A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose) Read online

  The third thing I might do was find the Sally sheriff to tell him my boss had been murdered.

  Sure, I ought to do that.

  The sheriff would be glad to hear some more bad news on top of what must be one of the worst days Sally ever had. It had probably escaped his notice that the train had been derailed on purpose.

  And the stab wound in Jake’s neck would look an awful lot like the sharp glass wound that had pierced Charlie’s neck and killed him. Were doctors going to examine every single body real thoroughly after a massive loss of life? I didn’t think so. And whoever our employer was, surely that employer would want to know what had happened … that we’d failed.

  What with the bop on the head, the arm wound, and the tossing around I’d gotten in the wreck, it took me a bit to think through all this. Eli’s feet shifted restlessly, but I did not look up.

  Eli said, “Come with me, Lizbeth. Please.”

  “Where to?” I had too many problems. I couldn’t organize them enough to make a plan to solve them. I gathered up my rifle and my bag.

  “Come with me to Sally.”

  “What are you going to do there?” I asked. I made myself look up at Eli. Who was also Prince Ilya Savarov. And so many other things.

  Not like me. I was one thing.

  Eli’s long, light hair was braided clumsily. He had beard stubble. He wasn’t spanky clean. When we’d been on the road a few months ago, he’d shaved every day. This made me worry even more.

  “I have to find a man who hired some people to bring a chest to him.” Eli looked like he’d rather be anywhere on earth than standing in front of me telling me this.

  “Did you know?” I said, suddenly angry.

  “Did I know … ?”

  “That it was me? Did you know we were bringing it? That was our cargo.” Because what had been in the crate had looked exactly like a very old and carved chest with something important in it.

  “No,” Eli said. “I swear, Lizbeth. Your neighbor told me you’d left on a job, but she didn’t know where you were going. I had no idea you were here until I spotted you across the field.”

  We looked at each other for what seemed a long time.

  “So … where is it?” Eli glanced around.

  I pointed to the broken wood around Jake’s body.

  “We got it this far. After the wreck, there was a gunfight. Jake got wounded. We all got wounded. I was least hurt, but I was unconscious for a time.” I should have known Eli was in the vicinity, just from that. I’d never spent so much time unconscious as I had while I was working with Eli. “When Rogelio asked me to bring Maddy to get on the wagon to the hospital, I left Jake guarding it,” I said.

  “And this was Jake.” Eli glanced down at the body. Luckily we were far enough from the other survivors that no one had noticed Jake had been killed. Yet.

  “Yeah. This was Jake.”

  “Let us get away from here, Lizbeth. Unless you feel you have to tell someone, officially, that Jake is dead? Murdered?”

  “I think that’s pretty clear without me pointing it out.” Though I’d been wondering the same thing myself, I sounded tart to my own ears. Like I resented his thinking for me.

  “Lots of people saw you together?” Eli started walking in the direction of the tent, slowly, clearly hoping I would trail along behind him. For lack of a better idea, I did.

  “Lots,” I agreed. “But most of them are injured or dead, or too … too shook up to think about what happened to us and the crate when the train left the track.”

  “And why did the train leave the track, do you think?”

  I almost said, To get to the other side. “The tracks were blown up. Wait, you weren’t on the train?” I was having a hard time getting this picture together.

  “I was in an automobile. Trying to beat the train into town.” Eli was so patient with his answer, I knew he must have told me this before.

  “You didn’t see the tracks blow up?”

  “No. I was ahead of the train, closer to Sally. But I heard the noise. It was terrible. I turned back after I heard it.”

  “Hear the gunshots?”

  “No. So the tracks were blown up, the train began to derail, and your car went sideways?”

  I nodded. Though Eli’s words didn’t seem adequate to sum up the awfulness.

  “You were hurt in the wreck?” Eli said, nodding at my arm.

