Bleeding Kansas (6 page)

S
USAN AND LARA'S BREATH
made white puffs in the cold air, barely visible against the gray sky and peeling paint of the porch. Lara stomped her feet, which were freezing in her running shoes, but Susan stood still, not wanting to jar the pie she was carrying.

“Maybe we should just go in and leave the pie on the table,” Lara suggested. “She must know we're here but doesn't want to answer the door.”

“Not the first time we come over,” Susan said firmly. “She won't know who we are or why we left a pie.”

It was two weeks before Christmas. Neither Susan nor Lara had met Gina Haring yet. The day Gina moved in, Susan had a church board meeting, so Jim had shown Gina the house and explained the workings of the old octopus furnace, with its eight outsize arms pushing hot air into the house.

Lara knew Gina's car, a battered turquoise Escort, from all the trips she'd made past their house on her way to Lawrence. The Escort stood in the circular drive, alongside a newer car, one of the Honda hybrids. They didn't recognize the hybrid model—no one who lived out here would own a car too small to take the punishment of country roads—but it had Douglas County plates, and a bumper sticker that proclaimed
WITCHES HEAL.

Susan had waited until eleven to drive over, not wanting to seem like a busybody. Lara came with her, hoping her mother and Gina Haring would get into some deep conversation so she could slip upstairs to retrieve her diary.

The morning after she and Chip had broken into the house, her father had bolted two large planks across the coal-cellar doors. Lara didn't know how she'd get in again uninvited unless Gina drove off and left the doors unlocked, and she couldn't sneak through the fields a million times a day to see if that had happened.

Susan was finally agreeing with Lara's suggestion to leave the pie with a note for Gina when Gina opened the kitchen door. Lara couldn't keep back a little gasp of admiration. Gina had on jeans, but they'd been ironed, and the big sweater she wore was made from yarn so soft Lara wanted to reach over to pet it. Not even her aunt Mimi wore such expensive-looking clothes. Gina also looked older than Lara had expected, her face thin, with well-defined bones, her dark hair combed severely behind her ears. Although it was Saturday morning, she even had on makeup, and tiny gold earrings.

Susan rushed through the business of introductions: My name is—You met my husband—my daughter—If there's anything you need—Here's a pie.

After a moment's hesitation, Gina invited them into the kitchen. No one else was there, which made Lara wonder if the hybrid was hers along with the Ford. Gina didn't smile or say anything, just stood holding the pie as if it were a foreign object she'd never seen before. Lara flushed, wondering what she and Susan could have done to make her so unfriendly.

“I re-created the recipe as best I could from my husband's great-great-grandmother's papers,” Susan was saying. “Of course, she didn't list ingredients in detail, or proportions, but I did as much research into pioneer baking as I could. Since you're going to be living here, I thought you'd be interested in a pie that comes out of the history of this area. The apples are from the trees behind this house, and they still have branches going back to the 1850s. I think it's pretty authentic.”

“It also tastes good,” Lara ventured, seeing that Gina was looking even more forbidding.

That made Gina laugh. Her front teeth were crooked, which seemed somehow glamorous to Lara, the little flaw that made the rest of her look perfect.

She finally murmured something that might have been a thank-you, adding, “I'm not much interested in pioneer history.”

“Oh, but once you start learning about it, you'll change your mind.” Susan ignored Gina's chilly tone. “This little triangle, where we and Fremantles and Schapens live, was at the center of some of America's most violent battles in the 1850s. Not this house, but the people who lived here—this house wasn't built until 1871, but the Fremantles, and my husband's family, even—”

“Mom!” Lara interrupted, embarrassed because Gina was looking stern. “She doesn't care about all that stuff, she just said!”

Gina said, “It's always engaging to hear from someone who is enthusiastic about a subject.”

