Bleeding Kansas (21 page)

“Never mind my clothes and your dirt,” Rachel snapped. “I have lessons to prepare and a ton of other things to do this evening. I came out here as a favor to you, so if you don't have anything creative to say about providing for Elaine's well-being I'm going home.”

“I'm sorry. I know you're doing me a great favor. The Schapens spy on me so constantly that they've thrown me off balance. Come into the house with me for a minute so we can discuss Elaine.”

Her frank apology, the wistful appeal in her eyes, the gap-toothed smile Jim and Lara both liked—all those things affected Rachel, too. She let herself be mollified, let herself be led to the kitchen, where Gina took two bottles of water out of a nearly empty refrigerator.

“There's so much iron in the Fremantle well that it's undrinkable—I have to buy bottled water in town. All the pipes are rusted out, too—I don't even like to bathe out here—it was turning my skin orange, so I joined a gym in town just to have a place to wash up.”

Gina rinsed her arms under the sink tap. When she dried them, she showed Rachel the towel. Sure enough, it was faintly streaked orange.

Rachel nodded, her face grim: adolescents avoiding difficult discussions indulged in similar dramatic tactics. “Elaine Logan.”

Gina flung the towel away. “I can't be responsible for her. She's too difficult.”

“I don't think anyone asked you to be.”

“No. But she's started coming out here almost every day, and I can't make her go away.”

“When I got here, I heard noises on the second floor. I thought it might be you so I went up to see, only no one was there.”

“Well, damn her, anyway! I told her two days ago she had to find some other drop-in shelter. And here she is, the second my back is turned, invading—”

“I don't think so. She's a very big woman, and she doesn't move fast. She couldn't have hidden from me, even in the middle of all the boxes and clothes and whatever else in those second-floor bedrooms. I probably just heard mice or squirrels or something.” Rachel's voice trailed away uncertainly. She was sure she'd heard something drop or fall. “You don't have a cat, do you?”

“Everyone here is obsessed with animals.” Gina shook her curls in irritation. “Jim thinks I need a dog, you think I need a cat—spinsters or dykes are supposed to love animals, is that it?”

“You are an Olympic medalist in the conclusion jump!” Rachel cried. “I asked because a cat might have knocked something over to make the sound I heard. How did you get from there to accusing me of the kind of homophobia that rides in your head?”

“Oh. Sorry.” Gina bit her lip and looked at the floor. “Why can't Elaine go back to New Haven Manor?”

“Because they have a no-alcohol policy, which Elaine kept violating.”

“And you Christians can't stand for a homeless woman to drink?” Gina looked up.

“We
Christians
turned a blind eye to that for months—everyone at New Haven knows she doesn't have a lot of choices—but Elaine has set the place on fire three times when she passed out while smoking. We can't ignore the problem because she's endangering other people's lives, not just her own. She could stay at New Haven if she joined AA or went through a detox program, but she refuses to admit that she drinks. She says the staff are lying, that they set the fires themselves.”

The pain over Rachel's left eye intensified. “How does she get out here? For that matter, why did she come? You must have made her feel welcome in some special way.”

Gina shook her head. “After the midsummer bonfire, she started attaching herself to me. I tried to discourage her, but she says my great-aunt let her roam around the property, which makes her think she's entitled to the use of the place. Back in the summer, back before Etienne's death, Susan Grellier told me Elaine had only come out a few times when Great-Aunt Liz was alive, but Elaine has blown it up in her head to remembering that she practically lived here. She somehow persuades people to give her a lift to the crossroads and sometimes even bullies them into dropping her at the door. I never know when she's going to show up.”

“What's so special about this house that she'd go to all that effort?” Rachel asked.

“She says she was part of the Free State Commune. That was a bunch of hippies that lived in the bunkhouse—that ruin where I was working when you showed up. I don't know about the commune—I was never in this house before I moved here—I don't even know any of the Fremantles except my uncle John, who isn't even really my uncle. He married my father's sister. Anyway, I wasn't born when the bunkhouse burned down, but Elaine says her lover died in the fire.”

“How terrible!” Rachel's ready empathy was engaged. “Perhaps that's why she drinks so much.”

“Frankly, I don't even know if that's true,” Gina said impatiently. “She enjoys drama, as you've probably noticed. She entertains herself by making up stories with herself as the heroine, so I don't know what I can believe of her memories.”

“Is that why you're excavating the bunkhouse?” Rachel asked.

“What—to see if I can find any proof of her story? No.” She twisted her mouth in a rueful smile. “I'm hoping to find—”

A strangled screech, the staple of horror movies, brought both women to their feet. Gina stood for a second, trying to pinpoint the noise, then strode through the dining room to the front hall. Rachel followed her. The great front door, slowly swinging on its hinges, screeched again.