  “No, I was shot,” I said, for what seemed the tenth time. “There were people, lots of ’em, trying to take the cargo after the wreck. They were coming in from both ends of the car. Maddy and I were the only ones standing. Charlie was already dead by then—that was the wreck—and Rogelio and Jake were banged up, but they helped, especially Jake. We stood over the cargo until we went down. I got shot in the arm. Maddy got shot in the leg. And someone snuck up behind me and hit me on the head.” I felt my scalp again. The minute I touched the bump, it let me know it was ready to hurt. To make it all better, Eli’s fingers went over it too. Thanks.

  “Why didn’t they take the cargo then? I was down.” I tried to figure it out, but my thinking felt as clumsy as my wounded arm. Then I remembered. “Oh, the man and the woman.”

  “What man? What woman?” Eli wanted to move and he wanted to talk, and he couldn’t seem to make up his mind which was more urgent.

  “That Seeley and Ritter,” I said. “I saw her after the wreck, her and Sarah Byrne.”

  “Now someone else!” Eli flung up his hands. “Let’s get in my car and go.”

  “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t think of a better plan. Eli and I in a car in a strange country. Felt like old times. When I’d seen a man’s blood leave his body, and a dead woman walk into a house. A man being hung. A woman shriveling into a mummy.

  When I’m with Eli I see awful things, I thought, clear as a bell.

  And that was the thought I should have stuck with.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Come this way.” Eli glanced back to see if I was still trailing him. I was. I couldn’t see that I had a lot of other choices, but I was doubtful I could walk much farther.

  “Just a little now,” Eli said coaxingly, like I was a blindfolded baby. He took a hold of my arm, the unshot one. Eli’s car was on the other side of the road from the tent, at the base of the low hill where the bodies lay. They were now being loaded into the back of a truck. It had a mortuary name printed on the door.

  “Charlie is in there,” I said, nodding toward the truck. “I guess when they find Jake, he will be too.” I felt a little distant.

  Eli looked at me, his eyes all narrow. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

  Maybe I wasn’t. It had been a long day already. And I’d thought I’d never see Eli again, to top off everything else. But here he was.

  I climbed into the car. It was not the fancy Celebrity Tourer he’d had in Texoma. It was an ordinary Carrier, which was—if cars could be averaged out, the Carrier would be on that line.

  “The refrigerator’s working great,” I said, as he pulled onto the road. Always grateful for the refrigerator, Eli’s gift.

  “Good.” Eli gave me another narrow look. Worried.

  I hadn’t seen him since right after I’d killed his father. I had a history of killing fathers, I realized all of a sudden.

  “Water under the bridge,” I said out loud.

  “What?” Eli kept his eyes on the road. It was paved, but that was just a notion the work crew had had. The potholes were more like tiny caverns. “Lizbeth, you’re not making sense.”

  “How is the tsar?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “He’s well. Thanks to the young man we found, and your sister to back him up.” Talking about the tsar made Eli feel that I was just fine, because that was a right and proper topic.

  “Have you used Felicia’s blood yet?” The tsar had a bleeding disease. Grigori Rasputin’s blood had kept him alive long enough to take the throne when his dad, Nicholas, had passed away. But when Rasputin had died, grigoris
had combed the continent looking for his by-blows, since all of his legitimate kids were dead. My half sister was Rasputin’s granddaughter.

  So was I. But Eli had kept my secret.

  “Once, Felicia gave him blood. When the older boy was ill.”

  “How did she do?”

  “She was very brave, I am told.”

  Felicia would not have wanted them to see her cry. “She’s young for that,” I said, not happy. And there was something wrong with the way Eli had said “I am told.” Why hadn’t he been there? He’d been in the inner grigori circle taking care of the tsar before.

  “I warned you it might happen,” Eli said, all touchy. “That we’d need to try Felicia’s blood. The time came sooner rather than later. One of Rasputin’s other children … died.”

