Bleeding Kansas (22 page)

I
T WAS SIX-THIRTY
, the autumn twilight a hazy purple, when Rachel pulled into the Grelliers' yard. Lights were on in the kitchen and one of the upstairs rooms. When she knocked on the back door, she heard a chair scrape, and then Jim opened the screen door for her. His face was thin and drawn, but he smiled kindly at her.

“Blitz said you'd be stopping by. Come on in.”

Blitz, sitting at a table in a little eating alcove, got to his feet and ambled over. The pain behind Rachel's eyes lessened, and she looked around, curious. Unlike the Spartan kitchen at the Fremantle place, this was filled with color and family artifacts: the children's clay handprints on one wall, school artwork in Lucite frames, blue ribbons from the county fair, a signed baseball in a Lucite box.

“That's George Brett,” Jim explained, when he saw Rachel looking at the baseball. “Chip caught one of his foul balls when he was five, the last year Brett played. We stayed after the game and got it signed.”

When she stepped closer, Rachel saw a faded snapshot of Chip standing next to his hero, grinning ecstatically. Her heart contracted at the wide, gap-toothed smile.
“Where have all the young men gone,”
she murmured under her breath.

“How did it go over at Fremantles'?” Blitz asked.

“Okay enough,” Rachel said. “But something rather frightening happened.” She explained about the intruder and finished with a request to help bar some of the entrances.

“Gina should come over here,” Jim said. “If someone's breaking in—you say that she's there alone right now? I'll call her, she can sleep on the sunporch, it's plenty warm enough right now. Maybe—maybe Susan will get up if Gina comes over.”

“She isn't getting up at all?” Rachel was aghast.

Jim shook his head. “I took her to the doctor finally. He gave her an antidepressant, but he said it could take six weeks for it to take hold, and it's hard to talk her into swallowing the pills.”

“Jim, I'm so sorry.” Rachel laid a hand on his arm, then jerked it away as if she had done something shameful in touching him. “Would you like me to see her before I leave?”

“You could try,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe a woman…what can I give you to drink? Blitz and I were having a beer, but there's tea or coffee. Maybe some kind of juice, I'm not sure.”

“Tea. Point me to it and I'll do it, if you want to phone Gina.”

Jim showed her an assortment of boxes in one of the cupboards and turned on the gas under the teakettle before taking the phone into the dining room. Rachel heard the eager note in his voice when Gina answered and turned firmly toward the stove, her headache suddenly harsher. She noticed Blitz watching her and wondered if all her confused feelings were written on her face. If so, she'd better turn on her public face, pretend she was facing a classroom.

Blitz went to a dish cupboard and brought her a mug, choosing one from the Kansas Farm Bureau that announced
A KANSAS FARMER FEEDS
128
PEOPLE PLUS ME.

Rachel put a bag of mint tea in the mug. “I didn't realize Susan was in such bad shape. I mean, I knew she looked dreadful when Jim brought her to church last week, but not getting up!”

“Yep. I don't know what it is, guilt, maybe. Grellier doesn't discuss it. If she doesn't want the rest of her family to disappear on her, she should make an effort, get her feet back on the floor. With Susan, they're never exactly on the ground.”

Rachel was startled by his frankness. “Do you dislike her?”

Blitz gave his crooked, unexpected smile. “Nope. I've always liked her. She and Jim took me in when I got lost in a snowstorm sixteen years ago. She was pregnant with Lulu. Chip was two, maybe three. He gave me my nickname,” he added irrelevantly, “Blitz, for blizzard. My real name—my parents, oh, they called me Aloysius. Parents! Who wouldn't rather be a blizzard? Chip was such a happy little boy…”

His voice cracked. He drank from his beer can to steady himself. “Chip named Lulu, too—he couldn't pronounce his
r
s when he was little. The whole family used to be so happy. Even if she does look at the world cockeyed, it's Susan's passion that's made this farm go. I couldn't live with her, myself—too many days when you leave her in the attic and come home and find her in the basement. Or sometimes the other way around. She gets fired up, then after a while she crashes and burns. She's never gone on like this before. Usually, two, three days, a week max, and she's, well, not revved up, but ready to pick up the reins again. I'm not saying losing a son isn't a special source of loss, but if you let yourself go too far away I don't know how possible it is to come back again.”

