Always (26 page)

“About that job you mentioned to me a while back. It’s obvious that you need someone to help get you organized.”

“Is it?” he quipped with an amused grin.

“The question is, are you and Mr. Stauffer willing to pay for it, and if so, are you up to placing your trust in a woman to help whip this place into shape?”

Karl’s eyes sparkled with devilment. “Why, Miss Emily, when you put it that way, how can I possibly resist?”

*

When Ross came out of the Davenport building, the sweltering summer heat rose like a rude slap to greet him. Jamming his watch into his pocket, he muttered a string of invectives as he crossed the busy square to city hall. It was only ten-thirty on Friday, and he already had a raging headache. Virgil Davis, the local intelligence reporter, hadn’t shown up for work. This wasn’t the first time Ross had covered for him. Although he liked Virgil, the man’s fondness for whiskey was a problem.

The police station and lockup were located in the basement of the city hall building. When Ross entered the small, windowless office, he found one of the constables, Lionell Smith, eating an early box dinner at his desk. Lionell was in his mid-twenties, but his fair, wispy hair was already thin on top and he carried about a dozen unnecessary inches around the waistline. As far as Ross was concerned, Lionell was a perfect example of how badly the war had depleted the labor force during the past four years.

“Morning, Ross,” Lionell called as he set aside a half-consumed sandwich and pulled a sheet of paper from his cluttered desk. “Where’s Virgil?”

“Sick.” Ross already had his pencil and notepad ready by the time Lionell moseyed over to the oak counter near the door.

“Old Virge hitting the bottle too hard again, eh?” The young constable smirked as he presented the police log sheet to Ross. He was in the mood to gossip.

“Couldn’t say for sure, Lionell.” Taking the sheet, Ross caught whiffs of sweat and pickle juice as he scanned the first items on the police log. A burglary, a petty theft, a lost boy, and a drunk and disorderly. “So, how have you been?”

“Can’t complain,” Lionell said with a huge yawn. “You?”

“Fine.”

Ross knew his reply was ludicrous. Ever since Emily had told him the truth, he’d been feeling anything but fine. Still, he managed to force a tight smile before he began jotting down the particulars for the following morning’s local intelligence column.

“The little boy have a name?” Ross asked as he scribbled.

“What? Huh?”

“The little boy they found wandering in Duke Street.”

“Uh, yeah, right there. Michael. Can’t ya read?”

In fact, Ross couldn’t read much of Lionell’s chicken scratch, and his spelling was atrocious. “Michael,” Ross repeated. “I see they took him over to the Home for Friendless Children. How old is he?”

“About three. Ain’t old enough to tell us.”

Ross moved to the next item. A stolen awning rope from Mr. Stahl’s store on Orange Street. “Didn’t we just do a write-up about his awning rope being stolen last week?”

“Yup.”

“Twice now,” Ross mused as he wrote. “I imagine old Mr. Stahl’s getting pretty steamed.”

“Said he was gonna sit up all night with a loaded shotgun to catch the rascals, but the chief talked him out of it.”

“Hmm.” Ross stopped writing upon spotting an eye-catching name on the next line. He looked up. “Arnold Gibson? Holy smokes, that can’t be the city councilman’s son, can it?”

“It can and it is.” Lionell’s eyes sparkled with juicy knowledge.

This could be big. Ross knew he would have to satisfy Lionell’s need to feel important. “I see what’s down on paper here, Lionell, but I’m sure there’s more to the story than that. Were you here? Do you know the details?”

“As a matter of fact, I was here. And you’re right. The story is a little more complicated than just what’s on the sheet.”

Ross leaned on the counter to get closer. He lowered his voice. “Why don’t you tell me the real story?”

Ross’s avid interest seemed to satisfy Lionell for the moment. “Well, you see, a fella from Marietta came in early yesterday evening saying he picked up a lady all bruised and bleeding by the side of the road outside town.”

“What happened?”

“According to the little lady, she agreed to go for a ride with Arnie Gibson, but once they got out of town, he turned mean. She managed to get away from him and run back to the road where this fella happened to be going by and picked her up.”

Ross kept a neutral expression, but he remembered Arnie well from their growing-up years. Arnie had been a crony of the late John Butler, quick with his fists, and never terribly bright. So, what he was hearing now didn’t surprise him. “She hurt bad?”

