by Ann Parker
The door to the shack was closed. Tony approached, heart hammering. With a quick glance around, she opened the door and slid inside. She pulled the door shut after her, wincing at the familiar scrape of warped wood on the sill, and listened, trying to slow her breath and her pulse. Inside was as cold as outside. The gray of an overcast sky leaked in through the purple netting on the window, shedding a light that only made the place feel colder. Not sure what she would find behind the curtain, she screwed up her courage and went forward, tweaking the thin material aside.
No Maman.
Although she didn’t expect the coppers and the reverend to leave her mother lying there, the emptiness of the bed only enlarged the hollow she felt deep inside. Tony approached the bed and put one bare hand on the mattress where she and her maman had slept together, huddled for warmth under the blankets they had bought and scavenged.
Gone. Where?
She’d have to ask the reverend, or Mrs. Stannert maybe, where her maman went. Where she was buried. The thought of her mother lying under the snow and dirt in a grave was unbearable. Her mind slammed down on that thought, so painful it felt like someone was digging a grave in her heart, and instead grabbed hold of a more bearable goal: the gun.
Tony scanned the area by the bed, knelt, and threw a desperate hand underneath the bedstead. Her fingers groped for the familiar leather lanyard, the cold silver barrel, the textured ivory grip.
Nothing.
She finally threw herself on her stomach so she could reach all the way to the wall. Her arm knocked into Pisspot Brown’s empty carpetbag. She pulled it out in the wild hope that the gun would magically be lying inside, waiting for her.
Nothing.
“No, no!” It was almost like finding Maman gone all over again. “It has to be here,” she hissed to herself. “It has to be!”
She jumped up and began manically searching every one of the meager cupboards and hiding-spots in the small living space. Not in the ash-bucket. Not in the drawer of the rickety washstand. Not behind the three cans of beans and one tin of oysters in their larder. In desperation, she approached the last place she wanted to look, but now had to.
Her mother’s small traveling chest of clothes sat wedged and almost invisible between the foot of the bed and the wall. Holding her breath and her tears, Tony pulled the chest out and threw back the lid. Maman’s colorful tops and sashes were neatly folded, undisturbed. Tony, sobbing between muted gulps of air, plunged her hands into the silky soft fabrics, searching against all odds for the hard and deadly object of her desire.
One hand brushed something unexpectedly dense. Her heart leapt with impossible hope, then plummeted as she pulled out a small rectangular tin box, dented and undistinguished, swathed inside a sheer purple roll of lace. She pulled off the lace and opened the box to reveal her maman’s fortunetelling cards, cradled in a soothing yellow scrap of silk. She could hear her maman’s voice from when they first came to Leadville and were staying in the hotel, see her wrapping the box and securing it deep within the chest: “The people here in Leadville, I do not need the cards for them. They wear their wishes, their deepest pains and desires, their craziness for riches and happiness, always on them.” After she’d set the cards deep and sleeping within the chest, Maman had turned to her, taken her small hands in her warm ones and said, “My mother gave me the cards. When it is your time, when you are become a woman, I will give them to you and they will be yours.”
Tony closed the tin and shut away the memories, then gripped its sharp edges tight. She can’t give them to me now. I can only take them.
She tucked the box into the inside pocket of Ace’s voluminous gaudy jacket. Taking another deep breath, as if preparing to jump into the nearby headwaters of the ice-cold Arkansas River, she plunged a hand back into the trunk. Her fingers banged into the canvas-covered bottom of the container. Scooting them along the bottom, she searched blindly, the cheap silks and satins sliding over her hand, rippling like currents of woven threads. Her fingertips touched, then recognized cold ivory and steel. Her fingers curled around the slim object and pulled it to the surface. Sashes of maroon, purple, and copper slid and slithered from her arm as she brought her hand up to examine the object, heart gladdened through the tears. Still here. Maman’s knife. Delicate little flowers were carved into the ivory at the top of the handle where the blade folded; a small inlaid figure of a fox gazed over its shoulder where her palm would naturally curl around the grip.
