The Kept (27 page)

“Who?” Paul said, only half present.

“The men Martin hired. Where did they come from?”

Paul gave the object in his hand to Caleb. Wrapped in dark fabric was a roll of money. “Kelly and I have been saving that,” he said, “all our lives. Whatever we could keep from Martin we did. Sometimes he’d find it and he’d go off and buy another drunk tracker, another man itching to let loose his bullets.”

“Where did they come from?”

“We want you to know that you can stay here, and we’ll put this money to making you a life. Kelly and I, we’d take care of you,” Paul said. “But if whoever brought you here is important to you, you take that money and you run. You get far enough gone that you’re not on those maps Martin spreads out.”

Caleb didn’t care about the money. To him, it was nothing but paper. “Where are the killers?”

A sudden demonic glow flared out the window like a sunrise, followed by a holler. “He’s burning it all—the maps, the papers, the accounts, the newspapers—now that you’re here.” Paul’s eyes squeezed into a frightened squint. “This release”—he tipped his chin toward the window—“will be followed by the thirst for another.” He closed Caleb’s hand around the wad of money. “Go.”

Caleb gathered up his few belongings. The broken gifts he ignored. He looked around for the Colt before remembering he’d traded it in for a bag of junk. He longed for his Ithaca and felt too light without it.

In the kitchen, Kelly stood at the window, watching as Martin threw sheaves of paper into the blaze and then poured a bottle onto them that made the flames leap. From the way she stiffened, he knew she sensed him there, the same way the animals would only partially acknowledge his presence. He lingered, not sure what he hoped for, before walking down the front hallway and into a night filled with Martin’s rhapsodic screams.

E
LSPETH PICKED HER
way down the stairs in new shoes that necessitated that she gather up her skirts to see where she stepped. The hotel had begun to wake, some rumpled men stumbling in from the night out and others straightening well-pressed outfits and drinking coffee. A few women were scattered among them, dressed in elaborate fashion. The room smelled of cleanliness: soaps and subtle perfumes. Out of habit, Elspeth expected Charles, carrying their mugs of coffee.

Frank recognized her, but it took a while, even with her standing right in front of him.

“Elspeth,” she said.

“Elspeth,” he repeated.

“My son,” she said. He brought his cup to his mouth but failed to drink from it. “Have you seen him?” Frank shook his head. “Do you know where he might be? It seems as though,” she said and struggled to keep her composure, “he has taken some of his belongings with him.”

“Did he take his shotgun?” Frank asked. The gun, cleaner than the day she’d bought it, occupied the shelf above Caleb’s bed. “That boy isn’t going anywhere without his gun,” he said. “Why don’t you come talk in the back?”

He grabbed her elbow roughly and pulled her through the kitchen and into a back pantry filled with jars of jams and jellies of all colors, shelves of cookbooks, and sacks of flour and grocery bags labeled with crooked letters. Frank shut the door and left them in the dark. Another explosion of dynamite in the graveyard shook the tiny room.

“Look, ma’am, sir, whatever the hell you are today,” he said, “this is none of my business, but since I’ve spent some time with Caleb: Have you given any thought to what you’re doing to that boy?”

“Not enough,” Elspeth said. “But more lately. Thank you.”

His hand touched her stomach, then slid quickly down and into her groin. His fingers pressed against her. “Why?”

“To avoid being recognized,” she said. “To stay out of trouble. To keep myself from the same sins.”

“That boy doesn’t have a chance,” he said. “Not a damn chance.”

She was glad for the darkness. “I know.”

His hand raised to her. She could sense it looming and waited for the blow, tilted her head back to receive it. Finally, the punishment she’d deserved for so long. “My wife is pregnant,” he said. “I’m sad for the world that will meet our child.” The hand lowered and he tossed the door open. The new air hit Elspeth’s face and her tears turned cold. Another explosion sounded, this time unsettling jars and a bag of flour. The cooks busy making breakfast halted, ready to catch falling objects, then resumed their work, the whisking of eggs sounding to Elspeth like the claws of an animal hunting. She wished it would hurry up and find her.

