The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (26 page)

It was too bad Boz wasn’t there to hear this, Trace thought. Two proposals from two women in the same week.

But this time, God help him, he was tempted. Repulsed and fascinated, in stomach-churning succession. What
was
it about her that unsettled him so? Granted, he’d never met anyone like her—he’d known smart women and he’d known bossy, authoritative women, but the two traits seldom met in the same person, male or female.

“Well, forget it,” he said. “If Ferris was there stalkin me—and I don’t believe he was—I’d still sooner take my chances with his kind than—” He broke off, not wanting to stoop to outright insults. “Besides, it wouldn’t be right, me livin here, with you unmarried and not another soul in the house.”

“I could hire you as my groom,” she said, without missing a beat. “There is a perfectly adequate apartment attached to the carriage house.”

“Thank you, but no. And if you don’t mind I’ll be takin the rest of what’s owed me for this trip.”

She didn’t like that answer, but she buttoned her lips and led him back downstairs to the front parlor, where she wrote out a bank cheque. “I shall expect a full report from you about this little excursion,” she said as she tore out the page. “Everything you remember about those creatures
and
about the other psychic you met—”

She broke off as Trace tossed his packet of notes on the desk.

“Had to kill a few hours on the train, comin back,” he said. “Figured you’d want the particulars. But you won’t find much about Ferris in there. Whatever you think he is, he saved my life and he don’t deserve you houndin him.”

“
Hounding
him? I’m not sure
I
deserve such an accusation—”

“I know you ran down Kingsley to make sure I didn’t take his employ,” Trace said, and watched her face tighten in defiance. “And best I can figure, you did it more than a week after we’d shook on
our
deal.”

She had the grace to lower her gaze. “I could not risk losing your services.”

“But I’d already said I’d work for you.”

“I could not risk it.” She looked him in the eye, a pained expression on her face. “I do not mean to impugn your honor, Mr. Tracy, but I know you are not at ease with our arrangement, and you have this lamentable tendency toward heroic gestures. For all I knew you might have taken up the missionaries’ cause and disappeared into the Wild West.”

He twitched his shoulders, disturbed that she read him so clearly. “They’re
Baptists
. I’m Catholic.”

“Forgive me,” she said. “I am not well versed in your American cults. I only remembered your
penchant
for the faithful and inept.”

That did describe the Baptists, unfortunately. He thought of them cowering in the box-car, waiting sheeplike for their own slaughter, and met her eyes in a glance that was not exactly shared humor—more of a cynical rapport.

And he understood in a flash why Eliza Kingsley’s invitation had held no appeal for him. She had glimpsed his power, yes, but she had immediately framed it in terms of submission to God and service to others. If he’d followed her to Butte he would have been putting himself right back into the situation of his marriage: keeping the power—and his real self—tamped down, constantly on his guard to maintain that illusion of mealy-mouthed piety.

The very idea made him feel smothered. Miss Fairweather might well be an imp of Satan, but she
admired
the darker parts of him. Since he’d met her he’d felt more at ease with himself than he could ever remember being, even around Boz.

It was a peculiar thought, and he shook it off, extending a hand to help her to her feet. “I gotta confess, these days I find myself inclined toward the worldly and sinister.”

“Sinister?” she echoed, amusement in her voice. “Is that how you see me?”

“Well I know you ain’t pious,” he said, “and if you claimed to be helpless I’d be lookin for the knife in my ribs.”

He could tell she took that as a compliment. “What a relief, then, to know I needn’t play the damsel in distress. How tiresome that would be.”

“Wouldn’t suit you,” he agreed, and won himself a wry gleam from those cool blue eyes. He put his hat back on with a half-cocky grin. “You just holler when you need me again.”

APRIL 1880

PARLOR GAMES

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

While the breakfast sausages were cooking on their tiny boarding-room stove, Trace repeated what Miss Fairweather had said, about the keung-si being made with magic, and about Mereck being the likely maker, and about Ferris being sent to test Trace’s mettle.

“I don’t know,” Boz said, when asked for his opinion. He scooped flour into a bowl, added salt and saleratus. “I don’t know about none of it.”