“Considering Amie’s size and temper and all, I’d say she got off pretty light.” Lionell paused to extract a wrinkled handkerchief from a trouser pocket. He mopped beads of sweat from his forehead. “You know, that boy ain’t been right in the head ever since he got back from the war.”

“Is the lady going to be all right?”

“Her face was bruised up some, she had a knife gash on her arm, and her dress was torn. We sent her to see Doc Weaver in case she needed to be stitched up. You’d have to check with him.”

“I don’t see here that any charges were filed,” Ross said. “Why not?”

Lionell offered an I’ve-seen-it-all chuckle as he jammed his soiled handkerchief back home. “Well, now, you know as well as I do, Ross, Arnie’s daddy has lots of pull in this town. The chief brought Amie down for questioning, but the councilman came charging in after him, mad as a hornet. Got a lawyer with him and everything. Can’t tell you one way or another whether there’ll be charges filed or not.”

“But what about the lady’s family?” Ross pressed. “Why aren’t they up in arms?”

“The lady?” Lionell drawled the word dubiously. “Now, you see, there’s the other part of the problem.”

“No,” Ross said, “I don’t see.”

“The lady in question ain’t exactly a lady if you get my meaning.”

“Why? Who is she?”

“Her name is Miss Stacy Bliss.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

The constable leaned his pudgy forearms on the oak counter and gave Ross a lascivious wink. “So, you know her, do you? Ain’t surprisin’. A lot of fellas around here do.” It was then that Ross put his finger on it. Stacy Bliss. A pretty, if not terribly bright, farm girl who had left school in the eighth grade. “I knew her when we were kids. She was a nice girl.”

Lionell snorted. “Yeah,
real
nice. She’s working down at the Bull Tavern these days, if you get a hankering to catch up on old times.”

What the man was saying, plain and simple, was that Stacy was a prostitute. Considering what he remembered of the girl’s worn-out shoes and poor clothes, this didn’t come to Ross as a big surprise, but it was sad just the same. He’d meant it when he’d said Stacy was a nice girl. At least when Ross had known her. That was a long time ago now.

Ignoring Lionell’s snide comment, Ross pressed him. “So, what you mean is, since the lady hasn’t got anyone to take up her side in this matter, it’s likely to be forgotten. Is that about the size of it?”

At this, the rotund constable’s dull eyes lit with wary comprehension. He pushed up from the counter and straightened. “Her family ain’t had nothing to do with her for years now. Just what’re you getting at, Ross?”

“It looks like Amie Gibson will get away with it.” The look of defensiveness faded, and Lionell shrugged. “Maybe. This time, anyway, and maybe again and again, too. At least until he slaps around the wrong daddy’s little girl.”

Ross read over the police log again. Stacy’s injuries might have been minor, but her dress had been torn. He wondered if she’d been assaulted in a sexual manner as well. Just because she hadn’t reported it didn’t mean a thing.

“This ain’t the chief’s fault, you know.” Ross looked up to see Lionell mopping his forehead dry again.

“I didn’t say it was.”

But Lionell continued as if Ross hadn’t spoken. “If he decides to take it to a hearing, it probably won’t even be bound over for trial, and even if it is, chances are no jury is going to give Amie more than a fine or a couple days in the lockup.”

“Maybe that’s better than nothing. Maybe it’ll get his attention.”

“I doubt it,” Lionell said.

“But it’s worth a try. What if the lady in question were your sister or your aunt?”

“Look, if you ask me, it wouldn’t be no big loss to this community if Arnie was to be locked up for a long while. Like I said, he has a rafter or two missing. But Stacy ain’t nobody’s sister or aunt. Not anymore. These girls ask for trouble, and when it finds them, there ain’t many folks ready to offer sympathy. Now, them’s the facts of life.”

“It shouldn’t matter who the victim is. Justice is supposed to be blind.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t change the world, Ross.”

If that were true, Ross thought, then they’d just fought one of the bloodiest wars in history for nothing. “I don’t agree, Lionell. Maybe if we make an effort, we can change a small part of it.”

“You do what you have to. If the chief feels he’s got popular support on this, then maybe something will come of it. Otherwise, don’t expect to hear anymore about it.”

