Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  Bracing herself against the heat and the wasps, Rachel forced herself to go all the way to the top of the attic stairs. She kept her hands defensively on her head and peeped underneath her arms. The attic was full of boxes, old baby furniture, the thready remnants of onions from the days when bulbs were hung from the rafters to dry. She didn’t see Elaine, or anyone else, and ran thankfully down the stairs, shutting the door with a thump and brushing imaginary insects out of her scalp.

  There was one last bedroom just past the attic door. This was clearly the most important room to Gina, the one where she was writing. A laptop was set up on an old side table; next to it were stacks of papers and books. She’d even piled them on a daybed that stood under the east window. In contrast to the other rooms, even the bedroom where she was sleeping, here Gina had scrubbed the walls and the floor.

  Much of the faded floral wallpaper had peeled from the walls. On one bare patch of plaster, some bygone Fremantle had written differential equations in a tiny hand. Next to these, Gina had hung a poster-sized photograph of a woman with long dark hair, inscribed, “Gina, This is what a Wiccan looks like.” The woman was smiling so intimately that Rachel was discomfited, as if she had walked in on someone’s bedroom.

  She turned away, but as she left the room movement out the east window caught her eye. Beyond the apple trees stood the heap of charred, weathered boards that had once been the Fremantle hands’ bunkhouse. Someone was out there in the wreckage—Rachel could just make out a figure through the trees.

  She ran back down the narrow stairs to the kitchen and out the south door. The earth was rough, untended, beneath the high grasses, and she stumbled in her low-heeled classroom shoes. She slowed down to keep from hurting her ankles.

  When she reached the ruins, Rachel found Gina Haring stabbing at what was left of the roof with a long board. She turned when Rachel came up, but didn’t stop what she was doing. Rachel stood well away from the overhanging beams—they looked unstable, and Gina’s poking seemed singularly inept.

  “I’m Rachel Carmody,” she finally said as Gina kept slamming the board against the remains of the roof.

  “Hang on a minute. I’ve almost got this piece.”

  Gina shoved several more times. A section of roof tumbled down, landing with a sighing thud among the weeds and charred wood inside the house. Both women jumped as a family of rabbits scurried from the rubble.

  Gina dropped her long board and stood panting. She had on heavy work gloves, a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armholes, and old jeans, but she still made Rachel feel dowdy. It was something in the way she held herself, perhaps, or the way her hair was cut, curling back from her face into a perfect oval at the nape of her neck. Her arms in the sleeveless tee were tanned and sinewy.

  “Jim Grellier warned me not to go into the ruin of the bunkhouse because the roof was unstable,” Gina said.

  “So you’re taking off the roof. I guess that makes sense. What do you want it for—more firewood?”

  Gina looked startled. “Who are you? Have you come to lodge another complaint about the bonfires? I can’t believe how much attention people out here pay to each other’s every move! In New York, if I set a fire in the street no one would notice, and there’d be two million people around me.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how little I care about anyone else’s business. I only heard about your bonfires because of Susan Grellier. She was trying to explain them to me after church one Sunday—she loved the ritual, but some of the church’s board thought even for an open and inclusive church, a pagan ceremonial was going too far. There was quite a debate at the meeting, and Susan was describing what went on. I’ve never felt free enough to experiment with New Age ceremonies, but Susan embraces change. Used to,” Rachel amended sorrowfully, “until life dealt her the kind of change that no one wants to embrace.”

  “Her son’s death, you mean. People blame me for that,” Gina said.

  “Blame you?” Rachel wrinkled her forehead. “You didn’t encourage Chip to enlist, did you? I—I thought you were part of the anti-war movement.”

  “I am.” Gina struck a defiant pose, gloved hands on hips. “But a couple of people have told me it was my fault that Susan got involved in the movement. They say that Etienne enlisted because of the fights they were having over it.”

  “Etienne—oh, yes, of course, that was Chip’s formal name. I forgot. I think Susan was the only person who called him that.”