A screech of wood ripping away from wood outside caused Tony to shoot to her feet. Her first thought: Pisspot Brown! Had they been watching, and now they were going to kill her too? She broke into a sweat, feeling like a mouse trapped in a corner by a savage cat. The knife in her fist whispered to her in Maman’s comforting voice: Not a mouse, my Antonia. A fox, with sharp teeth.
The knife.
She didn’t know how to use it. In the past, she’d seen Maman snap the blade open and slash, most recently just those two months ago when that man had grabbed Tony and she’d run. Tony couldn’t bear the thought of using the knife, and then losing it, or having it turned against her. The distinctive sound of the door scraping open told her that, whoever was outside, they were entering the place she had once called home.
There had to be something else she could use as a weapon. She grabbed the heavy ceramic chamberpot, thinking that if they all entered in a bunch, she might be able to throw it at their heads and shove her way past them.
A light step inside, and Tony burst from behind the curtain, ready to fling and run.
“Ha!” a woman’s voice surprised, greeted Tony’s appearance.
Tony stopped, nonplussed.
The figure, definitely female, retreated to the entry. Well-covered against the cold with many layers of shawls and skirts, the dark-skinned woman with the lined face and angry eyes was no stranger.
Tony quailed.
The voodoo lady from Coon Row, Madam Labasilier, advanced, the fortunetelling sign that used to hang over the door now swinging from her dusky hand. The bangles on her wrist jangled with a sinister edge. “Where is she, boy? Where is the pretender?”
Tony’s legs trembled and would hardly hold her upright. “W-who?” she croaked out.
“That Gypsy who pretends to see the future and read hearts. Gizzi. Where is she?”
Tony couldn’t say the words, couldn’t make her tongue pronounce the truth. “She’s, she’s gone.”
“Gone!” Madam Labasilier sounded triumphant. “Of course she is gone. I sent her away. So, if you are looking for an answer, you will not find such here. This place is cursed. Tell anyone, everyone. This place should be burned to the ground to destroy the evil within. Now, go!” Labasilier shifted to one side, opening a clear path to the door.
Tony didn’t wait for another command. She dropped the porcelain pot and flew out the door, her maman’s cards in the hidden pocket knocking against her knees as she ran.
***
Tony now had two places she desperately needed to go. Mr. Alexander’s coffin-shop was first, because she needed a job, something to pay for bread and cheese, something to take the place of the coins she would not be able to earn from the newspapers and the Silver Queen.
The second place was the saloon. She had decided that, between the reverend and the saloon lady, it seemed more likely Mrs. Stannert would have recognized and picked up her gun.
Now, more than ever, she needed that revolver with her, its comforting weight tugging at the lanyard about her neck.
Was it too early for the coffin-shop? People died all the time, so maybe not. Maybe she could go around and see if there was a back door to knock on. There must be. They sure didn’t carry the stiffs and the coffins in and out on Harrison! Maybe someone would answer. If not, she’d find a safe place to wait back there until regular business hours.
As for the saloon, Tony remembered Mr. Jackson
saying Mrs. Stannert didn’t hold with the Silver Queen being open all night or on Sundays, unlike most of the other whiskey mills in town. So, it was too early to go there now. After the coffin-shop, she’d go around to the back of the saloon and ask for Mrs. Stannert. She risked maybe running into the swells again, but the chances weren’t high they’d be hanging around Tiger Alley before noon. She felt sure that Mrs. Stannert would’ve picked up the gun. Heck, she’d practically sat on it right there in the cabin, when she’d been talking to Tony. And once she had her gun, Tony felt that the world, which seemed to be wildly spinning out of control, would sit straight upon its axis once more.