“Well, you met Ferris.” Trace turned the sausages with a fork, rolling their pale bellies over in the grease. “What’d you think about him? You reckon he was a liar?”

“I didn’t think so, but then I didn’t think you was a liar, either.”

“What’d
I
do?”

“You told me we was goin huntin for some animal!”

“Yeah, but that’s about all she told me, too. And you said yourself it had to be somethin more, if she—”

“All I know is, you got all these new secrets with that woman, and it’s got nothin to do with me.” Boz’s fingers swiped through the lard bucket and then mashed down into the flour. “Magic and religion, it’s all the same—you in or you out.”

“What’re you talkin about?”

“Was the same thing with my wife.” Boz jabbed at the dough as if he were mad at it. “Goin to visit with the Voudou woman next door, come back talkin bout dark futures. Wouldn’t say what, or couldn’t. Then one day she’s up and gone.”

“You said she was taken. Slave-stealers.”

“Don’t make her any less gone.”

So Trace figured some of what was going on, at least. “Boz, if there’s an inside and an outside, then I’m standin on the doorstep. I
have
to. Miss Fairweather’s a liar if I ever saw one—”

“Hah!”

“—but I
need
her. And I need
you
to keep my head turned the right way.” Trace forked the sausages out onto two plates. “I don’t want to start thinkin everything has some sinister cause, or there’s crazed Russians lurkin round every corner.”

“Maybe better if you do.” Boz elbowed Trace away from the stove and began to spoon out balls of dough, dropping them into the sausage grease. “The only thing I ever heard about all this spirit business that made sense is what some old Pawnee medicine man told me. He said you can’t open your tepee to the sun and expect the wind to stay out.”

That was unfortunately true. And there was no denying his power was growing—although to Trace it felt more like something
stretching,
uncoiling after a long slumber, hungry and eager to run. The buzzing in his head had never really quieted down since Eagle Rock. He felt as if he were constantly on his guard, listening for something that was not quite in range.

Worse, the spirits were growing bolder, more demanding. Twice in the last week he had been woken in the middle of the night—once to the sound of weeping, which proved to be an inconsolable Mexican girl, and the second time by a fellow who stood in the corner, ramrod-straight and screaming.

Trace had almost screamed himself, coming awake to that sudden panic. He was no longer merely seeing and hearing the ghosts, he was starting to feel them, to experience their last moments of despair or regret or terror. It had been that way in the old days, before he’d quit the morphine, but he thought he’d left that unpleasantness behind with the addiction.

He could still block them out when he was awake, and at night, if one managed to intrude on his sleeping mind, a quick, simple exorcism would send it away. But he had to wake up, and realize in time what was happening, to separate his logical mind from the spirits’ hysterics. As it went on, night after night, it became harder to do.

Boz noticed he was acting frazzled, and demanded to know what was wrong. And God help him, Trace put him off with platitudes. He didn’t know what else to do, because Boz wanted to hear that everything was fine, that Trace had it under control.

*   *   *

H
E WAS LITERALLY
shaken out of a sound sleep—came to in a spasm of disorientation, in the dark, thinking for a moment he was back at Sharpsburg, and artillery was tearing up the ground around him. But in the next breath he was groggily awake and there was a dead man at the foot of his bed, gripping the wrought-iron rails.

The heavy feet of the bed drummed on the floor like thunder. In another minute the whole boarding-house would be woken. Across the room, Boz sat up in a furor of quilts. “What the
hell—
”

“It’s all right,” Trace mumbled. Speech was a heavy thing, each word dragging a lead weight. “It’s just a spirit. I’ll take care of it.”

“I dinna do it,” the dead man gabbled. His face was swollen and dark, the eyes shiny and bulging. The tail end of a rotted noose hung around his neck, and his tongue protruded, dripping froth and obscuring his words. “Ye gotta tell ’em, I dinna touch that gel!”

“All right, all right, I’ll tell ’em.” Trace felt across his chest, and then the mattress beneath, for his crucifix. The chain must’ve come unknotted again. He had not had it repaired properly after Idaho.