  “I only knew about him through Susan,” Gina said, “so that’s how I always think of him. Etienne Grellier. When he joined the Army, Susan said he was doing it to get back at her, because he kept trying to argue her out of her work in the movement.”

  “Who can possibly say what led Chip to enlist? I think a lot of things were preying on him.”

  Rachel’s voice trailed away. It troubled her that she couldn’t remember Chip clearly. He’d stopped coming to church a year or so before he enlisted, and that was where she’d chiefly known him, since he hadn’t been one of her English students. Her most vivid memories stemmed from seeing him at the farmers’ market, where he’d been a bright-faced, good-natured boy, bantering easily with the customers, until the last six months or so before he’d left home. He’d turned withdrawn and surly, to the point that she’d wondered if drugs had become an issue in his life. When he joined up, she’d even privately thought the Army might be good for him, by giving some structure to his life.

  “Has anyone at Grelliers’—Blitz, Jim—suggested you’re responsible?” Rachel asked.

  Gina flushed under her tan. “Some hysterical girl came up to me after the funeral and said if it wasn’t for me, Etienne would still be alive.”

  “Janice Everleigh. I didn’t hear her accuse you. The rest of her outburst was hideous enough.”

  Chip’s girlfriend had seen herself as the heroine of the drama, almost a widow; church gossip said Janice tried to lay claim to Chip’s body, then to his life insurance, even though he had designated his parents and sister as beneficiaries of the ten thousand dollars, asking them to give five hundred to Tom Curlingford. At the interment, Janice snatched the flag as Chip’s honor guard started to hand it to Susan and Jim. She draped it around herself like a cloak and ran to the open grave, leaning over it and wailing as if she were going to fling herself in. Susan stalked up to her and tore the flag from her shoulders while Janice screeched, “You don’t have a right to that flag. You hate the flag, you hate America, you hated Chip being in the Army.” Susan had stared at Janice for a long second, but all she said was, “Etienne. His name was Etienne, and that is how he is being buried.”

  Rachel shuddered in the September heat as she remembered the scene but said to Gina, “You’re so sophisticated, I wouldn’t think anyone could get under your skin, especially not a girl like Janice.”

  “Yes, I know: everyone thinks I’m some kind of shellacked, unfeeling manikin. The truth is—I’m an empty hole underneath my shellac. Anyone can fill it with anger or contempt.” Gina compressed her lips, as if ashamed of revealing herself, and added quickly, “I went over to the Grelliers’ to offer my condolences, but Susan was lying down, and Jim said he couldn’t suggest a good time for me to come back—which sounded as though he wants me to stay away!”

  “He may have been speaking out of despair. He may be afraid there won’t ever come a time when she’ll be—I don’t know—maybe healed enough for visitors. I have to go there after I leave here, and I’m dreading it myself.”

  “What—are you visiting everyone in the county or just the ones who danced around the bonfire last June? Are you going to call on Arnie Schapen and his mother? Myra Schapen’s the kind of person who gives witches a bad name. She and Arnie brought the fire department out to douse our midsummer fire, but you can tell them from me that I still plan to have a fire at Samhain.”

  Rachel felt a headache building behind her eyes. She was tired, and talking to Gina was strenuous work. “I don’t have any plans to see Mr.
Schapen, nor do I know what Samhain is, so it doesn’t matter to me. Besides, I’m only here because you asked to see me!”

  “I? I’ve never heard of you!”

  “Elaine Logan,” Rachel said, angry. “You called New Haven Manor and demanded we do something about her hanging around you, even though you invited her to your fire ceremonies.”

  “Oh.” Gina suddenly grew quiet, deflated almost. She looked down at herself and murmured something about not realizing how dirty she’d become, poking around in the bunkhouse. “And I’m sure you’re not comfortable in that pantsuit. Isn’t it rayon? Rayon holds heat terribly. Who would believe it could be almost ninety on September twentieth?”

  “Never mind my clothes and your dirt,” Rachel snapped. “I have lessons to prepare and a ton of other things to do this evening. I came out here as a favor to you, so if you don’t have anything creative to say about providing for Elaine’s well-being I’m going home.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you’re doing me a great favor. The Schapens spy on me so constantly that they’ve thrown me off balance. Come into the house with me for a minute so we can discuss Elaine.”

