If it was interesting, yes, she did. And there was no Miss Bentley around to rap her knuckles for demonstrating “excessive curiosity.”
“What’s Rust?” she asked.
“That mess. It’s putting people out of business,” Pete said, raising his voice above the men, who were shouting now. Lucy resisted for a few more moments, but she was getting jostled. Someone stepped on her foot and she felt suddenly small next to all the angry men. She was carried several feet, just as if she’d been caught by a wave in the ocean. She’d lost sight of Pete’s russet hair. Where was he?
And then he was there, grabbing her hand. This time, she held on tight and followed him away from the mill.
• • •
Pete thought they could get a root beer at Dawson’s general store and ask Mr. Dawson if he’d had any dealings with Lucy’s father.
“I’ll bet you fifty cents he knows something about your dad,” Pete said. They’d both been a bit shaken by the mob at the lumberyard. But Lucy’s confidence returned once they were seated at the soda fountain in Dawson’s store.
It turned out that Mr. Dawson had seen her father. Three weeks ago William Darrington sold him his horse and saddle, bought jerky, salt pork, and hardtack, and cleaned him out of his stock of writing paper.
“Didn’t care about the price he got for his horse,” said Mr. Dawson, looking down his long, thin nose. “Didn’t want to catch his own food. He was particular on that account. Excitable fellow.”
The storekeeper licked his pencil and made a tiny, precise notation in his account ledger. Lucy figured most of the world appeared excitable to Mr. Dawson—he was as slow and dry as a tortoise. But he did tell them that her father also spoke of needing to pick up supplies from the apothecary.
Their next stop was a crowded little shop stuffed with jars and bottles of all kinds of medicines and miracle cures: Dr. Lloyd’s Toothache Drops, Stickney & Poor’s Female Tonic, Dr. Kilmer’s Swamproot Kidney Cleanser, and many others. The proprietor of this medical wonderland was an Arthur Lyman: a man in his early fifties with a twitchy nose, untamed eyebrows, and an air of nervous energy that made Lucy think of a high-strung rodent.
William Darrington had come here with an unusual request. He asked the apothecary to make up a tincture to stop dreams.
“And it used some very expensive ingredients,” Mr. Lyman said petulantly. He clearly felt he’d not been well compensated for his potion.
But he didn’t know why Lucy’s father didn’t want to dream. Nor where the ghost clearer had gone once he received his dreaming cure.
They asked a few more questions. But the druggist made it clear that if they weren’t in the market for vitamin drops or a baldness tonic they were wasting his time. He turned his back on them and began unpacking a box of skin creams.
“You might try the Climbing Rose,” he told them, seeing they were still there. “A drinking establishment of the lowest sort.” He picked up a feather duster and applied it to one of his shelves.
But as they turned to leave, one last thought occurred to Mr. Lyman. He stopped, poised with his feather duster in the air. “He is not the William Darrington, is he? Of Boston?”
With a twist in her insides Lucy nodded. “Yes,” she said, feeling nothing good could follow this. “That’s him.”
The druggist’s eyes turned bright with malice. “I thought so. Yes. Your father acted as if he were doing important research. But the William Darrington I’d heard of was famous for trying to save a rock because he claimed it housed a local deity.” He clucked his tongue. “I knew that man was a crackpot as soon as I set eyes on him.”
“What’s he talking about?” Pete asked. “What rock?” He looked at her in confusion. But Lucy, too humiliated to answer, pushed through the door, Mr. Lyman’s laughter ringing in her ears.
Once they were outside, Pete ran to catch up with her.
“What was that about?” he asked. “Your father thought a rock was a god?”
This made it sound even more ridiculous than it was. Pete had a smirk on his face, which she supposed she deserved after the way she’d treated his precious stone. If he wanted to get her back for it, he couldn’t have done any better, for the story was the most humiliating thing that had happened to her.
“No!” She crossed her arms. “Well, not exactly.”
“What was it, then?” Pete shrugged as if he were simply curious. Maybe he didn’t want to make fun of her after all.
