Page 25
The next morning, I pretended to be asleep when Eli crept into the room to get fresh clothes. He’d already bathed; I could smell the soap. I was still tired after a restless night. It wasn’t hard to keep my breathing slow and my body relaxed.
Eli left just as quietly to dress somewhere else.
He was as loath to have the big fight we were going to have as I was.
But it had to be gotten through. I bathed and dressed and went down for breakfast, to find that Eli had already left the table.
Felicia was there and gave me a doubtful look…
the first time she’d ever looked at me so.
“What happened last night?” my sister asked directly.
“So many things.”
“Make a start.”
“Felix bought a mind-reading spell from some magician. He used it last night.”
“Mind reading,” Felicia said. She looked unhappy. “To read my mind?”
“No, some of the people at the party. But I don’t see how he could pick and choose what he heard. The last place I want Felix is in my head. Anyway. He heard a German and a Japanese, and he’s sure they’re the ones plotting to kill you.”
“ Kill me,” she repeated. “They want to kill me? Why?”
I explained to her. The upcoming war. The probable use of grigoris in the war. Her power to kill. And to top it all off, the fact that my husband had put a target on her back by telling the two parties they could not approach her.
“Ahhh…” Felicia had a strange look on her face. “After I talked with Hans at the Del Coronado, I knew a bit about the way the war is shaping up. Not all you’ve just told me, but a little.”
I looked at her, stunned. “So you asked Eli to do that,” I said. “And you didn’t tell me. You too.”
I had never seen Felicia look guilty, but she did now. And she ought to.
I got up from the table and left. I went back up to the third floor, got my guns out of the wardrobe, and lay a towel over the small table in our room.
I got out my Colt 45s and all my cleaning things, the Hoppe’s and the rags and thin brushes.
I fetched a stool from the bathroom, since the chair was not right for this work.
I took the Colts apart. I lay the pieces out. I began to take care of the tools of my trade: I could clean them without thinking about it, but today I paid attention to each little task. It was one that gave me pleasure.
There was a storm inside me. What the hell? Did no one trust me? Why was everyone I most cared about keeping secrets from me? Whereas Felix, whom I had never liked, was all too willing to tell me things I should have known already. Things I really didn’t want to hear, by the way.
Part of my brain focused on little task after little task, making the guns clean and beautiful. Part of me imagined packing my bag and calling a cab to go to the train station.
That was a very satisfying daydream.
Leaving behind Eli and Felicia seemed like a grand idea. My husband didn’t think I needed to know what was going on around me, for no reason I could see. My sister, for whom I had rearranged my life, had so little regard for me that she didn’t share a major decision.
Why would she do that?
Because she had already made up her mind. She had fixed on this Hans Goldschmidt. Everything else was just pretense.
She could have simply told me.
I don’t know if I’d ever felt as low as I did that morning, in that bedroom, in my mother-in-law’s house.
Oh, wait, I had. When Eli and Peter had taken off following the militia that had come into Segundo Mexia, without telling me. When Felicia and I had had to rescue them from that militia. When Eli’d gone to San Diego the previous summer, without telling me why he was going.
My hands grew still as I simply looked out the window and thought.
Even when my first gun crew had died, all in one night, one of them my lover, one my best friend, I’d had a clear purpose. Now I had none.
I’d come to protect and support my sister through a grigori rite of passage, one you only got to experience if you were very lucky and your family had enough money. I’d done it gladly… to discover she was throwing it away behind my back.
Was I looking at this wrong? At the moment, I didn’t think so.
There was a knock at the door, but I didn’t say anything. The next knock had more muscle behind it. “Go away,” I said, hoping whoever it was would take me at my word.
No such luck.
Both Eli and Felicia shuffled into the room. I could tell by the sound of their shoes. If they were waiting for me to say something, they’d wait till pigs flew.
“Lizbeth, you’re sulking,” Eli said.
Something in me snapped. Probably my last straw. “Am I? Is that what I’m doing? Please tell me, because I sure as hell don’t know.” I resumed cleaning. My guns had never let me down.
Felicia, who was smarter about people than Eli, said, “I’m sorry we didn’t talk about it.”
“Why? Since you both don’t tell me anything else.
