“We are not going to California—only to Dog Hollow, and that isn’t even to the Mississippi.”
I took up a forkful of beans and bacon, chewed, and swallowed. “But why are you here? When Polly gets the news, she’ll break off your engagement,” I said.
Billy observed me for a moment and then spoke. “Loved. I loved Agatha. It’s past tense, Fry.”
Then he picked up the skillet and dragged that diamond-hard biscuit along the scummy edge. “Do you remember that day in February when the two of you came up to our place? I didn’t see you but Agatha said you went hunting? You remember?”
I exhaled audibly. Billy was going to take his own sweet time getting to the point.
“That was the day she turned me down,” he said, responding as if I’d nodded.
Billy shook something off his fingertips, put his plate on the ground, and settled back against the log. “I’d asked her to marry me before that. By then, I had asked her so many times I lost count. Think I started when I was fifteen. She laughed—always. But in February I got down on my knee. I said, ‘I mean it, Agatha. I need to know.’ She said, ‘I can’t.’ I said, ‘Can’t or won’t?’ She didn’t answer right away. Finally, she said, ‘Won’t.’ ”
I stared at Billy more than I listened to him. Why wouldn’t he simply tell me why he’d come on this journey? It seemed like there was something he wasn’t saying.
Again I wondered if Billy was meeting Agatha out here, somewhere. But that seemed far-fetched. I could not believe Agatha capable of such willful deceit. To make her family believe she was dead? No—it was not within the bounds of possibility. I’d have to imagine Agatha wrapping a body in a blue-green ball gown. The Agatha I knew could not shoot a sparrow.
No, she would not be able to hurt her family, let alone treat a body with such disrespect. Whatever Billy was hiding, it was not a meeting with Agatha. It was something else.
As Billy continued his reminiscing, I began counting days, working out the time line of events. I started with the kiss—a fist in the air, a whoop, a whistle. I saw the kiss on a Thursday, the first week of May. I went to see Mr. Olmstead the next day, on Friday.
The worst part (and the part I never wanted to admit) was that a moment before I spoke to Mr. Olmstead, I knew I shouldn’t say a word. But up until that moment, I possessed absolute certainty of the rightness of my cause. I would have said, with confidence, that my sister was seeing Mr. Olmstead for his library. (Beware of such convictions, for they are fraught with peril.)
See, I’d never seen a room like Mr. Olmstead’s study. Books were everywhere. Books lined the walls. Books were splayed open on the seats of chairs and were piled in corners in precarious-looking stacks. (And why were there so many books in his study? Agatha had told me there was a hotel library—there wasn’t enough room in his library for these books?) What wasn’t filled with books was taken up by collections. Butterflies, from white to purple, had been lined up, pinned to a board, and framed. Another frame held hundreds of beetles in shades of blue, green, and gold. An osprey, wings spread, stood guard in one corner, a badger in another—both stuffed, of course.
But the most startling item was a book open on a pedestal. This volume was abnormally large. Each page was two feet by four feet, and the book was laid open to an illustration of two birds. Those birds breathed on the page. The female (in yellows, olives, and browns) perched on a branch above the male (in blues, black, salmon red, and white). The female leaned to place something in the male’s beak. The male stretched his beak upward to accept, arching his neck. I traced their necks with a finger—yellow feathers to olive feathers to a red, upturned throat. A bit of text from the opposite page caught my eye. It read: “I cannot describe to you the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions.”
I knew those birds. They were wild pigeons. “Extreme beauty” written of pigeons? But who would even take the time to see the beauty of pigeons—let alone paint them? And then to print an enormous book with two pages devoted to the birds? It was an insanity. Pigeons were not important birds like, say, eagles. And pigeons lacked intelligence; they were not noteworthy in any manner, except in their abundance.
Of course, I knew who would describe the beauty of pigeons: my sister.
Also, the author of this big book.
And, after seeing this study, Mr. Olmstead.
“Isn’t it something?”
I jumped. But of course Mr. Olmstead had been sitting behind his desk the entire time. He had watched me take it all in.
