Karen Memory (28 page)

It didn’t even really need saying out loud, but still I felt a kind of relief that Effie’d up and said it.

Madame looked around the room. No one said anything else, though Miss Francina’s stare was pretty heavy where it laid on me.

“Without the machine,” Pollywog said, “I might be able to talk some sense into Dyer. If Bantle’s running the insides of people’s heads, that might explain some things about how Dyer’s been different lately.”

The silence kept on for another few seconds. Madame let it go until it was uncomfortable, and nobody was making any signs of breaking it before she nodded. “Then it’s settled.”

“Fetch your friend the Marshal,” Miss Francina said. “If they haven’t hanged him or his posseman yet, he’s got a horse in this race.”

“And a bounty to collect,” I agreed.

After all, he’d come all this way.

Chapter Eighteen

And that’s how I came to be shivering beside Tomoatooah at three in the morning, and not for the first time, neither. At least this time we was on a rooftop. You know, for the sake of variety and him not getting lynched.

I’d hate to find myself in some kind of a rut when it came to skulking. Which was perfectly likely, with Tomoatooah and the Marshal and Merry around.

They hadn’t gotten hanged, or jailed, or what have you—though to hear the Marshal tell it that weren’t much more than a happy accident and not for lack of trying on Bantle’s part. They’d moved from the rooming house they’d been staying at and were camping up the mountain to cover their tracks. I imagined neither one of them was much enjoying the ride back and forth, but at least Rapid was still small enough that it weren’t too inconvenient. You’d be riding half a day, you tried that near New York City.

Or so I imagined, anyway. I was all of a sudden struck by the urge to see it for myself.

Maybe I didn’t care to stay in Rapid and environs after all. I wondered suddenly where all those dime novels came from, and who wrote ’em, and if any of those writers had ever spent a night crouched on a hoar-slick tile roof next to a wild red Indian. Maybe I was setting my sights too low, thinking about a livery stable. Because I realized then, too, that if there was a living in dime novels nobody who published or read ’em needed to know that K. L. Memery was a woman.

And maybe I could still talk Tomoatooah into selling me one of Scout’s fillies.

For the first time, I realized I might not have to work in horses to
have
horses, if you see my meaning.

It was not much more than a wild hair, honestly. A fancy to keep me from thinking about how cold my damned toes were. I’d borrowed money from Francina and bought myself some used boys’ togs. I could get used to lace-up boots, but I hadn’t borrowed enough for good ones and the socks were thin.

And we had been up there on that roof for the best part of two hours, waiting for the last lights to go out at Bantle’s house.

Effie and Marshal Reeves was off somewhere to our left, and the Marshal and Tomoatooah had some system of whistles they planned to use to communicate. So we was waiting for a signal, unless we felt confident enough to give it ourselves. Tomoatooah and me, we were meant to go in and smash the machine and look for evidence. The Marshal and Effie, they was supposed to stand watch.

It nearly worked out that way, too. At least at the beginning.

Bantle’s house was the best on the street, a big foursquare Italianate in shades of amber and piney green, with a wrap porch and dull red window sashes. You couldn’t see the colors by night, of course, but I knowed what the house looked like. He lived within sight of his cribs and the Sound, but far enough down Geoduck Street not to be bothered by the traffic.

Bantle’d apparently learned something about guarding rooftops from his men’s last run-in with Tomoatooah. Now they moved from place to place and met up at regular intervals. So this time, Tomoatooah hadn’t knocked any of ’em over. Instead, he’d timed their routes and led me past ’em until we was inside the perimeter—that’s the Marshal’s word—and then we hunkered down in the shadow of a chimney and stayed quiet and small.

Quiet and small was about my speed, anyway. I guess I was mad lucky I wasn’t hurt any worse than I’d have been if I was dumb enough to go out on a boat without a bonnet, but my lungs still felt congested and thick, and you know how a sunburn makes you nauseous? I had a little of that, too, and spent some time swallowing the sick water that wanted to fill up my mouth.

