The Kept (14 page)
In the bar, the tears came again. She dipped her head low so Charles couldn’t see her. Surely this would give her away. Her cheeks burned as though she stood on her barstool and shouted her transgressions into the close air of men who’d toiled all day on the lake. Time would expose her. Though when she raised her head, she saw that Charles cried for his own loss.
“I don’t know why we put them through that,” he said, “seeing that plate every night. Maybe we were trying to let the other boys know how lucky we all are. It’s difficult to be happy with what you have, isn’t it?” Elspeth couldn’t begin to answer that question. Charles didn’t give her a chance, ordering another round of drinks and some chicken pies. Elspeth protested that she didn’t have enough money. “It’s my pleasure, Jorah,” he said. Had she said she needed to get back to Caleb, she assumed Charles would have slid his stool back and excused her without a word. “Hard to feel lucky in this world,” he said. “But today, I am.” He punched her on the shoulder. “You saved me, Jorah.”
C
ALEB SAT IN
a soft chair in a luxuriant room that had a bath in one corner, surrounded on all sides by mirrors. A woman was in the bathtub, naked, but the man he’d followed inside paid her no attention. Caleb tried to do the same. When the man in the fine clothes saw the boy’s discomfort, he chuckled. “Go ahead,” he said. “You can look.”
Some part of Caleb wanted to, but he shook his head no.
“A man of principle,” the man said. “A dying breed.”
The rest of the room shone with the reflections from the water, the polished wood walls and beams glittering. Even the bed seemed radiant; the bronze had been burnished and the very sheets appeared to exude warmth. The man sat on a lounge opposite Caleb. “My name,” he said as he crossed one leg over the other, “is London White.”
The unmistakable crack of a gunshot sounded from the other room, followed by shuffling on the hardwood floors. Caleb flinched. White made no move.
“My brother and I were born in this town. And where are you from—?”
“Caleb Howell,” he said, embarrassed by his small voice. He knew there was a slight difference between
from
and
born
and he took pains not to lie. “From a farm.”
White laughed. He laughed so hard tears rolled down his face. He wiped them with a handkerchief that he produced from his pocket. When his laughter slowed, he took one look at Caleb and began again. The scuffling in the other room escalated. Solid thuds knocked dust from the walls. Caleb wished he’d brought his Ithaca.
“I’m sorry. But, yes—a farm. And are you a hard worker, Caleb?” Caleb nodded. “Don’t waste much time talking, I see. That’s good. A great benefit to this establishment, silence.”
A picture frame slid from one of the walls and shattered on the ground. In a flash, White crossed the room and threw open the door. He was gone only a moment. When he came back, he ran a silver comb through his hair and smiled.
A few seconds later another gunshot. The noise ceased.
“Yes, the benefit of silence.” White took the time to seat himself, straighten his clothes all over again, and cross his legs with perfect leisure. He drew a watch from his vest by its chain and wound it, an affectation Caleb immediately admired. “So, what brought you from your farm to my doorstep?”
Caleb knew he had the right place—the Elm Inn was indeed a home for killers. He recalled Charles Heather talking to his mother. “I think you were going to offer me a job.”
“I was, was I?”
“I think so.” Caleb, not sure of himself, tried to affect confidence. “You were going to pay me to work for you.”
“I wasn’t,” White said, and extended his hand for Caleb to shake, “but I will. We reward the bold here, as you shall find.” White’s grip was intensely strong. “Welcome, Caleb Howell, to the Elm Inn, and all her splendors.”
T
hat night—their first in a real bed since leaving William and Margaret—Elspeth and Caleb were both racked by nightmares. Caleb’s involved dark, furtive men sneaking into his house and stealing his gun. Sometimes he would reach for it, but he could never grasp it. Others, he’d aim, only to see nothing in his hand but one of his feathers. He woke and nodded off again, a twisting, sweating sleep stalked by an animal at the edge of his vision. When he finally managed to get off a shot, he tracked its blood through the woods and the trail ended with Jorah, dying on a mound of new earth on the other side of the hill.