  “I understand.” In return for her blood, my little half sister, Felicia, who was maybe ten (she wasn’t sure), got room and board and an education, things she would never have had in Mexico, where we’d found her. What I didn’t like was Eli’s pause. How had “one of Rasputin’s other children” died? But I felt too tired to ask. “So her blood helped,” I said.

  Eli gave a quick nod.

  There’d been some question as to whether Felicia and I had had the same father, Oleg Karkarov, a bastard son of Rasputin. If her blood had worked, she was definitely my half sister. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told the grigoris that so they’d give her a home and an education. That should cheer me up, when I got over being shocked and shot and so on. I knew there was an important fact beckoning from somewhere right beyond my grasp, but I could not quite reach it. I put it aside to think of later after I’d had some sleep. I was so tired.

  And then I was asleep.

  I was lying down flat in the back seat when I woke up. There were trees all around us, which took some getting used to. All the car doors were open, a breeze was blowing through, the sun was shining, and I felt pretty well.

  Still filthy. But my arm didn’t hurt, and my head only ached a little.

  “Thanks,” I said. I knew Eli had cast a healing spell.

  “Glad to help.”

  I got out of the car very slowly and carefully, testing my muscles. Sore. Bruised. But three days ahead of where I should have been. One of the good things about having a grigori around—at least, one who meant well.

  “Plus,” Eli said, “I wasn’t going to get any good out of you until you’d recovered some.”

  That was more like it.

  Eli was sitting up against a tree, just like Jake earlier. His hair was moving in the breeze. He looked older. Older than the few months it had been since I’d last seen him.

  “I only have a little magical talent in me,” I said. “But it would be handy if you could teach me a healing spell. Couldn’t hurt.”

  “I’ll be glad to try. Since you can withstand magic to a startling degree, maybe you will be good at performing some spells.” Eli tried to look like he believed that.

  “You had better tell me what’s happened to you and your family,” I said. “You’re here by yourself, in a banged-up Carrier, no partner. You were the golden guy last time I saw you, despite your father the traitor.”

  Eli shook his head. “You’re always so quick.”

  Didn’t take a genius to figure it out.

  But Eli didn’t leap at starting the conversation. This was going to be like pulling nails out of a board. Okay, I’d start with his family. “How’s your little brother?” Peter was not so much younger than me in age. Experience … way younger.

  “Peter is back in school. One more year and he’ll be out, maybe helping me. It would be nice to spend time with him.”

  Peter had gone into the grigori business, like Eli. Since it was okay for Prince Ilya Savarov to be a grigori, it was okay for Peter, too. Lucky they hadn’t wanted to be carpenters. “And your mom? Your sisters?”

  “They live a retired life.”

  That didn’t sound like any fun. Maybe they were in mourning for Eli’s dad?

  “Your stepfather and your mother?” Eli asked politely.

  “Fine. If we’re down to talking about the health of our families, we better get a move on.” Being closed in by the trees and the high growth was making me feel blind. Eli obviously wasn’t ready to talk about whatever was wrong.

  “You haven’t asked where we’re going.”

  “I assume you need to go to Sally. You were on your way there.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “So, let’s go.” I wanted out of this green. I wanted to see the sky.

  “All right.” We shut the two back doors and climbed into the car.

  “I want to tell you some things about Sally, about Dixie,” Eli said. He was backing out of the cage of green, very carefully. We’d pulled into a sort of rutted excuse for a road that ran into the woods off the main road to Sally, apparently. It was lucky he’d done some healing on me. Otherwise, the ruts and bumps might have knocked me senseless again. “Since we’ll be there for a few days, I think.”

  “So talk.”

  “I met a friend of yours when I went by your house looking for you,” Eli said, with an edge to his voice.

  This was not talking about Sally. Eli already knew Chrissie. “Who?”

  “A young man named Dan.” Dan hadn’t impressed Eli, or they hadn’t struck it off, or something.

  “What was he doing at my house? He lives west of town.” I was even more confused.