“My steward said the matter was of utmost importance?” He smiled. Why hadn’t I noticed his blue eyes before?
I shook my head, confused by what I’d seen in this room and unsure of my purpose. I stepped toward the door.
Mr. Olmstead laughed. “I shouldn’t have frightened you. Please, Georgie, tell me. Whatever it is. Particularly since you came all this way.” He gestured at a chair. “Please.”
My hand stuck to the doorknob. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t go.
What Grandfather Bolte and Ma had said was true—Agatha and Mr. Olmstead seemed to be made for one another.
But I had seen that kiss.
I told him in a blurt.
Mr. Olmstead winced. He rapped his fist on the desk. “Did you know we are engaged?”
“No.”
Mr. Olmstead read the disappointment on my face. “I’m sure they meant to tell you. It was only three days ago. Your store has been busy. We did want to keep it quiet, though, because every one of my relations will descend on this town when they hear the news. I’d like to give Placid time to clean up after the nesting.”
Ma had tried to tell me something. We had kept getting interrupted.
He looked at me. “Did you ask Agatha about the kiss?” he said.
“No,” I said.
I heard his fist rap the desk again.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said. He got up, walked around his desk, and opened the door. His face had gone still. I could not read it.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He nodded.
I left.
By Monday, I was fairly certain that Agatha had been thrown over by Mr. Olmstead, because she stopped talking to me. On Tuesday, I overheard my sister explaining to Ma that Mr. Olmstead did not trust her and that she could not marry a jealous man.
Agatha gave me the silent treatment for a week. The next Monday night, May 15, the nesting broke and Agatha told me the story of the old man and the white pigeon. Ten days after that, she ran off with the pigeoners. That was Thursday, May 25. Now it was sixteen days since she’d run off, and here I was a runaway too. I’d run off with Billy McCabe in order to search for her.
I looked across the fire at Billy—the whistler, the whooper, the kisser. If anyone knew what that kiss meant, it was Billy McCabe. But when I’d asked him about it on the day I negotiated for a horse, all he’d ended up saying was that I “shouldn’t have seen that kiss.”
Anyway, what did it matter what the kiss meant? If I hadn’t told Mr. Olmstead, my sister would still be in Placid, her funeral would not have been held, and I would not be out here searching for her.
I glanced again at Billy and willed myself to stop ruminating. I was like some old cow on her cud, continually re-chewing wilted, partially digested conversations. Find Agatha. Go forward. That should be my plan now.
Billy folded his arms across his chest. He’d been rambling on and on about Agatha, oblivious to the fact that my mind had been elsewhere. (Some people assume your attention. It is annoying.)
Billy continued: “I needed time. I could have convinced her if it weren’t for Mr. Olmstead. He turned her head, gave her ideas. Agatha was mine.” He huffed. “It was underhanded and rude of the man to court her like that. Mr. Olmstead owns the entire world and he had to have the one thing that mattered most to me.”
Mine? Thing? I would give my right foot if Agatha thought she was owned by Billy like some item stocked on a store shelf. “I don’t remember any rule th
at says someone is yours. Agatha didn’t even say she’d marry you. She didn’t have to marry you. On that February day, Agatha asked me to run the store with her. She wouldn’t have married you—no matter the circumstances.”
Billy sniggered. “That was your plan, huh?”
I didn’t like that “heh heh” at all. “You must have believed her. You started seeing Polly.”
“I thought it would bring Agatha around,” he said.
My jaw dropped.
He pointed a stick at me. “You can’t say a word of that. I love Polly. I do. I don’t want to discuss this. You’re too young to understand,” he said.
“I’m only too young when it suits you,” I said.
“It is not your concern,” he said.
I glared at him and got up to clean my plate in the creek.
We sat silent awhile, each of us engaged in our own tasks. I finally joined him by the fire in order to clean my rifle. The Springfield was covered with pigeon muck, and I needed to know that it would fire without a problem. I promised myself I would be ready next time, shooting dead any cougar contemplating a meal of girl and mule. As I worked, honey light soaked into a deepening blue sky. Moonlight spattered the water, and clouds of tiny white insects floated up from the banks.