“They wouldn’t let me have my gun back,” Caleb said as soon as his mother’s eyes opened. Upon reaching their room, he’d searched their packs for a weapon. He’d found the hunting knife, which he’d unsheathed and placed under his pillow. “I left my gun at the counter and when I got back, it was someone different and he didn’t know where it was.”
“They probably put it someplace safe,” Elspeth said. The boy had dark circles under his eyes. He played with the buttons on his shirt, his nerves frayed. For Elspeth, the dreams contained bundles dumped on railroad tracks, the sheets unfurling and leaving a naked baby on the iron rails. Gusta van Tessel floated above her, her hair and thin clothing waving in a starry sky as if underwater, her lips blue. The baby’s feet and arms would stir, its large eyes searching for someone to pick it up, and its mouth would open wide and let out a piercing shriek.
She tried to shake the murkiness the dreams left behind and concentrated on Caleb, his boots tapping on the floor. His brown hair uneven from Margaret’s haircut, he looked small in the space of the window, sitting low on the stool. When the children were infants, life had been simple. If they cried or fussed, she fed and rocked them. She became adept at slipping them out of her arms and into their cribs without their even stirring. There were times she woke in the middle of the night to silence, and made her way across the room to linger until the child moved—a sigh, a shift, a kick. Only then could she return to Jorah. In those days, there were simple problems with simple solutions. Caleb not being able to sleep without his gun was more complex. His foot shook in his dead brother’s boots—boots she’d purchased on an abbreviated trip to Betherd that Elspeth had cut short before the child had been born, before indulging again—and the leather hammered out a rhythmless beat on the floorboards. She stood up from the bed, fully dressed, smelling as if she hadn’t bathed in a week, knowing it added authenticity to her disguise, and went to retrieve the boy’s gun.
Not having his Ithaca had banished all else from Caleb’s mind. At his mother’s receding footsteps, he took the hunting knife from beneath his pillow, replaced it in its sheath, and put it back in his mother’s pack, careful to restore everything to its rightful order.
She wasn’t gone for more than five minutes. She handed the Ithaca to him having judged its heft automatically, as she would an infant—eight pounds—and he cradled the weapon carefully. He checked the chamber and took the cloth from his back pocket and folded it several times to find a clean square of fabric.
“I have to go to work,” Elspeth said. “How do I look? Dirty enough to be a man?” Caleb tore his eyes from the Ithaca and glanced at his mother. She’d turned into someone else. Caleb said she did. Elspeth hesitated, not sure if she’d made a joke, decided she hadn’t, and left the boy wiping down the barrel of his gun, as if he couldn’t bear to have someone else’s hands sully the steel.
C
HARLES MET HER
outside the hotel, holding two steaming cups. He gave one to her and she took a careful sip of thick, black coffee.
“How’s your boy?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, but she worried.
The morning was late in coming, under cover of dark, roiling clouds. The air smelled like snow, and Elspeth pulled her jacket close. “You’ll get used to the cold, Jorah,” he said, “but we need to get you some thicker gloves. Those won’t last the day.” He drew a pair from his denims and slapped them into her outstretched palm. “I always bring a spare. After work I’ll show you to the mercantile.”
Elspeth thanked him, the cold providing the rough edge to her voice so she didn’t have to. The harshness of their breath and the snow packing under their feet constituted their conversation for the rest of their walk. There wasn’t a soul on the streets except the occasional man headed in the same direction.
Lanterns drew a line from the icehouse to the canal upon which the frozen blocks would soon float up to the shore. The sight of the giant cubes of ice, almost as big as a man, made the nerves in Elspeth’s stomach leap into her chest. She wasn’t sure she could do the job. Maybe it would expose her for the fraud she was. Maybe the company would simply fire her. Or maybe Charles would fail to lock the pincers, and the ice would tumble onto her spine, and all she would know was a faint crack.
The lights reflected off the snow and hung a series of golden domes over the beginning of the workday. Horses whinnied and stamped their hooves into the frozen ground, their tack jingling. Elspeth and Charles joined a long line of men—none of whom spoke to Charles or greeted him as they did the others, with grunts or quick words. Elspeth retied her laces and pulled at her gloves. Somehow these small gestures took the edge off her apprehension. At the end of the line stood Edward Wallace, who leaned on a cane fatter than Elspeth’s arm, and, despite his crooked posture, towered over them all. He held a ledger, which he glanced at when Elspeth and Charles stepped forward. He handed them each a pair of ice cleats, a series of metal teeth with adjustable straps at the toes and heels to fasten them to their boots. “Van Tessel and Heather—the cranes,” he said.