T
HE TWO WOMEN
stared at it for a frozen moment, then Gina said, “That door was bolted on the inside. I've never used it. Elaine was hiding out in here after all, damn it!”

She pushed the heavy door open and went out onto a veranda that surrounded the house on three sides. The house stood on a slight rise, man-made when it was built, to keep it above flood level when the Kaw and Wakarusa rivers spread their waters through the valley. From the top of the rise, Rachel saw a trail of bent and broken stems through the waist-high grass, showing where the intruder had fled.

The yard was filled with trees—firs, sycamore, walnut, a dozen varieties that Una Fremantle had brought with her as seedlings from Massachusetts; these had grown so huge over the centuries that they shielded the road from sight.

Rachel went down the porch stairs and made her way through the bent stalks and past the trees, but the wild prairie grasses in the drainage ditch still blocked her view of the road. She slithered into the ditch. When she made it up to the road, she couldn't see anyone in either direction.

The wind kept the high grasses in constant motion, but as she stared across the road into the twilit fields a different kind of movement caught her eye. Something like the wake a boat would make in a turbulent ocean was splitting the corn in the field to the north. She squinted, concentrating on the motion until it was lost from sight. Whoever was going through those fields was heading northwest toward the Grellier house.

Rachel limped back up the road to the Fremantle drive and slowly returned to Gina. Scrambling through ditches and grasses in her school shoes had raised blisters on her heels and toes. When she got back to the house, Gina demanded to know where Elaine was.

“It wasn't Elaine.” Rachel sat on the veranda steps and took off her shoes. Blood was oozing through the stocking on her left foot. “She can't move fast. Whoever this was could run.”

Gina's shoulders sagged. “Anyone could get in here who felt like it—the place has five doors. I have keys, but you can see what a sieve it is. My God, I wonder if it was Arnie Schapen or that dreadful mother of his, trying to plant some kind of evidence here so he can prance around in his deputy's uniform and arrest me.”

“It's hard for me to imagine Mr. Schapen giving up his dignity by squatting down here in the hallway for half an hour or sprinting to the road with me after him—he'd be more likely to shoot me and claim self-defense.” Rachel peeled off her socks and stared mournfully at her bleeding feet. “I don't know Mr. Schapen's mother, but this was someone who could move fast on foot. Unless she really is a witch, I doubt an old woman could have gotten away by the time we came out the front door.”

“People have the wrong idea about witches,” Gina said. “We don't do magic, we can't influence the outcome of events or violate the laws of physics any more than Christians can. However much the Schapens photograph our rituals, they won't find any sign that we fly or kill babies for their blood or any of the other crap they accuse us of.”

“If Junior Schapen were still living at home, I might suspect him,” Rachel said, “but the football coach, or Arnie, persuaded a local Bible school to let him play football for them, despite his abysmal grades, so he's over in Tonganoxie.”

“They do have another son. I've never met him, but he passes here sometimes on his way to the Wakarusa. Hard to believe, but people eat fish out of that muddy creek.” Gina flushed. “I'm as bad as everyone else out here, aren't I, keeping track of who's doing what?”

Rachel smiled, but shook her head. “That must be Robbie. He's in my sophomore English class this fall, but, Schapen though he is, he seems so engaged by poetry that I can't imagine him doing something so—so sordid.”

“Eddie Burton!” Gina exclaimed. “I would have thought of him at once if Elaine hadn't been hanging around.”

When Rachel said she didn't know him, Gina gave a harsh bark of a laugh. “That's because he's mentally deficient, or whatever the jargon is—couldn't even learn the alphabet, according to Lara Grellier, so it's not likely you'd have seen him in your high school. He climbed a tree outside the second-floor bathroom, spying on me the week I moved in last winter, and I know I saw him lurking around the place on Midsummer Eve, when Arnie Schapen called out the fire department against us. But Jim spoke to Eddie's father, and I haven't seen him since the last fire. I'd forgotten about him until now.”

“Where does he live?”

“Down near K-10.” Gina pointed south toward the highway, away from the Grelliers'. “That ramshackle place with the cars up on cement blocks.”

Rachel shook her head again. “I saw movement through the field to the north. Who lives that way besides the Grelliers?”

Gina shrugged. “I don't know. A million people, all minding my business, but I don't know their names. Lara and Etienne Grellier used to come into this house when it was empty—Jim says they treated it like a kind of clubhouse. Maybe it was Lara—she slipped into the bedroom one morning right after I moved in, looking for some damned thing.”

“Lara?” Rachel tensed. “I can't believe it.”

“The country is a murky place. All these houses, with people doing dreadful things in them, any of them might think it was a funny idea to break in here. I can believe it of Lara or the young Schapen or Eddie or—or anyone else, if I knew their names.”

“Why Lara?” Rachel demanded sharply.