Lucy went to the edge of the wooden sidewalk and leaned her elbows against the railing. She might as well tell him.
“Living things are alive, right?” she asked Pete. She didn’t expect him to understand what she was about to explain.
Pete’s face contracted as he thought this over. “Er, yes.”
“How do you know?” She tilted her chin at him.
“You just know?” He sounded as if he knew this wasn’t the right answer.
She shook her head. “There’s something that shows they’re alive. It’s an energy called the Od. Life energy. And you can measure it with a vitometer, which my father invented. People have more Odic force than, say, chipmunks. Ghosts are part of the Od, too. But they’re fainter.”
So faint, her father had to create special oculars to see them.
“Okay,” Pete said. “I better have more Od than a chipmunk.” He flexed his arm muscles to reassure himself.
“But then my father started thinking that he could detect the Od in things that weren’t alive. Rocks, rivers, caves . . .” Lucy frowned. This was where everything had started to go wrong.
“There was a big rock near where we lived, the Maran Boulder. It was famous for being haunted. People would hear noises, they’d get lost. Old folks would say, ‘Don’t wander there by yourself, you might not come back.’ But they also said the First Peoples would go there and ask for a vision, if hunting was bad or people were sick. Some folks from our town would leave little bits of things there for good luck: bread, bones, flowers . . .”
Lucy paused, remembering the strange lichen-encrusted rocks poking up like teeth, the little piles of offerings, and emerging at the center of the rock field, the great black boulder itself.
Pete settled against the railing next to her. She liked telling stories, but this wasn’t one of them.
“The railroad was coming and they were going to lay track right where the boulder was—so they planned to dynamite it. But men started getting sick, and the dogs kept running off. The mules were spooked and wouldn’t pull. So the railroad hired my father to fix it. We went out to the Maran Boulder thinking it was no more than a bad ghost.”
The morning they set out was the most exciting of her life. She got up before dawn to help her father pack the equipment and make sure the instruments were in working order. For the first time, she would have her own vitometer to help her search out places where the Odic force indicated spirit activity. She was to take the south side of the rock field and her father the north, which, being colder and darker, was more likely to be the ghost’s terrain.
“The first clue that anything was wrong was the vitometer—that’s the instrument he invented to measure Odic force. The reading was higher than for anything he’d ever recorded. So if this was a ghost it was a humdinger.”
“And was it?” Pete’s eyes were wide now.
“No.” Lucy still felt the confusion of that day. “We tried clearing it. My father’s the best ghost clearer in the world and nothing worked.”
She looked out onto the town square with its cheerful bandstand and shivered. “It was getting late, and I wandered off. I remember I felt kind of sleepy. I must have stumbled, and then . . . somehow, I fell into a crack in the rock and got myself stuck.”
She still felt chills when she thought of it, recalling how she tried to call out, how faint her voice was, almost as if she’d fallen into a lake. Th
e world felt like it was rising away from her, while she fell, pulled deep by something ancient and hungry.
“I was wedged in tight and couldn’t move. Then I saw my father. He looked like he was shouting. He was pulling me, but I was stuck tight.”
“So what happened?” Pete asked.
Lucy bent over the wooden railing and stared at a police wagon coming up the dusty street. “I don’t know. It loosened up a bit. I popped out.”
Pete leaned an elbow on the railing beside her. His eyes were thoughtful. “And you were okay?”
“Sure. All I did was get my leg stuck. Only after that my father said it wasn’t a ghost after all, but something else, something he’d suspected but no one had ever proven the existence of. A nature spirit.”
That night her father was more distracted than she’d ever seen him. Muttering to himself, marching up and down.
“Then after that he didn’t want the railroad to dynamite anything. He called the newspapers and said there was a spirit in the rock and he’d prove it to everyone. He went out there with his thought interferometer—”
Pete’s forehead wrinkled. “What’s that?” He had some sunflower seeds in his pocket, which he now began to eat, cracking and spitting them over the edge of the sidewalk into the street.
