The Threshold (26 page)

“You were right, my dear, it was extremely simple,” he said with enthusiasm as though he didn’t notice her stiffness. “There was but one house for sale in all the town.” The feeling in her middle compressed to a sick hardness as he turned the buggy the wrong way on Pacific Avenue. “I took the liberty of investing your current salary and commissions as a beginning payment. The demand for this property would have made it unavailable by the time of your return.” He pulled the buggy over and stopped the horse on a corner. “Well, what do you think of it?”

The house was newly painted, had lovely ornate trim at the eaves, and a charming little cupola. It had a carriage house and stables behind it, all sparkling white, and a black wrought-iron fence. It was not large or imposing but roomy enough. From the outside it would have been a home she might easily have chosen herself. Had it been in another section of town. Had it not been overshadowed by the two-story perversion of human greed next to it called the Big Swede. A saloon downstairs, and she dared not think what it was upstairs. Men lounging in the doorway were already staring at her.

“You must be joking,” she said finally to the lawyer beside her.

“On the contrary, Miss Heisinger, it’s a fine property and fills all your requirements. It even comes with a few of the essential furnishings left behind by the previous owner, and I’ve taken the liberty of hiring a girl for you.”

“You take far too many liberties, sir.”

“But someone must look after it while you travel about, and see to your comforts when you return home weary. She comes for practically nothing and I have it on good authority she’s an excellent cook.”

“I insist you drive me to the New Sheridan Hotel at once.”

He raised snowy brows and shrugged. “As you wish.” He had the nerve to maintain a light one-sided banter as they drove up the street, as if everything were normal. “You have much to learn of the world of work, my dear Miss Heisinger, but then, you are young,” he said kindly as she stepped from the buggy unaided. “Your little home awaits you should you change your mind. Your most recent earnings including the commissions are already invested in it, remember.”

Mildred needed time to collect herself, to decide what to do. Now she was hungry and tired and there were no beds available at the New Sheridan Hotel. Nor at the Victoria. Nor at the New Colombia. And the looks she received at each of these places raised her suspicions. There were no vacancies in the few boardinghouses on the north side of town that accepted ladies. She even went out to the Italian Catholic section to the east. Late afternoon was turning into chilly evening as she raised her chin and hurried back up the street. She stopped a woman with wrapped parcels. “There’s boardinghouses down in Finntown that take in ladies, I believe.”

“Mrs. Pakka and Mrs. Riconola rent rooms,” a man on the street in Finntown told her, and pointed out both houses. No sidewalks here, and Mildred’s skirts gathered dust as she stepped around animal droppings. Mrs. Riconola’s rooms were filled. A lanky scarecrow of a man sat on the steps of Mrs. Pakka’s house.

“In the kitchen, straight through to the back,” he said, and dipped his face into the collar of his coat. Mildred was halfway down the hall when she recognized the hollowed eyes. Brambaugh O’Connell. She had to stop and clutch a door molding to let that face sink beneath her own worries. And in the kitchen she confronted his mother. Mrs. O’Connell had always looked worn for her age but now she looked nearly as eroded as her son. “Miss Heisinger?” She wiped her hands, large and reddish, on her apron. “I’ve worried for your welfare since the unfortunate turn of affairs at Alta. It’s good to see you looking so well.”

“Heisinger?” Mrs. Pakka brought a bowl of steaming soup to a sideboard. The kitchen smelled of yeast and boiled meat and other good things. The warmth was heavenly. “There’s no room here for your kind, woman.” Her eyes had that shutter behind them Mildred had hoped never to see again.

“But, Mrs. Pakka,” Mrs. O’Connell said, “she’s a—”

“She’s the lowest among the crawling things on God’s green earth. Luring innocents to their destruction.” The landlady picked up a wooden chair, her expression every bit as outraged as Charlene Rassmussen’s. “She’s a procuress, Mrs. O’Connell.”

“Oh, surely not. You must be mistaken.”

But Mildred watched the shutter close over Mrs. O’Connell’s open and concerned expression, mere doubt shuttering Mildred out for all eternity. She backed away as the chair legs poked at her, prodding her through the back door as if she were a dangerous animal let into the house by mistake.