I might of chattered—it all made me nervous as a brown field mouse at a cat convocation—but Tomoatooah was like an Indian carved out of rock and I caught the silence from him. He waited better than anybody I’d ever met, including my da. And I would of said nobody waited better than my da, and there was damn few as could wait
like
him.

The last light got blowed out about five minutes after three by Ma’s radium watch. Tomoatooah glanced over at me—I caught the glitter of the whites of his eyes. It was hard dark, no moon, just some glow up from the street lamps—and it crossed my head kind of hysterical that this was a bad night for a Comanche raid. That’s why they called it a Comanche Moon, when it was full and bright. They could ride their horses by moon- or starlight better than most white men could during the day.

But maybe it was a good night for housebreaking. Tomoatooah tipped his head, an invitation I thought, and slipped away down the angle of the roof. Not toward Bantle’s house, but on the back side. Dark or not, we didn’t want to take the chance of being silhouetted.

I followed.

I expected to be scared shaking, hardly able to make myself move. But maybe I was getting a taste for all this adventuring. Or maybe my system was just in a state of saturation, having absorbed all the adventure it could hold, and so this one was just rolling off me like it was happening to somebody else. I put my rubber-soled boots down careful, and the roof slates held, and when I got to where Tomoatooah had tied a hand line I used it to lower myself over the gutter without breaking it off. It hurt my hands—there was still gauze under the too-big gloves I was wearing—but a little bit of getting hurt just didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

It might of been scary, if I’d bothered to think about it. But my mind was on other things. Like where to put each foot in the dark and how much less awful this was than my house burning down around my ears and whether I’d ever see Priya again. It crossed my mind to wonder if I fell, if I’d see Connie first in Heaven or if it’d be Mama and Da. Did they come in order of how recently they’d died or how close they was related?

I’d heard some people say Negroes didn’t go to Heaven, but some people said Negroes didn’t have souls, and you’ll pardon me if I got no truck with that. Any Heaven didn’t want Connie I didn’t want no part of my own self, and it wouldn’t have any good biscuits, anyway.

I was so caught up in thinking about what might happen when I got to Heaven that I forgot to die on the way down at all. Tomoatooah was waiting for me at the bottom. Silently, he pointed with two fingers along the alley. I followed, stepping in his footsteps as best I could. Something brushed my leg, furry and fast—a rat or an alley cat. I didn’t squeak.

Bantle’s house was at street level, not below it. New built, and it showed. A lot of the land down here by the docks was fill.

We got into the shadows by the kitchen door and Tomoatooah touched me on the shoulder, a light touch moving me back into a niche behind the kitchen porch. He went up the cast-iron drainpipe like a tree octopus, leaning back and grabbing on with his feet and hands. A squirrel would have more difficulty and make a hell of a lot more noise.

I waited, counting Mississippis, and made it to forty-one before the back door came open. Bless city houses and brass hinges and capitalist pork-barrel bastards who can afford staff to keep them oiled. The leather hinges on Da’s kitchen door would of let the door drag and in the wet of Rapid most metal hinges quickly learned to squeak and stick, but this door opened in silent as a jaw gaping.

And weren’t that an unsettling image?

I came up the porch steps, keeping to the outside so the wood wouldn’t squeak, and stepped into the dark kitchen beside Tomoatooah.

There was a fire banked in the big new fireplace, but it didn’t shed much light beyond a kind of faint cherry glow that vanished once it met the bigger dark outside the hearth. My eyes was so used to the nighttime I could sort of see anyway. At the very least, I could catch the whites of Tomoatooah’s eyes, the faint rose glow on his beads. It was enough to follow him.

The kitchen was deserted. Something niggled at me so I decided to risk a word, spoke low. Murmurs don’t carry so far as whispers.“You don’t mind a girl on an expedition like this?”

He looked over and I swear he winked at me over the palisade of one cheekbone. “Numu women ride to hunt and raid,” he said. His shrug continued,
And they know when to keep quiet.

Since I’d met him, I’d found out in my reading that “Comanche” was a Ute word, meaning “enemies.” All the things I’d seen him do, on horseback and off, and that moment was the thing gave me an inkling why.

His hand gesture said,
Follow,
and I did. Conversation over.

