She had followed Tommy out as often as she could, snuck out right behind him. At first, in the early winter, he was tearing off on Sonnet to Miss Flora’s house, racing back with a kiss on his lips and a letter in his breast pocket. Millie hiding in the Indian corn east of the farm as the filly huffed by her, frustrated that she had not even made it a mile down the road before Tommy was on his way back. She had been dying to go all the way to Miss Flora’s house, to see them at the window like Romeo and Juliet, but it was too far. Then she remembered the old bicycle. It had been leaning up against the wall of the tack room collecting chicken droppings since Junior left for the war. Maybe not as fast as a race horse, but something.
Sonnet was not the best winter pony, and took some coaxing to get out of the barn; this bought Millie time to sneak past the barn to the gate, where she had the bicycle hidden. On that first night with the bicycle, she went as fast as her legs would go until she was a good piece up the road, that sharp south turn toward town Pa was always cursing, then sit and catch her breath as she watched the road behind her.
He didn’t come—not that first night or the next night or the third night. Well then where did he go? She looked around, thought of the field roads, or the fields themselves, her shortcuts to town she learned from Tommy himself. She pictured Tommy cutting through stubble and bare acres of frozen dirt to the edge of town, to Miss Flora’s house. “Goddamnit,” she said that night, teeth chattering. Sneaking around in the cold like this, in the middle of the night, all for nothing.
It was not a minute later the sound of a horse whinnying came to her from far away, from the east woods, followed by, barely, what might have been Tommy’s bird-whistle. She turned an ear, waited; this time she heard the huff of breath from a horse, clearly heard it.
Well well well, she thought.
Looking east across a few acres of dead, frost-bent hay, a black wall of bare trees marked the edge of the field. She never went there; Pa and Tommy told her not to, said it was no place for girls.
“Horsesh-sh-shit.”
She left the bicycle against a tree, stumbled across the frozen field. Up close, the east woods looked tall and deep and real, instead of like a black wall, a place to walk into instead of upon and something about that wasn’t right. Tommy had told her stories of badgers still roaming around in there, of a pack of wild dogs that had been there since the first days of the Indians, and of bootleggers who had kettles and Civil War muskets and these guys were the dangerous ones. But Tommy was in there, most likely, and no animal had ever harmed her on purpose, and who in his right mind made moonshine on a night like this?
It wasn’t so windy in the trees, and not as cold, but much, much darker. She walked on a cow path until she came to the same dried-up creek she knew also ran through Pa’s fields. She followed along the near side of the creek, stepping over rocks and around tangles of branches. As she walked she began to hear little noises in the leaves, panting, whining, sniffing noises. The dogs. She began to walk faster, her eyes wide and looking all about for signs of life.
She saw the shack only because Sonnet, who was tied to a tree, shook her mane out, startling Millie. Inside the shack a lantern was burning low.
Well well well.
Looking around, Millie found a huge fallen tree with a hollow gap on its underside, near its roots. When she finally got the guts to crouch into the little den-like space under the trunk she found it was perfect, warmer and safer-feeling, and from here the backside of the shack was not thirty feet away. From this secret place, Millie had spent many nights watching her lovey-dovers.
Each night, the sounds of Sonnet’s hooves had come toward the shack from the opposite direction Millie had come—from Miss Flora’s house. Millie knew then he had made off with her from her window, like some fairy tale. She had wondered many times if Tommy’s idea of a fairy tale had always included the tumble-down shack in the middle of these woods. A fifty-year-old fishing and hunting shack, from back when there had been game in the woods, instead of wild dogs, from when this crater had been a pond. Now the shack was grown over with vines and weeds, rattling brownly when the cold wind blew, now the pond was a dried-up hole. This was no place for young lovers, for a prince and his fair lady to arrive in a rush, sometimes laughing, sometimes serious…no, not serious exactly. What was the word? Urgent. Sometimes she was all over him like she was scrabbling up a tree from a pack of wolves. They then disappeared into the shack. They never stayed for longer than an hour, ever. Then off they would go on Tommy's horse, leaving Millie to race home before Tommy caught her.