Tucking his notebook back into his coat pocket, Ross prepared to leave. “Oh, I intend to hear plenty more about it. I’m going to be out of town tomorrow on a story, but I’ll be back to see you early next week.”

“See you then, Ross.”

Ross raised a hand as he left. His original intention had been to drop his police log notes on another reporter’s desk to do the write-up for tomorrow’s edition, but he’d just changed his mind. This particular item he would compose himself. Right now, the identity of the victim wouldn’t be an issue. Because of newspaper policy and his belief that Stacy needed to be protected from public scrutiny, her name wouldn’t be published. But Arnold Gibson’s would. If public pressure would help move this case into the court system, then that’s what Ross intended to deliver.

Chapter Nineteen

Malcolm was out of the office until Saturday, which gave Ross editorial control. He took advantage of this authority by writing the local intelligence column himself. Late Friday afternoon, he sent his copy to the composing room to be set for the following day’s first edition.

The next morning, Ross took a train to Gettysburg, where ceremonies were planned to accompany the laying of a cornerstone of a national monument. He intended to cover the story for the paper, but he also had personal reasons for wanting this assignment. His old regiment had been ordered to represent the infantry of the army. Many of the soldiers in the Fiftieth were veteran volunteers, his old comrades, and he looked forward to seeing them again before they were mustered out of service.

When the ceremony was done, Ross took a hotel room to stay the night. He hoped that spending time with his old friends might help distract him from his present troubles.

It did. For a while. They reminisced over camp life, squad drills, guard duty, and hardtack. They recalled the battles they’d fought, the acts of gallantry they’d witnessed, and afterward, as one of the men accompanied them on the harmonica, they sang a few verses of “When This Cruel War is Over.”

In the quiet that followed, they remembered their slain friends, and Ross was pressed to describe his experiences after being wounded and captured at Wilderness. He did his best to oblige, even though he didn’t normally talk about it.

His stay at Libby Prison in Richmond had been brief, and he’d been in such pain and delirium from his wounds that he remembered little of it. By then, Libby was being used as a temporary holding facility for new prisoners, thus, its notoriously poor conditions had improved. Ross was lucky to end up in the care of a surgeon who seemed concerned about the patients’ welfare.

After he was judged fit to travel, Ross and some other prisoners were transported south by boxcar to one of the new prison pens in Georgia—Camp Sumter, Andersonville. If there was a hell on earth, Ross knew the moment he stepped inside that stockade gate that he’d have to travel not one step further to find it.

It was fifteen acres of fenced-in ground with a swampy, diseased stream running through it and twenty thousand ragged, starving Yank prisoners. Only some of them were lucky enough to be sheltered by makeshift shebangs fashioned out of scraps of wood and blankets. When Ross arrived, men were already going about the gruesome business of dying at a rate of eighty a day.

No, his stay at Andersonville wasn’t something he liked to talk about, but he could write about it. At the time of his imprisonment, the chances of a letter reaching home were almost nonexistent, so Ross kept a diary. By the time he was moved to the prison at Florence and later released, he had two journals from which to draw the series of exposé articles he would later write, as well as the novel he was at work on now.

Sunday morning, Ross boarded a train to return to Lancaster. He used the travel time to compose his article on the monument ceremony, so that, once home, he was free to pull out the unfinished manuscript of his novel. It was still early afternoon when he sat down to work in the parlor, and it wasn’t long before the words began to flow.

When a sharp knock sounded at his front door, he was surprised to see that the hands of the tall case clock had crept past six o’clock. A second rap brought him to his feet. When he opened the door, he found Emily on his front porch.

Dressed in black, she held a folded
Herald
newspaper to her chest as if it were a shield. It was of no matter that she didn’t smile when he opened the door. This was the first time he’d seen her since their argument. An unexpected wave of relief washed through him, and he was surprised to realize that his anger toward her had all but vanished.

Although he still believed she should have told him about the baby, he knew she wasn’t the only one who’d made mistakes four years ago. The possibility that he could have gotten her pregnant had occurred to him, but he also knew that the odds were slim. What hadn’t occurred to him was the possibility that she wouldn’t tell him if she were in trouble. When she hadn’t answered his letters, he’d assumed the whole question was by then moot. Looking back now, of course, he’d behaved irresponsibly.