Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) (6 page)

“I’ve survived worse.” She
punctuated each of her words with a stab of her index finger in the air. “I
want you gone by the time I get home. You aren’t welcome here.”

“Jessie—”

She cut him off with a slam
of the door.

Jessie’s chest burned from
the cold, acrid air. She’d been a fool to venture out in such weather. Between
the smoke, the sulfur from the smelters, and the cold, it was a wonder she
could breathe at all. She’d been an idiot to leave at all, especially without
weapons.

This
was the kind of thing Luke Bradshaw
reduced her to.

His sudden reappearance made
her forget all logic and common sense, and turned her whole world upside down.
He turned her into a quivering, emotional mess—the kind of woman who
walked out of her own house in the middle of a goddamned snowstorm.

She hadn’t survived for as
long as she had because she was another weak-willed woman, but she hadn’t been
thinking when she’d walked out. Her only thought had been to get away from Luke
and find Hiram. Get some answers for herself. After years of silence, Luke had
come back into her life to tell her the one man she’d been able to trust over
the years was cheating her, and had been since before her birth.

She fingered the letter in
her pocket. While she hadn’t exactly lied to Luke when he asked if she’d heard
from Hiram, she hadn’t told him the truth, either. Hiram had contacted her, and
recently, too. Given the tone of Hiram’s letter, she’d figured something must
be wrong, though he hadn’t said as much when he wrote.

Dearest
Jessie—

I
need to talk to you about your father’s papers. 154729.10.

--Hiram.

Jessie knew what those
numbers meant and precisely where she would find him, if she chose to look. For
two days, she had ignored his letter. Though she loved Hiram and always enjoyed
his company, she hadn’t wanted to discuss her father’s papers, and in the
months since her father’s death, Hiram hadn’t wanted to discuss anything but
secret laboratories, unknown papers, and inventions.

Lately, he’d begun asking
Jessie if she thought she had the ability to build her father’s inventions, if
he had the plans. There had been a desperation in his letters that made her
nervous.

Especially now. Given what Luke
had told her, something was going on, and she needed to find out what it was.
It wasn’t just about the money. She needed to find out if Hiram had been
betraying her, cheating her as Luke claimed.

The thought gnawed at
her—what
else
had Hiram lied
about?

The pulsing ache in her head
matched the pounding of the ore processors as the metal giants continued with
their work. The crushers worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,
Virginia City’s own peculiar symphony. To locate the city, a person only had to
follow the riotous sounds of ore crushers, crawlers, and bar fights.

Jessie reached the top of the
hill overlooking what had once been a hundred mile view before the smelters
came. Now, dark clouds of soot and sulfuric ash hovered over hills covered in
gray snow. The landscape was dotted with crawlers, their tracks groaning as
they lumbered over the snow and ice and rock with loads of unprocessed ore.
That they could be heard over the hammering of the ore processers was a
testament to how loud they were.

Even separated by the
ridgeline and built in such a way as to minimize the impact of all that sound,
the crushers were audible at Jessie’s house, and not just when the wind was
right.

The land moaned and metal
shrieked as the enormous crawlers shambled over it with their precious cargo.
The crawlers chewed up the earth and pulverized everything in their wakes,
turning sagebrush and juniper trees into nothing but splinters and slush in the
winter and dust in the summer. Their tracks destroyed the land much like the
smelters burned the sky and the ore crushers obliterated the quiet, a cacophony
of sound she had long learned to ignore like she ignored everything else.

The broken earth.

Her own broken heart.

A steam-powered horseless
carriage belched black smoke as it bore down on her as she crossed the street.
The driver didn’t even bother to slow as the carriage jumped and shuddered down
the muddy, rut-lined main boulevard. More than likely, it belonged to one of
the mine owners—only the sublimely rich would be so foolish as to drive
one of those things in this town. The man behind the wheel caught her eye as
the carriage passed, glaring at her from behind his ridiculous driving goggles.

He would slow for a horse, or
even a dog, but not an Indian woman. Not even this Indian woman, and most of
them owed their enormous fortunes to her father’s inventions. Granted, they
thought the long war was probably his fault as well, so maybe the disdain was
warranted.

Jessie pushed the thought
aside as she stepped up onto the covered wooden walkway, pretending the hoots
and vulgar propositions didn’t bother her. As she entered The Globe, she dodged
a couple of drunken miners, their fingers grazing the hem of her dress as she
danced around them, their dirty fingers leaving sooty tracks on the leather.

She said nothing. Silence was
safer in a town like this.

Months had passed since she’d
last been inside The Globe—but then, she had little desire to spend her
time with the locals. She came into town for supplies, and had a passable
relationship with several local merchants, but she didn’t come to socialize,
and certainly not in a place like this. A dirty, run-down hotel and saloon in a
rough and tumble mining boomtown, The Globe catered to the down trodden and the
destitute, thieves and prostitutes, the bankrupt and the morally corrupt.

Dull light from smoke-stained
lanterns filtered into the corners and created the shadows in which
rats—human and otherwise—lurked. A thin layer of soot covered
everything within, from the bar, which had once been some light wood but was
now a smoky black, to the stools, the floor, not to mention the miners passed
out on the floor. Filthy. Bullet holes dotted the walls, and, like everyone
else, she pretended not to notice them.

Tarrying too long would get
her killed. She would be neither the first nor the last woman to die in this
place.

Jessie would never understand
why Hiram insisted they meet in this place, but he always did when he was in
town.