C
HAPTER 16

A
gain Caleb heard the beat of a horse’s hooves chasing him back to the center of Watersbridge. The graveyard was quiet. The bodies lay beneath lamps strung up for the occasion, and in their golden domes the empty graves yawned at their prey. When he reached them, he braved a glance back and saw nothing there. No horse followed him. Martin Shane did not appear out of the gloom, smoke hanging about him, emanating from the folds of his coat.

Dawn approached and things were beginning to brighten, objects emerging from the black to reveal themselves as everyday bushes and trees, not men with scarves sighting him down the barrels of their rifles. He slowed. By the time he reached the Brick & Feather, his hysteria had subsided, and his mind had focused on one objective: leaving.

The wad of money sat heavy in his pocket. In the quiet of the hotel, the carpets softened his steps. From the counter, Frank gave him a sad smile. Caleb opened the door to their room to reveal Elspeth awake and already bundled, her bags under her arms, and dressed, once again, like a woman. His frazzled mind could barely process this transformation.

Elspeth had waited all night for the boy who appeared before her, and she had forgotten in her image of him the lump on his skull and the bruised cheeks. After Frank had spoken to her, she’d stood in the pantry for long enough that her clothes had become saturated with the scent of coffee. In that time, she’d thought of all she’d put this small boy through, everything that he’d suffered and fought, the images and the ghosts that she knew would hound him the rest of his life. Her only conclusion—made all the stronger by forgetting entirely about his beating—was that she needed to leave him.

“I couldn’t bring myself to ask,” Caleb said. “I tried.” He unraveled the scarf from his neck. “I’m not your son.”

“No,” Elspeth said. The animal that had come after her had found her, had already begun to devour her, and with the fear and guilt radiating from her body, it was like liberation. “I took you.”

Time passed. Caleb shrank to his haunches, and Elspeth could hold on to her bags no longer and set them on the floor. She kept her coat and hat on, her sweat profuse and sour. They could hear the church bells calling the mourners to the funeral, and the scratchy shuffling of their steps. Elspeth watched the long streams of people dressed in black, their heads down. After a while, she turned to him. Caleb’s mother and father had been kind people, she began, and she’d decided they would make it easy not to sin again. “You understand, I assume, that I took your brothers and sisters also?” She made the statement coldly, because if she’d soaked it with the breadth of her emotion, she would not have been able to continue. She didn’t have to protect the boy from her fear because she no longer possessed any. She would lay herself bare.

She explained that because his mother and father were such sweet, loving people, she thought she would be able to return to Jorah and the small family they already had and she would be satisfied. Those children, with their curling hair, their burbling sounds, their reckless steps, would be enough. Caleb’s mother—“Kaitlyn,” he said, “her name was Kaitlyn”—was sturdy and prepared, almost calm, when Elspeth arrived. She kissed her husband at the time when most women screamed, and she bore down on the pain. “She was brave,” she said. Elspeth knew she could not steal this baby. This would be a good child and a good family.

“I fear, Caleb, that if I tell you the rest . . .” she said and trailed off.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “I know she died because of me.”

“Not because of you,” she said, and began to cry for him. She continued. The blood began to seep out, first a small rivulet that neither Elspeth nor the doctor noticed, as they were so busy and the mother—“Kaitlyn,” she added—was so calm. When the drops began to splash Elspeth’s ankles, she pointed the small pool out to the doctor, who told Kaitlyn, “You’re doing fine.” But Elspeth recognized that he needed the baby out because the mother didn’t have much time. “I wanted to warn her, even as the color drained from her face and her eyes began to roll,” she told him. “I should have, even though it would have done no good.” The baby came. A small boy, bald as a potato and just as full of lumps. “You.” Once he’d left her body, the mother released, and her body seemed to collapse in on itself, her face gaunt and her legs mere spindles. Elspeth took an ankle in her hand, the heat escaping. The doctor yelled for Elspeth to clean the baby, and she did. He cried right away, and she swaddled him, alert and strong already. She held him close.

Caleb’s father—“Samuel,” he said—came in, and he screamed and prostrated himself onto the floor, his knees sliding in the blood and excrement. “Take him away,” Samuel said of Caleb, “take the baby away.”

Caleb blanched at this. She continued.

