A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2)(31)

There was a sharp rap at the door I’d come through. Reva and Hosea stood immediately and started for the back door. “Get out there quick and sit on the bench like you waiting for him to get through with your shoe,” Hosea said over his shoulder.

A few seconds later I was sitting on the bench with my legs crossed, studying a map of Sally from a rack on the counter. The owner of the shop came in, mopping his face with a handkerchief. Mr. Kempton was short and white-haired and red with the heat, dressed in white shirtsleeves and black trousers. He’d loosened his necktie.

“Good afternoon, young lady. Has Phineas taken care of you?” he said, real loud. I thought Mr. Kempton was at least a little hard of hearing. He wouldn’t hear the back door closing on Hosea and Reva.

“Yes, sir, thank you,” I said. “My boot is just about finished, I imagine.”

“Boot? You ride? Sorry, I’m Brent Kempton.” A glance at the boot Phineas held in his hand told Mr. Kempton that this was no shiny riding boot, but a strictly everyday item.

“I live in some rough country,” I said. I didn’t introduce myself. Instead I took my boot from Phineas, pretending to examine the heel. “Good as new,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”

“A quarter,” Mr. Kempton said. “Just took a nail or two to fix that.”

Phineas never raised his eyes to mine or reacted to my presence in any way while Mr. Kempton was there. But then, Phineas didn’t show emotion. He seemed deadened, somehow.

I walked out of Kempton’s Shoe Repair with my boot again tucked under my arm and a debt discharged. It galled me that I’d had to meet with them in secret. In fact, it made me angry.

I realized I was walking pretty fast. I had to remind myself to slow down. One, no one else was hurrying. Two, did I really want to be back in that hotel room, mad and confused?

But what else could I do? I passed the hotel, too restless to check in with Eli.

I went to the telegraph office to see if I’d had a reply to the message I’d sent Jake’s lover.

“We were just about to deliver this to the hotel,” the middle-aged man at the counter said. “You didn’t need to come walking over here, Mrs. Savarov.”

Just now, being called Mrs. Savarov was awful irritating. But that wasn’t this man’s fault. “Thank you,” I said, accepting the message.

In touch with funeral home shipping body home have talked to Charlies wife do not know employer. Burke Printer

Brief and to the point. I hadn’t really thought he’d know who our employer was, but it would have been handy.

I couldn’t face another trip to the hospital just now, with the big echoing rooms and the pain and Nurse Mayhew. I went back to the hotel. Not exactly to my surprise, Eli was waiting for me on the porch.

“Let’s go to the park,” he said, and off we set. He was wearing a white linen shirt and tan slacks, but no grigori vest. (His shirt pockets did look real bulgy.) He’d rebraided his hair with care. He looked nice, and he blended in as much as he ever would. (Not at all.)

I hadn’t seen the park. It was right across the street from the courthouse. It was green and neat, full of big old trees, a Confederate cannon, two water fountains (one for white people and one for black people, the signs said), and quite a few wooden benches in good repair. Eli picked one on the shadowed side of the big war memorial, and we sat down under a tree. It was a pleasant afternoon when the breeze sprung up. The sun was shining but we were in the shade. The town was a few steps closer to normal after the train wreck, looked like.

There weren’t many other people around: a woman pushing a baby carriage, two men talking seriously as they walked, and a groundskeeper picking up trash with a spike on the other side of the park.

We were side by side in body, but not in mind. I spoke first. “We got to be honest with each other. Since you hired me, am I not an…” I couldn’t think how to end the sentence.

“An extension of me?” Eli looked thoughtful. “That is a good way to think of it. How can you help, if you don’t know what I want to do? I can tell you a few things.” He looked around us for anyone close. This was the land of listening-in, all its people seemed to think. The groundskeeper was wandering out of the park, maybe to pick up trash somewhere else.

Eli said very quietly, “I got assigned this job, one no one else wanted, because of my father’s treachery. I have to hand the crate’s contents over to certain people here in Sally. If I’m successful, I’ll change the course of events here in Dixie forever. If I’m not, I’ll probably be killed. My brother Peter will be expelled from his school, half-trained. My two sisters will not be able to marry.”

I let all that settle in my head. “Can’t your sisters do anything for themselves?” I asked.

“Young women in Russian aristocratic families are not taught how to do anything but run a household,” Eli said. “And usually that means directing the servants.”

I thought if you watched a servant work you could learn to do the servant’s job, if you had a little grit. I kept that to myself. “Can your sisters shoot?”

“They’ve never held a gun.”

He expected me to be shocked, but I wasn’t. My neighbor Chrissie had never carried a gun, because it would be crazy to give her one. “Your sisters, they don’t want to be grigoris like you and Peter?”