  Her frank apology, the wistful appeal in her eyes, the gap-toothed smile Jim and Lara both liked—all those things affected Rachel, too. She let herself be mollified, let herself be led to the kitchen, where Gina took two bottles of water out of a nearly empty refrigerator.

  “There’s so much iron in the Fremantle well that it’s undrinkable—I have to buy bottled water in town. All the pipes are rusted out, too—I don’t even like to bathe out here—it was turning my skin orange, so I joined a gym in town just to have a place to wash up.”

  Gina rinsed her arms under the sink tap. When she dried them, she showed Rachel the towel. Sure enough, it was faintly streaked orange.

  Rachel nodded, her face grim: adolescents avoiding difficult discussions indulged in similar dramatic tactics. “Elaine Logan.”

  Gina flung the towel away. “I can’t be responsible for her. She’s too difficult.”

  “I don’t think anyone asked you to be.”

  “No. But she’s started coming out here almost every day, and I can’t make her go away.”

  “When I got here, I heard noises on the second floor. I thought it might be you so I went up to see, only no one was there.”

  “Well, damn her, anyway! I told her two days ago she had to find some other drop-in shelter. And here she is, the second my back is turned, invading—”

  “I don’t think so. She’s a very big woman, and she doesn’t move fast. She couldn’t have hidden from me, even in the middle of all the boxes and clothes and whatever else in those second-floor bedrooms. I probably just heard mice or squirrels or something.” Rachel’s voice trailed away uncertainly. She was sure she’d heard something drop or fall. “You don’t have a cat, do you?”

  “Everyone here is obsessed with animals.” Gina shook her curls in irritation. “Jim thinks I need a dog, you think I need a cat—spinsters or dykes are supposed to love animals, is that it?”

  “You are an Olympic medalist in the conclusion jump!” Rachel cried. “I asked because a cat might have knocked something over to make the sound I heard. How did you get from there to accusing me of the kind of homophobia that rides in your head?”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Gina bit her lip and looked at the floor. “Why can’t Elaine go back to New Haven Manor?”

  “Because they have a no-alcohol policy, which Elaine kept violating.”

  “And you Christians can’t stand for a homeless woman to drink?” Gina looked up.

  “We Christians turned a blind eye to that for months—everyone at New Haven knows she doesn’t have a lot of choices—but Elaine has set the place on fire three times when she passed out while smoking. We can’t ignore the problem because she’s endangering other people’s lives, not just her own. She could stay at New Haven if she joined AA or went through a detox program, but she refuses to admit that she drinks. She says the staff are lying, that they set the fires themselves.”

  The pain over Rachel’s left eye intensified. “How does she get out here? For that matter, why did she come? You must have made her feel welcome in some special way.”

  Gina shook her head. “After the midsummer bonfire, she started attaching herself to me. I tried to discourage her, but she says my great-aunt let her roam around the property, which makes her think she’s entitled to the use of the place. Back in the summer, back before Etienne’s death, Susan Grellier told me Elaine had only come out a few times when Great-Aunt Liz was alive, but Elaine has blown it up in her head to remembering that she practically lived here. She somehow persuades people to give her a lift to the crossroads and sometimes even bullies them into dropping her at the door. I never know when she’s going to show up.”

  “What’s so special about this house that she’d go to all that effort?” Rachel asked.

  “She says she was part of the Free State Commune. That was a bunch of hippies that lived in the bunkhouse—that ruin where I was working when you showed up. I don’t know about the commune—I was never in this house before I moved here—I don’t even know any of the Fremantles except my uncle John, who isn’t even really my uncle. He married my father’s sister. Anyway, I wasn’t born when the bunkhouse burned down, but Elaine says her lover died in the fire.”

  “How terrible!” Rachel’s ready empathy was engaged. “Perhaps that’s why she drinks so much.”