“I did as I was told.” She waited for Samuel in the nursery, but he never came, not even as the hands on the clock hit eight, nine, ten, eleven. Not that night, not the next morning. The doctor went home. In that time, she convinced herself—because she was a sinner and easily convinced—that God had told her to take Caleb, using Samuel as a mouthpiece. “I stole you,” she told Caleb, “and it was a wicked thing to do.”

The admission didn’t satisfy Caleb as he thought it would. He assumed Elspeth finally voicing her mistakes would relieve the pain like the removal of a splinter. It didn’t. “And now,” Caleb said, standing, “they’re all dead, everyone, and my uncle’s going to come and kill you.”

Elspeth adjusted herself on the bed. “Then that will be the end.”

He pressed something into her hand and she touched his, warm and soft, and dragged the tips of her fingers across his palm when he pulled away. She opened her fist to reveal the wad of money. “We’re leaving,” he said. Caleb tucked his Ithaca under his arm and yanked at her sleeve.

“You’re coming with me?”

“We can find the killers,” he said. He began to throw their belongings into the old pack—Margaret’s stitches still taut.

“Caleb,” she said, “I’ll wait. It’s enough now.”

“No!” He couldn’t calm himself, nor could he force her to care. Everything appeared in swirls of color and movement and every beat of his heart told him to sleep, that the world moved at all the wrong speeds, but he banished these thoughts and continued to stuff their pack with whatever remained on their shelf. He filled his pockets with shotgun shells. “He sent them.”

Elspeth thought he meant God. He stuffed items into their flimsy bag. “Wait, child,” she said and took hold of his wrist to stop his packing. “Who? Who sent them?”

“My uncle,” he said. “Trying to find me.” The words spilled out, and it was as if he saw them crack on the floor like eggs, and he recognized that without him, his brothers and sisters would still be alive. It was his uncle, his fake mother, his town—everything about Caleb had become death. He didn’t wonder at Kelly being unable to face him. The poison coursed through his veins.

Elspeth didn’t have much experience trying to soothe Caleb and so she did all she could: She wrapped him in her arms. When she let him go, the shoulders of her dress were wet, and Caleb blushed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’ll talk to him,” she said and hushed him before he could argue. “We’ll find out where those men live. I’ll try to explain to Mr. Shane.”

“No,” said Caleb. “He’ll kill you.” He refused to see anyone else murdered. “We have to go. Now.”

With each tantrum, he looked smaller to her and her responsibility grew. “He’ll be at the funeral. I’ll talk to him at the church.” She gripped the boy’s hand. “He won’t shoot me in a house of God.”

Caleb couldn’t guess what she planned on saying, how she figured she might excuse herself, but he didn’t have the strength to argue. He understood his father’s end: how he’d steered his horse onto the ice, the animal trusting him, skittish at first, but then he’d encouraged it with some whispered words and a strong tug on the reins. Caleb knew his exhaustion.

They joined the procession of mourners. Along the way, the stream of people gained tributaries, more coming from the side streets and out of the restaurant and mercantile, until they filled the road from gutter to gutter.

Elspeth tried to unlearn in two hundred yards what she’d spent a month affecting. The dress hung—floppy and insubstantial—off her frame, and her face stung from the harsh soap and scented oils, tender without the shoe polish on her jaw and neck. The steeple hovered above them, and as they approached, the bells rang—even the straining of the ropes on the pulleys audible in the silent shuffling mass. Elspeth no longer considered the bells an alarm signaling her failures; she heard them as encouragement for her newfound freedom. She held no secrets from this world.

Caleb looked for Martin, but he stood no more than shoulder high and could see only backs and torsos. The church had been filled to capacity, everywhere one looked the pews and aisles crawled with black clothes and faces contorted in grief. They climbed the steps to the balcony and found a pocket of space. More mourners pressed them to the back wall, against a mural depicting a series of angels lifting souls up to heaven, their arms outstretched in serene acceptance. The usually majestic stained-glass windows were deadened by the slate gray sky. Caleb stood on his tiptoes, and could make out the pulpit and the lectern, each dressed in black, and the candles of Advent burning on the altar. People sat on the floor and stood in the aisles. In the center of the sanctuary lay a block of ice. The organ began to play, low and insistent, the notes stretching long and resounding through the building. The choir came through a door at the side of the church—briefly stymied by the crowd clogging the aisle—but the congregants cleared a narrow footpath, and the choir members tried to affect some semblance of formation and decorum on their way to the chancel. Next came the minister, and he waited for those seated in his path to stand and pack themselves together, flattening into one another so that he could pass. As he fought through the horde, his patience clearly tried, his smile tight, another commotion erupted at the rear of the lower level, and Caleb located an alley in the crook of a man’s arm to see London White, with Ethan clearing the way, taking no note of the crowd, strolling to a seat in the first pew. Elspeth watched mourners scatter like insects for her son’s boss, who wielded his black suit like a weapon. White ended up in the front left pew, Ethan next to him on the aisle. The minister’s face grew red at his presence, but White ignored this and serenely opened a hymnal.

