Charity (30 page)

Gustie felt strong hands lift her up off her knees and help her outside. Once out of the ice house, she could stand again; she could see and breathe, but she could not speak to answer Lena’s and Jordis’s worried faces for she was overcome by a wrenching sorrow. She began to weep uncontrollably and did not know why. This weeping was not for Clare; Gustie knew
that
sorrow. It was clean. Its edges were gone. This was a sharp, murky, fearful thing.

“What’s the matter with her?” An unsympathetic voice fell on them like a chill. Lena and Jordis both started. Oscar Kaiser was watching them. His left armless sleeve was tucked into his coat pocket. His right arm hung at his side. More sounds at the front of the house told them that the family was home from church. Julia and Frederick appeared around the corner and stopped short when they saw Lena and Jordis, their arms around a weeping Gustie, the ice house door agape.

Frederick echoed his brother but with more concern. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. She got in there and went all to pieces,” Lena answered.

Oscar asked, “What were you doing in there?”

“We were just looking,” said Lena.

“What for?” Oscar seemed annoyed, but Lena couldn’t tell if it was because they had been in the ice house or, because of their commotion, he was going to be delayed sitting down to his dinner.

“You tell me.” Lena could get just as annoyed. “Come here,” she commanded. Oscar followed her back to the ice house. “Look at this. What’s Ma’s rocker doing out here? What’s all this wax?”

When Lena went in Oscar remained in the doorway, killing the light. He was not as tall a man as Will, but he was broader and heavier. “You make a better door than a window,” Lena commented.

Oscar shifted to the side. “Ma probably wanted that chair out of her way. Nyla’s brought in some things of her own so the house is crowded. No place to put things since we took Ma’s barn down. I told her we shouldn’t have done that,” Oscar growled. “Julia’s barn is just big enough for the team. You keeping company with squaws now, Lena?” He produced a leering kind of grin.

“What do you care who I keep company with?” Lena snapped like a terrier. She asked again, “What’s all this wax?”

“Don’t know.”

Lena threw a hand up in frustration and, pushing past Oscar, went back outside. “It’s freezing.” Gustie still sobbed and Jordis stood with one arm around her protectively. Julia had apparently gone into her house. Frederick stood eyeing Gustie and Jordis, and then Lena and Oscar. His ears were red with cold, but he made no move to go inside or to warm himself.

Lena returned to Gustie’s side. “Let’s get her indoors.”

“Bring her in to Julia’s,” Frederick said. “It’s warmer than Gertrude’s.”

Jordis shook her head. “This is a bad place. I’m taking her out of here.”

Just then Julia came flying out of her house, shrieking, “Where’s Feather? Where’s Feather?”

Jordis looked astonished.

“That’s her cat,” explained Lena.

“I saw a cat slip out when she went in. It went for the ice house,” Jordis said.

“Funny I didn’t see it.”

“You were talking to him,” Jordis nodded toward Oscar.

Julia was crying and wringing her hands. “Oh, no. He’ll freeze. He’s so little. He’ll freeze to death!”

Frederick patted Julia’s arm, murmuring some assuring words. He was about to go bring the cat back to her when Ma Kaiser came through her back door. Frederick saw her and stopped.

Lena thought he seemed suspended between his mother and his aunt, but now there were two people crying and no one doing anything. “Will somebody get that blame cat? Honest to Pete, I don’t know...” To Jordis she said, “Take her out of here, you’re right.” Then, in exasperation, Lena went back into the ice house to get the cat herself. She found Feather down in a hole between two blocks of ice. He had burrowed his way into the straw.
Probably a mouse nest down there or something
, thought Lena. She bent over the ice block and called the cat’s name. When Feather raised his head, she scruffed him and hauled him up neatly just as Frederick came in.

“Oh, you’ve got him.”

“Yup, I’ve got him.” Lena held the little animal securely in her arms and ran her hand soothingly over his head.

“Is he all right?”