The words showed interest, but her tone was cold, smooth, like ice cream. Embarrassed though she'd been by her mother, Lara couldn't bear for anyone else to make fun of her. She said abruptly, “It's freezing in here. You know, if you don't turn the furnace on, the pipes will burst. Do you want me to light the pilot?”

“Lara!” Susan was embarrassed in her turn. “She doesn't need you telling her how to run the house.”

“Maybe I do,” Gina said. “I've never lived in a palace before. The furnace is on, but I can't afford to heat a palace. I put space heaters in the rooms I use. The rest of the place stays a nice fifty-five degrees, perfect for the spiders and the mice.”

Lara looked at her, baffled. It was impossible to tell what Gina meant, because, despite the sarcastic words, she sounded enthusiastic, as if she wanted to make the house attractive to vermin. Lara decided it was safer not to say anything else. Besides, she couldn't believe Gina didn't have any money: not only did her clothes look as though they cost a fortune, she had a big cappuccino machine on the counter; one not even that fancy was for sale at Z's Espresso Bar, and it cost twelve hundred dollars.

Gina glanced at Lara's troubled face and smiled, a genuine-looking smile, and said with genuine-sounding warmth, “I'm sorry, I'm a little distracted this morning. I know your house, because your father pointed it out to me when he drove out with me last weekend to open up this place. Who lives behind me? Do they own all those cows?”

“The cows belong to the Schapens,” Lara said. “You can't see their house from here. Really, you can't see it from anywhere, not even our hayloft, because their farm is built so far back from the road. The Ropeses live behind you.”

Lara pointed at the gray clapboard house across the field, where her best friend Kimberly had grown up. Kimberly and her parents lived in town now, but Kimberly's grandfather still farmed the land. She and Lara had gone to Kaw Valley Eagle together, before Kimberly's dad gave up on farming and took a job in the maintenance department at the university. Now Lara and Kimberly were in ninth grade together in town. They played basketball on the junior varsity team.

“Your husband told me you were an expert on the house,” Gina said to Susan, still in the same warmer-sounding voice.

It was all the encouragement Susan needed. She launched into the story of Abigail's journey west, how the Fremantles and Schapens had helped her when Etienne Grellier was too busy thinking great Transcendentalist thoughts to work the fields, how Abigail's oldest son married Una Fremantle's daughter and that's how the Grelliers ended up with all the papers about the house.

Lara watched Gina's face. She was blinking under the avalanche of Susan's information, but she continued to listen. Her face didn't have that blank look people get when they are really thinking about lunch or their date to the game instead of what you are talking about.

Susan showed Gina the flour bin where Una Fremantle had hidden her husband during Quantrill's raid, a waist-high receptacle that pulled out of the wall at an angle. When Lara was a child, she used to beg Mrs. Fremantle to let her climb into it, so she could pretend to be hiding out from Quantrill.

“Quantrill burned down my husband's family's shanty and the Fremantles' first house—this is the one Judge Fremantle built after the Civil War. The Fremantle kitchen survived Quantrill, fortunately, or the judge would have been murdered. Una Fremantle was always obsessed with fire after that. Have you seen the study? Once, Jim and I took a trip to Boston so I could see where the Grelliers and the Fremantles had started their pilgrimage, and I got to tour the house that Horace Fremantle grew up in. This room here is an almost exact replica of his father's office. I fixed it up so you can work in here, if you want.”

Susan ushered a dazed Gina across the small foyer at the bottom of the back stairs, through a bathroom next to it, and into Horace Fremantle's study beyond. Lara knew all about Horace and his effort to look important in his father's eyes. She knew how much the marble in the fireplaces cost and where it came from, and how when the wagon hauling it from Kansas City sank in the Wakarusa River the first Mr. Fremantle and the first Mr. Schapen rescued the marble and the oxen. She waited until her mother was in full flight in the study, then ran up the back stairs. The boards didn't creak if you moved fast and light.

