“Hullaballoo,” I lie. I would never admit to Nathan that it’s actually besotted. “I like how it makes your mouth move around. If I guess your favorite word, will you stop moving your mouth around?”
“How could you possibly guess? There are so many words.”
“Quixotic.” After Mr. Bell read the story of Don Quixote to him, Nathan spent a whole year proclaiming everything from the way his bread crumbs stuck to his shirt to the way certain flies don’t budge even when you blow at them quixotic.
“How did you—?”
“Mouth is still moving.”
He quiets, though his face is still loud with disbelief. I should not arouse suspicion. “It was a guess. I do read the Focus, as I told you, and you overuse the word.”
He stops before a lavender Victorian. Up close, the paint is peeling, and the gray trim appears to have once been white, a color likely to cause great disappointment in a railroad city.
A leprechaun of a man with a small hill of a nose peels himself off the porch post. He leers, and the cigarette pursed in his lips droops, raining down ash. While we ascend the stairs, he swaggers down with a gait much wider than a man his size should take. “Enjoy that pretty bit of arse,” he drops in a rough brogue, and then laughs.
“Enjoy . . . ?” The words catch up to Nathan. He wheels around, midstep, and begins to storm back down the stairs after the leprechaun, but I grab his arm.
The front door has opened, revealing a middle-aged woman solidly packed into a pin-striped dress. Her white skin is even paler under a thick dusting of powder. “I recognize you,” she tells Nathan in a voice that sounds as scratched as old soles. “The ladies loved you last time you came.”
Nathan tears his attention from the departing man, and with a flush blooming on his face, he clears his throat. “Good evening, Madam Delilah. May I introduce—”
“Jo Kuan. I am here to see Billy Riggs.”
The madam’s bloodshot eyes slide up my lampshade dress to my face, and then shrink. “Wait here.” She closes the door.
Bear’s tail swats at the porch.
“Come here often?” I can’t resist asking.
Nathan frowns. “I came here to investigate. Didn’t get very far.” He refocuses on the door, on which I notice two carved squares, a cleaner version of the carving on the curly oak.
“What do the dice mean?” I ask.
He rolls back on his heels and the floor protests. “That four-five combination is a Jesse James in craps.”
“The outlaw?”
Nathan nods. “He was killed by a forty-five caliber pistol. Billy thinks himself a better outlaw than Jesse.”
“Better as in more virtuous?” Despite his being a train robber and a violent murderer, some considered Jesse James a folk hero who gave his plunder to the poor.
Nathan snorts. “Jesse James was as virtuous as Satan on a Sunday. ‘Better’ as in more cunning.”
Madam Delilah appears once again. “He will see Miss Kuan only.”
“But the lady requires an escort.”
“If she is bold enough to seek out Billy Riggs, she can handle herself.”
“I will be fine,” I pipe up, somewhat relieved at the notion of not having to expose my affairs to Nathan.
He angles himself so the woman cannot see his face, which is clouded with concern. “Miss Kuan—” he says between his teeth.
“Jo, please.”
“Jo. The word imbecilic comes to mind.”
“As does the word vexatious. Madam, I am ready.”
He shoots me a black look as I enter the house. Before he can follow, she locks the door behind her.
The parlor extends at least twenty paces, with a bar at the end. Dim lamps make it hard to distinguish faces, but it is clear from the slouched postures and raucous laughter that the occupants are not here to play whist.
Madam Delilah leads me down a dark corridor. Maids, mostly colored, in uniforms more revealing than the ones used by the Paynes’ staff, deliver trays of food and drink. Their faces are closed, as if used to minding their own business. Velvet wallpaper smooths the walls between doors, tight as a lady’s bodice. A laughing woman pulls a man into a room. No doubt, much of Billy’s information is collected in these very halls.
The madam stops in front of a door marked with the number 9. She knocks. “Jo Kuan to see you.”
The door opens, and I come face-to-face with a man bearing the dead expression of an undertaker. He’s even dressed for death—a black frock coat with gray-and-black-striped trousers.
“Knucks, let her in.”
The man steps back, and the dirty pennies of Billy Riggs’s eyes appraise me. Billy is not dressed for a funeral, or a wedding, for that matter. He is not dressed at all.
Twenty-Five
Dear Miss Sweetie,
My ten-year-old boy takes after his father, a lazy back-talkin’ lout. God rest his black soul. How can I raise him to be a good man?
Worried Mama
Dear Mama,
Make him sweep the porches of the elderly. Caring for others is a gift we give ourselves. Then the only thing left is to teach him how to pick up his own socks.
Best regards,
Miss Sweetie
* * *
—
Billy Riggs is bathing. The pale mountaintops of his scarred knees peek out above gray suds. His auburn hair frames his face in wet noodles. “Well. I guess the gilding on my door was too hard to resist.” He smirks, feeding my saucy comment back to me. His gaze cuts to a single chair positioned beside the tub. “Please, sit.”
My eyes crawl around the curiosities lining the walls—a stuffed owl missing its eyes, bottles in different sizes, and several dolls, at least their heads. An expensive-looking vase painted with a grinning Buddha adorns a side table.
Something inside me flares. There is little doubt in my mind that exposing himself this way and in this bizarre setting is meant to intimidate me. I flex my back. If I can handle the two-headed she-devil Caroline Payne, I can handle this bathing freak show. The way out is forward.
I summon Miss Sweetie’s most irritated voice. “I prefer to stand.” A quick exit might become necessary.
The undertaker henchman positions himself before the door, his hands held in front of him. His left hand sports a tattoo of a horseshoe. At Mrs. English’s, women often requested horseshoes on their hats as symbols of luck. He must be superstitious. On his business hand, a metal band around the knuckles gleams in the light of a pulley lamp. No wonder he is called Knucks. Perhaps he hopes the horseshoe on the left hand will restore some of the bad fortune that might follow the harm done with his right.