“It’s like a colander with wires. You wear it on your head. And his od-oculars.” She heaved a big sigh. “They’re like goggles. But the newspapers just took photos of him.” Her father, wearing a colander and goggles, pointing to a rock. Headline: Ghost Clearer Gone Mad.
The next day the railroad went in with dynamite and blew the Maran Boulder to smithereens.
Lucy sucked her lip. People in Wickham believed in ghosts, but not rock spirits. She was a laughingstock among her friends. “My father lost his teaching job. No one would hire him, not even for ghost work. Then we lost our house and . . . just moved on.” She stared out at Pentland’s modest, weathered storefronts—their displays of burl art and saw blades—suddenly pierced with homesickness. It wasn’t even Wickham that she missed so much, just the way things used to be.
Pete thrust his hands in his pockets, perhaps hoping to find something useful there to say to her. “That’s rough,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.
She shrugged. “It’s all right.”
A few doors down, there was bang of doors and another man was thrown out of a saloon. Lucy watched him roll like a tumbleweed into the street.
She hadn’t told Pete the worst of it: her secret. Sometimes she wondered if her father had gone crazy; she wasn’t sure she believed his obsession with nature spirits and the Maran Boulder. Maybe he was wrong. And maybe he suspected her of thinking that. Since that day he hadn’t taken her on any more clearing jobs. The day she slipped into the crevice did more than ruin her father’s reputation; it changed something between them.
But what was the Darrington motto? Onward.
She straightened her shoulders. All her posture lessons at Miss Bentley’s hadn’t been completely wasted. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find that Climbing Rose.”
The Climbing Rose was a saloon on the far end of town set away from the other buildings. Its outside was painted with eyes and a mouth, like the faces she’d seen on the Lupine poles. Ancient rose vines climbed up its sides, and beyond stretched a muddy flat grown thick with blackberry brambles. Beyond that was a gray and tumbling river. A pack of skinny dogs trotted by, following a trail of scent along the mucky ground.
Inside, the place was dark, with a hammered tin ceiling reflecting the glints of hurricane lamps. An elk’s head hung on one wall, the antlers so large across that a grown man could lie down inside them. A motley assortment of drinkers were gathered about the bar, seated at tables, or in the back, throwing darts. The men looked to be mainly of two kinds: big and mean or scrawny and trigger-happy.
The bartender had two long braids and a scar across one cheek. He was polishing a glass and put it down when Lucy and Pete came in.
“This isn’t a place for children,” he said. “Get on with you.”
Children? Her eyes narrowed. If he thought that was going to get them out his door, he was sorely mistaken.
“We’re looking for my father, William Darrington,” Lucy said in as loud a voice as she could manage.
Pete, who’d also bristled at “children,” stepped forward, blocking her way. “Lucy, I can handle this.”
One of the men drinking at the bar sniggered at Pete’s bravado, and Pete shot him an angry look.
“I can handle this myself,” she told Pete. She clambered onto a bar stool to get everyone’s attention. “We heard some of you here knew William Darrington.”
Pete looked up at her in embarrassment. “What are you doing?” he hissed.
At her father’s name, a few men had looked up from the table where they sat. Dark-eyed, with their black hair worn long, they were First Peoples in settler dress, wearing dungarees and flannel. One had a string of bear claws on a leather thong around his neck. She thought of Niwa and wondered whether these Lupines lived in Pentland among settlers.
At the far end of the bar, a man in a worn deerskin jacket inched his hat down lower on his face.
Nobody was going to talk.
After a moment the men turned to one another and resumed their conversation, their solitary drinking, their dice games and dart games. The bartender went back to polishing glasses.
“Come on, Lucy,” Pete said in defeat. He held out a hand to help her down.
But she couldn’t leave without an answer. She climbed from the stool to the top of the bar and stamped her foot—hard. Whisky jumped in glasses the bartender had set out. All eyes turned to her and the room was so still, she could hear the quiver of a dart still shaking in the board.
