The Steep and Thorny Way (5 page)

“He didn't really say that, did he?” asked Fleur.

“He claimed that Daddy's arm and leg hurt badly after he crashed into him with that damned Model T but that Daddy didn't seem like a man about to die. After Uncle Clyde went in to see my father, however . . .” I cleared my throat, experiencing an ache that felt like the stab of a fork into my tonsils. “That's . . . that's when Daddy suddenly died, ‘as if someone had just shot a poisonous dose of morphine through his veins,' Joe told me.”

“And you believe Joe?”

I clenched my teeth and stared at the “backward dip” of Mary Pickford's right nostril, which supposedly demonstrated her “great affection and sympathy.”

Fleur nudged me with her arm. “Do you believe him?”

“No. Of course not. I think I would know if I were living under the same roof as my father's murderer. If Clyde Koning hates Negroes, I'd be long gone, too, wouldn't I?”

“Hanalee!” Fleur grabbed my hand. “Dr. Koning does not hate Negroes. Did Joe try to convince you he did?”

“He hinted that Uncle Clyde's involved with the Klan.”

At that, Fleur sputtered a laugh. “This isn't the old South. Do you know what the Oregon KKK is like?”

“I know, I know—they're pushing to fix roads and improve public education.”

“And they have ridiculous names for their ranks. ‘Imperial Wizard,' ‘Exalted Cyclops,' ‘Great Titan.'”

I shuddered, not liking such names. “How do you know?”

“Mama once received an invitation to join the Women of the Ku Klux Klan in Bentley, and they included all sorts of pamphlets.” Fleur flipped the magazine to an advertisement for Mulsified Cocoanut Oil Shampoo. “But she didn't join them. She heard that the organization's mainly a big business venture out to collect money from people still scared of immigrants from the war years.”

I held my forehead in my hand and sighed from deep within my lungs.

“Hanalee . . .” Fleur squeezed my right shoulder. “You're safe here in Elston, despite a few prejudiced folks out there who might imply otherwise. And you're safe in your house with Dr. Koning. You've told me yourself that he saved your mother when she was sick with grief and drugging herself with nerve pills. How could a kind man like that commit murder?”

“He did marry her awfully quickly—just thirteen short months after we put my poor father in the ground.”

“Hanalee, don't—”

“Uncle Clyde was always friendly with her”—I picked at one of the magazine's curled-up corners—“even before Daddy died. They've known each other as long as your mama has known her, since childhood.”

“Your mother's a likable person.”

“She is. She'd be worth killing for, wouldn't she?”

“Stop it, Hanalee.”

“Especially if your target was a man with no rights and no respect—only a pretty white wife who wasn't even considered his legal spouse within this state. Oh, Jesus, Fleur”—I gave a start, for
the music came to an abrupt halt again—“I hate that I'm tempted to believe that jailbird. I hate that he planted these sickening seeds inside my brain.”

“Shh.” She cupped her warm fingers over my hand. “Stop thinking about him tonight. Stay here with me, have a calming cup of tea, and push all your worries off to another time. I'll take care of you, Hana-Honey.” She kissed my cheek with lips butterfly soft. “Like always.”

WE LISTENED TO FIVE MORE PHONOGRAPH RECORDS
and skimmed at least ten additional
Motion Picture
articles. After those diversions failed to assuage me, Fleur brewed a pot of tea in the kitchen, and then we trooped upstairs to her bedroom with our beverages and my bag.

I fetched my drawing pad from the valise, sank onto Fleur's bed, and rested my back against the rosebud-papered walls of her bedroom with a charcoal pencil in hand. A teacup steamed by my side, smelling of chamomile.

I sketched a portrait of Fleur, who sat across the way in her window seat, half hidden behind the tendrils of two creeping Charlies that dangled from pots hanging above her. Fleur's favorite grandmother had died when Fleur was ten and bequeathed to her a stack of Gertrude Jekyll gardening books and a journal of handwritten herbal folk remedies. So Fleur lived in the Garden of Eden and served as mother to dozens of potted children.

“You always sketch when you're nervous,” she said from behind those lanky vines that brushed at her right shoulder, for she sat half-turned toward the window.

“What are you talking about?” I lowered my left knee and, with it, the pad of paper. “I sketch whenever I feel like sketching.”

“But you always seem to be pulling out a pad of paper whenever something's troubling you.”

“Hmm. Well”—I adjusted the arch of her eyebrows on the paper to mimic her worried expression—“at least it's not as bad as you biting your stubby little nails whenever you're nervous.”

She peeked over the brim of her teacup, her eyes smiling. “Just drink your tea.”

“Yes, dahling,” I said in a poor imitation of a British-born woman named Mrs. Hathaway, who attended our church—a woman who liked to ask Mama if she'd consider bleaching my skin. “Quite right.”

I set my paper aside and took a sip of my chamomile tea, fragranced with a hint of lavender, tempered with a splash of hot milk. Warmth spread through my insides.

Downstairs, Deputy Fortaine's muffled voice still accompanied Mrs. Paulissen's titters. I cradled the cup against my chest and wondered if I could trust the deputy enough to tell him Joe's story.

Fleur pulled her pale pink curtains open, inviting the moonlight inside with us. “You see it out there?” she asked.

I craned my neck forward. “See what? The moon?”

“The brightness from all the whiskey stills lighting up.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I don't see anything but stars and evergreens.”

“It's an orange glow that hovers over the trees. I overheard Laurence tell Robbie it's even brighter in Oregon's eastern outback, where the land is flat and you don't have pines and firs hiding everything.”

I took another sip and let the heat travel down to my toes. “I'm afraid to look out my window at night.”

Fleur turned her face toward mine, her eyebrows raised. “Why?”

