One of Us (22 page)

I close the door behind me, hang up my coat, and brush the snowflakes from my hair.

My concern is situational, I tell myself. This man has managed to survive for ninety-six years without any help from me. I never worry about him when I’m back in Philly. It’s only because I’m here in his house that his welfare weighs on my mind.

I know I can’t expect him to babysit Mom all the time, but after my dealings with Scarlet today, I’d feel much better if someone were here with her.

I don’t think Scarlet Dawes is going to attack my mother, but Marcella Greger probably never dreamed the gorgeous heiress would show up at her house one day and crush in her skull with a rainbow. Or did she? Marcella Greger knew something Scarlet didn’t want her to know. I’m convinced of that. But what?

Scarlet is a very specific kind of murderer. She wouldn’t have thought she was doing anything wrong in killing her nanny and her classmate. In her mind, they needed to be eliminated. Each had done something unforgiveable in her eyes and their further existence would have gnawed at her.

I highly doubt she runs around randomly killing for the sake of killing. Someone has to get under her skin or get in her way, but how far under her skin or how much in her way?

I told Brenna before she drove off that she and Moira should be careful. I let her think my concern stemmed from Marcella’s anonymous killer still remaining at large. I couldn’t tell her the real reason, that all these years later Scarlet remembered a young Moira and even the
shoes she wore, and it excited her. I’m fairly sure it’s not a good idea to rouse strong feelings in Scarlet, even positive ones. Especially positive ones.

It’s barely ten o’clock, too early for my mom to be asleep if she’s well. I need to check on her.

I go into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. I’m going to try and get some work done tonight.

On my return to the front room, I give the deer head a caress on his nose then take one of the dish towels from his antlers and cover Fi’s portrait with it.

I start making my way up the stairs, almost welcoming the cold lump of dread in my stomach. The sooner it begins, the sooner it will be over.

I don’t know how many times I’ve made this trip, my stomach bunched in a knot of wariness, my pulse thudding heavily in my throat, never knowing what I might find when I finally enter my mom’s room.

The door is slightly open. I peek inside. The curtains are drawn. The lights are on. She’s lying on the bed in her bathrobe staring at the ceiling.

A cup of cold hot chocolate sits on the nightstand. A piece of lint floats in the skin on top.

When I was a child, this was always the worst way to find her. If her eyes were closed, I could tell myself she was sleeping and run away, but if they were open and she wasn’t moving, I knew she could be dead. I was never able to see her chest rise or hear her breathing, so I got in the habit of putting a mirror under her nose to see if it fogged up.

I’m wondering if I should do that now when she turns to look at me and gives me such a start, I jerk backward against the nightstand and slosh cocoa onto the carpet.

I go to the bathroom for a towel to clean it up.

“I’m sorry, Mom. Would you like me to make you a new cup of cocoa?”

“I’m not feeling good tonight, Danny,” she says dully.

“Then this is the best place for you to be. You should get some sleep. Let me help you get under the covers.”

She sits up and I move to her side.

“I heard someone killed Marcella Greger,” she tells me. “I didn’t do it.”

“Of course you didn’t do it.”

“She hated me, but I didn’t hate her. If someone killed me it might’ve been her. That would make more sense.”

I pause in tugging the comforter out from under her.

“What are you talking about? I didn’t even know you knew Marcella Greger. Why did she hate you?”

“Because her cousin Anna hated me. I stole her boyfriend.”

“What are you talking about?” I say again.

“It was an accident.”

My mother accidentally stole someone’s boyfriend. I’m not sure how someone does this, but it sounds like something she’d believe.

“He said I trapped him,” she goes on. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even want him. You don’t trap something you don’t want. It was more like the time that possum fell in the window well. It was his own fault. Then he couldn’t get out. When I tried to help, he got mad at me. Hissing and baring his teeth. I kept telling him, ‘I’m trying to help you.’ But he didn’t care. He blamed me for not being able to free him.”

“I don’t think possums can feel blame. He was probably afraid of you.”

“His eyes were shiny and black with hate,” she insists.

I push her feet beneath the blanket and pull it up over her legs.

“I told him we didn’t have to get married.”

“The possum?” I ask, smiling at her.

Mom’s delusions don’t usually involve talking animals, but anything is possible.

“He wanted me to kill you. I wouldn’t do it. I already loved you.”

The content of her story has taken a serious turn.

I sit down on the edge of the bed.

“You’ve lost me, Mom. Who are you talking about?”

“Your dad.”

“What are you saying? Dad wanted you to have an abortion when you were pregnant with me?”

“I wouldn’t do it, then he said if I was going to have his baby, I had to marry him. He said he wasn’t going to let me find some other guy to raise his kid.”