This was how it went, night after night.
Then one night, Millie came out of her nook in the tree, just to figure out another secret, no other reason, just to find out what was going on in that shack. She shouldn’t have come out; but she did come out. Junior's coat tight around her neck, she edged closer until her eyes were just inches from wood. At first, she couldn’t figure out what it was she was seeing—it looked like earthworms in a knot. When it finally dawned on her what they were doing, and when the shock had faded away, she was more confused than ever. This couldn’t be what love is, could it? Two people going at each other like this, legs and behinds and front sides meshed together, faces looking like they were in some kind of pain? It made her knees weak, it made her stomach squirm. It followed her like a barn smell throughout her daylight hours.
Still, there were nights when she had to watch. She had to see it. When she saw them like this, or in the day when she thought of them like this the sickening feeling she got was almost always overpowered by something else. Was it their love? Did love make all that writhing around and groping at each other’s privy parts okay?
All these months later, she just didn’t know, but she did know the fairy tale had made her feel less squirmy than the knots of earthworms in the lanternlight, so most nights she had stayed in her nook, where she could watch the darkness around the fairy tale, watch the moon slide by through the branches above, gaze upon this tumble-down shack that glowed and pulsed in the trees like a heart inside the rib cage of a snowed-on skeleton, the only living thing as far as she could see.
14.
Sterno drove the doctor back to the Old Price Hotel. Dr. Rosenzweig led him through the lobby and dining room to the kitchen, where Tess Helmcamp was using both her knotty forearms to stir a pot of ham and white beans. Without really knowing what he was doing, he stood in the threshold to the kitchen watching her, until the Indian girls became too uncomfortable with him there and tapped Tess on the shoulder. She was glad to see him, and grateful for the break from the kitchen to show him the cellar. "Hold this, handsome," she said. She handed Sterno a kerosene lantern while she lit her own wick. "Dad didn't run any electricity down here. He was scared senseless of fire. Good reason, I suppose, in this wind..." She used a key from a ring of a hundred keys to get the door open. Together they descended. They held their lanterns up against the total darkness of the windowless cellar.
"...Not to mention, Hope County seems to be prone to fires more than most places, I suppose."
"The timber around here," Sterno offered.
Tess Helmcamp stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The dust their shoes stirred up flurried upwards in the gas light of their lanterns. The library smell of mold and old wood and lots of old paper filled the room.
The Helmcamp woman looked at Sterno. "I suppose it is the timber that's burning," she said. She removed her apron and used it to dust off a table made of clapboard and sawhorses before setting her lantern down. She cranked up the kerosene in her lantern so that the flame grew, then flickered, then grew and stayed steady. Once Sterno had done the same to his light, he could see the walls around them.
The spines of record books made up the walls. Wooden boxes were placed along the bottoms of the shelves, and showing from inside these boxes were more record books. They were marked by year and by category, as such: "1865-1900: Property Registry G - 9" or "1910 - Census" or "Water Table Stat. 1900."
Some of the books contained the minutes from town hall meetings, some town charters and some farm reports. There were also stacks of bound newspapers. The Kansas City Star was well represented, but also were the Wichita Eagle, the Wichita Daily Beacon, the Daily Oklahoman and the New Bremen Caller. There were rolled up maps and charts stacked like lumber on one shelf. There was even some shelf space devoted to albums marked: "Histories - A thru G" and so on, complete with old world lineage, letters and even, Tess bragged, photographs her father had wrestled away from homes in the spirit of safety and well keeping. "Dad was fanatical about two things, newspapers and family lineages. Took this information from family Bibles all over the county. I used to think it was out of kindly curiosity, a drawing room historian collecting facts. But sometimes I wonder if his fact collecting was for some other purpose."
"So why the cellar of the hotel?" Sterno asked. He was idly reading the handwritten script at the bottom of each rolled map.