“You've heard the stories”—another sip, more of a gulp—“about his ghost.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “Well, but . . . wouldn't you want to see him, though, if he were out there?”

“No. He'd be a ghost, not my father. That's not the same at all.”

She squirmed on the window seat and tucked her legs beneath her in the nest of pillows.

“Mildred Marks claims she saw him in her house last night,” I decided to add, even though the thought of Mildred and her devil's moonshine made the tea taste sour. “She said Daddy wouldn't speak to her, but she told me if I drank some concoction she brewed up, I'd be able to talk to him. ‘Necromancer's Nectar,' I think she called it.”

“Hmm.” Fleur frowned. “It sounds like something that might make you hallucinate.”

“Do you know of any local plants that would allow a person to speak with the dead?”

“Not at all.”

“That's what I thought.” I clanked my cup onto the ivory saucer sitting on the bedside table and grabbed my sketch pad again. “I just wish people would keep those ghost stories to themselves.”

Fleur's face crumpled, as though she might cry. She shifted back toward the window and squeaked the tips of her right fingers down the glass.

“What's all that about?” I asked. “You look like you're about to burst into tears.”

She sniffed.

“Oh.” I shrank back against the wall and remembered Mr. Paulissen, killed overseas in the war, just like Mildred's father. “I'm sorry no one ever talks about your father still existing somewhere out there. But, honestly, Fleur, it's for the best.”

“I think I saw him, too.”

I shuddered. “You saw . . . who?”

“Your father.” She ran her fingertips down the windowpane again. “Just last night. After I helped Joe with his scrapes from that fence, Laurence took Mama and me to the Dry Dock to celebrate Mama's birthday. On the way back home in the truck, just for a fleeting moment”—she pushed aside one of the vines and met my gaze—“I saw your father in the moonlight, walking down the road, toward our houses.”

The tip of my pencil quivered against the paper and made an ugly, dark smudge. I couldn't formulate a single word in response.

Fleur twisted a clump of her hair between her fingers. “I'm sorry, Hanalee. Maybe telling you about it only makes things worse . . .”

“Well, there's nothing we can do about it.” I scratched out my drawing, disappointed with the results. “I'd have to be a fool to wander out on the road at night, all alone, looking for him, so there's no use dwelling on ghost stories. I'm sure you just saw moonlight and shadows.”

She nodded, and we closed that chapter for the night, sitting in
silence for a good long while before unpinning our hair, changing into nightclothes, and climbing beneath the covers of her bed.

I squirmed around under the blankets for about a minute or so, digging my shoulder blades into the mattress, bumping into Fleur, until I formed a nice groove that fit the shape of my spine. With my eyes closed, I heaved a sigh that came out as a wheeze.

“Are you all right?” asked Fleur from the darkness beside me.

“You talked about Joe hiding out until he figures out what to do with his life, but what about us?”

“What do you mean?”

I shifted about again. “What are we supposed to do with
our
lives? Should we even bother starting the eleventh grade in September if we're to be trapped here in Elston until we're old and dead?”

Fleur wound one of my spiraling curls around her right index finger, gently tugging at my roots in a way that felt nice. “I thought we were going to move to New York City and become artists.”

I gave another sigh. “I wonder if there's ever been a black female lawyer. I should look in that book Mrs. York gave me.
Noted Negro Women
.”

“You want to become a lawyer?”

“Maybe.” I rubbed my lips together and contemplated that potential plan. “To keep from feeling so helpless . . . maybe.”

Fleur released my curl and let it spring against the side of my left arm. “Mama hopes I'll find a fiancé soon, probably so I'm one less mouth to feed. She says I'm getting too old for that little one-room schoolhouse.”

I grunted. “I wouldn't allow you to marry any of the goofs here in Elston if my life depended on it. Can you imagine, always having to pretend to like all those terrible farm jokes?”

Fleur laughed so hard, she shook the bed.

I smiled, but the expression was so forced, it made the muscles in my cheeks hurt. “I mean it. I'm scared to death we'll get stuck here.”

“We won't get stuck. I won't let us.”

“I'll be trapped with my mother and a potential murderer.”

Fleur grabbed my shoulder. “Dr. Koning didn't kill your father, Hanalee. Don't let that terrible thought cross your mind ever again.”

“But—”

“Ignore Joe. Naturally, he's going to put the blame on someone besides himself.”

I shifted onto my right side, away from her, and the mattress whined and rocked us about as if we were afloat on a raft at sea.

“If Joe doesn't genuinely possess a need to avenge himself”—I wiggled my right arm and shoulder into the spine-shaped space I'd made—“then why is he here? If his family doesn't even want him, why doesn't he simply run off to some other place?”

Fleur didn't answer, although I strained my ears to hear a response.

“Fleur? Why else would he be here, living like a rat in a shed, if he didn't genuinely believe he suffered in jail for someone else's crime? If he wasn't furiously seeking justice?”

“Go to sleep—and stop worrying,” she said in a voice so quiet, it sounded like the wind whispering through the curtains of that open window that looked out at the stills and the empty highway.

CHAPTER 4

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN

WITH MY VALISE STILL IN HAND FROM MY
stay at Fleur's, I wandered up the brick front path that led to Mildred Marks's house, a brown bedraggled thing that seemed to have nudged its way out of the ground alongside the weeds and wildflowers that shot from the earth around it. Vines of bloodred roses curled around the porch rails, clinging tightly, as if prepared to yank the structure straight back into the earth if anything inside those walls ever required concealment. A plain white cross stood among the dandelions and the browning tufts of grasses in the front yard, although no actual body rested in that unhallowed ground, as far as I knew. Mrs. Marks's husband lay in a grave in a field in France, buried with other fallen Great War soldiers.