Bleeding Kansas (20 page)

His dark face relaxed into a grin. “No wonder you're looking like a dog facing a burning hoop. Angry teenager and an ice queen in the same afternoon. That does take courage. Even if you were as strong as me, you couldn't punch your way through those encounters. Still, you don't mind people knowing you're afraid, so you're already ahead of the game.”

He stepped back into the road, hesitated again, then leaned once more through the window. “Lulu needs to know how proud Chip was of her brains.”

He slapped the roof of her car and waved her on her way.

A
BATTERED BLUE
F
ORD
stood in the Fremantles' drive, but when Rachel went to the kitchen door she didn't get an answer to her knock. She stood for several minutes, listening, thinking, at least she'd tried to see Gina, she could turn around now. But after knocking twice more, she pulled open the door and stepped into the kitchen.

The room was almost bare, as if Gina never ate or cooked. An enamel table, its white surface chipped and creased with knife scratches, stood under the window. It held only a handful of ripe tomatoes and the big cappuccino maker, which Rachel had heard about from Lara Grellier back in the spring when Lara was still a lively, engaged teenager. An old-fashioned industrial clock, dating to Mrs. Fremantle's days as a bride, seventy years ago, ticked loudly in the still room in counterpoint to a drip from the rusted kitchen faucet.

“Hello?” Rachel called. “Gina?”

There were five doors in the kitchen, two leading outdoors and three into the interior. Rachel had been in the house a few times before, most memorably when Mrs. Fremantle let Susan Grellier run a tour of its Civil War history. What stood out in Rachel's mind was not the layout of the house, but the mud-floored cellar, where Una Fremantle and her children hid from Quantrill's raiders in 1863.

Rachel started with the door farthest to her left. This led to the dining room; she stuck her head in and called hello again, more boldly this time. When no one answered, she tried the second door, which opened onto the cellar stairs, a set of planks, really, roughly nailed into steeply rising open stringers.

Rachel shut the door quickly, remembering all too well the giant spiders from the tour she'd taken. “Harmless,” Susan had assured her, but Rachel didn't believe any spider the size of her palm could be harmless.

The third door led to a narrow stairwell, where chunks of plaster had disappeared from the walls, exposing the lath. Rachel heard a scrabbling sound, like papers being dropped, or mice running through leaves. She wondered if Gina were up there, sitting silent, waiting for her to leave.

Her face grew hot. How dared Gina call, demanding help from New Haven's board, and then hide from her? She turned to leave, but had a sudden vision of herself offering houseroom to Elaine Logan, not out of charity, but out of cowardice, because she hadn't been able to face Gina Haring. She laughed nervously and started up the stairs, pausing halfway to listen again.

“Hello!” she shouted. “This is Rachel Carmody, Gina. You asked me to come out here, remember?”

This time she heard a kind of thud, something being dropped. She ran the rest of the way up. The long hallway at the top offered another array of doors. She turned to her right and started flinging them open. The rooms beyond hadn't been used in months, maybe years, judging by the thick dust on the floors and furniture. A narrow-gauge model train covered the floor in one of the side rooms, but it, too, was heavy with dust. Only the master bedroom showed signs of use, the unmade bed presumably the place where Gina slept. The floor in here was more or less clean, but you'd have to dust every day to keep up with the dirt floating in from the fields and the gravel road. The house showed no signs of someone who dusted every day.

Gina had left a blue-striped nightshirt in the middle of the floor. It looked expensive, like all Gina's clothes—combed cotton, maybe, or silk—something Rachel couldn't afford. She almost bent to pick it up, then thought
Why should I be her maid
and moved on through the closet that connected to another unused room, this one stacked high with old magazines and papers. A limp tarlatan prom dress hung from the closet door. Here the dust had been disturbed by someone—Gina?—sorting through the boxes of papers. She'd dumped ones she didn't want on the floor.

Rachel left the room through a far door, past a door leading to the steep attic stairs. She called up the stairs and even climbed a few risers, but the heat up there shimmered down on her, at least twenty degrees hotter than the rest of the house, and she saw wasps at the top, like small parachutes floating on the currents of hot air. Not even Gina would hide from her up there.