"This is Dad’s favorite place to relax, with all these dates and names. Crazy old curmudgeon, down here in the dark organizing and re-organizing and yelling up at my girls to be quiet. The records are safe down here—maybe he felt safe, too. Up until just a couple years ago, the 'Ol' Blue Mare'—as Dad calls her—was the only brick structure in town. There was an old red brick church for a long while, a Catholic church, but that was out by the river. Then it burned down in 'fifteen. The walls are still there."
"Another fire."
"Yes. Geez, I never really thought about it. But I guess...you know, it was a little prairie fire that took the church, up and started out of nowhere right next to the church."
"Maybe God is a Lutheran, after all."
"Yeah maybe." She smiled, then stopped smiling. "Well, anyhow, it was good enough reason for Dad to bring all this down here; brought it over in 'sixteen and 'seventeen. Then, lo and behold, another mysterious prairie fire, this one under a starry sky too, I remember that. More than one comment was made about that. So, we lose the hall and the brand new annex, not even a year old." She thought about this for a few seconds. "Geez, these people. There were farm troubles and labor troubles all over the place, even some shooting here and there. Then came the war; everyone in America stopped hating the Irish and started hating the Germans. And who knows what an American is capable of when he's full of hate. Then this Ku Klux Klan—or whatever it's called—popped up out of nowhere. A bunch of jug-humpers from Missouri and Arkansas—no offense meant—riding through here like it was the Civil War all over again. Well, Dad didn't like it. He wanted these records safe from any man's torch. That's the one you're looking for--" she interjected as his hand brushed a large map of rolled vellum. "And speaking of any man's torch..." she said in a conspiring tone, leaning against a sawhorse. "...Since we are out of the wind."
Sterno rolled two and lit them both with one match. He took the map down and spread it across the clapboard, a lantern resting at the northeast and southwest corners.
Tess Helmcamp enjoyed her cigarette but kept on talking in the same vein as though there had been no break in the conversation. He enjoyed watching her smoke her cigarette. In fact, he enjoyed most of what she did. Her ease. It made him feel like everything wasn’t always so hard, and sometimes Sterno forgot how hard it was for him. Everything. "Who knew these Klansmen could organize into a real political party, isn't that right?” she continued. “Taking over state capitals. We're not careful, our own state is going to be an official Klan state, like up there in—where is it? Iowa?"
"Indiana. They haven't elected him yet. We'll see."
They smoked. Sterno studied the map.
"So this is us right here?" he asked, pointing at the map. The map was dated 1910, and the town looked much different on paper than it did walking around in it twelve years later.
"That's the hotel. You see? One of the few original buildings still left."
Sterno followed the road from town to Donnan's farm. For the first time it struck him what a long way that is for a young horse to remember on its own. An old mule, sure, but a young, skittish female, going at full reach...?
Someone knocked on the cellar door. “Tess,” one of her girls called down from the crack in the door.
Tess had been mid-drag. When she let out her smoke, it was more a deflating than an exhaling. "Rosie, for Pete's sake. Can you give me five minutes?" Tess snubbed out her cigarette butt on a brick in the wall. She stared down at the property chart, but Sterno could tell her mind was no longer in this room. With another sigh she snapped the dust from her apron, looped it over the bun in her hair. "I best get up there. I got tenants who'll be wanting some grub soon," she said, tying the apron strings behind her as she mounted the stairs.
As she left, she brushed his cheek with her hand, then let her fingers linger on the clenched muscle of one side of his jaw. "You get hungry, handsome, you know where to find me."
Her touch remained on his cheek for several minutes after she had left.
*
Sterno took in the whole of the county before he narrowed his search. Large patches of blank space took up the areas south, west and northwest of Price. Fence lines were indicated with dots; property lines with longer dashes. In the lower right hand corner of each geometrical plot of property was the name of ownership. A property chart.
He saw the Big Silky River running jaggedly from north to southeast. It ran just north-northeast of Price. That dried up scar in the weeds he’d been riding by the past two days was a river. And that mayor bragging about the water around here.