Chapter Nineteen
The sun struggled through a gap between the heavy curtains. Weakened by a scrim of clouds, it was still too bright, merciless, and early for Inez. As soon as it woke her, the sun vanished, defeated by an advancing army of clouds. Inez sat up slowly in her narrow bed. Her head swam, even though she’d taken care to not move quickly. She leaned her back against the tall wood headboard, which gave out a protesting squeak, and surveyed the confines of her small sleeping room up in the second story of the Silver Queen. Daylight was too much for her pounding hangover. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, blocking out the sight. The pressure caused sparks to shoot across the inside of her eyelids, providing an unwelcome light show.
Goosebumps rose on the back of her exposed neck. It was far too cold in the room as well.
With a sigh, Inez dropped her hands and reached for a heavy wool wrap that she’d thrown over her Eastlake-style bed last night for added warmth, shortly before her mind had become too fuzzy from exhaustion and brandy to think straight. She draped the wrap over her shoulders and got up, trying to keep her movements slow and deliberate. After adjusting her nightcap, she advanced on the pert, silver-shiny warming stove in the corner of the room, scraped the ashes out, revealing the sleeping coals beneath, and restarted the fire. Straightening up, she rubbed her cold hands together, anticipating the warmth that should soon begin to fill the room, and glanced around.
Her gaze first fell on her expensive, and once-exquisite maroon evening dress, crumpled on the floor where she’d kicked it aside in a fit of pique when she’d undressed, sometime before dawn. Unnamable muck, mud, and slime stained the ruffled hem and traveled up the front where it had splashed up under the cloak. Now, that muck was probably insinuating its way into the folds of fabric throughout. It would take an expert to clean it. Her mood, already dark, darkened.
Her gaze then traveled over to the small, marble-topped corner cabinet tucked neatly into the dark area below the foot of her bed. The little cabinet had magically appeared during her absence. Sporting inlaid mahogany and cherry strips, thin delicate legs, and the bevels and curves of Louis XVI-style furniture, the beautiful little cabinet looked fussy and out of place, almost as if it were sulking in the corner. Inez thought it would have felt far more at home in her parents’ Gramercy Park brownstone “palace” in New York than in the second-story slap-and-dash Western boomtown saloon. She also wondered where it came from, and rather suspected it might have been salvaged from the fire at Frisco Flo’s brothel earlier that summer.
Frisco Flo.
Inez covered her eyes again, trying to focus.
Yet another thing I must do today. I arranged that meeting with Flo in advance, before all this happened. I must talk to her, come hell or high water…
The thought of hell conjured another image—that of the doll she’d unearthed in front of the Gizzis’ residence last night. The doll’s likeness to Mrs. Gizzi, and what Madam Labasilier had done to it, gave her the heebie-jeebies. Inez was not given to faints and shivers over talk of ghosts and “haints” and stories of the spirits of murdered victims returning to drive their killers mad. Such talk and tales were the common fodder of the men who loitered at the Silver Queen, when they weren’t talking investments, shares, assays, and yields-per-tonnage. Still, that doll seemed to emanate malignity. As soon as Inez had made her way up to her room, shortly before the dawn light crept over the Mosquito Range, she’d ripped it from her pocket. Holding it with the most tentative of two-fingered pinches, she tossed it into the little corner cabinet and locked the ornately stamped brass lock with the small brass key.
Now, the doll’s inner darkness was jailed in the more worldly darkness of the cabinet.
The stove was doing its job, cheerfully pouring heat into the room. Inez abandoned her wrap, pulled off her nightcap, and ran her fingers through her hair as she slowly paced the floor, willing her limbs to move at her command. Twelve determined steps took her to the window, where she looped back the dark green window hangings, allowing the overcast gray light to seep in through the sheer lace. Twelve return paces brought her to the door that led into the second-story hallway. She could detect murmurings up through the planks. Mark, no doubt, in the kitchen with Bridgette and Abe. How he managed to stay up all night playing poker and present a cheerful countenance before the noon hour was completely beyond her.
When she’d dragged herself to the upper story of the saloon after the events of the night, all she wanted to do was retrieve the bottle of fine brandy secured in the office and retreat to her sleeping quarters. Mark must have been keeping an ear out for her return, because he popped out of the gaming room as she emerged from the office, took in her appearance, and said, “Darlin’, you look like somethin’ the cat dragged in. Are you all right? What happened?”
