Jodi Thomas - WM 1 (14 page)
Read Jodi Thomas - WM 1 Online
Authors: Texas Rain
They spent the afternoon talking. Rainey held the baby while Pearl waited on customers and helped her stock while little Jason slept. Rainey insisted on making a peach pie to pay Pearl back in a small way for having eaten half her lunch. The smell of baking peaches filled the kitchen and drifted into the store. Pearl swore she sold three bags of peaches that afternoon because of the smell customers enjoyed while in the store.
“I wish we had the money to hire you,” Pearl said as Rainey organized the spices. “The place looks better today than it has since the baby came. I don’t seem to be able to do as much out here with him holding on to my skirts, but my Owen never complains.” She laughed. “In fact, he told me yesterday that he wouldn’t mind if our little Jason had a brother or sister.” She blushed.
“I’ll find something.” Rainey tried to sound hopeful. “But first I’d better be off to find a place to board for the night. In this dress I could never go down to the creek to sleep tonight.”
She’d just walked through the door when she noticed a tired man climb from his wagon and walk toward the store. He was stout, and balding, with a mustache that seemed to run from ear to ear. “Pearl!” he yelled as he neared the door. “Are you in there, or did you finally get an ounce of wisdom and leave me?”
Rainey heard Pearl’s laughter. She rushed into his arms a moment later, and they hugged wildly, as if it had been days not hours since they’d seen each other. Rainey smiled as she walked away. She’d made a friend today. And to know her new friend was loved made Rainey feel good, even hopeful.
The good hotels all had Full signs swinging above their doors. A few places said they took men travelers only. She’d asked a man at one of the hotel desks, who looked like he might have been in Austin a while, if he knew of a place where respectable young women boarded. He said there was one fine women’s boardinghouse and one not so grand on opposite ends of a street called Congress Avenue. One stranger asked if she might be the new schoolmarm, and Rainey realized she looked exactly like what she’d always been, an old maid schoolteacher. She’d been thirteen when students first called her Miss Adams, and she felt she’d aged a decade for each of the eight years she taught.
She didn’t want to go back to teaching, but at present it seemed her best option. Jobs for women were few in this part of the world, and respectable jobs were almost nonexistent. She walked the busy streets reading posted notices in windows. A cook needed at one place, but offering less money than a boardinghouse would charge each week. Several notices were posted for house servants, promising room and board and a half-day off each week, but little pay. She found two ads for clerks, but one business wanted a man, and the other position had been filled before Rainey could find the address.
By dusk she decided to drop her bag off at the less expensive boardinghouse and make sure she had a bed for the night.
When she first saw the rooming house, she thought it looked respectable enough, only it was gray, the one color Rainey decided she hated. The old woman who ran the Askew House said she only had one room, a small third-floor space with a tiny window overlooking the alley.
“I’ll take it,” Rainey said and followed the rail of a woman up the carpeted stairs.
“I’m Mrs. Vivian. My husband and I came here with Mr. Stephen F.,” the owner said.
“Stephen F.,” Rainey repeated as she followed.
Mrs. Vivian stopped and turned around. “Stephen F. Austin.” She raised her chin. “We were part of the original three hundred.”
Rainey wasn’t about to repeat anything else. Whatever Mrs. Vivian thought she was because she and her husband arrived first seemed to be very important. “Yes, ma’am,” Rainey whispered.
“I run a respectable house.” The landlord continued up the steps.
“I understand,” Rainey said without having a clear idea what the woman meant but guessed if she asked for a list of what wasn’t respectable, horse borrowing would probably be on it. So she followed up to the second flight of stairs.
When Mrs. Vivian learned Rainey was looking for work, she insisted on collecting the entire first week’s rent in advance. It was twice what Rainey hoped it would be.
“Don’t know if you’ll find work.” The old woman pulled her mouth into a bow of wrinkles. “Most places don’t pay women enough to live on.” She raised one rather bushy eyebrow. “I guess they figure any proper woman would find a husband to provide for her.” The landlord looked her up and down. “You’re not very big, but you should have no problem finding a man to marry you if that’s what you came to Texas looking for.”
“No.” The last thing Rainey wanted was Mrs. Vivian trying to match her up with a man. “I came to work and make my own way.”
The old woman raised her nose. “It’s not easy. Leastwise if you plan to make an honest living, and I don’t rent rooms to those of them that don’t.”
Rainey touched the top button of her blouse, making sure she looked totally respectable. “My parents died of fever on the boat from New Orleans,” she lied. “We’d planned to start a girls’ school in this area.” It was the only thing she knew, she realized, and she’d never be able to start a school without a great deal of money.
Mrs. Vivian shook her head. “I wish you luck, but staying alive seems more important than reading and writing in this part of the world.” She appeared to have lost interest in the conversation. “The room comes with supper at seven each night and breakfast the next morning also at seven. If you miss either serving, I don’t keep a plate warm for you, and I don’t refund any part of your board.” She handed Rainey a key, pointed to the door, then headed back down the stairs mumbling rules she’d memorized years ago. “Male visitors are not allowed past the parlor, and there are no exceptions or refunds if I ask you to leave for breaking that rule. You’ll use the bathroom on the second floor, but you’ll have to carry your own water up from the pump in the kitchen. If you ask Mamie, my slave, to tote or wash clothes for you, I expect you to pay me a quarter a bundle. The first outhouse in back is for my ladies, but after dark I recommend you use the chamber pot. My house backs up to Saloon Row. I won’t be responsible for your safety after dark.”
“I can take care of myself,” Rainey said.
The landlord glanced back over her shoulder. “I hope you carry a loaded pistol with you, ’cause someone your size wouldn’t have a chance against a man.”