Pete crossed his arms nervously.
“Now see here.” She mimicked the stance of her most intimidating Miss Bentley’s teachers: arms crossed, beetled brows. “I know he talked to you. And he wanted to hear your stories. He was looking for something. A ghost or a spirit. So what I want to know is, what’s the biggest haunt you’ve got?”
She held her breath and crossed her fingers.
“Your father came in here, sweetie,” said an old man with a great white mustache that curved out on either side of his jowls. “And he did ask questions. But that’s where you should leave it.”
At that moment, the doors to the Climbing Rose banged opened and a man walked in. Lucy’s first glimpse was of someone tall and broad—a general impression of power—caught in silhouette against the light.
The drinkers in the Climbing Rose sat up, as if a current ran through them.
Once the doors had shut behind him, Lucy could see the newcomer more clearly. He had gleaming dark hair, swept back from a strong, handsome face: square-jawed under a black beard, with deep, commanding eyes.
He raised one eyebrow as he saw Lucy.
“What’s this?” he said to the bartender. “You’re letting girls run all over your place now?”
“Ha-ha.” The bartender laughed with no sign of humor.
The big man settled himself in, as others made way for him. Lucy could see at once the fine cut of his clothes and the gold watch chain peeking from the folds of his morning coat. He was the only person she’d seen so far in Pentland who appeared to be prospering.
“I’ll warn you, Shatterhand,” he said to the barkeep, “you’re about to have a thirsty crowd in here. There’s been more Rust at the mill. Logs from Billups’s place. Who knows how many of them.”
There was a general intake of breath as the men in the Climbing Rose took in the bad news.
A scrawny, toothless drinker sidled up to the big man’s side. “Mr. Murrain,” he said fawningly, “how is Billups? He gives me work now and then and I fear to see him ruined.”
The big man frowned. “I haven’t talked to h
im yet. But the infection is far gone and spreading.” He took a drink from the bartender and emptied it in a swallow. Then, seeing the plaintive look on the toothless man’s face, he put a coin on the bar in front of him and gestured at the barkeep to pour for the little man as well.
Murrain? Lucy tried to catch Pete’s eye. Was this the man they’d been looking for earlier?
“Pete,” she whispered.
But for some reason Pete was too deep in his own thoughts to hear her. His forehead was knit with worry as he stared into a middle distance.
“Pete!” she said more loudly.
Hearing her, the big man looked up. “You’re still here?” he asked Lucy. “What are you now, a bar ornament?” He produced a handsome calfskin case from his pocket and took out a cigar.
The men around him laughed; his toothless friend laughed loudest.
“No.” She’d been stuck up there thinking how she would gather her skirts to climb down with dignity. “I came to ask after William Darrington. I was hoping someone here would tell me how to find him.”
“Darrington.” Mr. Murrain cocked his head and put his cigar down, unlit.
Lucy settled for scooting down on her backside. The stranger had taken the stool she used to climb up on, so she had to turn around and dangle for a second before jumping to the floor.
“Yes,” she said once she’d landed. “He’s my father.”
He swiveled on his stool to face her, his handsome face animated, eyebrows arched in surprise.
“Then you must be Lucy. But you’re supposed to be in San Francisco.”
Now it was Lucy’s turn to be surprised. “Yes! How did you know? Have you seen him? Where is he?”
“Whoa there.” He rested an elbow on the bar as his dark eyes swept over her. “I do know your father. I met him here, in fact. I’m Angus Murrain.”
“The head of Pentland Timber,” the toothless drinker told her, adding in an awed whisper, “A very important man.”
Angus smiled tolerantly. “It’s my mill, so that means a great deal around here,” he said, as if amused by how much importance people gave to this little detail. “But your father was doing significant work. He told me he could find a cure for Rust.” He leaned back, smoothing his luxurious silk tie. “I told him I’d give a thousand dollars to any man who could deliver the cure.”
Dreamwood Page 5