True to Mayor Greentree's bragging, however, was that Hope County was heavily wooded. The shaded areas representing timber claims wrapped around the farms mostly to the east and northeast of town, but a crooked finger of woods also ran along the south end of town, along a stable, a garage, the hardware store and a schoolhouse. Sterno followed a thin straight line that was a dirt road into one of the wooded patches northeast of town. By chance he saw the name "Neuwald" penciled in the bottom corner, where two property lines met. It was nowhere near the house he had visited that morning; but now his gaze flitted around from corner to corner, lot to lot. “Neuwald” was penciled into a good portion of them, recently, in a shaky hand.
Sterno turned his head, stared into the darkness, thought about this. It didn’t make a lot of sense. The Neuwalds didn’t seem like property owners to him.
"Let's see," Sterno said with smoke. He found the farm labeled "Donnan." From the point where the main gate would be, he followed the road east until it turned sharply and dropped into town.
Where the line in the map turned southwardly, Sterno went off the road with his eyes, moving east where there was no road marked on the map but where he had seen the wagon ruts when he’d been out there with the doctor. There was a swath of white space running with the road and on the other side of this road was a thick shape of shaded vellum. Woods. It was the same space at which he had just been looking, arrived at from a different angle. The Neuwald Distillery.
The demarked lot of the Neuwald house was at the same latitude as the road where it ran east-west. That little dirt path Sterno had seen shooting off to the east at the turn in the road led straight east to and through Neuwald property.
Sterno re-traced his visual path back to the turn in the road, where all the bloodied rocks were found. He traced the road on its westward track, past Donnan's gate, further west until the road bowed slightly northward to run parallel with the Big Silky until they both went into the next county, off the map, off the table, into the dark dust of the cellar floor.
Sterno took a drag, shook his head just slightly. He was looking for a Pawnee reservation, but there was none to be found. There was no Indian reservation of any kind shown on this map, in this county. Now, Sterno could concede, there was a good chance Geshen Neuwald was running his booze into other counties, that was standard; the question was if he would do it on the night of one of the few social gatherings in these parts. There would have been dancing; there would have
been gambling; there would have been enough call for hard liquor right here in his own back yard. Or—even less likely—would he be making a run in the daylight of the morning following a big hurrah? Making it even less likely, nay, nearly impossible: there was a tornado that night. In Sterno's view, there was little reason for that Neuwald boy to be out on that farm road that morning, to see the hungry filly and empty buggy and dead boy and wailing mother of a dead boy.
Sterno rolled up the map, replaced it on the shelf. He made some notes while they were fresh in his mind. He thought about telegraphing St. Louis, but couldn’t think of what to say. Instead, he decided to go back out to that turn in the road. Alone this time. Take another, much closer look. See what he could find in those woods, maybe.
He left the cellar, but carried away its maps and names with him in his mind. He went up the stairs, through the busy kitchen—with a goodbye to Mrs. Helmcamp—across the lobby floor and out onto the front walk of the hotel without noticing or speaking to anyone. He was working out some scenarios, a timeline or two, but he had to get into those woods, check things out, see if what he found jibed with what was forming in his mind. He had to do this before it got dark.
He saw the men in hats out front before he opened the door.
It was the mayor. He stood with one foot on the running board of his Cadillac, holding his tan fedora. Jonas Neuwald and his twin sons stood on either side of Mayor Greentree. No one was speaking. Save the mayor, no one was smiling either.
"We got plans for you, Mr. Sterno," he said, standing straight. He spit into the dust. "But it looks like you might be off to do some work. You know it's a day of rest, don't you?"
"No rest for the weary, as they say," Sterno said.
The mayor put his hat on hugely, smiled hugely at Sterno, stepped forward to wrap his huge arm around Sterno's shoulders. "You're in my town," he said in his huge voice. "And it is His day, and we want you to take a load off, so why don't you get in the car, take a little drive with us?"
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