I have no idea why I went to all this trouble.
Borrowing Veronika’s clothes. Wearing shoes I hate.
Getting shot at by arrows. Getting blown up.
Killing a man in the middle of a crowd. Waiting to be arrested, if someone saw me stab him.
When this turns out to be a game to you.
” I put the first gun down and turned to face them.
My face was made of stone. My heart felt like that, too.
Eli finally understood this was not going to go away.
Felicia finally understood that for the first time, I was seriously angry with her.
“Just leave,” I said, suddenly feeling very tired. “Go away. When you’re ready to be honest with me, I’ll listen, but you better make it snappy. Otherwise, I’m on the train home.”
Wisely, they left.
I finished cleaning my guns. I wished I had brought my Winchester so I could clean that, too, but you couldn’t come into the Holy Russian Empire carrying a rifle. At least I hadn’t been able to figure out a way.
I stowed all my cleaning stuff and lay my guns carefully on a shelf in the armoire.
I sat in the easy chair in the corner, and after a while I moved it closer to the north window overlooking the backyard.
I could see the north-south sidewalk marking the end of the block, two yards over to my right.
I watched cars on that street, I watched people walking (some with dogs), I watched the yard crew come in to tidy up the flower beds.
I watched Leah hanging up laundry on the clothesline between the house and the garage.
A man wearing a starched white bib apron walked up to her.
Leah seemed surprised to see him. They exchanged a few words, and he handed her a piece of paper.
She finished pegging up the clothes, and she brought the paper inside. Huh.
Was someone sending my sister a love note? Requesting a meeting? I felt something, finally. Curiosity.
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I assumed either Eli or Felicia was coming to try to mend fences again, but it was Leah who came to the door.
She knocked.
I said, “Come on in.”
“Barney, he works down the street, he said a man paid him to bring you this.” An envelope was in her hand.
“Down the street where?”
“At the corner grocery. Barney brings the deliveries around.”
I’d been in the grocery during the insurrection, when the people running the store and my sister had been taken hostage by the rebels. Touch and go.
“Did he say who this man was? What he looked like?”
Leah shook her head. “He gave Barney a good tip.” She lingered, enjoying the novelty of the event, but I was waiting for her to leave before I read this mysterious message. “In case you were wondering, Miss Felicia went into her room crying,” she said.
I nodded. “Thanks for bringing this to me.”
She left then. I kind of liked Leah. She was doing her best to enjoy a job that must be full of drudgery.
I tore open the envelope.
“I know this is irregular,” the note began. “Since you are Felicia’s older sister, I need to tell you some things about my past.”
Even more promising.
I hope you are free to meet me in the park across the street from the grocery store. I will understand if you can’t come, but if you are home and not engaged, maybe you will agree to talk to me.
It was signed “Hans Goldschmidt.”
I held it in my hand and tapped the paper against the window. I pretended to think about this.
Of course, I’d go.
I had some pants I’d brought with me, purchased the last time I’d been in San Diego. I pulled them on, and a blouse and a jacket, and I tucked a gun into the waistband in back. It was good I’d lost some weight, though I hadn’t much to spare.
Leaving the house without anyone knowing?
That took some figuring. With my shoes in my hand, I eased down the attic steps, and then took the servants’ stairway to the back of the house.
Mrs. O’Clanahan, the cook (hired when McMurtry married Veronika), was in the kitchen.
She was chopping an onion, and she looked up with teary eyes to see who’d come into her kingdom.
I nodded at her as I went out the kitchen door, and she nodded back, and that was that.
I sat on the steps to pull on my shoes. Then I went around back of the former carriage house (now the garage) at the rear of the yard, now home to two cars, McMurtry’s and Veronika’s.
Walking on the rear property line, I cut across the yard of the two houses next door to reach the sidewalk.
Then I walked to the corner grocery. Across the street lay the little park I remembered from my previous visits.
At this hour of the afternoon, the park was almost empty. Two children were playing on a seesaw, a uniformed nanny watching them while she knitted. No one else was in the park but Hans Goldschmidt, sitting on a bench. He jumped to his feet when he saw me.
Table of Contents
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- Page 25 (Reading here)
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