  “Frankly, I don’t even know if that’s true,” Gina said impatiently. “She enjoys drama, as you’ve probably noticed. She entertains herself by making up stories with herself as the heroine, so I don’t know what I can believe of her memories.”

  “Is that why you’re excavating the bunkhouse?” Rachel asked.

  “What—to see if I can find any proof of her story? No.” She twisted her mouth in a rueful smile. “I’m hoping to find—”

  A strangled screech, the staple of horror movies, brought both women to their feet. Gina stood for a second, trying to pinpoint the noise, then strode through the dining room to the front hall. Rachel followed her. The great front door, slowly swinging on its hinges, screeched again.

  Twenty-Four

  WHO WAS THAT…INTRUDER?

  THE TWO WOMEN stared at it for a frozen moment, then Gina said, “That door was bolted on the inside. I’ve never used it. Elaine was hiding out in here after all, damn it!”

  She pushed the heavy door open and went out onto a veranda that surrounded the house on three sides. The house stood on a slight rise, man-made when it was built, to keep it above flood level when the Kaw and Wakarusa rivers spread their waters through the valley. From the top of the rise, Rachel saw a trail of bent and broken stems through the waist-high grass, showing where the intruder had fled.

  The yard was filled with trees—firs, sycamore, walnut, a dozen varieties that Una Fremantle had brought with her as seedlings from Massachusetts; these had grown so huge over the centuries that they shielded the road from sight.

  Rachel went down the porch stairs and made her way through the bent stalks and past the trees, but the wild prairie grasses in the drainage ditch still blocked her view of the road. She slithered into the ditch. When she made it up to the road, she couldn’t see anyone in either direction.

  The wind kept the high grasses in constant motion, but as she stared across the road into the twilit fields a different kind of movement caught her eye. Something like the wake a boat would make in a turbulent ocean was splitting the corn in the field to the north. She squinted, concentrating on the motion until it was lost from sight. Whoever was going through those fields was heading northwest toward the Grellier house.

  Rachel limped back up the road to the Fremantle drive and slowly returned to Gina. Scrambling through ditches and grasses in her school shoes had raised blisters on her heels and toes. When she got back to the house, Gina demanded to know where Elaine was.

  “It wasn’t Elaine.” Rachel sat on the verand
a steps and took off her shoes. Blood was oozing through the stocking on her left foot. “She can’t move fast. Whoever this was could run.”

  Gina’s shoulders sagged. “Anyone could get in here who felt like it—the place has five doors. I have keys, but you can see what a sieve it is. My God, I wonder if it was Arnie Schapen or that dreadful mother of his, trying to plant some kind of evidence here so he can prance around in his deputy’s uniform and arrest me.”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine Mr. Schapen giving up his dignity by squatting down here in the hallway for half an hour or sprinting to the road with me after him—he’d be more likely to shoot me and claim self-defense.” Rachel peeled off her socks and stared mournfully at her bleeding feet. “I don’t know Mr. Schapen’s mother, but this was someone who could move fast on foot. Unless she really is a witch, I doubt an old woman could have gotten away by the time we came out the front door.”

  “People have the wrong idea about witches,” Gina said. “We don’t do magic, we can’t influence the outcome of events or violate the laws of physics any more than Christians can. However much the Schapens photograph our rituals, they won’t find any sign that we fly or kill babies for their blood or any of the other crap they accuse us of.”

  “If Junior Schapen were still living at home, I might suspect him,” Rachel said, “but the football coach, or Arnie, persuaded a local Bible school to let him play football for them, despite his abysmal grades, so he’s over in Tonganoxie.”

  “They do have another son. I’ve never met him, but he passes here sometimes on his way to the Wakarusa. Hard to believe, but people eat fish out of that muddy creek.” Gina flushed. “I’m as bad as everyone else out here, aren’t I, keeping track of who’s doing what?”

  Rachel smiled, but shook her head. “That must be Robbie. He’s in my sophomore English class this fall, but, Schapen though he is, he seems so engaged by poetry that I can’t imagine him doing something so—so sordid.”