“No special reason,” Gina said, “except that she's one more teenager in a place where everyone seems to lead disturbed or disturbing lives.”

The trouble was, Rachel realized, she, too, feared it had been Lara. The new, downward-spiraling Lara might try almost anything to get some attention from Susan. If Lara was deciding to add vandalism or housebreaking to her new hostile persona, she was heading for more serious trouble than Rachel could help with. She couldn't bear to think of the pain it would cause Jim. She made one of those meaningless prayers:
Please don't let it be Lara. Let it be someone else's child, someone else's problem. Protect Jim from more harm.

Gina ran her hands through her hair, leaving a trail of dust across her temples. “Will you go through the house with me? I don't want to spend the night jumping up every time a board creaks—and every board in this house creaks, believe me. I can fix you up some Band-Aids for your feet,” she added, seeing Rachel's pained look at her bloody socks.

Rachel rubbed the tight spot behind her eyes where her head was throbbing. She wanted to hobble to her car, bypass the Grelliers', forget life east of town, and sleep for a year or two, but then she imagined what it would feel like when she had left, when the light was gone, and Gina was alone.

With surprising patience, Gina cleaned Rachel's blisters and wrapped them in layers of bandages. She even gave Rachel a clean pair of socks. When Rachel was duly wrapped up and able to walk again, Gina took a heavy-duty flashlight from a kitchen drawer. With Rachel at her elbow, she went through each of the downstairs rooms in turn, then went up the formal front staircase to the second floor. The clutter in the bedrooms Gina wasn't using was so dense it was impossible to tell if anything had been added—or, indeed, taken away—but the black dust covering the surfaces didn't seem to have been disturbed.

It wasn't until they got to the little corner room Gina was using as a study that they found anything out of the ordinary. Gina checked her laptop, to make sure it was still there, to make sure her work files were intact, but Rachel was looking at the portrait of the dark-haired woman.

“There's a cigarette stub in her mouth,” she said.

Gina glanced up from her machine, then sprang to her feet, furious. “It's a roach. How dare they? Come in here, spy, and then deface my picture!”

“A roach?” Rachel moved closer to the picture. “But it looks like a cigarette.”

“You are damned naive for a high school teacher. Marijuana. The butts are called roaches, okay?” Gina blazed with anger but worked carefully on the tape holding the end of the joint to the woman's lips to make sure she didn't pull any of the paper away. “They did this so Arnie Schapen could march in, wearing his deputy sheriff's uniform, looking for drugs, and get me locked up! And then his repellent mother could write a screed about dykes who practice witchcraft and use drugs.”

Rachel looked at the roach meekly, feeling there was, in fact, something amiss with her for not knowing what it was. Her roommate in college had smoked dope, but Rachel had never wanted to try it, and her adult milieu had never included drug users. Over the years, her students had used the language of the drug world in the hopes of shocking her, but she couldn't remember whether she'd ever seen
roach
in a student paper. Maybe this joint end meant it really had been one of the Schapens. If Arnie or Junior Schapen were breaking in, Rachel wouldn't want to be alone in this big house.

“Who is the woman in the picture?” she ventured, as Gina searched the room for any more drugs.

“She's someone—I treated very badly.” Gina's face twisted in pain. She led Rachel abruptly from the room. On her way downstairs, she said, “I'm not up to going into that basement, are you?”

“No,” Rachel agreed thankfully, “but I'd nail the door to it in the kitchen shut if I were you. That way, if someone tried to break in through the cellar they wouldn't be able to get into the house. I need to stop at the Grelliers' on my way home. Do you want me to ask Blitz Fosse to come over and do that for you?”

“Is he the big guy with the dark beard? He looks at me so disapprovingly whenever I've gone over there, I can't imagine he'd help me out.”

“Don't jump to any more conclusions today, okay?” Rachel said, thinking of Blitz's encouragement to her on her way over. “You're so—so elegant, you make all the rest of us feel awkward. Most people are nervous and uncomfortable around strangers, after all, but they do want to find common ground, not look for the nearest rock to pick up and throw.”

It was a talk she gave to at least one student at least once a term, but Gina said, “Actually, I don't believe that. If it was true, we wouldn't have so many wars.”

“But you're part of that peace group. If you want peace, then why not try practicing peaceful behavior? It's that old saying of Gandhi's, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.'” Rachel stopped, embarrassed to find herself preaching. “Is there someone you could stay with or someone in your group who could come out to be with you tonight?”

“Call me from the Grelliers',” Gina said. “If Blitz or Jim can come over to nail things shut, I think I'll be okay. Maybe I should let Elaine Logan move in here, after all—she could sleep in the living room, where anyone coming in through the front would trip over her.”

Rachel smiled, but said seriously, “At least you wouldn't be alone in the house.”