As she turned away, she suddenly thought of Elaine Logan. Why hadn't that occurred to her sooner? Gina might have left the house, gone into town with some friend, which would explain why her car was in the yard and she wasn't home. Elaine could have walked in, helped herself to the house. It would be totally typical of her, and typical of her as well to think she should run off and hide when she heard Rachel calling.

Bracing herself against the heat and the wasps, Rachel forced herself to go all the way to the top of the attic stairs. She kept her hands defensively on her head and peeped underneath her arms. The attic was full of boxes, old baby furniture, the thready remnants of onions from the days when bulbs were hung from the rafters to dry. She didn't see Elaine, or anyone else, and ran thankfully down the stairs, shutting the door with a thump and brushing imaginary insects out of her scalp.

There was one last bedroom just past the attic door. This was clearly the most important room to Gina, the one where she was writing. A laptop was set up on an old side table; next to it were stacks of papers and books. She'd even piled them on a daybed that stood under the east window. In contrast to the other rooms, even the bedroom where she was sleeping, here Gina had scrubbed the walls and the floor.

Much of the faded floral wallpaper had peeled from the walls. On one bare patch of plaster, some bygone Fremantle had written differential equations in a tiny hand. Next to these, Gina had hung a poster-sized photograph of a woman with long dark hair, inscribed, “Gina, This is what a Wiccan looks like.” The woman was smiling so intimately that Rachel was discomfited, as if she had walked in on someone's bedroom.

She turned away, but as she left the room movement out the east window caught her eye. Beyond the apple trees stood the heap of charred, weathered boards that had once been the Fremantle hands' bunkhouse. Someone was out there in the wreckage—Rachel could just make out a figure through the trees.

She ran back down the narrow stairs to the kitchen and out the south door. The earth was rough, untended, beneath the high grasses, and she stumbled in her low-heeled classroom shoes. She slowed down to keep from hurting her ankles.

When she reached the ruins, Rachel found Gina Haring stabbing at what was left of the roof with a long board. She turned when Rachel came up, but didn't stop what she was doing. Rachel stood well away from the overhanging beams—they looked unstable, and Gina's poking seemed singularly inept.

“I'm Rachel Carmody,” she finally said as Gina kept slamming the board against the remains of the roof.

“Hang on a minute. I've almost got this piece.”

Gina shoved several more times. A section of roof tumbled down, landing with a sighing thud among the weeds and charred wood inside the house. Both women jumped as a family of rabbits scurried from the rubble.

Gina dropped her long board and stood panting. She had on heavy work gloves, a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armholes, and old jeans, but she still made Rachel feel dowdy. It was something in the way she held herself, perhaps, or the way her hair was cut, curling back from her face into a perfect oval at the nape of her neck. Her arms in the sleeveless tee were tanned and sinewy.

“Jim Grellier warned me not to go into the ruin of the bunkhouse because the roof was unstable,” Gina said.

“So you're taking off the roof. I guess that makes sense. What do you want it for—more firewood?”

Gina looked startled. “Who are you? Have you come to lodge another complaint about the bonfires? I can't believe how much attention people out here pay to each other's every move! In New York, if I set a fire in the street no one would notice, and there'd be two million people around me.”

“You wouldn't believe how little I care about anyone else's business. I only heard about your bonfires because of Susan Grellier. She was trying to explain them to me after church one Sunday—she loved the ritual, but some of the church's board thought even for an open and inclusive church, a pagan ceremonial was going too far. There was quite a debate at the meeting, and Susan was describing what went on. I've never felt free enough to experiment with New Age ceremonies, but Susan embraces change. Used to,” Rachel amended sorrowfully, “until life dealt her the kind of change that no one wants to embrace.”

“Her son's death, you mean. People blame me for that,” Gina said.

“Blame you?” Rachel wrinkled her forehead. “You didn't encourage Chip to enlist, did you? I—I thought you were part of the anti-war movement.”