Bantle liked rugs, the thicker the better. I followed Tomoatooah across them, both of us slinking like cats. He moved like he weighed half an ounce and was made of baling wire and bison jerky. I did my best to copy him. The India rubber soles of my boots felt squishy underfoot. I guessed I could get used to that for walking on, though they’d be terrible for riding. And probably wear out fast.

Still, they was quiet. Especially as I took care not to let ’em squeak. With luck, the servants’ rooms were in the attic or at the back of the second floor, and we weren’t making much noise at all.

We didn’t see a soul as we picked down the corridor. Priya’d said the machine was in the parlor, and parlors were at the front of the house. My guess was as good as Tomoatooah’s whether that meant right side or left, but the right side (as seen from the outside) had a bay front and piano windows—little windows up high—and I was guessing if you were going to show off your big pretty mind control machine and you didn’t play piano, that might be where you’d want to put it.

I touched his elbow and pointed left. He didn’t give any sign of acknowledgment, but he crossed the hall and flattened himself against the wall on that side. The door from the back of the house and the servants’ stair to the atrium was closed, and he opened it softer than anything. No sound.

There was a little nook to our right—the house’s left—and a short cross hallway off to the left that gave access to a cupboard under the grand stairs. Past those, the hall opened out—and upward—to a foyer. After the kitchen, the little light that floated in from the street made it seem bright.

The room I thought was probably the parlor was off to our left—the house’s right—behind a set of pocket doors. Glass ones, and as we crept past the stairs I glanced through.

Something gleamed in the dimness—brass and glass and God knows what—with a faint blue spark shimmering on and off inside what might of been a big vacuum tube. I wished I was Miss Lizzie, all of a sudden, or Priya, so I might know what I was looking at.

Found it,
I mouthed. Tomoatooah stepped forward, and I put a hand out to redirect him.

There ain’t no such thing as a quiet pocket door.

We fell back toward that cross hallway with the closet under the stairs. There was a door there that probably led to the dining room or library, by my guess. I hoped the hinges was as well oiled as those out the back.

They was, too. Tomoatooah turned the handle, and we was just about to step into the hall when a familiar—and totally unexpected—voice hissed from the crack of that understair cupboard door, “
Karen?
”

It’s a miracle I only squeaked and didn’t scream. Honestly, I think if it had been anybody other than Priya I would of shrieked like a pig’s bladder blown full of air. But something deep inside me responded to her voice the way horses responded to Da: with a settling kind of attention.

Some of the knots of tension all up and down my back slid away, and a few new ones came to join the remainder. Was she
locked
in that closet? Why the hell would Bantle hold her prisoner here in his house and not in one of the cribs? And what had he done to her?

The fear didn’t last, though. Because she slipped out from behind the door, one hundred and eleven pounds of whipcord and attitude in men’s tweed trousers, and Merry Lee with her cropped hair and her black bowler hat was right behind her.

“If I’d knowed you were coming, I’d have brought a picnic,” I murmured.

Priya looked befuddled—there was just enough light coming through to make out her expression—but Merry Lee grinned and laid her finger alongside her nose like Saint Nicholas.

Suddenly I wanted to take Priya by the shoulders and shake her. She’d been fine, all this time, and she’d left me hanging and waiting and worrying, and she hadn’t even sent a note to see if I was hurt bad. But then she grabbed me by the shoulders and hugged me sharp and tight, and I realized maybe she had come looking, and who was there who would of been able to tell her where I was, or what had happened to me?

So of course she’d gone to Merry Lee, and she’d talked Merry Lee into coming here, to smash Bantle’s machine.

I knowed that was what they was here for because Priya had an eight-pound sledge slung on a strap over her shoulder. I noticed it because cold metal bonked my nose before she realized that we was wasting time and started to set me back from her.

“I knew we forgot something,” I said. I have her one more squeeze before I let her let go of me, and we stood there for a second grinning at each other like fools until Tomoatooah cleared his throat real significant like.

“Right,” Merry said. “How are you getting out again?”

We
had
thought of that. Tomoatooah held up a long red stick of dynamite. He said, “Fuse.”