The stairs ended next to Lara's second-favorite thing in the house, a drinking fountain built into the hall wall. It hadn't worked for years, but it was beautiful. The back was a silver shell, and the fountain part was more of the same marble as the fireplace. Lara could hear her mother at the bottom of the main staircase, her voice high and squeaky, as it always was when she was excited.

Lara tiptoed to the south end of the hall. The bedroom in the southeast corner had a closet that connected with the main bedroom. It had been cold in the kitchen, but it was freezing up here. Lara felt a sneeze coming on, tried to hold it in, succeeded only in exploding in the middle of the connecting closet.

“Gina? Is that you? I thought I heard more voices downstairs.”

Lara froze at the entrance to the main bedroom. A woman wrapped in a heavy dressing gown was sitting up in bed, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

She dropped the paper and flung aside her reading glasses when she saw Lara. “Did they send you on a reconnaissance mission? Do you want a full report on my name and who I am?”

Lara flushed. “I'm sorry: I didn't know anyone was up here.”

“Then why did you come up? Didn't you know Gina was living here? In town, we don't wander uninvited through people's houses.”

“I'm sorry,” Lara repeated helplessly. “Honest, if I'd known you were here I would have stayed downstairs.”

“You didn't see my car standing out in the yard all night and wonder if someone had a breakdown and needed a jump? That was the previous
visitor's
excuse.”

She gave “visitor” a sarcastic emphasis, meaning Lara was just one more nosy intruder. “Gina!” she added, leaning forward in the bed to shout. “I've caught a live one. Do you want to come get her?”

Lara turned a deeper red. Already embarrassed, she found she couldn't move her legs, much as she wanted to back up and disappear. She heard her mother and Gina's steps on the hall stairs; an instant later, they were in the bedroom.

“Lara!” Susan cried. “What are you doing up here?”

Lara looked around wildly and saw the blue-black patch of mold around the fireplace. “I came up to see about the mold. It's gotten worse, you know, and they could get a bad lung infection from breathing that stuff.”

“She's right,” Susan said to Gina, “it isn't healthy to breathe in those funguses. But, Lara, you're almost fifteen, you know better than to think you can still parade through here without permission. I'm sure if you'd told Gina—”

“Doesn't anyone out here mind their own business?” the woman in the bed demanded.

“Of course,” Susan said stiffly. “I'm sorry my daughter broke in on you, but it was with the best intentions. I'm Susan Grellier. My husband and I were the caretakers until Gina moved in. I didn't realize it would take Lara so long to adjust to being a visitor instead of someone with the right to be in the house. We'll leave now. But you have our phone number, or Gina has it, if something goes wrong, or you're lonely—”

“How can we be lonely when everyone in the county waltzes in before noon?” the woman said.

“Autumn, I think they're different. Susan's a neighbor. She baked a pie in the best tradition of the Old West. She's a historian—at least, she's an amateur historian—and she knows a lot about the house. She came over to tell me about it.”

Once again, Lara couldn't decipher what Gina was saying. She sounded as she had when they first came in, as though her meaning didn't lie in her words but in her inflection. The woman in the bed seemed to understand her because the angry lines had smoothed out of her face, making her look younger.

“Autumn Minsky runs Between Two Worlds in Lawrence,” Gina said. “We met when I went in for—supplies last week.”

“As the sheriff was at pains to find out early this morning,” Autumn snapped, but then suddenly laughed. “You should have seen his face when I gave him one of my business cards—he acted as though it would turn him into a toad. Which I wish it had, once he told me he'd been keeping an eye on my store!”

Lara knew Between Two Worlds. It was a New Age store where you could buy incense or books on pagan religion, but they also sold jewelry, little gold suns on gold chains that cost hundreds of dollars, earrings in the shape of crescent moons with turquoise or lapis set in them. Some of the things weren't so expensive, though. Her friend Melanie Derwint had four piercings in her ears and wore silver moon-shaped studs she'd bought at Between Two Worlds.