A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose) Read online

  Nothing was going to stop Eli now. His head was up and his stride was manly. I was going to get some damn clothes. I sighed and trailed after him, wishing I could go in armed. He’d asked me to leave my guns in the car.

  Nothing more exciting had happened in that shop, ever. Eli commanded some respect, since he acted like he was used to having money; and he was, well, pretty good-looking in his own way—kind of gawky and exotic, with his cheekbones and his accent and his hair. The Fancy ladies fluttered when he came in the door.

  Then they saw me. It was like they’d seen a rat running across the floor. And I didn’t really blame them.

  The next forty minutes ranged from painfully embarrassing to just painful. I asked where their washroom was and cleaned up as best I could short of stripping and bathing in the sink. I didn’t want to get grime on these ladies’ dresses.

  Lady One (stout, brown-haired, heels) looked relieved when I came out, so I’d done some good.

  In the interest of getting me out of the store as soon as possible, Lady Two (blond, thin, red lipstick) had put several things in a dressing room already. I had never seen a dressing room, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. I’d heard Eli explaining I’d been in the wreck, trying to drum up some sympathy for me to make this easier. Hadn’t worked very well.

  After ten minutes I was thinking, Fuck these women. I didn’t often even think that word, but it made me feel better while they yanked at me and turned me around. I tried to tell myself this was like picking out a new gun, but that didn’t work too well. I love guns.

  I left Fancy with a dress, two blouses, two skirts, two pairs of shoes, underwear, and a nightgown. And a hat. And a purse. I had no idea what I was going to carry in the purse, unless it was extra bullets.

  Eli had added the nightgown to the pile, which had made the ladies look at me out of the corners of their eyes.

  “So, to the hotel,” Eli said as he was putting the bags in the back seat. I was silent, trying to get my sense of me back.

  The bustle on the streets had not abated. A lot of the people were wearing uniforms of one kind or another: police, firefighters (who would be volunteers), railroad employees. I saw clusters of weeping women and stricken men. They’d come here to meet someone on the train, and now they were wondering if that someone had lived.

  “They’ll never forget today, here in Sally,” I said. I never would either.

  When we reached the Pleasant Stay Hotel, located right off the main street, I saw it was a pretty big place: white painted brick, with a screened-in front porch twice the width of a regular one, set with round tables and chairs arranged a decent distance apart.

  There was a crowd sitting on the porch, a real subdued one. And a steady stream of people coming and going out the big front door. Eli found a place to park, which was kind of a miracle.

  “Take me around back,” I said, just as Eli was about to turn in.

  “What’s wrong?” Eli frowned at me.

  “Your reservation might get lost when they see you have someone with you who’s not proper.” Now that I knew I looked like a dumb rough shooter, “unwomanly” according to Dixie standards, I felt like a sore thumb. I knew I was being stupid, but those women had done a job on me.

  (Not that Eli himself was so proper, with his long pale-brown hair and his grigori vest with all its little pockets, and his tattoos. But still, since he was a man, and had money, he’d get the benefit of the doubt.)

  “You heard ’em,” I said. “The ladies in the store.”

  “Those women? What do you care what they say?”

  A good question. “I didn’t understand it,” I said stiffly. “Why would they say, ‘raised by wolves’?”

  Eli looked angry, impatient, embarrassed, and like he didn’t want to have this conversation.

  Neither did I, but we were finishing it.

  “If I promise to explain later, can we go inside?”

  I nodded. “But you know what, Eli? I don’t think you need to explain.” They didn’t know my mother, how hard it had been for her to raise me on her own after my grandparents died. They didn’t know how smart and pretty she was. I had never felt like I did her no credit, though. Until now.

  CHAPTER SIX

  With his mouth set in a grim line, Eli drove around to the rear and parked. We had a lot to carry. Our real bags and the extra stuff. I locked my rifle in Eli’s trunk.

  There was a door up a short set of steps, neatly labeled GUEST ENTRANCE. It led into the big hall that ran the south length of the building ending in the porch. Eli walked forward to the front desk, just inside the wide front door. I kind of lurked in the back of the hall with all our stuff.