“I am.” Gina struck a defiant pose, gloved hands on hips. “But a couple of people have told me it was my fault that Susan got involved in the movement. They say that Etienne enlisted because of the fights they were having over it.”

“Etienne—oh, yes, of course, that was Chip's formal name. I forgot. I think Susan was the only person who called him that.”

“I only knew about him through Susan,” Gina said, “so that's how I always think of him. Etienne Grellier. When he joined the Army, Susan said he was doing it to get back at her, because he kept trying to argue her out of her work in the movement.”

“Who can possibly say what led Chip to enlist? I think a lot of things were preying on him.”

Rachel's voice trailed away. It troubled her that she couldn't remember Chip clearly. He'd stopped coming to church a year or so before he enlisted, and that was where she'd chiefly known him, since he hadn't been one of her English students. Her most vivid memories stemmed from seeing him at the farmers' market, where he'd been a bright-faced, good-natured boy, bantering easily with the customers, until the last six months or so before he'd left home. He'd turned withdrawn and surly, to the point that she'd wondered if drugs had become an issue in his life. When he joined up, she'd even privately thought the Army might be good for him, by giving some structure to his life.

“Has anyone at Grelliers'—Blitz, Jim—suggested you're responsible?” Rachel asked.

Gina flushed under her tan. “Some hysterical girl came up to me after the funeral and said if it wasn't for me, Etienne would still be alive.”

“Janice Everleigh. I didn't hear her accuse you. The rest of her outburst was hideous enough.”

Chip's girlfriend had seen herself as the heroine of the drama, almost a widow; church gossip said Janice tried to lay claim to Chip's body, then to his life insurance, even though he had designated his parents and sister as beneficiaries of the ten thousand dollars, asking them to give five hundred to Tom Curlingford. At the interment, Janice snatched the flag as Chip's honor guard started to hand it to Susan and Jim. She draped it around herself like a cloak and ran to the open grave, leaning over it and wailing as if she were going to fling herself in. Susan stalked up to her and tore the flag from her shoulders while Janice screeched, “You don't have a right to that flag. You hate the flag, you hate America, you hated Chip being in the Army.” Susan had stared at Janice for a long second, but all she said was, “Etienne. His name was Etienne, and that is how he is being buried.”

Rachel shuddered in the September heat as she remembered the scene but said to Gina, “You're so sophisticated, I wouldn't think anyone could get under your skin, especially not a girl like Janice.”

“Yes, I know: everyone thinks I'm some kind of shellacked, unfeeling manikin. The truth is—I'm an empty hole underneath my shellac. Anyone can fill it with anger or contempt.” Gina compressed her lips, as if ashamed of revealing herself, and added quickly, “I went over to the Grelliers' to offer my condolences, but Susan was lying down, and Jim said he couldn't suggest a good time for me to come back—which sounded as though he wants me to stay away!”

“He may have been speaking out of despair. He may be afraid there won't ever come a time when she'll be—I don't know—maybe healed enough for visitors. I have to go there after I leave here, and I'm dreading it myself.”

“What—are you visiting everyone in the county or just the ones who danced around the bonfire last June? Are you going to call on Arnie Schapen and his mother? Myra Schapen's the kind of person who gives witches a bad name. She and Arnie brought the fire department out to douse our midsummer fire, but you can tell them from me that I still plan to have a fire at Samhain.”

Rachel felt a headache building behind her eyes. She was tired, and talking to Gina was strenuous work. “I don't have any plans to see Mr. Schapen, nor do I know what Samhain is, so it doesn't matter to me. Besides, I'm only here because you asked to see me!”

“I? I've never heard of you!”

“Elaine Logan,” Rachel said, angry. “You called New Haven Manor and demanded we do something about her hanging around you, even though you invited her to your fire ceremonies.”

“Oh.” Gina suddenly grew quiet, deflated almost. She looked down at herself and murmured something about not realizing how dirty she'd become, poking around in the bunkhouse. “And I'm sure you're not comfortable in that pantsuit. Isn't it rayon? Rayon holds heat terribly. Who would believe it could be almost ninety on September twentieth?”