Seven Sisters (33 page)

“Read somewhere that was an alkaline lake,” the detective said.

I nodded. “Usually it’s dry this time of year, but we had a rainy summer. In the winter, you should see the sandhill cranes. It’s quite a sight.”

Eva Knoll’s house sat at the end of a half-mile dirt road. With only a lone cottonwood for shade, the tiny slat-board house and the occupant seemed defenseless against the frightening expanse of prairie. When we pulled up, a huge rottweiler mix bounded off the front porch, its large, powerful teeth bared. The dog jumped against the side of the detective’s truck, its claws scraping down the passenger door with a sound like chalk on blackboard. I instinctively scooted across the seat away from the growling dog.

“He’s scratchin’ the paint!” Detective Hudson cried. “Dang it all, this is a custom job!” He leaned over me to pound flat-handed on the window. “Get back, you sorry piece of taco meat!”

“Maybe you should get out and stop him,” I said, pressing myself against the seat and laughing.

The look on his face could have melted cheese. “You wouldn’t be laughing if it were your truck he was clawin’.”

“You’re right,” I said cheerfully, then instinctively jerked back against him when the dog hit the side of the truck again. I cracked my window and called to the woman standing in the porch’s shadows. “Mrs. Knoll? Mrs. Eva Knoll?”

“Who wants to know?” her cracked voice called back.

“Benni Harper.”

“Okay, then, come on out. Lukie called about you.”

She moved out of the shadows, dressed in a flowered housedress and holding a double-barrel shotgun. So much for Mrs. Knoll’s vulnerability. I eyed the growling dog, then called back. “Uh, could you call off your dog?”

“Heidi, come on, girl. These people won’t hurt you.” The dog turned and trotted back to Mrs. Knoll on the porch.

I laughed at Detective Hudson’s stunned face. “She does kind of favor your girlfriend around the muzzle, don’t you think?”

“Let’s get this done,” he said stiffly, opening his door and walking around the passenger side. The shredded paint caused a deep moan to erupt from his chest.

“Oh, cowboy up, city slicker,” I said. “Better your door than your face.”

Though the dog sat quietly next to the old woman, we were hesitant as we walked up to the shadowed porch. After a short introduction and a minute of letting Heidi sniff our hands, she rolled over and exposed her pale brown stomach, begging for a scratch.

“You’re just an old fake, aren’t you, girl?” I said, rubbing her muscled stomach. Detective Hudson stood a foot or so back, glancing over at his truck’s ravaged door, still annoyed at the dog’s disregard for his paint job.

“Oh, she can take a hunk out of you,” Mrs. Knoll said. “Don’t doubt it.”

I straightened up and held out my hand. “I’m Benni Harper. You said Lukie called?”

Mrs. Knoll nodded, her short, white hair wispy about her dried-apricot face. Her handshake was firm and direct, like that of a young woman. “Said you needed to ask me some questions.”

“Yes, if you don’t mind.”

She set her shotgun down on the corner of the porch. “Don’t reckon I have much anyone wants to know.”

“It’s about Rose Brown,” I said.

Her old face seemed to sink further into itself, and she stared out over my shoulder at something in the distance. She seemed lost for a moment in the past. She turned her ghost-lit eyes on me. “He the lawman Lukie was talking about?” she asked, nodding over at a silent Detective Hudson.

“Yes, he’s with the Sheriff’s Department.”

“I don’t have any use for the law. Won’t talk to him. It’s you or nothing.”

I turned to look at Detective Hudson, raising my eyebrows in silent question.

He threw his hands up in frustration. “I give up.”

“Come inside,” she said to me. “You.” She pointed at the detective. “Go sit in your truck. Sound travels around here, and this ain’t none of your business what I got to say.” The wooden screen door slammed shut behind her. Heidi remained on the porch, panting and watching me and Detective Hudson.

“I’m not sitting in my truck,” he said. “I’m the one with authority here. If that batty old woman thinks...”

I put a finger over my lips. “You want to blow this just because of your overinflated ego? She’s agreed to talk to
me
, so just humor her and go sit in your truck.”

Looking as if he’d like to take a bite out of someone’s leg, he stomped back to his truck.