To test my cleaning job, I loaded a cartridge into the Springfield and aimed at a twig approximately one hundred yards away. I fired. The twig shattered.
“Nice shot,” said Billy.
“I never miss,” I said.
“I have heard that when you’re holding the rifle, you’re quite good.”
He’d caught me off guard and I laughed. “I do need to work on my draw.”
Billy grinned. “Let’s not fight. I like you when we’re not fighting.”
It was a simple enough statement, but somehow that statement stopped my tongue in its tracks. “Yes” was all I managed to say in reply, though I suddenly wanted to tell him that he hadn’t been as bad a companion as I’d imagined he would be.
Then Billy yawned. “That’s it. I’m going to bed.”
At that, my neck hairs lifted straight off my skin. I saw cougars stalking me, dragging me off, my screams muffled by the sound of river water passing.
I set the Springfield across my lap. “I’m going to sit up,” I said.
Billy waved away fire smoke to look at me. “We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
“If you’re tired, go to bed.”
Billy laid his eyes on me. “Fry, that cougar isn’t coming back. It went straight over the hill, remember? You scared the bejeebers out of it.” He smiled. “Like I expect you would.”
I shook my head. “No, Billy, listen to me. Today I learned I need to pay attention. Long Ears was the one that heard the cougar—not me. I’m keeping my eyes open,” I said. I began to shake.
“It was probably only curious. You and Frederick are a pretty big target.”
“Go to bed.”
“I shouldn’t have let you get so far behind.”
“Even if I wanted to sleep, I couldn’t. Go.”
Billy frowned. After a moment, his eyes lit up. I watched as he pulled a canvas tent from his saddlebag and set it up. He opened my bedroll inside it and set a saddle at the top for a pillow. “How does this look?” he said.
He was right. I liked the idea of canvas walls all around me. He said he’d sleep in front of the tent with the repeater by his side.
Then Billy reached for my hand. As his hand wrapped around mine, a sort of wooziness came over me. I stood, but I swear my feet were not on solid ground.
This confused me, but I had confronted a cougar. Ever since that cougar, my senses seemed off, misfiring every which way.
Billy walked me to the tent, lifted the flap, and let go of my hand. “It’ll be fine. I won’t let anything get you,” he said.
As I went to sleep, I may have thought of Billy, but I dreamt of Agatha. I dreamt of that night—years and years ago—that I woke up and found Agatha gone from our bed. I crept through the house and finally found her in the vegetable garden out back, the wind twisting her nightgown around her ankles. Barefoot, I ran into the garden to meet her. The two of us, in white nightgowns, stood hand in hand between rows of carrots and lettuce as we watched comet after comet scuff the sky. I felt garden dirt between my toes, and liked the way her hand fit around mine.
But in the dream, her hand slipped from my own. It was like she wasn’t even trying to hold on.
After more lessons in mule saddling, Billy and I rode all the next morning. We arrived in Dog Hollow as the sun beat down overhead.
I’d heard Dog Hollow described as down-and-out, distressed, and in straitened circumstances, but nothing could be further from the truth. Not one thing sagged, leaned, or needed oiling, and there were plenty of inhabitants. The railroad had come through Dog Hollow about five years previous, and people say rail transforms a town. Consider Dog Hollow transformed. Dog Hollow was a full-fledged community as big as Placid. The Smoke River—a tributary of the Wisconsin—ran straight through its center.
As we crossed an ample wooden bridge, I noted the town’s amenities. I saw two inns—the American House and the Ellwood House. We passed a flour mill, a foundry, a sawmill, and a brewery. This was beyond the usual townlike accoutrements—the blacksmith, the general store, the churches (Methodist and Lutheran), and the harness shop. The water-powered sawmill did look aged, but it had been painted a bold red, and from within its walls came the ear-piercing buzz of board-making productivity. Pigeon lime streaked several porches, but that was the same everywhere.
We tied up at a watering trough in front of the Dog Hollow General Store. Long Ears and Storm plunged their snouts into the trough and began to drink.