“Not now.”
He must have gotten the message, because he held his tongue and refrained from further comment as she continued to her room at the end of the hall, holding her bedraggled and ruined hems immodestly up and away from her evening shoes with one hand and the bottle and empty glass with the other.
Now, he was no doubt waiting to hear some explanation from her as to what had transpired after she’d stormed out of the room last night.
We stepped off the train less than a day ago, but it feels like the distant past.
In that brief interim, she had met Drina Gizzi and her daughter, only to have the mother brutally murdered hours later and her corpse vanish. As for the daughter, Inez admitted to herself that the elusive Tony, with her disguise, her fierce independence, and intense, yet still childlike manner, had inadvertently unleashed maternal feelings inside Inez. And here she thought she had securely sealed all those vulnerable emotions away in Colorado Springs after kissing the top of her two-year-old son’s head and saying goodbye. From there, Inez’s sister had whisked him into the train and back to the bosom of Inez’s decidedly complicated family on the East Coast.
All the people and events of the past day whirled about, creating a dizzy storm in her mind as she paced: Drina, Tony, Madam Labasilier and that damn poppet, the oddly disturbing and disturbed Mrs. Alexander and her undertaker husband and his solemn companion, the medical practitioner Dr. Gregorvich. On top of them all poured the Lads from London, their quarrel with Tony, and the “unmentionables” drummer, Woods.
So, what was Woods doing in that unmentionable section of town at that unholy hour? Could he have been in the area when Drina Gizzi was killed? Could he have seen or heard something that would help lead to the murderer? Elliston’s tales of corpse-stealing elbowed into her thoughts. Could that have been the fate of Mrs. Gizzi? But her corpse had disappeared so quickly, almost as if someone was watching and waiting.
And Justice Sands. Was it true that he might be forced to leave Leadville? Where did the apparently sudden impetus to replace him come from? So help me God, if Mark has been busy behind the scenes on this…
Inez rubbed her forehead, trying to stop her spinning thoughts and the rising feeling of frustration and impotence.
The nausea that had wound through her upon waking now gripped her with a fiercer, insistent hand. No surprise there. The glass, well used, perched on the night table by her bedstead. The empty bottle, which had emptied much too quickly, it seemed,
was nowhere in sight. She was fairly certain it had rolled under the bedstead when, nearly insensate, she’d dropped it, after the warmth of the brandy had cradled her and lulled her into a deep, but unrestful sleep.
Suddenly much too warm, she stopped at the window and leaned her forehead against the lace undercurtain. The icy touch of glass bleeding through the sheer fabric was shocking, but welcome.
As the sensations of hot and cold mixed within her, the interrupted passion of last night’s moments flared in her memory. Justice. Me. Minister. Minister’s wife.
The empty brandy glass, the besmirched expensive clothing, mocked her thoughts.
Despair ratcheted around, playing havoc with her insides. She placed a palm flat against the pane, watching the steady march of pedestrians on Harrison. Somber all-business black coats and hats mixed with the drab browns and rust of working men. A few women moved among them, muffled in long winter coats, bonnets, mufflers on a morning that heralded the quick approach of a long winter.
As minister’s wife, my life will devolve into chit-chat with church ladies, sewing circles, visits with the sick and needy, keeping hearth and home, staying above reproach. The closest she had come to living such a life recently was her two months in Manitou Springs visiting her very proper young sister and husband. There, they had mingled with the Springs’ polite society, as well as with the wealthy consumptive émigrés from the East Coast and elsewhere who had come to Colorado in desperate hope of improving their health.
She would need to be like the women she had known while growing up, before Mark had “rescued” her from their fate. Women who were quiet. Reserved. Polite. Laced up right tight and proper. Who knew what lurked behind those carefully erected “false fronts?” Despair? Contentment? Happiness? A desire to escape it all in a bottle of laudanum or sherry? Or an acceptance of women’s roles and “God’s will” as set forth by men?