Inside the cramped house filled with the accumulation of a lifetime of possessions, Mrs. Knoll was already sitting in a ratty blue velour armchair with beige doilies on the arms. Heidi had followed me into the house and settled in what was obviously her accustomed spot in front of a fireplace filled with charred bits of wood.

“Over there.” Mrs. Knoll pointed with a spindly finger to a Victorian sofa across from her. I moved a pile of ancient
Life
magazines and sat down.

“Sorry for the clutter,” she said. “I don’t get many visitors.” We sat there for a long, silent moment. Finally I said, “Mrs. Knoll, I have some questions about the years you worked with Rose Brown out at Seven Sisters ranch.”

“That was a long time ago, young woman,” she said, her thin arms resting quiet and still on the chair’s lacy arms.

“Yes, it was. But there’s been some... trouble out there recently, and Detective Hudson and I think it might have something to do with what happened back then.”

“What kind of trouble?”

I quickly told her about Giles’s death and the circumstances behind it. Her face never changed expression.

When I finished, she took some time to answer. The ticking of a large grandfather clock next to the door reminded me that an impatient Detective Hudson was fuming outside.

“Do you know . . . ?” I started.

She held up her hand. “That family will haunt me till I die. That’s the plain truth of it.”

“How?” I asked, hoping to get her started talking.

She gestured over at the table next to me. “See that picture?”

I picked up the round, copper frame and looked at the black-and-white photograph of a young boy sitting in the lap of an older woman who bore a striking resemblance to Mrs. Knoll. The boy appeared to be about two years old, and I recognized the facial features of a Down’s syndrome child.

“That’s my boy and my mother,” she said. “He wasn’t normal. Guess you can tell that. He had the best care, though. His whole life he did. Even when he got the cancer in his bowels. Had the best care. Private nurses. Big pretty headstone when the angels finally took him home. All because I kept quiet.” She reached down and stroked Heidi’s huge head, causing the dog to sigh deeply. “But now, I reckon there’s no reason anymore. I’m old. I’ve been wanting to tell someone. You look like a nice young lady. Do you have any children?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. You’ll do anything for your kids. Leastwise, most folks would. Oh, you make your mistakes, all right. Maybe you’re too easy or too hard. But most folks do their best. They
try
. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“There’s those, though, that just defy everything God ever intended. You want to believe they have a soul, but you can’t imagine, can’t imagine on this earth, why they do what they do. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded and didn’t answer.

Then she told me a story that would darken a piece of my heart until the day I died.

14

“THOSE BROWNS NEEDED me, no doubt about it,” Mrs. Knoll said. “Good nannies weren’t any easier to find then than they are now, and the Browns really needed a good nanny, what with those three little girls under eleven and then the two sets of twins. Rose Brown had her hands full, and she wasn’t raised to do nothing much but sit around and look pretty.”

“When did you first come to work for them?” I asked.

“Right before the first set of twins was born. Oh, my, Mrs. Brown was big as a steamer trunk. By the time I came, those little girls of hers had been running wild for months. Took me a good long time, let me tell you, to get them civilized again. Especially that little Capitola. She was wild as a fox and liked it that way. Took me a week to comb all the knots out of her hair.”

She shifted in her chair and wiped a bit of spittle that had pooled in the deep wrinkles around her mouth. I waited, trying to keep every part of my body still, though I was jittery with nerves.

“She was a handful, that little Cappy,” the old woman reminisced. “The others, too, though not as much. That house was beautiful. It felt like a castle to me. I grew up around San Miguel in a little two-bedroom shotgun shack out in the middle of nowhere. Father worked for a farmer out that away. Mother was sick from the time I was real little. I started keeping house for Father when I was five years old. Could make a perfect angel food cake when I was seven, and that was on a woodstove.”

“Incredible,” I murmured. Then I asked, “How old were you when you went to work for the Browns?”

“It was in 1925,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I was thirty-eight. Father said it was the best thing, what with Johnnie’s condition and all. The Browns paid real good, and Johnnie’s daddy took off right after he was born. Never saw him again. I sent money to my parents and visited when I could. The money helped a lot, Father said.”

“Johnnie is your son?”