This sounds like something my father would say.

“Tommy wanted to shoot him,” she adds.

“Dad?”

“The possum. I wouldn’t let him. I put a board down for him and he crawled out in the middle of the night.”

She sighs and sinks into her pillows.

I trace her jumbled thoughts back to her original statement the same way I used to help her separate the colorful tangle of her embroidery threads.

“Dad was Anna Greger’s boyfriend?”

She nods and rolls over onto her side, pulling her knees to her chest, her signal that she’s done talking.

“I’m too tired to make you breakfast,” she mumbles.

There’s no point in explaining what time it is.

“It’s okay, Mom. I can make my own.”

Back downstairs, I pour a cup of coffee and sit alone at Tommy’s kitchen table thinking about my father and how much I don’t know about him.

Dad and Anna Greger? But why not? They were the same age living in the same small town. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have been involved before he met my mother.

The foreboding feeling I had when I asked him if the dead baby in our yard was Molly returns, and I finally realize why his response troubled me so much at the time.

He wasn’t shocked by my question, and for someone who found his child murdered and watched his wife go to prison for it, this particular question should have been inconceivable. He didn’t even seem to wonder or care how I had come up with such a wild idea. He exhibited his usual reflexive anger and defensiveness, but strip away his bluster and he was a man almost willing to have a rational conversation on the subject. Then who was that baby in our yard, huh? Then where’s your sister, huh?

I meant what I told Scarlet about my feelings for my sister. I was too young to understand death. I didn’t even understand babies. Molly was a week old when we lost her. All I knew about her was that she was soft, smelled like talcum powder, and my mother loved her.

Mom kept telling me about all the fun we were going to have together, how we were going to be a family, repeating this word “family” over and over again as if I didn’t know its meaning or had never taken part in one.

Maybe Mom, Dad, and I didn’t make a family after all, I remember thinking. Maybe we needed Molly to complete it. I thought she was going to solve all our problems. I loved the idea of her for that reason, but I can’t say that I loved her. I was never given the chance.

This didn’t keep me from thinking about her, though. I imagined her to be the complete opposite of the heavy, bristly, black goblin that had clung to Rafe’s back as he fought his way through the jungles of hell.

Molly was feather light and translucent, her presence marked only by a pale rosy shimmer dancing before my eyes as if she were dusted in the pink sugar our mom favored for her heart cookies.

I never knew when she’d appear. I could never conjure her to help me deal with the worst of my melancholy, my loneliness, or my fear. She would appear at the oddest moments, times when I didn’t think I needed her, but it would always turn out later that I did; moments like now, when her tiny spirit hovers near me and seems to whisper that I may yet find a way to save us all.

twenty-two

P
ROSPERITY’S STANDING IN LINE
at the company store waiting for his pay and watching the waning light outside. Another summer has passed. Before long, the days will grow short and he’ll leave for the mines in darkness, work in darkness, and get home in darkness, his life no better than an earthworm’s.

Each day since he’s arrived in Lost Creek he’s watched the coal dust stream from the doors and windows of the colliery settling on everything, even the petals of wildflowers and the wings of birds. The interior of the building is always filled with a foggy blackness, and the silent shadows of men appearing and disappearing in the sooty haze makes him think of damned spirits floating in the storm clouds of hell, which was probably where they were all going to end up no matter how many rosaries they said. He knew God was male and therefore his biggest concern was making sure he was obeyed, but the Virgin Mary was a woman and a mother and she would have been appalled at the mess.

Bill Fahey had been in prison back in Ireland and he said a far more cheerful lot of men could be found there than in these mines. Prosperity had discussed the possible reasons why with him: was it the filth they lived and worked in, their constant exposure to danger, the strain of the physical labor?

There was something more. He knew what it was but he would
never say it out loud because to hear the words spoken would make his fate all too real.

His turn comes and he steps up to the counter.

The superintendent, Llewellyn, looks down at a sheet of paper in front of him and begins to read, “Coal mined . . . twelve cars at sixty-six cents a car. Total—seven dollars and ninety-two cents.”

He knows better than to put his hand out yet. He waits.

“Less . . . two kegs of powder at two dollars and fifty cents a keg—five dollars. Two gallons of oil at ninety cents a gallon—one dollar and eighty cents. Repairs to one drill and one lantern—thirty cents. Replacing one pickax—sixty cents. Total—seven dollars and seventy cents.”

Llewellyn looks over at the company store manager keeping track of the books who nods his head.

“Wages for the week—twenty-two cents.”