  I stood in the darkest corner I could, but still passersby gave me the narrow-eyed look that meant they thought I was real out of place. One of the black workers did too. She was wearing the uniform all the black people did at this hotel: a dark green dress with a white collar for the women, dark green pants and a lighter green shirt for the men. I sighed, and reminded myself that according to my mother, patience was a virtue.

  Eli strode toward me, and he’d gone from frowning to scowling.

  I figured the hotel proprietor had said something about me. Come to find out he had, but he’d also said something to Eli about Eli. “Told me to be sure and keep my magic to myself inside the walls of the hotel,” he muttered. “Told me people in the town of Sally didn’t tolerate godless magic spells and the people who cast them.”

  “Did he tell you he didn’t suffer a witch to live?” I said.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I’d like to see how he could stop me living before I stopped him.”

  “I’d put my money on you.” For the first time in many hours, I smiled.

  The black man carrying our bags up the stairs had been a perfect blank, but his mouth twitched too. I could swear he came close to smiling along with me. Eli tipped the man generously, and the man actually did smile as he said, “Thank you, sir.”

  I looked around the room, which was plenty large, with the usual bed with night tables, and an easy chair with a little table beside it. I spotted another door and opened it with hope. Yes! The Pleasant Stay Hotel was fancy enough to have a bathroom attached to each room! I would put up with a few nasty remarks for the lovely convenience of having a bath whenever I wanted one, and not having to wait in line for a turn at a common bathroom in the hall.

  There was soap, too, and it smelled really nice. “I have to bathe,” I said. I really felt nasty to the last degree.

  “Your arm,” Eli reminded me. “Let’s have a look.”

  He unwrapped the bandage real gingerly. We wanted to save it, since bandages were going to be in short supply in Sally.

  The furrow in my arm was red and crusty, but it looked good for a bullet wound only a few hours old. Eli’s healing and the salve Harriet Ritter had smeared on the wound had done a great job. I asked Eli if he knew the name of the germ-killing salve.

  “I’ll try to find some more, and another bandage,” Eli said. “Though it hardly needs a bandage now.” He looked pleased.

  “I owe you more and more.” I couldn’t sound happy or even content about that.

  “I have a strong feeling the scales will balance,” Eli said, and gave me a crooked smile before he left. I locked the door behind him.

  I stripped off my clothes in record time. The bathtub was nice and deep, and I started the water running. It got hot pretty fast, and I put in the stopper. There was a bottle of stuff on the stool beside the tub, and it was labeled FOR THE LADIES. Maybe it would turn me into one. The water foamed up and the smell of lavender filled the room. I smiled again. Things were looking up.

  There were lots of towels and they were all thick, not a threadbare one among ’em. Even the washrag was thick. I climbed in, feeling better than I’d felt in days.

  I was humming when I took out the stopper. I stepped out onto the fuzzy mat and glanced in the mirror. I felt more like myself, more in balance. “Afte
r all,” I said, “I can always go back and shoot those ladies.” That cheered me up. I hummed as I washed the bandage in the sink.

  Eli, too, was in a better mood when he returned with a couple of small shopping bags. “I had to walk several blocks,” he said. “Every pharmacy in the area is selling out of first-aid stuff. But I have fresh bandages and some of that ointment.” He’d enjoyed stretching his legs and tracking down what I needed, I could tell.

  I sat on the bed wrapped in a towel while Eli emptied out the drugstore bag. Didn’t take Eli long to re-dress my arm. He read the directions on the ointment and dabbed it on the wound, circled my arm with gauze twice, pinned it in place.

  “That antiseptic stuff seems to work great,” I said. “Thanks for getting more.” I wasn’t sure I would need it after today, but I was glad to have it on hand.

  “It’s going to change everything,” Eli told me. “That’s what the pharmacist said.” Then his smile faded, and he had that look. He was going to tell me something he knew I wouldn’t like.