“Don’t mind if you do,” I mumbled, feeling that some sort of etiquette had been breached when they started drinking before I’d dismounted.
Billy gave me twenty cents for some bread and hard cheese from the store, mentioning the inedibility of my biscuits. He said he planned to see about repairing a buckle on one of his saddlebags, and then to stop at the butcher. He had a taste for sausage roasted over a fire.
A cowbell clanked when I opened the door to the general store. The sound reminded me of home. But all similarity to our store stopped with the cowbell.
Two women took up space on the floorboards—one behind the counter and one in front. The woman behind the counter frowned, looking at me with pin eyes in a face that was as hard and as expressionless as a plank. She was the width of a door frame, she’d yanked her salt-and-pepper hair into a bun, and she wore a red blouse with girlish ruffles. She leaned on that counter like she hadn’t the strength to stand upright.
The second woman, spectacled and wasp-waisted, turned to take a lengthy look at me.
“I’d like a loaf of bread and some hard cheese, please,” I said. I used my best Sunday-school articulation.
With good customer service you expect a little huphup, one, two, three. Old Pin Eyes, though? She didn’t even straighten up out of her lean. In fact, she leaned farther forward, and her rather significant ruffled chest nudged a jar of butterscotch candies to a precarious position at the counter’s precipice. “Let me see your money,” she said. She held out a hand.
Asking for money first? I sent her a flinty look in reply.
“I don’t know you from a darn hole in the wall,” she said.
That burned me up. I could feel those five gold dollar coins stitched into the waist of my skirt. I sure would have liked to show her a couple. I settled on dangling my two dimes in front of her face.
She made to take one.
I jerked both hands back. “I need to see your cheese and bread first,” I said.
“I’ll come by tomorrow,” said the spectacled woman to the woman behind the counter. As she left, she cinched up her purse and her face at the same time. She made sure I saw it too.
The unpleasantness went on like that. There were heaves and sighs, eyes rolling like marbles, and mu
ch trundling back and forth. Pin Eyes brought out farm cheese and two-day-old bread. I took it anyway, along with two licorice sticks for me and a box of sugar cubes for Long Ears. (I planned on working on the mule’s affections.) At the end of our transaction, I had to tell Pin Eyes to wrap it up. When she asked for twenty cents, I pointed out I’d only bought fifteen cents’ worth of goods. She replied that if I didn’t care for the price, there was another store in Owatonia—only thirteen miles out of my way.
As I gathered my parcels in my arms, I paused to consider whether I should ask Pin Eyes about Agatha. Ask the rudest woman in Wisconsin? Why? I wanted to wash my hands of her.
But I knew I had to do it. If you only talk to nice people, you won’t find out the half of it. Nice people either keep their noses so clean they hardly know a thing, or they conveniently forget what they know and fill their heads with daisies. You’ve got to talk to the rude ones as well.
“Excuse me. One more thing,” I said.
The look on her face told me turning had taken significant effort.
I held out the framed photograph of Agatha. “I’m looking for a young woman. Her name is Agatha Burkhardt. She’s eighteen. A little shorter than you. With auburn hair.”
Pin Eyes took the photograph. She ran her finger around the edge of the frame.
I continued: “Agatha came through here two and a half weeks ago. She was traveling from Placid, Wisconsin, with three pigeoners—a married couple and a single man.”
I paused, and then added: “Also, if you know anything about a body found on Miller Road about eight miles outside of Dog Hollow, I’d like to hear about it. The body was difficult to identify.”
Pin Eyes handed the photograph back to me. “Who is this girl to you?”
I could see in her eyes that she would not talk unless I told the truth.
“My sister,” I said. I did not want to say that. Every time I said “my sister” out loud, water gathered in my eyes. It happened then too. I could not control it.
Pin Eyes looked away (a kindness I noted). Then she spoke: “I hear things now and again. What I heard was that the Placid sheriff took that poor girl’s body back with him, saying he thought he could identify her. Our sheriff said that given the rough condition of the body, it was difficult to say what happened.”
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