The Boneshaker (25 page)

She stared at him. "Your friends ... fought to the death while you jumped off a cliff? How could they do that? And you jumped off a cliff
and you're still standing here now?
" Nothing about this story made sense. "You're not telling me the truth, are you?"

Simon Coffrett frowned thoughtfully. "Well, I suppose it is a little more complicated than that. Let me try again." He paused for a sip of tea. "I was on a bridge over a gorge miles wide and miles deep. Two locomotives were speeding toward me from either side, bound to collide with each other in the middle. I jumped off the bridge to escape." He added another lump of sugar to his cup and stirred it, that same deep sadness creeping across his face again. "I might have stopped the engines somehow, but instead I ran away. The wreckage was terrible."

It was the strangest thing. It didn't have the feel of a
lie, but still it didn't sound right, and it certainly didn't make any more sense than the first story. Again, Natalie shook her head. "Mr. Coffrett, how could you have stopped two locomotives from crashing? And how could you survive jumping into a gorge miles deep?"

He considered. "All right. The truth is that I was on a battlefield, Natalie, high in the mountains. I stood between two armies about to charge at each other, knowing that if something didn't stop them, the battle would end in total disaster, chaos, uncounted loss of lives. I fled the field. I might have negotiated a truce, or stopped the first bullet, or done something—anything—to change the outcome. But instead I ran. I jumped off the mountain, and instead of changing everything, I changed nothing."

Natalie shook her head. This felt closer somehow, more right, and yet still there was something wrong with the explanation, something missing. "But still, Mr. Coffrett, how can one person stop an army?
Two
armies? And how could you survive jumping off a mountain? How could you survive any of the things you've told me?"

Mr. Coffrett's eyebrows came together over his spectacled eyes. "How do you know I survived?"

Natalie opened her mouth, closed it again, frowned. If he had to ask, then
Because you're sitting right there and I can see you
couldn't possibly be the right answer.

You think you're dead, Mr. Coffrett.

Another breeze shook the wind chimes. Natalie shivered. Simon Coffrett sipped his tea, his eyebrows still furrowed in a way that made him look as if he was thinking
hard about something and might actually have forgotten she was there.

In the end, there was nothing for her to do but turn around and walk back into town. She decided Mr. Coffrett needed company for tea more often, if only to learn to have normal conversations with people.

When she reached Heartwood, Natalie leaned her bicycle against the Coffretfonce signpost and hauled herself to a seat on the stone wall. Simon Coffrett's strange warnings made no more sense here than they had in the oak grove, but they clearly had something to do with her mother. Mr. Coffrett had suggested that the town was in danger and Mrs. Minks had a role to play that she might not be ready for. But if Natalie's mother had something to do, why wouldn't she be ready? True, she'd been sick, but whatever sort of grim powers he'd used, Dr. Limberleg had cured her. She was stronger now than she'd been before. She'd actually been singing in the kitchen when Natalie had left.

On the other hand, Simon Coffrett had been disappointed that Mr. Minks had taken her to Limberleg for treatment. More than disappointed. Furious. What did he know that the rest of them didn't?

One thing was for sure: it wouldn't do any good to go back and ask. Simon had made it clear that for one reason or another, he couldn't say any more than he did. Which left one option. Natalie hopped down from the stone wall, grabbed the bicycle, and stalked back toward home.

She could smell the cake before she even got past the
bicycle shop. It didn't smell burned at all, which somehow made her nerves jangle even worse. The evidence that things still weren't right, if she'd needed any further evidence than her own gut feeling and Simon Coffrett's anger, was that perfect chocolate cake cooling in the wire-fronted cabinet beside the kitchen door.

She gave the cabinet and the cake inside it a wide berth and a dubious glance as she slipped inside.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Minks was sitting at the table chewing her thumbnail and flipping through an issue of
Life.
She brightened. "Nattie! Almost time to ice the cake!" She got up quickly, bumping the table as she did and upsetting her mug of coffee, so that it spattered across the cover of the magazine.