A few coins are extracted from a steel box and dropped into Prosperity’s hand. The nod meant he was in the tick on his household account. This was nothing new. The debt would be more than his meager earnings and it would reappear again next week even if he could pay it off.

Fi wasn’t going to be happy, but she never was. She had proven to be a difficult woman to manage. Sometimes he had to strike her, yet despite the problems between them, nothing could diminish the awe he felt for her as a mother. Her endless patience with Jack, her protectiveness, the sweet smile she bestowed on him for the most undeserving reasons made him think of his own valiant mother, and he’d fiercely miss the care from her he never knew and the green woebegone hillside where she had lain all these many years among a multitude of tiny deaths.

He jingles the coins in his hand while watching a pair of emaciated canines doing the deed in the middle of the rutted dirt road not far from the steps of the store’s porch. Eyes glazed with hunger, ribs protruding from beneath patchy, flea-bitten fur, their tongues lolling, panting for all their worth; they’re probably enjoying the act more than he ever did on the rare occasions when Fi was willing and he had enough energy to get it up.

He gazes longingly at the Rabbit where a pint and the camaraderie of the Nellies were waiting to help dull his pain.

He knew a man could endure the worst kind of poverty and abuse if he had even the slightest expectation of something better, but that was what was missing in the company town: hope. There was no hope here, and its lack created a vacuum that had the power to suck the very souls out of men. Only shells were left behind.

He looks around him as he crosses the road. There seem to be more men than usual wandering about, but on closer inspection he realizes they’re not men at all. They’re hard, blackened carcasses of men.

A giant hand reaches down from the sky. A woman’s slim, milky white hand wearing a flashing ruby ring. It touches them one by one and they shatter into piles of smoldering onyx bones.

I sit bolt upright on the couch gulping for air and instinctively look toward Fiona. Her portrait’s still wearing the dish towel I covered her with last night.

Tommy’s sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast.

He glances my way, not at all concerned. I must not have screamed.

“Still having those nightmares?”

“No. Not exactly. They’re different nightmares now. Sort of.”

I look around at the open folders and papers scattered about. I fell asleep in my clothes again.

“Come have some breakfast,” Tommy suggests.

He raises his bowl to his lips and slurps up the sugary cream left after the cereal is gone.

I join him, pour a cup of coffee, and put my face over the steam, hoping the caffeine will seep directly into my pores.

“I had a strange talk with Mom last night,” I tell him.

“That would be a first,” he says with a wink.

“Is it true that Dad was dating Anna Greger before he met Mom?”

He puts the bowl down with a clunk and makes a noise that’s a cross between a snort and a gag.

“Not dating. He and Anna were engaged,” he replies. “And he had met your mother long before he started sniffing after her. They went to school together. They always knew each other.”

“What happened?”

“As hard as it is for a father to speculate about the amorous dealings of his daughter, I think it was what you youngsters call hooking up. I don’t think it was serious for either one of them, but then your mother got pregnant and it became very serious.”

Tommy reaches across the table and pats my arm when he sees my face fall. No kid who comes from a failed marriage wants to know that he was the reason his parents married in the first place.

“Did you know Fiona was pregnant with Jack when she and Prosperity got married?” Tommy asks, trying to distract me from my gloominess.

“No.”

“Did I ever tell you about the day they met?”

I look up at him and know he must see the curiosity in my eyes. Could there be a story about Prosperity that I haven’t heard?

“I don’t think so,”

Tommy grins, claps his hands together, and leans back in his chair, settling into storytelling mode.

“Each day on the way to and from the pit, Prosperity and his best mate, Kenny Kelly, and all the rest of the miners were forced to walk by the superintendent’s house,” he begins. “It was a lovely three-story affair with a fresh coat of white paint, a picket fence, and a tree-lined path leading to a front door with a real brass knocker. As they passed, their steps would slow and they’d all stare sullenly at the Welsh name on the mailbox, Llewellyn. How they hated this man. But that’s another story.

“One particular day, he and Kenny were late heading home and were all alone on the road as they approached the super’s house. A girl was leaving it carrying a sewing basket. She had a sweet face and a fine shape to her.

“Prosperity asked Kenny who she was. Kenny told him her name was Fiona and she was a maid for a family in Barclay but did sewing for other folks, too. He also thought to add that she was an orphan like Prosperity. He knew his friend would find this fact interesting.

“Prosperity ran after her and tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

“‘Don’t waste your time. I have my sights set higher than a boy in the pits. Look at me. What do you see?’ she said to him.

“‘A beautiful girl with a foul disposition,’ he replied.

“‘Foul disposition? Just because I don’t want nothing to do with the likes of you? That makes me foul?’

“‘In my book, yes.’

“‘You’ve never opened a book in your life.’