She nodded and pointed again at the picture on the dusty end table. “I visited him every chance I could get. He did okay out on the farm as long as Mother was alive. He didn’t take much care, mostly just feed him and dress him, sit him on a blanket under a tree. I’d been with the Browns for about a year when Mother died. By that time, I’d already seen what I’d seen and I wanted to leave, but the judge offered to triple my pay, and with Father being all stoved up and not able to farm anymore, I was the only bread-winner. He and Johnnie moved to a little house near the San Miguel mission, and Father Xavier there gave him a job tending the mission gardens. It worked out real well because there was an old nun there who took care of Johnnie. I was real grateful for their kindness.”

“What was it you saw at the Browns’?” I said, trying to focus her wandering attention.

Her age-spotted hand went up to her mouth as if wanting to physically hold back her words. “The first baby, Daisy, died of pneumonia,” she said.

I nodded. That fit with the death certificate. “What about her sister?”

“Rose was so sad when Daisy died. Inconsolable. But the family and all her friends were right there helping her and taking care of things. Petted her and comforted her and told her she had to get up out of that bed, that her other little baby needed her, that her little girls needed her. Even her husband, the judge, started coming home at night. And her doctor, handsome fella, he came over every day, twice some days and talked and talked to her. They took to having tea in the parlor every day about four. She started wanting to live again, blossomed really. All that attention, she just craved it, and it fed her like an underwater spring feeds a lake. But then, like people do, they got back to their own lives. The judge started staying away again. He had his work and, though no one talked openly about that sort of thing then, his lady friends. Her doctor got busy with other patients and such. It was just me and her again, with the little baby and the girls and all the servants. The first time she came running down with the baby calling for me to fetch the doctor, the baby wasn’t breathing, my heart just about broke for her. No one deserved that kind of sorrow. The doctor came, but by that time the baby was breathing again, and he sat with her down in the parlor and had his tea, and she laughed and carried on with him as if her baby hadn’t been on death’s door only an hour before. It didn’t seem right to me, but I never was one to question about folks’ ways much. They’d always been such a mystery. Still are for that matter.”

She paused for a moment, breathing deep and hard. The effort of telling this story was wearing on her, but I didn’t know how to make it go any faster. Like most things in life, it had its own pace, and I had to just let it unfold. She inhaled a phlegmy, rattling breath, and suddenly I was fearful that this might all be too much for her.
Should I stop?

“Would you like some water?” I asked.

She motioned no with her hand and continued on. “It was after the third time the baby stopped breathing I got suspicious. It only happened when she was in the room, and since I tended that baby more than she ever did, it just didn’t seem right to me. Every time the doctor came, and they talked and he fawned over her. I kept telling myself a mother wouldn’t do that to her own child. Not just for a little attention. So I started kinda following her, watching her. Then I saw her do it.”

“What?” I whispered.

“Hold the pillow over the baby’s face. Her little legs just kicked and kicked. I screamed, ‘Mrs. Brown!’ and she looked up at me. Straight in my eyes she looked at me, set the pillow aside, and said, ‘Yes, Eva?’ Just like that, face as blank as a rock. ‘Yes, Eva?’ My blood ran cold as creek water.”

“What did you do? Did you tell someone?”

Tears pooled in her pale eyes. “What could I do? Do you think anyone would believe me when I said Mrs. Rose Brown, wife of the richest man in the county, was a-tryin’ to kill her own baby? So I made myself believe her when she said the baby had pulled the pillow over her face, and she was taking it off. I believed her because I wanted to. I had to. I kept telling myself that mothers don’t smother their own babies. They just don’t kill their own babies.”

“Except she did,” I said.

She nodded. “I was down at the stables with the girls, watching while they took their riding lessons. When I saw the doctor’s car come barreling up the dirt road, and I knew in my heart this time it was bad.”

“She killed Dahlia.”

“Yes, and all the attention started all over again. Oh, such a funeral you can’t imagine. Just like Daisy’s. Hundreds of people. All the florist shops in town were empty. Judge Brown knew everyone, just everyone. A lot of people came, of course, trying to curry up to him. And during it all, I knew she’d killed that baby. At the funeral, she caught my eye and she knew I knew.”