He gave a self-conscious bark of laughter. “I don't usually say that many words from the beginning of the day to the end. Must be you have a gift for listening. I'm worried because I love them all. Especially Jim.”

“So Lara—it's a tougher problem than I realized. Gina suggested—not that I believe it myself, but—Lara, Gina said she and Chip used to use the Fremantle house when it was empty—” Rachel broke off in the middle of her disjoint phrases.

“That Lulu was flitting around in there, pretending to be a ghost?” Blitz supplied. “It's possible, I suppose. She was out this afternoon; showed up again about forty-five minutes ago. She probably knows a lot of ways into Fremantles', but—what would she be doing there now?”

“She—or whoever it was—taped a, a roach.” Rachel stumbled over the word. “Taped a roach to the mouth of a picture Gina has on the wall in her workroom. Do you think Lara is using drugs?”

Blitz rubbed the back of his neck, considering. “If she is, not a lot. And if she is, it's probably out of some crazy sense of connecting to Chip. He and Curly, they used to do reefer over in that house when it stood empty. I don't know why the boy thought anything he did was secret, even if he was alone in the dark, but Lulu—I'll talk to Curly. Damned jackass better not be getting weed for her.”

“Who's Curly?”

“Tom Curlingford, the other guy who works out here.”

“I didn't actually see the intruder. Gina told me that another teen in the area, developmentally disabled—Eddie, I think she said—”

“Yes, Eddie Burton. After he climbed up a tree to peep into her bathroom, Jim talked to Clem Burton, who promised to keep tabs on Eddie. The Burtons are a ramshackle family—Eddie could easily be breaking in at Fremantles', thinking it a pretty good joke.”

Rachel hesitated. “I saw, not the intruder, but someone cutting through the field across the road this side of the tracks, and Gina said the Burtons live the opposite direction.”

“Yeah, but Eddie doesn't have anything to do with his time. His parents are too disorganized to get him into a group home or job training. He's a grown kid, and he covers a lot of ground during the day. Some days, he rides the boxcars up the Santa Fe tracks as far as the outskirts of K.C. Ardis—his mom—once had to pick him up in Tonganoxie, and that's a good thirty miles away.”

Jim came back into the kitchen, his face brighter after talking to Gina. “She doesn't want to spend the night—says she won't give local busy-bodies the satisfaction of driving her out of her own bed—if we'll go over to batten down the doors and loose windows. Brave lady.”

Blitz headed for the barn to collect slats and hammers. The tea and Blitz's company had eased her headache, but Rachel felt the muscles clench again as she tried to think of a way to talk to Jim. She was too tired for subtlety.

“I didn't know how badly Susan was doing. It must be a terrible worry, on top of losing your son, so I hate adding to your burdens, but I'm concerned about Lara.”

The brightness faded from his face, and he sat heavily on one of the kitchen stools. “She's not in trouble in school, is she?”

“She will be if she doesn't pull herself together soon. She's a popular kid, with the teachers as well as the students, and everyone wants to help her before it gets serious, but she's not doing her course work. I've tried to talk to her, but she refuses to meet with me. It might be good to set up some appointments for her with a counselor.”

“Oh, my God. Where I am going to find the money? Susan's treatment, it's already been—Never mind, not your problem.” He gave a ghost of a smile, a grimace so ghastly Rachel flinched.