The wood creaked ominously as
she went up the back stairs, a passage typically reserved for ladies of a
certain reputation and the hotel staff. Avoiding the low spots in the floor,
she knocked on the door of Room Ten.

Hiram opened the door. “Jessie.”

Everything about Hiram was
quiet and unassuming—his voice, his mannerisms, his clothing.
Bespectacled, rail thin and pale, with a chronic cough and thinning,
indiscernibly colored hair, he was the image of a college professor.

“Hiram.”

“You came.” He stepped aside
and gestured for her to follow him into his room. “I was beginning to worry you
hadn’t gotten my letter.”

“We need to talk.”

He peered down the hallway in
each direction, his movements skittish. “I agree. Come in.”

“I think we should go
downstairs.”

Something crashed below them,
and Hiram jumped. He looked at the door to the stairway. “You want to talk, you
come in. It’s not safe out there. Come in, child.”

The day before, she might not
have thought anything of Hiram’s anxiety. But today, everything had changed.

“All right.” She stepped past
him and into the room, a sparsely furnished single, with a small bed, dirty
brown coverlet, and a view of the roof of the building next door and the street
below.

Jessie folded her arms and
leaned against a wall. “What’s going on here, Hiram?”

He shut the door behind her,
cleared his throat, and shifted his weight. “I’m having difficulty with some of
the investors.”

So he wasn’t even going to
try to pretend a problem didn’t exist. At least she had that.

“What exactly does that mean?”
she asked.

“Nothing to worry about, but
some people have been following me.”

“Who?”

Hiram shook his head and
loosened his black string tie to unbutton the top button of his shirt. It had
been white once, but, like everything else out for too long in Virginia City,
it had turned a dirty gray, the color darkening to almost charcoal around his
neck and under his arms. “Just people.” He motioned to the bed. “Have a seat.”

She shook her head and
smoothed the folds of her buckskin dress. “Tell me about the money.”

His eyes shifted from her face
to an area over her left ear, and he shoved his hands into his pockets. Not
much of a movement, but enough to tell her he was lying. “There isn’t any
money.” He cleared his throat again.

“I had a visitor who told me
otherwise.”

“They’re liars. Confederate
spies. They’re trying to disgrace me, to blame me for a crime I didn’t commit.”

“What about the royalties on
the blue silver?” Jessie kept her tone level and reasonable. “Those haven’t
totaled a quarter of a million dollars in the last year? What did you do with
the money?”

“I need to pay the employees
and the scientists. You know how these things work.” Sweat dotted his brow. He
couldn’t have looked guiltier if he had the word stamped upon his forehead.

“No, I don’t, because you
never shared the books with me. Tell me the truth. Don’t I deserve that?”

Hiram paced, his footfalls
heavy on the creaking wood floor. Despite the warmth of the room, he shivered.
He ran his through his lank hair. “I really need your father’s notes. I have to
give them something.”

“Give
whom
something?”

Hiram paced like a caged
lion, and one wrong word would have him running for the hills. A part of her
was surprised he hadn’t already.

“Before I say anything, I
need you to understand, I never meant for anyone to get hurt.”

“Tell me, Hiram.” She kept
her voice low and soft, struggling for calm despite the desire to scream
bubbling just below the surface of her skin.

Hiram took her by the
shoulders and turned her so she faced him squarely. “Please, Jessie, I never
wanted to bring you into this.”

Jessie remained silent,
waiting for him to continue.

He said in a rush, “As you
know, your father hadn’t finished his latest invention when he... when he
...
you
know
. But I had to keep the company running. So I sold the invention on
spec. I thought I could hire some scientists and finish it with the plans I
had. But I couldn’t produce it. Now they want it but I have nothing to give
them.”

“How much were you paid?”

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

She nodded as though she
believed him, but something inside her snapped and broke. One of the few people
she had thought she could trust stood in front of her and lied, had cheated her
out of a fortune.

What made things worse was
that Luke had actually told the truth.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“You’re right. But if I had
your father’s papers—”

“No, Hiram.”

“You have to
understand—” Desperation leaked from his pores like bitter perspiration.

“No.”

He stopped short and stared
at her with his jaw hanging open. Jessie had never told him
no
so explicitly before.

“You’re not being honest with
me, Hiram. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the truth.” Funny, her words
sounded a lot like Luke’s, not two hours before.

Had he meant them as much as
she did now? Because if so, she was in a world of hurt.

“Jessie…”

“Where’s the money? What
about the millions of dollars we’ve supposedly been paid in royalties? What
happened to that?”

“Jessie, honey, I don’t know
what they told you, but look around. Is this the room of a man who has a
fortune hidden away?” he asked.

She had to admit it wasn’t.
No one with any sense would willingly stay at The Globe, and Hiram had always
struck her as a sensible sort. But Jessie couldn’t trust either her instincts
or what she thought to be true, because nothing was certain anymore.

“Where are the books?”

“I don’t have them, but I
promise I’ll get them to you as soon as I get back to Chicago.”

“You said the same thing last
time, and I haven’t seen them. By your own admission, you were paid one hundred
thousand dollars for an invention of my father’s, but I didn’t see any money.
Not one cent.” She folded her arms. “Do you know
I’m
being investigated?”

Hiram blanched. “By whom?”

“Special Services or
something like that. What the hell are they, Hiram?”

He loosened his collar even
more, undoing two buttons. Wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Spies.”