In the balcony Caleb and Elspeth were jostled as well, and she put a protective arm around the boy. Her hat was knocked from her head. Harsh whispers erupted, and Elspeth could see the disturbance coming toward them as a fishing line disrupts the water. Martin Shane broke through the pack, his elbows high to clear room. He gnashed his teeth. In his belt, he carried a pistol. Elspeth maneuvered herself in front of the boy. Now that she’d received what she’d asked for, she had no clue as to where to begin. To Elspeth, Martin Shane didn’t look anything like he did as a young man, twelve—almost thirteen—years prior. She’d only seen him once or twice, hanging back in a quiet corner while she met with his sister. Then he’d been a rosy-cheeked boy with hair the color of wheat, his eyebrows bleached almost white by the sun, his nose freckled. The years had been unkind. From his manner, she put no faith in the church to protect her child. However, when the minister requested those who could to take their seats, Shane merely exhaled liquor-stained breath onto them and gave his attention to the pulpit. The minister—the real preacher, back from Rochester—spoke loud enough to carry over the coughing and shifting of hundreds of bodies.

Shane moved decisively and Elspeth wished she’d brought her gun, but she’d told Caleb they’d go unarmed into God’s house. As the big man clasped the boy’s arms, however, she prayed for a chance to lodge a bullet in his heart. She scratched at him, their movements met with exclamations elsewhere in the balcony, their struggle rippling outward.

The choir began to sing. “
In heavenly love abiding, No change my heart shall fear, And safe is such confiding
.”

Caleb had no room to fight. His feet left the floor and he didn’t know what Shane intended and he clenched his fists and pounded at him. No one noticed, least of all Shane, who lifted Caleb onto his shoulders and leaned against the wall. Elspeth ceased her clawing. Caleb found himself in the hot air at the ceiling. Shane smelled of smoke. Elspeth and Caleb exchanged a look that neither could decipher, something of confusion and weariness.

The voices of the singers below—“
Wherever He may guide me, No want shall turn me back”
—comforted Caleb, slowed his heartbeat, though he could sense it in his tongue and his wrists. He stared at Shane’s towhead, where the gaps between the thin strands of hair were covered in splotches and dark spots. It had been five or six years since he’d ridden on Amos’s shoulders for the last time; his hair had been brown and full. From his new perch, he could see the entirety of the room: the huddled choir, the block of ice on a black tarp, the stained-glass windows that reminded him of the candy his mother had given him long ago.

The church heated with all the bodies, even as outside the snow came down, the storm gaining energy, the mild reprieve of the last few days only that. It piled on the sills and attacked the panes of the windows. Between words of the sermon, one could hear the drumming of the fat flakes trying to work their way inside. In this hushed reverence, the minister left the pulpit. He was shorter than Caleb expected, with a full head of white hair, green eyes, and a neat beard. He placed one unsteady foot, and then the other, on the block of ice. A member of the chorus, a bald man, half stood when the minister’s feet slid, but the old man steadied himself with his arms outstretched, the Bible in one hand. “On this, God’s Earth,” he said, “there are no accidents. The word
accident
doesn’t appear in His Book.” He shook the Bible in his hand and almost slipped again.

Elspeth watched Shane and Caleb interact, gauging whether the boy would change his mind and stay with his uncle. Caleb bent his head low, entirely too large to sit on someone’s shoulders. They didn’t look alike, not exactly, but a certain similarity about their bearing and their mannerisms struck her. The closeness with which they observed the ceremony made her believe the boy would indeed remain in the place of his birth, and continue the life she’d disrupted.