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  “When I was going out, Mr. Mercer at the front desk stopped me. The man who’s not going to suffer me to live.” Eli grimaced. “Mr. Mercer told me he had not realized I was taking a woman up to my room, a woman to whom I was not married.”

  I stared at Eli. “He really said that?”

  “He really did.”

  “I bought dresses. I got underwear. I have a purse. Now this man I’ve never met wants me to be married, too. Who made these people God?”

  “Themselves, apparently.” But Eli did smile just a little. “Mercer’s more than a desk clerk. He owns the hotel.”

  “So Mr. Mercer can have us thrown out, and then we wouldn’t have anywhere to stay. I bet every hotel in Sally is full by now.” Plus, I was in love with the bathtub. “Does he want me horsewhipped or stoned?”

  “Mercer just wants some whitewash, apparently.” Eli sat beside me on the bed. “So I told him we were married.”

  “Okay.” It didn’t make any difference to me. I knew who I was.

  Eli looked like he was relaxed all over. “Then we’re all right,” he said. “I got you this, to look the part.” He opened the second bag, the smaller one, and withdrew a tiny box.

  “This” turned out to be a plain, thin gold band. Eli took my left hand and slid the ring on.

  Something about the ring, about Eli putting it on my finger instead of handing it to me … that made the air in the room suddenly feel fraught.

  Eli had bought himself a wedding band too.

  “I hadn’t thought I’d marry so young,” I said, making myself smile, willing the tension to go away.

  “Good God,” Eli said. His eyes flew wide. “Lizbeth! How old are you? I’ve forgotten, if I knew.”

  “I’m still nineteen,” I said. “Same as when you asked me in Mexico.”

  “Lots of people are married by the time they’re nineteen.” But Eli looked uneasy.

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to ask to see my birth certificate,” I said, wondering if I even had one. “In Texoma, I’ve been counted grown up since I left school when I was sixteen. And that was kind of late to still be in school.”

  “I thought you might get mad about all this,” Eli said.

  “I got other things to worry about, things a lot more important.”

  Maybe I could have put that nicer. But Eli only raised his eyebrows, to tell me to go on.

  “I have to find out what happened to our cargo. I have to check on Maddy and Rogelio. Harriet Ritter and Travis Seeley can connect me to Jake. If anyone looks close, they’ll see he was murdered. I may get accused of killing him.”

  Eli smiled. It was like the sun coming out. “We do have a lot of things to do. Can you wait to check on your friends? So we can try to get a lead on your cargo? Are you feeling well enough?”

  I noticed he had said “we.” And I felt the biggest sense of relief. Doing everything by myself had seemed like a huge, steep mountain. I knew no one in Sally. I knew nothing about who’d employed the Lucky Crew. I had almost no money. But I tried not to let it show. I didn’t want Eli to feel I was a burden on his shoulders.

  “I wouldn’t call them my friends,” I said, just to break my silence, which had lasted too long. “I like Maddy, though she’s not real bright. But she’s steady. Rogelio is an ass. Good-looking ass, but an ass.” I shrugged. “But they’re my crew for now, they got hurt while they were working, and I should make sure they’re getting good treatment.”

  “I noticed that,” Eli said out of the blue. “That Rogelio was what you’d call a handsome man.”

  “What?”

  Eli had focused on the least important part of what I’d told him. But when he looked off into space, obviously wanting me to forget he’d made that remark about Rogelio, I was confused. And I was slow enough to say something about it. “I didn’t think you looked at men that way.” I cocked my head. Something was going on that I didn’t understand. With my wizard buddy, that seemed to happen often.

  Eli flushed red. “It’s not a hard-to-see thing. His looks.”

  “Okay. I guess.” But I didn’t understand. “That Harriet Ritter is a good-looking woman,” I said, just to give him some company.

  “This is the third time you’ve mentioned this Harriet Ritter.” Eli’s voice was sharp. “Can you describe her?”