Down the embankment to the edge of the water, they stood under a large post, jammed into the earth like a false tree trunk. Fifteen feet in the air, the post formed a T with another, this one parallel to the ground, the two held together by a swiveling metal bracket. On one end of the arm was a pair of metal pincers. On the other, nearly blending into the steely clouds, was an iron bar in the shape of a cross.
F
RANK HADN’T EVEN
finished shaking the cold from his arms when Caleb asked him, “How did you expect me to get my gun back?”
Frank hung his coat. “Morning, Caleb. How’s the room?”
Caleb ignored him and repeated his question.
“Sorry, son, I must have forgotten to tell Wilkes whose weapon it was,” he said as he moved behind the counter and rearranged the items that Wilkes had shifted over the course of the night. “But—God’s honest truth—I didn’t figure you’d find much at the Elm Inn worth your time. I expected you back rather quickly.”
Caleb accepted this explanation, and gave Frank his empty breakfast plate. “I enjoyed the eggs.” Caleb searched his pockets for the rest of the money. He’d laid the coins on the bed and arranged them by size, then memorized the numbers on their faces. He’d wanted to know which was best, what he could buy for each one, and he clinked them together in his pockets as he stood in front of Frank. “Do you know where I can buy a pistol?”
Frank dripped some oil onto a rag and began to wipe down the counter. “A pistol? Caleb, I don’t know you from Adam but I have to say, I’m a Christian man, and I don’t know if I should associate myself—or this hotel—with someone who carries a pistol and finds himself at the Elm Inn at all hours of the night.”
Caleb knew what one would buy a pistol for, but he’d studied himself in the mirror from the time his mother left for work until breakfast, and he didn’t look like one of the three men in red scarves or the men at the Elm Inn—not like a killer. He looked like a boy. Even for a boy, he thought, he didn’t look dangerous.
“The type of man I’m talking about is a man looking for trouble and trouble has an easy enough time finding folks on its own.” Frank scrubbed at a spot on the counter, his forearms flexing where they emerged from his rolled sleeves. “So, Caleb, sorry to say, I think you and I might be done being friendly.” With that, he balled up his rag, tossed it under the counter, and walked through the door to the kitchen.
E
LSPETH AND CHARLES
snapped the tongs onto a block of ice, the water sloshing under their cleated boots like liquid steel. Once they had secured the teeth, they walked over to the cross and each set their grip. Leather had been wound around the bar, but it had worn out in places and torn free in others. The apparatus groaned, the ice lifted, and the water dripping from its heights froze before it hit the hard-packed snow, pinging like shot.
“Jorah,” Charles began as they pushed, swinging the ice to the sled, “is your wife home waiting on you?”
Elspeth strained at the weight. The bar required both a forward and a downward force to move. She pushed harder. Her wounds yanked at her skin; the bandages constrained movement. A groan escaped from deep within her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to pry. Maybe another time.”
The thought of divulging anything made Elspeth queasy. Her secrets threatened to burst her at the seams every day. The constant pressure had become such an accustomed part of her that to live without it, she thought, would likely deflate her and she’d collapse to the ground like an empty burlap sack.
They dropped the ice onto the sled and the memory of the strain in her muscles tried to make her arms rise. She led the way back down the incline. The apparatus whined when they pulled it along with them, empty. “I had to ask,” Charles said, “because I have a soul that needs some unburdening. My own wife—my own dear wife—has been trouble for me lately.” He proceeded to list his complaints with his wife—her misunderstandings of him, her distaste for his work, her desire for a more comfortable life—in such detail that Elspeth gave up on listening and his voice became another sound in the rhythm of the work—the crisp squeal of the tongs as they snapped shut, the creak of the swivel as they pushed at the bar, the panting of their breath, and the small, measured steps of their feet on the packed snow, the teeth on their soles biting into the ice.