Rainey nodded, not wanting to admit she carried nothing for protection.
Mrs. Vivian left without another word. Rainey unlocked the only door on the third floor and looked around her new home. The room reminded her of a cabin on a ship. It could not have been a smaller space and been called a room. But on the bright side, it was clean. She leaned across the bed and opened the window. If she looked up, she could see the sky, but if she looked down, she not only could see but smell the filth of the alley below. Heaven and Hell. She had her own little slice of each.
While unpacking her few belongings, she listened to bits of conversation drift up from below her window. Two women on the porch behind the saloon were complaining about their late night as they smoked thin cigars. Parts of a song reached her window from the kitchen below, and one man, already drunk for the evening, talked to himself as he found his way to the privy.
Rainey looked out and decided the buildings along the alley must act as a chimney, for sound carried everything said, even softly, to her window. She smiled, remembering a place in the great hall of the school. One spot in the entire room where a person could stand and hear everything said within those walls. She used to love standing in that spot and feeling a part of all around her.
She almost laughed. This window could work to her advantage. If she listened closely, she might be able to pick up the accents that seemed to have blended into a way of talking that sounded slightly different from any dialect she’d ever heard. Then, alone in her room, she could practice until she sounded like a Texan. She’d be safest if she blended in here.
A few minutes later, when she walked into the dining room at exactly seven o’clock, Rainey found the other seven residents of the house.
A stout woman named Margaret Ann Mathis stood and introduced everyone.
One mother and her grown daughter from Germany spoke little English. Margaret Ann explained that they were waiting for the woman’s husband to finish with the fall crop so he would have time to come and get them.
Three sisters had been in Austin two months waiting for their supplies to arrive so that they could open a dress shop. Though they smiled at Rainey, they were boredom in triplicate with dull eyes and hair in different stages of graying.
The last woman was in her late thirties and introduced herself as Mrs. Dottie Davis. She wore widow’s black and nibbled at her food while the others were being introduced.
As soon as Margaret Ann finished her duty of introducing everyone, she sat down and, like the others, began eating. Rainey followed suit, noticing the food, though simple, was well prepared. Compared to the meals on the train and the ship, this looked like a feast.
After a few minutes Widow Davis broke the silence by asking if Rainey knew the history of the Askew House.
“No,” Rainey answered. This entire town seemed far too new to have much history.
“Then I must tell you,” the widow whispered.
“Not the murder of Lora again,” Margaret Ann protested. “How can you keep telling that story when we don’t know what really happened?”
Widow Davis pouted. “Lora was too young to be traveling alone, if you ask me. That was her first mistake”—she raised one eyebrow and stared at Rainey—“and maybe her last.”
The closest of the three sisters agreed, then poked Rainey and added, “About your age. We heard the story from a woman who lived here the night it happened. Miss Lora was young with doe eyes and hair so blond it looked almost silver.”
Widow Davis interrupted. “She came to marry a Frenchman back in forty-nine just before half the men in America went crazy over the gold rush. Poor child barely spoke English and didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. They say the man she was to have married still paces in front of the Askew House some nights as if hoping for an answer to exactly what happened to his bride even though it’s been years.”
Mrs. Vivian was busy serving dinner to her guests and showed no interest in the story. Maybe she’d heard it one too many times.
The widow talked on while she chewed. “A few of us remember like it was yesterday and not five years ago. Mrs. Vivian had just started the place and my Henry was still alive. We had a restaurant down a few blocks.” The chubby woman lowered her voice as the landlord left the room. “Seems like I remember Mrs. Vivian’s husband and only son went missing down near Galveston a few months before. She had to make a living somehow, so she opened the house to women only.”
Rainey smiled at the phrase. “Did they ever come back from missing?”
Everyone who understood English at the table shook their head, but one of the three sisters answered, “Not yet. We heard the husband died. If you talk to Mrs. Vivian, her son is due back any minute. Some say he just went to California and will never came back.”
The widow agreed. “My Henry used to say both Miss Vivian’s husband and her grown son were meaner than skunks. Never worked at nothing but being no good.”
“What happened to the French girl?” Rainey pulled the conversation back on track. “How was she murdered?”
Grace, the oldest of the sisters, answered, “I’ve asked around and no one seems to know. All they found was her ivory dressing gown, hanging neatly on the back porch.”
“Then how do you know she was murdered?” If all the women hadn’t looked so pale, she would have thought they were kidding her.
“Blood,” the widow said. “There was blood trailing all along one side of the alley. Lots of blood, running from building to building, as if someone had dipped a wide paintbrush in a tub of crimson.” Everyone except the two German women leaned closer as she continued. “They said all her things, her clothes, her shoes, even her brush and comb were still in her room looking as if she might have just stepped out for a moment. The only thing missing was a small chest of valuables she’d brought as a wedding gift from her parents.”
The talkative sister picked up the story. “They never found so much as a lock of her hair. No one reported seeing or hearing anything that night, but that little bedroom on the third floor has been hard to rent ever since.”
“My room,” Rainey whispered, but no one seemed to hear.
The widow shook her head at one of the old maid sisters. “How could she have been killed and no one hear? It gives me chills in the night, it does. People die in this town sometimes, but not like that. Not with their blood marking the alley.”
They finished the meal and all said their good nights. Rainey climbed to her room and watched from her window. The three sisters made a trip to the privy together, with two standing guard while one went inside.
For them the alley was an evil place to be feared, but Rainey couldn’t help but wonder how much of the story was true. A young woman going out back at night—maybe. Folding up her dressing gown and placing it on the porch while she crossed to the privy—very unlikely. Someone killing her and dragging her bloody body down the alley without anyone seeing or hearing anything—impossible. Judging from the noise, the alley was almost as busy as the street.
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