  Eli seemed to be listening to a different conversation than the one I thought we were having. I said, “Blonde, in her thirties, built trim. Sharp clothes. Made up. She and Travis Seeley were on the train, same car as us. They were armed. We could tell they knew how to use their guns. And they stuck to us for a couple of days. I figured … well, I figured someone had sent them to make sure we were doing our jobs. As backup.”

  Eli had his thinking face on. I gathered my new clothes and went in the bathroom to dress. I was tired of sitting around in a towel.

  I put on the garter belt and the brassiere, then the hose, then the panties, then the slip. Though I’d seen garter belts and hose before, I’d never put ’em on. I felt I was already wearing a lot of items, and I hadn’t even finished yet.

  Next I put on the blouse. The saleswoman had called the color “rose pink.” I guess some roses were that color.

  As “accents”—that was what she’d called ’em—the blouse had a white collar, white trimmed pockets, and white cuffs on the puffy sleeves, which came halfway to my elbow, covering the bandage. The skirt was full and to my knees, and it was covered in flowers, some of them the same pink as the blouse. At least the material was cotton and the shoes were tolerable, though not real practical.

  I hated to think what Eli had spent on all this gear. For a mean moment, I hoped it was a lot. If I had to wear this, he should pay for it.

  I wanted to strap on my gun belt, but I knew it would look ridiculous on top of the skirt. Also, going armed openly would spoil the whole point of the … costume. I was wearing all this to blend in, which Eli had assured me was absolutely necessary in Dixie.

  I told myself that several times.

  I stood in front of the mirror while I combed my hair as much as I could. My curls were spring-loaded. I could only see myself down to the waist, but that was enough. I made a sour face. I looked like I was going to a fancy-dress party.

  I made myself leave the bathroom. Eli glanced up, looked down, then looked up again with the funniest expression on his face. “You look very nice,” he said.

  “I know you’re trying not to laugh,” I said, sounding just as snippy as I felt.

  “Far from it.”

  Then I correctly interpreted the look he was giving me. “No, sir,” I said. “It took me a long time to put on all this rig, and I’m not getting out of it anytime soon.” Our past history had not always been what my mother called “platonic.”

  “There’s always later,” Eli said, sounding hopeful.

  “Later is not now.” I didn’t want to promise anything. I didn’t know how t
his new Eli was going to act compared to the old Eli. If I had changed a bit, he must have also.

  “So where to, Eli?” We needed to get out of this room, away from the bed.

  “Just remember,” Eli said as he stood, “we’re married now.” He gave me a sly smile.

  I could not forbear laughing. “Let’s get to work on that list of jobs.”

  “If you insist.” His accent was right at the front. “First we will find out what we can about the chest.”

  I had no idea how we were going to do that, but he sounded as though he had a plan in mind. We went down the stairs together and toward the front door. I had the gratification of seeing Mr. Mercer, who had a narrow face and receding dark hair, actually drop his jaw. I gave him a cool look to let him know I had registered his presence. I was tempted to raise my ring finger and waggle it at him.

  We swept out the front door.

  “That was fun,” I murmured.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling broadly. “It was. Of course, we now have to walk all the way around the building to get the car.”

  “It was worth a walk.”

  Eli drove west out of town. We were returning to the site of the derailment.

  I thought of it as a battlefield.

  When we got out of the car, Eli insisted I put my hand in the crook of his arm, as if I needed support to walk on the grass. It went contrary to common sense, but I managed to match my pace to his.

  “You looked like you were going to bite someone,” he whispered.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. I made my face relax and go vacant.

  “Much better. Now you look lack-witted.” We were approaching a short, stout man with a badge pinned to his coat. His face was full of a large, white mustache. The sheriff was giving instructions to a small group of men. He ended by saying, “And the sooner we get all this cleared up, the sooner the railroad crew can repair the tracks, and the sooner trains can come in and out.”

  After a few comments, all the men dispersed.

  “Yes, sir?” The sheriff turned to us, looking us up and down. Eli earned his deep suspicion because of the grigori vest. The sheriff looked at me with more favor, so the clothes were paying off. I introduced us, and the sheriff waited to hear what we wanted.