“Well, of course he’s all right. Why shouldn’t he be? For heaven’s sake, such a fuss! Her blame cat is fine.”

Frederick let Lena pass him, then he closed the ice house door securely. Julia had gone back inside her house, but her wailing could still be heard. Lena was so disgusted with her that she handed the cat to Frederick. “Tell her to keep him in the house if she’s so worried about him. I’m going to go with Gustie and come back later without all this commotion.”

Jordis had just helped Gustie get up on Biddie. Both Oscar and Ma had disappeared as though they had never been there. No one had offered to help Lena or Gustie, or even Julia, for that matter. And except for Oscar’s nasty crack, Jordis had apparently been invisible to the others.
What a bunch!
thought Lena. Gustie, slumped in the saddle on Biddie, was no longer sobbing, but her face was gray, wracked with grief.

Lena looked her over. She had never seen her friend so distraught. “Maybe we should take her over to the Doc Moody’s.”

“No. I don’t need a doctor,” Gustie said weakly.
I need Dorcas.

“I’m fine. No, I am perfectly fine,” Gustie protested Jordis’s insistence that they keep riding on out of town to Gustie’s house. “I feel like nothing ever happened. I remember it happening, but I don’t feel it anymore—not a trace of it.”

“What did you feel?”

“The dream again. Inside the ice house it was that dream. But, of course, I was wide awake, and this time it was not anything to do with Clare. This time it was...I was not the grave digger—I was the one being buried. But when I got outside it changed again.”

“What did you feel then?”

Gustie took a deep breath and brushed her fingertips across her lips in an effort to find the right words. “It’s difficult...I felt...like my heart was breaking. But I didn’t know why. I don’t know why.” Gustie stopped talking for a moment, then asked, “Where’s Lena?”

Jordis answered, “The last I saw, she was going into Julia’s house.”

Gustie sat, her hands braced on the saddle horn, her face deeply troubled and an expression in her eye of one looking inward, not out at the world. Jordis respected her silence and waited. At length, she said, “Lena will not be allowed back into the ice house. They won’t let her.”

“Who’s they?”

“I don’t know.”

“You cannot go in. The same thing will happen to you.”

“Yes, probably.”

“I can go in.”

“I don’t like to ask you.”

“You did not. I volunteered.”

“As you said to me once, ‘This has nothing to do with you.’”

“I was wrong then.”

Gustie considered. “How will we manage it? The key isn’t going to be so easy to find this time.”

“Could Will help us?”

“Perhaps. One can’t be sure of Will, though.”

“I thought you liked him.”

“I do. But he has a problem with whiskey.”

“Oh.”

They left Moon and Biddie at Koenig’s livery stable and went to Olna’s Kitchen for dinner. The main Sunday dinner crowd who came directly from church was mostly gone. They chose a table in the back by a window.

Betty Torgerson approached their table. “Hi, Miss Roemer.” She smiled at Jordis with the curiosity of the young. Then she asked politely, “How is your friend?”

Jordis remembered the girl from the afternoon that she and Dorcas had asked her about Red Standing Horse. “He is fine. Thank you.”

“We had roast beef and roast chicken today,” Betty said. “But the beef is all gone.”

“Chicken then,” Gustie smiled, “with everything.”

“Be right back.” Betty disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with plates piled high with Olna’s home cooking.

They ate more or less in silence. A few people whom Gustie knew came in and exchanged brief greetings with her and nodded to Jordis. The tables immediately next to them remained empty. Gustie didn’t mind a bit. “They’ll get used to us,” she said, biting into a hot biscuit. “Give them time.”

Mary Kaiser came in and looked around the room uncertainly. She saw Gustie and lifted her hand in a shy wave. Gustie motioned for her to join them.

“Hello, Gustie.”

Gustie made introductions.

Jordis nodded to Mary in a friendly way.

“Sit down, Mary...if you like.”

“Thank you. I’m just waiting for Walter. He’s up the street talking well-business with some men. I’d rather be comfortable in here. He can take a long time when he gets to talking.”