Natalie frowned as her mother muttered a word she probably hadn't meant to use and leaped for a dishtowel to mop up the spill. Mrs. Minks was always clumsy, but given the perfect cake, the nail biting, the distracted flipping of pages...
She's nervous,
Natalie realized.
She knows something's up.

Lowering herself cautiously into the opposite chair, Natalie waited for her mother to finish her distracted cleanup of the table and sit again. Instead, Mrs. Minks fluttered around the kitchen like a moth, flipping through her cookbook, collecting butter from the bowl in the icebox and peering into the chipped jug of sweet milk. "Want chocolate frosting? Or I have some almond extract. I may even have hazelnuts if we want them on top."

"Mama?" Natalie said at last, staring at the coffee-stained
magazine as she worked up her nerve. "Can you stop for a minute? I have a question."

The clatter of a tin hitting the countertop made her look up sharply. White powdered sugar spilled in a soft landslide into the sink. Mrs. Minks stared at the upended sugar tin, an overflowing measuring cup shaking in one hand. "Surely, sweetheart. Of course."

Something was going on for certain.

Mrs. Minks set down the measuring cup, dusted her hands on the dishtowel, turned her back on the mess on the counter, and sat across from Natalie. "What's on your mind?"

They looked at each other for a long minute. "I went to see Mr. Coffrett," Natalie began, fidgeting with her fingers under the table, out of view. How was she going to ask this question?

It would mean admitting that she knew the treatment had been a mistake. It would mean acknowledging that her father and Charlie had done something wrong. It would mean telling her mother, if she didn't already know, that as good as she was feeling now, there was still something very, very bad about it all, even though Natalie didn't understand what, precisely, that very bad thing was. It would mean demanding to know whatever it was that Mrs. Minks knew and had, for some reason, chosen not to share with her.

She looked at Mrs. Minks, and Mrs. Minks looked back. If such a thing was possible, it looked like she was even more nervous than her daughter was. Natalie had the
distinct impression her mother was fidgeting under the table, too.

"Natalie?"

She couldn't do it. It was cowardly, but she simply couldn't do it. The second Natalie realized she truly couldn't bring herself to tell her mother what she knew about Limberleg and ask why Simon was angry at her father for letting the treatment happen, she felt a huge pressure slide from her shoulders. But here they were, and the first words had already been spoken, so she had to ask something. Natalie thought fast.

"I asked Mr. Coffrett what a jumper was, and he told me three different things." The words came out in a tremendous rush. "I thought you might know which one was true."

Mrs. Minks's shoulders relaxed, as if she'd been holding her breath. She looked at Natalie closely. "You want to know about Simon Coffrett. Is that really what ... well, okay."

The terrible tension drained from the room; they were back on safer territory. The relief was cold comfort, though; Natalie knew she had backed away from something important. Everything in her said that she should've stood her ground.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Minks sipped at the remaining coffee in her mug. "I can only tell you what I know, but if what Simon told you is anything like what my mother told me when I was younger, I don't think you'll be any happier with the explanation I'm about to give you. What my mother told me was that Simon Coffrett once lived in a
very great city, high in the mountains. The city had a colony nestled in the valleys below, and the mayor and his second-in-command quarreled...." She paused for another sip of coffee, thinking hard. "Isn't that funny? I can't remember."

Again Natalie felt the stirrings of dread. For her mother not to remember a story...

Mrs. Minks scratched her head. "Wait ... yes. There was a great event, a ball or an exhibition or something like that, and ... yes. Yes, I remember now. The quarrel was this: who would take precedence at the dinner? The lieutenant mayor officially outranked the governor of the colony, but the mayor announced that at the dinner and from then on, the colonial governor would be second in precedence and the lieutenant mayor third."

"That seems like a kind of stupid quarrel."

"Well, it was, but you have to remember that in the olden days, precedence and rank and things like that were terribly important. In this case, it was enough to divide the city and the thousands and thousands of people in it. The lieutenant mayor refused to take the third seat at the state dinner, so the mayor accused him of treason and told him he had to leave the city and never return. But the lieutenant mayor was very much loved by the citizens, and many of them thought the mayor was being terribly unfair. Half of them sided with the lieutenant, the other half with the mayor and the colonial governor."