“‘That’s only because I can’t read them. Otherwise, I’d be opening them all the time.’

“This made Fiona smile.

“‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

“‘Prosperity.’

“‘What’s the name your mother gave you?’ she persisted.

“‘My mother died before I was born.’

“‘Before?’

“‘Before.’

“‘Mine died after. What about your da?’

“‘Never knew him. But I’m named after him. James Michael McNab.’

“‘I never knew mine either. And I got nothing from him. Not even a name.’

“‘We’ve got a lot in common then.’

“‘We got nothing in common except our Irish blood.’

“‘I’d say that’s enough.’

“She slowed almost to a stop and gave him a look that made his heart beat faster when he realized the meaning behind it. She was paying attention to him.

“‘You’re a patriot, then?’ she asked.

“Jimmy was his own country and owed allegiance to no one else, but at that moment he would have marched off to war against any foe she chose.

“‘I am,’ he proclaimed.

“‘I suppose you’re too young to run with the Nellies?’

“Her question surprised him, not only because he was obviously too young but because people rarely spoke the name of the Nellies out loud
and definitely not in front of someone they didn’t know well and could trust completely.

“‘I am too young,’ he said gravely, ‘but I plan on getting older.’

“‘Would you think of joining then?’

Tommy stops. He takes a drink of his coffee and closes his eyes. I wait for him to continue the story. He doesn’t.

“That’s it?” I ask him.

“There was more, of course, but it starts to drag after that.”

“So what is the point of the story?”

“Does there have to be a point?”

He gets up from the table and stretches.

“Are you trying to tell me Prosperity joined the Nellies so he could hook up with Fiona?” I press him.

“Who knows? Although it’s true Fiona was an avid supporter of the Nellies. She thought they were heroes.”

The phone rings. Tommy grabs up his cane and hobbles into the other room.

“It’s for you,” he calls out a moment later. “Brenna Kelly. She sounds upset.”

My mind flashes to last night and our encounter with Scarlet and her fascination with Moira’s shoes.

“Hi, Brenna. What can I do for you?”

“Remember you told me you owed me a favor after I gave you a ride the other day?” she says in a rush. “Well, I have a big one to ask.”

“I can barely hear you. Is that a siren?”

“Please, please,” her voice breaks off into a clipped sob. “Can you come to the mine?”

TOMMY COMES WITH ME.
We take his truck. I can tell his concern is greater than he’s willing to admit because he lets me drive.

An alarm is never a good thing, but at least we both agreed what I heard in the background was the chirp of a police car and not the enormous scream of the town’s siren announcing an accident at a mine.

Tommy’s heard it several times; I’ve only heard it once. I was sitting
in my sophomore English class. It began as a low, moaning wail that rose to a shriek, eerily human yet inhumanly immense, as if the earth itself were crying out in pain.

We all stood, the terrible sound pulling us to our feet, not knowing if we should run or hide or fight. We instinctively knew it meant death, and we were right.

Twenty-eight men died that day from an explosion in Lost Creek Mine No. 6, including Moira Kelly’s husband, Dave Rosko’s father, and Nora Daley’s son.

Tommy doesn’t say a word until we arrive at the mine. Nothing out of the ordinary seems to be happening. One police car and Rafe’s car are here, but there are no fire trucks or ambulances or any other emergency vehicles present.

Rafe’s talking calmly to a few of the miners I recognize from my run here a few days ago. Billy and Troy are drinking coffee.

Tommy smiles in relief.

“It’s nothing. Probably someone broke into the office and stole a few paper clips,” he jokes.

Then he notices Alphonse Kelly. He and Tommy are good friends even though Alphonse is in his early eighties. He’s one of the “kids” as Tommy calls them who hang out at the union hall, except his health has been failing lately. It takes a lot to get him out of his home these days. Tommy knows this, and the sight of the sickly old man in an ancient military-green Carhartt and flap-eared cap standing off to one side of the others, alone and stoop-shouldered, staring worriedly at the gaping black hole in the side of the snowy hill brings his dread crashing back.

“What’s Al doing here?” he says.

He barely lets me park the truck before he opens the door to get out.

I join Rafe and the other men. Brenna is with them, too.

The air around them buzzes with the energy required to control their combined panic.

Brenna seems to relax a little at the sight of me.

“So what’s this favor I can do for you?” I ask lightly, trying to improve the atmosphere as best I can.

The four other miners I met before are here, but I notice both of her brothers are absent.

“We have a situation,” Rafe answers for her.

“Rick’s gonna blow up the mine,” the one named Todd says.

“Don’t say it like that,” J. C. counters. “He’s not gonna do it.”