Betty came back and Mary said, “A cup of coffee, please, Betty.”

Gustie asked, “Mary, what do you know about the ice house out back of the Kaiser place?”

Mary was thoughtful. “Well, it’s funny. But now that I think about it, After Pa died, Tori was the first one that I know of to go out there. Do you think there is something in there?”

“I think so,” replied Gustie. “Or, if not, then something...happened in there.”

“Pa was killed in the barn, not the ice house. That’s what Dennis said.” Mary looked back and forth between Gustie and Jordis.

Betty returned with Mary’s coffee. When she had gone again, Gustie continued, “I know. But something happened in there before that. A long time before that.”

“How do you know?” Mary fixed her luminous eyes upon Gustie.

“I don’t...know.” Gustie described for Mary her episode in the ice house earlier that day.

Mary wore a very serious expression. “Only Pa ever went in there. Walter and Oscar and Will helped him cut ice and haul it back, and after Pa got older, they’d carry it in. But he was in there telling them just where to put it. It was his little domain, the only thing he kept his hand in, really, after he sold off his business to the boys.”

Gustie wondered, “Why would he be so possessive of a little wood shed full of ice?”

Jordis said, “Maybe he had some documents or money hidden in there. Something worth killing him for.”

Mary was almost breathless at the thought. “Oh, my! Pa made a nice living, but you can see we are not rich people. Nobody has money out here. Nobody kills anybody for money, do they?”

Neither Gustie nor Jordis said anything to that. But Gustie did agree with Mary, that there was not much money to be had out here. At most, people might have a little savings which they kept in Lester’s bank. With Clare’s inheritance, Gustie herself was probably the richest woman in Stone County, if not far beyond.

“We’ve got to get back in there,” said Gustie, “but I don’t know how. The door’s kept padlocked with a key that’s hanging in either Gertrude’s or Julia’s back porch. I gather it moves back and forth. After our poking around in there this morning, it may be in somebody’s pocket. We won’t find it.”

Mary took a sip of coffee, swallowed, and said, “There’s a second key.”

“There is?”

“Oh, yes. It’s in a broken china cup in the big hutch in Ma’s dining room. It’s always been there.”

Gustie and Jordis looked at each other, then at Mary.

“I can get it for you,” she said taking another sip of her coffee. “Walter is going to pick me up, and then we’ll visit Ma and Julia before we go back out to our place. We always do on Sundays. I’ll get the key and leave it for you behind the outhouse. There’s a big rock back there. I’ll leave it under there.”

“Won’t they notice?”

“No one ever notices what I do.”

“There’s somebody in there,” Gustie whispered. They had waited till after midnight to go back to the Kaiser place, approaching it from the pasture that backed the property. From where they crouched behind Julia’s barn, they could see light flickering within the ice house.

“Let’s wait and see who comes out.”

They waited all night, under a cold sliver of moon, afraid even to whisper for sound carried so far in the cold. All the small creatures and insects that throughout the summer and fall provided night music were already in their winter stasis. There was nothing to cover a sound that might give them away to the person inside the ice house. They sat, hands clasped tightly in each other’s, and watched. Gustie had become almost numb, dozing off, when Jordis jostled her arm and pointed.

A small form was leaving the now darkened ice house. “It’s Julia!” whispered Gustie. Julia was the last person she had expected to see. Julia quietly entered her own house. No light came on in there.

“Either she’s the one who’s been camping out in there by candle light, or she was in there looking, just like we wanted to.”

“Do you suppose she found something?” Jordis wondered.

“Who knows?” A light came on in Gertrude’s house. “Someone’s up over there. We can’t risk going in now.”

“Let’s wait. We didn’t sit here all night just to leave now. Just wait.” Jordis settled back on her haunches to watch the activity in the two houses.

The back door of Gertrude’s house opened and the matriarch herself came out, carrying a chamber pot. She went into the toilet. Gustie and Jordis pushed themselves close to the back of the barn so they would not be seen.