“Listen to me!” the hanged man insisted, and suddenly Trace felt his wind cut off. He was jerked against the headboard of the bed, clawing at his neck, scrabbling for purchase with his heels on the mattress. Then, sickeningly, the bed was no longer there, he was dangling in midair, panicked at the relentless clutch around his throat, red flowers blooming in his vision, blotting out the faces of the watching crowd—

Hands closed around his wrists. He fought, kicking and thrashing, until a sudden, stinging flood of water filled his nose and mouth and dashed the vision from his senses.

He sat up coughing, the threads of the possession ebbing away as his shield came into place, throbbing and bright, so bright it made his head ache.

Boz’s hands were rough in the darkness, patting over his wet shoulders and hair. Boz’s voice was rough too as he demanded, “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Trace croaked, and coughed again.

*   *   *

I
T WAS STILL
early when he got to Miss Fairweather’s house. Min Chan left him cooling his heels in the library for so long that Trace wondered if he had caught her still abed, but then the servant came back, led him to the second floor and the back of the house, to a room plush with deep carpeting and heavy draperies.

Trace balked at the sight of the canopied bed and the light, feminine furnishings. The chamber was sweltering and smelled of menthol.

“Come sit, Mr. Tracy,” Miss Fairweather said, from the chaise near the blazing hearth. Her voice was rough, and weak. “It isn’t contagious, and I don’t have the strength to speak loudly.”

She
had
been in bed, he realized, and had gotten up to receive him. She looked smaller and more peaked than usual, swathed in a heavy velvet dressing-gown and a pile of quilts. Trace had a vicious memory of seeing his wife’s face, just that drawn and drained of color, moments before he’d realized she was dead.

Miss Fairweather smiled grimly at his expression. “I told you it was no fashionable ailment.”

“Ma’am, forgive me for sayin so, but you look like you got one foot in the grave already. Have you had a doctor up here?”

“Mr. Tracy, I expect you know how absurd that question is, so I will simply say, thank you for your concern. Please sit.”

He sat, on the dainty upholstered chair near the foot of her chaise. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Your continued and diligent service is the best treatment for now,” she said with a sigh, hitching the quilts higher over her arms. “But I am not sorry to have your company. I would have written to you earlier in the week, had I not suffered this attack. I expect the spirits have begun to present a nuisance, again? I must say you don’t appear much hardier than I.”

Once again her directness—and her insight—set him back. She had a knack for saying just the right thing, so as to divert him from the things she didn’t say. Almost.

“Yes ma’am, they are. Becoming a nuisance, that is.” Trace watched his hands shape the brim of his hat, and decided to match candor with candor. “Boz has a notion you’re lettin me alone just long enough for them to become that, so I’ll have a reason to come back and see you.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “And do you share Mr. Bosley’s … notion?”

“Well, let’s see. After I went down to Sikeston, the power died down for a couple weeks—long enough you sent me a note askin if things had been quiet. Then after the print shop, things got
real
quiet, for maybe a week and a half. They were startin to draw close again just before we left for Idaho. And then after we got back to town, there were three or four days when it was … less, but never really quiet.”

She nodded, once. “Your interval is becoming shorter.”

“So you
have
been watchin.” He tried not to feel so gratified about it.

“I wanted to know how long it took for your abilities to replenish themselves. I
had
noticed the spirits gathering in greater numbers, of late.”

“They’re gettin stronger, too.”

“How so?”

“Wakin me in the middle of the night, throwin things around—”

“Moving material objects?”

“One last night picked up the bed and shook it. Blasted thing’s made of iron, weighs more’n a steam locomotive. Shook it like a dog shakin a rat … And then he tried to hang me.”

“To
hang
you?”

He pulled his collar down to show her the rope burn; she looked properly concerned. “I can keep ‘em out when I’m awake, but when I’m asleep … I can’t tell if I’m gettin more attuned to them, or if they—”

“Are feeding off your increasing strength?” she suggested, and he nodded. “I am certain it is both factors. That was one reason I proposed you take up residence here, so I could supervise your development. Have you noticed any other changes? Unusually lucid dreams? A sense of traveling through time or space? Any more premonitions?”