  “According to Dan, he is your boyfriend and keeping an eye on your house in case some stranger like me happens by, perhaps intending to rob you.” Eli’s voice was dry as a salt pan.

  “My boyfriend?” I was some kind of amazed. “I wonder when that happened? Somehow he forgot to tell me.”

  Eli laughed and relaxed. “Tell me all about the trip you had to get here,” he said. “How heavy was the crate?”

  “I helped carry it once,” I said. “I don’t think it weighed more than forty pounds. I could have done it by myself.”

  “Do you know what was in it?”

  “ ’Course not. We weren’t paid to open the crate. Just to get it here. And we almost made it.” Almost was no good.

  “When did you sign on with Jake? What’s his whole name?”

  “Jake Tutwiler. Less than a week ago.”

  “You’d known him for a long time?”

  “No. Just met him. But he had a good reputation.”

  “What about the others?”

  “I had known Charlie Chop for a while.”

  “Your other crew members?”

  “The man in the tent, the one with the broken nose, that was Rogelio Socorro. The woman I was helping to the wagon was Maddy Smith, another gunnie. I knew Maddy by sight, hadn’t met Rogelio.”

  “So how did Jake hire you? I mean, how did he know about you?”

  “I have a reputation,” I said, somewhat stiffly.

  “I remember,” Eli said, but he was thinking about something else.

  “So when I was free and well and ready to work again, Jake sent Charlie to let me know Jake was making up a new crew. I needed a job.”

  “Maddy was Jake’s partner?”

  “What? No. Jake has a guy back home.” These were odd questions.

  Eli kept his eyes on the road, which was good, because it was a rotten road and there were slow farm machines on it, and all kinds of trucks and cars going out to the wreck site. This must be the biggest thing that had ever happened in Sally.

  “So what do you plan to do next?” I thought I’d better find out. I’d had enough surprises for the day. “You were coming to get me to hire me to help you, you said.”

  “I plan to find the man to whom the chest would have been delivered and talk to him. I want to know if he has ideas about who stole it and where it is now. And I expect after you have had a rest, you’ll want to go see your friends in the hospital. Maybe they know more about the crate than you think. After we determine all these things, we’ll know what to do next.”<
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  I couldn’t think of any response to this.

  “Will you take some advice?” Eli said. This was what he’d wanted to say all along, I could tell.

  “Maybe.” Depended on the advice. He’d sure gone the long way around the bush to get there.

  “You need a dress and other … other lady things to pass, here. To move around.”

  “To pass as what?” I’d pulled on a skirt in Mexico so I wouldn’t be odd. Did no one like women in trousers? Surely up in Canada, where it was so cold, women wore practical clothes?

  “To be spoken to, to be treated decently, to be accepted as a woman worthy of respect. I’ve been here often enough to know that.”

  I had known I was going to stick out in Dixie, but I guess I hadn’t realized how much till I saw the women on the train. Also I hadn’t known I’d be walking around without my crew. I was sure Eli wouldn’t be saying that because my appearance embarrassed him. And when you considered all my mixed feelings about him, it was strange I was sure.

  “I don’t have money for clothes.” I didn’t think Dixie was like Mexico, where you could buy used garments from street stalls for pennies.

  “I want to hire you to help me. I just didn’t think I’d have to come here to do it. The clothing is part of the job.”

  “I accept, as long as it doesn’t conflict with my original hire.”

  “All right. First, we get you togged out. Then we start to work.”

  Sally seemed like a pretty little town, lots of white houses and green lawns and so on. Paved streets. At the moment those streets were clogged with traffic, with wagons and cars all heading toward the hospital or out to see the wreck.

  There was plenty of time to look from side to side.

  “There!” said Eli. On a side street to the left there was a store labeled FANCY.

  I had been thinking of a dry goods store. Eli thought higher than me, which didn’t surprise me.

  “I don’t know if they’ll let me in,” I said, and I was being honest. Being healed hadn’t changed the dirt and blood and sweat.