Rachel suggested Natalie Grimshaw, an associate at their church who was trained in pastoral counseling, or perhaps the school counselor. “He's too swamped to do individual work long-term, but if Lara could see him once or twice maybe it would help—before you have to think about paying someone to listen to her. Since she won't meet with me at school, I thought I'd stop by, try to make her talk to me at home.”

Jim shrugged, tired again, and spoke to the kitchen floor. “Yeah. Go on up, see her. I'm not much good for her right now. Between Susan and Chip, I don't seem to have much ‘give' left in me. Unfair to Lulu, but—Damn it, Rachel, I feel she's being unfair to me, too, right now. Does that make me a terrible father?”

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Sorry, Rachel. I'm going to pieces, I guess. I keep thinking of my grandparents, how they handled my father's death—and he was their only child. Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me, a curse even—my father is killed, my son is killed, my wife is unraveling. What's wrong with me? I know we're not supposed to think like that—look how God spoke to Job—but I can't help asking why.”

He looked up at her and forced a smile. “You've gone out of your way for Lulu, coming out here and all. Believe me, I'm grateful. Maybe if I'm out of the house, she and Susan will listen to you.”

Rachel nodded, tears of pity pricking the backs of her eyelids. When he left, she took her tea with her up the flight of stairs between the kitchen and the dining room. She'd never been in the Grellier house, but it was a straightforward place, without the millions of doors at the Fremantles'.

Night had settled in while she was talking to Blitz and Jim. The upper hallway was dark. She saw a sliver of light on the floor to her left and moved cautiously toward it, hands out to feel for obstacles. When she reached the door the light was shining under, she shut her eyes for a moment, took a breath, as if she were jumping off the high board, and turned the knob.

Lara was lying in bed, wearing only a T-shirt and underpants, iPod in her ears, eyes shut. She didn't move when Rachel came into the room, but from the way she tensed, her eyes squinching tight, Rachel knew Lara was aware of her. She walked to the bed and pulled out the earpieces.

Lara sat up, scrambling to pull the comforter around her. It was a rose-colored quilt, which she had made for 4-H two years ago, with emblems of her life stitched to it—sunflowers, trumpets, basketballs, even a combine, worked out piece by piece from green and yellow scraps—and its bright hopefulness seemed pathetic against the pain and anger in Lara's face.

“I thought you were Dad. What are you doing here?”

“Giving you a chance to talk.”

There was a plain deal desk, homemade, painted white, against one wall. Rachel pulled out the pine chair in front of it and turned it around, facing the bed. Her blisters were throbbing; she needed to sit.

“If I wanted to talk to you, I'd do it at school. Does Dad know you're here?”

“Yes. Were you in the Fremantle house this afternoon, Lara? What particular version of your reasons for being there should I tell your dad?”

“I wasn't there. I've been here since I got home from school.”

“Blitz Fosse says you were out until about an hour ago.”

“So you and Blitz are a gossip team now? Call Myra Schapen and get her to put it on her website.”

Only years of dealing with surly adolescents kept Rachel from giving in to the anger Lara wanted to rouse in her. “Whoever was in the Fremantle house ran through your cornfield. Blitz didn't see anyone but you go past.”

“Yeah, he thinks someone died and named him God, but he doesn't know or see everything. Lots of people live out our way. Being as how the corn is higher even than his all-seeing eye, I doubt he'd know if the whole track team was running through it.”

Rachel changed the subject since she clearly had taken the wrong tack with the Fremantle house. “Lara, you're a smart girl and a good student. If you fail your courses, that will affect the whole course of your life: where you go to college—whether you can even go to college—what kinds of careers are open to you, everything. Perhaps you're trying to punish your mother for abandoning you right now when you need her most, but is the satisfaction you get from punishing your mom worth the harm you're doing yourself? I haven't talked to Susan; I will before I leave. If she is so depressed that she's not getting out of bed or eating, you could damage your own life without getting any response from her. Not because she doesn't love you, but because she doesn't have the strength to help you. Lara is the one person who can help Lara right now.”