The Hunger(87)

Elitha was crying wildly now. She pointed at Keseberg. “He put you up to this, didn’t he? Whatever he told you is a lie. He’s doing this to get back at me and Thomas, because we wouldn’t do what he said.” They weren’t even listening, Mary saw. They didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow, and Keseberg only smiled at her, looking pleased.

Dolan pulled back the hammer.

Elitha’s scream and the shot rang through the trees at the same time. Thomas remained on his feet for one weightless second—Mary’s hope buoyed—maybe Dolan had missed.

Then Thomas toppled backward into the snow.





CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT




Springfield, Illinois

July 1840


Reiner had not changed much in fifteen years, Lewis Keseberg thought. His uncle’s hair was a little whiter and the skin on his face a little more ragged but otherwise much the same as when Lewis had last seen him, as a boy in Germany. Reiner had the same easy smile, the same wildness twinkling in his eyes. Both made something in Lewis’s gut turn over. He’d been content to hope Reiner had died, and seeing him again at his doorstep this evening had spooked Lewis more than he could say. You couldn’t trust his uncle’s smiles, and, he knew, those eyes held sickening secrets.

Reiner had just appeared on Lewis’s doorstep with no forewarning. Not that Reiner was ever one to write letters, but it was unnerving, still; Lewis had only started renting this homestead a few months ago. How had Reiner been able to track him down?

Lewis brought out a bottle of a neighbor’s home-brewed whiskey, potent stuff, and two tin cups. “Warum bist du hier?”—why are you here?—he asked in rusty German, eyeing his uncle as he set the cups down on his splintered old table.

That easy grin. “The family curse,” he laughed as he sat in one of Keseberg’s chairs and gulped down his liquor.

So. His uncle had fled the homeland. “What’d they get you for?”

“The usual. Not that they could prove anything. A man goes missing but there’s no body to be found—who’s to say it’s murder?” His uncle huffed out another laugh, then leaned back in his chair and squinted into the corners of the cabin, hidden in shadow. “Where’s your father gone off to?”

“He’s in jail. Back in Indiana.”

Reiner raised an eyebrow. “You left him to rot in jail alone?”

Keseberg’s cheeks went hot. “I’m making a fresh start.”

His uncle’s stare fell heavily on him but Lewis didn’t dare meet his eyes. He remembered Reiner’s wrath from his childhood; it was epic and unpredictable. A thrashing for spilling a teaspoon’s worth of salt on the floor, a tooth knocked clear out of his mouth for rolling his eyes at something Reiner had said.

But Reiner simply laughed again. “No fresh starts for men like us. What you are, it’s in your blood. You can never deny it.”

Lewis looked around his cabin. The gathering dusk hid its shabby nature. It was a simple cabin, one room with a sleeping loft. This table and the two chairs were about all the furniture he owned. “Not much room here for guests, Uncle,” he started to say.

Reiner poured himself another drink. “It will only be for a few weeks. I’m headed west for a spell. Heard about a prospecting gig out in the mountains.”

“California?”

His uncle nodded. “I hear it’s lawless out there. Men like us can roam free, if you know what I mean. No one watching.”

Heading out to make a fortune in gold. The idea flared up in Lewis’s mind like a mirage. To leave behind the daily grind of farming, plowing fields, watering and weeding. It was hard to carve out a living for yourself when you had nothing, came from nothing.

But—no. Lewis had plans. He’d get himself a wife, work hard, fit in. He had never known happiness as a child—his father had been abysmal as a parent and his mother disappeared before he’d formed any memories of her—but he’d vowed not to make the same mistakes as his father and uncle and the rest of his family. He’d resolved to be different. He would not be a failure. He would break the family curse.

If he could just hold on and get through these tough times, it would get easier. It had to.

The older man reached into his pocket before dropping a handful of wadded currency onto the table. “I can pay my way. I’m not asking for a handout.”

Keseberg’s eyes widened at the sight of the money, more than he’d made in an entire year. “Where did you get this?”

Reiner poured a generous amount of whiskey into his cup. “I’ve been selling patent medicines. My own recipes from the old country. I’ve been doing well.”

“So I see . . . But if the medicines are selling so well, why go all that way to California?”

That was when Keseberg knew his uncle was lying. The older man stretched back in his chair. He fixed his nephew with a stare, watching intently for his reaction. “I got a sickness no tonic can fix. Gold fever, I think they call it.” He winked.

Lewis felt ill. More like blood fever, he thought.

It wasn’t until that evening, as Keseberg made up a spot on the floor for his uncle to sleep—Lewis didn’t invite his uncle to share the loft, couldn’t quite bear the thought of lying next to him through the long night—that Reiner made the offer.