"Did it start a battle?" Natalie asked, thinking of Simon Coffrett's third explanation.

Mrs. Minks nodded. "It was a truly terrible battle, and in the end, the lieutenant mayor lost, and he and all those who supported him were exiled from the city. But before the battle even started, a number of the citizens fled. Some were afraid their city would be torn apart, leaving no survivors at all; others simply didn't want to fight over something they felt wasn't worth the lives that would be lost."

"They were the jumpers? Why were they called that?"

Mrs. Minks paused to remember again. "Because to escape without being seen by supporters of either the mayor or his lieutenant, they couldn't leave through the city gates. They had to make their way down a mountain pass, a gorge so steep and treacherous it had always been said in the city that the only way down was to jump, but it would surely be a jump to the death."

Natalie waited, but this appeared to be the end of the story. "So ... is that true, or not?"

"Well, like anything, I suppose it could be a little bit true and a little bit false...." Mrs. Minks hesitated. "But to tell you the truth, Natalie, I always had the feeling that your grandma made that one up for the sake of having an answer. She could never tell me where the city was, or when it happened—which never made sense to me because as far as I know, Simon Coffrett has always lived here, and his family before that, I suppose, back to the days when nearly everything all the way to Pinnacle was part of the Coffrett family estate. And certainly no city in Missouri ever had any kind of colony, so whatever happened, it didn't happen here."

Mrs. Minks stood and began sweeping up the spilled sugar on the counter. "There is, however, a very similar story to that one that your grandma also liked to tell, and when I was younger I figured she sort of ... well ... adapted it to Simon Coffrett."

"Huh," Natalie said. From the look on Mrs. Minks's face, she seemed to expect that Natalie would know the story she meant. Natalie had no idea, but she didn't feel like starting another story right now when she still had to figure out what was going on down at the medicine show. She nodded seriously.

Mrs. Minks winked, and began to whip together the cake frosting in a yellowware mixing bowl. "I'm impressed that you had the courage to ask Simon Coffrett about that, but ... where did you hear the word
jumper
in the first place?"

"Mr. Coffrett volunteered for the phrenology demonstration," Natalie said carefully. "I think I heard it there." Trying not to squirm under her mother's scrutiny, she slid off her chair. "I'm supposed to meet Miranda," she said as casually as she could manage. "See you later."

If she couldn't bring herself to ask her mother any hard questions, there was still one more place to go to try to find some answers. Natalie trotted alongside the Chesterlane down the middle of Bard Street until she got to the general store, then took a right on Sanctuary Street, which cut between the saloon and the old Methodist church, and sprinted half a block to a blue house with a wide porch. She banged unceremoniously on the door. While she was
waiting for someone to answer, Natalie realized there was another problem with the story her grandma had told her mother.

The story implied that Simon Coffrett himself had been around a lot longer than was possible. Natalie had no idea how old he was, but he certainly wasn't an old man. How could he have fled a battle "in the olden days," long enough ago that Natalie's grandmother had to come up with a story about his escape to tell her own daughter? How could Mr. Coffrett have been old enough to have made a difference in the battle if he had stayed?

Just then a small hand opened the door. Miranda Porter peered through the screen.

"I have to go back to the nostrum fair," Natalie said simply. "Want to come?"

A
T THE END OF HEARTWOOD STREET
, the strings of dusty round bulbs blinked to life along the roofs of the nostrum fair's tents, a little out of place in the early evening sky. On the stage, the Paragons were setting up some kind of apparatus for a demonstration.

Natalie tucked her bicycle against the old trough under the hawthorn, and the girls edged around the accumulating audience, trying to stay out of sight of the four men with their strange machinery. Miranda had needed no convincing to come along; she told Natalie that when she had run home after the episode in the Amber Therapy Tent, she had found her own mother in the kitchen, scrubbing her hands obsessively with a cake of Limberleg's household soap. By the time Natalie knocked on the front door, Mrs. Porter still hadn't stopped washing.