W
ITH HIS CONCENTRATION
divided by every new man coming in the door, Caleb was not an attentive sweeper. Several times London White whisked past and pointed to a section of floor blemished by a small nest of hair or a clump of dirt. Eventually he took Caleb by the hips and moved him over to a splatter of cigar ashes. “How’s your eyesight, Caleb?” he asked, and waved a hand in front of his face.
For much of the early morning, Caleb had debated whether or not to come to the Elm and begin work, but he always drew the same conclusion: There was nowhere else he would be able to observe the killing kind in such obscurity. Frank had said nothing from the counter as he’d slipped past, and London White had only pulled a pocket watch from his vest to comment on Caleb’s tardiness.
Caleb toiled upstairs, supposedly sweeping the walkway that was lined with rooms identified by swirling, golden numbers affixed to the doors. The bells chimed irregularly in the morning, far from the symphonic clamor of ringing at night. From inside the rooms came muffled moans and rhythmic thumping that Caleb pretended not to hear. He had a notion of what happened between the ringing of the bells, but thinking about it made his eyes go blurry, so he pictured the killers. When the customers exited the rooms, some flushed and hurried, others languorous—as if they’d eaten a large and satisfying meal—Caleb would bend over his broom, pretending to inspect the floor, sneaking only a glance at their walk or their hair, trying to fit them with red scarves.
The panorama of the Elm Inn was best viewed from the walkway, and Caleb swept it again and again. There were half a dozen tables for cards, and the tinkling of coins being tossed on them could be heard under the constant roar of conversation and the occasional disagreement. It was still early—the weak winter sun trickled through the filmy windows—and White had told Caleb not to worry about gunfire until the liquor had more time to work. Caleb acted as if he knew what this meant. Women circulated among the tables, and Caleb avoided looking at their ill-fitting attire and the bodies they barely restrained. These women were shaped differently than his mother or his sisters, rounder, more fleshy. They brought drinks to the men, played with their hair, sat on their laps, and whispered into their ears. Caleb’s embarrassment made it easy to give his attention to the men, who watched one another with wary glances. Many looked like the raccoon Caleb had impaled in the horses’ stall, their expressions wild, their bodies plagued by nervous tics. Each carried the kind of weight in his shoulders that bowed his back and hid his face from the world. Caleb thought he would know one of the killers if he saw them, that he would feel it as clearly as if he’d leapt into icy water. No one in the Elm Inn gave him that shudder. Some, however, struck a deep fear in his heart. One customer, frustrated by something unknown that happened behind one of the closed doors, caught sight of him on the upper walkway, the first time someone besides White or Ethan had taken any notice of him, and Caleb scurried in the other direction, lamely passing the broom behind him. The man’s longer strides caught up with him, and he rammed his elbow into Caleb’s back hard enough to knock the broom from his hand and send it clattering over the railing and onto a handful of patrons waiting at the bar. “Watch yourself, boy,” he said and tromped down the stairs.
Caleb heard a yell of annoyance and pressed his back to the wall, out of sight from the floor below. London White came up the stairs, broom in hand. He considered it, passing it from one palm to the other. Caleb knelt and swept the last of the dirt into his hand. He didn’t know what to do with it—he had been sweeping it up against the walls between the doors, rather than onto the card players and women below—so he dumped it into his pocket.
“When I was your age,” London White began, making it clear he’d paid no attention to Caleb’s work habits, “I was like my brother, living in the woods, making moonshine to sell to thirsty travelers, eating whatever we could catch—possums, rabbit, squirrel.” He winced. “Then I sold a jar full of our best to a man in a nice suit. He rode the finest horse I’d ever seen. He wore the finest clothes. We feared men like that. Sometimes we’d give them our product for free.” He wrung the broom handle with his fists. “Imagine that—the ones who could truly afford our wares and we’d give it to them for nothing because we were scared. I didn’t like that feeling. Not at all.” His knuckles went white. “I followed him home. He lived in a gorgeous house—windows and ceilings like a church, walls and floors as resplendent as the most magnificent of palaces. He had a beautiful wife—red hair to her shoulders, skin white as snow. Do you know what I did?”