blue eyes floating in a pool of tears. “I just wanna go home. I hate it here. I know I was the one who was all excited about it, but I’m really sorry I got you into this. I just . . . I don’t think I have it in me. I’m tired, I’m lonely, I’m sore, I’m scared out of my mind I’ll step on a snake or get eaten by a coyote every time I have to walk to the outhouse after dark. There are mice in my room at night. I smell awful, and I’m already sick of other people’s laundry and disgusting tub water. My hands are so cracked up, they’re bleeding. I feel like my fingers are gonna fall off. I thought this would be some great big adventure, but it’s so . . . physically and mentally hard. I want to quit.”
Taking her hands in mine, I looked at the damage. “I have some salve you can use on that. It’s in my medical kit for the school.” I tried to tamp down her panic as my own was rising. Even though she and I hardly ever saw each other in the course of a normal day here, just knowing she was nearby made village life doable. “You can’t leave.”
Her head dropped forward and tears trailed her cheeks. “I can’t do it, Allie. I’m not as strong as you.”
“Yes you are. You’re stronger than I ever thought about being.”
“The lives these women led in bathhouses and saloons were awful, Allie. They weren’t anything like you see on Gunsmoke. It’s sad to think that mostly these were just young girls. Teenagers. I don’t know how they did it, but I guess there’s not enough pioneer in me. Besides that, I miss Jake so much I’m going crazy. I just want to talk to him.”
She was cracking. The part of me that loved my best friend desperately wanted to make it all better, and the part of me that didn’t want to be left alone here was just plain desperate. “If you could talk to him, would it help?” The question was out before I really had time to think about the implications.
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