29

Cree Mackelwain hurt. Two stubby miners tried to help him out of the snowshed and ended up dragging him. They smelled of sulfur and brimstone and dirt mucked up from the devil’s playground. “Where are the women who were with me?”

“Got closed up in a hole in the air some ways. Those three men are running scared down Boomerang Road. Bunch of stiffs hard on their tails.”

It would have been a relief to be deposited in the chair in the miniature office if the bending of his body hadn’t felt so dangerous. There was a miniature desk and a metal safe on wheels with golden curlicues painted on it. Cree tried to stretch out his legs but the mustachioed men gathered around him made it impossible.

“Timothy Traub,” a man with clean skin said. He wore a suit coat, vest, and a bow tie that had tails on it. “Manager here. Don’t suppose you could tell me what it is you was doing in the adit?” Cree watched Timothy Traub separate into two identical men.

“Cuts his hair like a foreigner, Mr. Traub.”

“You an American? Were you born in this country? Union men do this to you? You insured?”

Cree blacked out. He surfaced to hear someone say, “Careful now. Easy. Long son of a bitch, ain’t he?” He could feel himself handled, the movement of air past his face. He sank back into the black that eased his pain. The next time he was aware of himself, he was lying on something brick-hard. He moved his hands outward and decided it was not very wide.

“Here we are, awake at last. What say we open those eyes and have a look at the world, hah?” A tight wrapping around his chest kept him from filling his lungs deeply.

“Aw, leave him be, Nurse Swengel, poor man must be paining after such a beating as was give to him,” said a voice farther away with a soft roll.

“Time he was awake and eating if he intends to heal, Mr. Pangrazia. And the sheriff would like to know his name.”

“McCree Ronald Mackelwain,” Cree said, and opened his eyes against his better judgment. “What year is this?”

“Well, now, you haven’t slept
that
long.” Nurse Swengel was small and wide and her clothes rustled. “It’s still nineteen-aught-one.” She put a hand on his forehead and against his cheek, tilted her head back to look at him through the little squares of her eyeglasses. Then she tilted it forward so she could study him over the tops of them. Her bodice and sleeves puffed with starch. When she lifted him to drink from a thick glass, his middle refused to bend at the waist and chills, sweats, and nausea attacked him all at once. She lowered him carefully.

“You’re one strong lady for your size,” he told her through gritted teeth.

“That I am, Mr. Mackelwain.” She reddened, smiled. Her teeth were a mess. “Just you remember that when it comes time to take your medicine.” She arranged a series of hard little pillows under his back so he could be raised without bending above the hips and introduced his ward-mates. Three lay ominously still and flat. One lay on his side snoring softly. One moaned and gurgled and wheezed. Mr. Pangrazia sat on the edge of his bed. He was minus a leg. Every bed in the ward was filled. Nurse Swengel disappeared to find Cree some soup.

“This isn’t Alta, is it?” he asked Mr. Pangrazia.

“This is Telluride. You sure got bumps on the head. You don’t know where you are or even what year you are in.” Mr. Pangrazia shook his own head sadly. The place reeked of urine and carbolic acid, held a deepening chill. Wind rattled at the windows. Snow blew in sandblasts, swirled in gray-white shapes that hid the rest of the world, piled powdered-sugar-fine in the corners of the windowsills. “Gonna be a terrible winter,” Mr. Pangrazia said, following Cree’s gaze. “My son, he tells me every burro and squirrel has fur three inches thick already.”

“Great.” Cree tried to sigh but his sore ribs objected. Aletha’s little time switch had saved them from a nasty fate at the hands of Duffer and the boys, but the very thing he’d feared would happen to her had happened to him.

At the Floradora, Aletha carried plates of the special of the day, Smuggler-Union Lasagna and Miners’ Salad, ignoring the looks her swollen lips attracted.

“Just don’t eat anything solid till your teeth feel firm again,” Tracy had said. “You won’t know if any are dead till they start turning gray.”

Aletha had a dental appointment in the morning. Bertie would turn gray if he knew all the money he’d sunk in orthodontics for her smile was in extreme jeopardy. She and Tracy had left Alta without Cree and with the black-and-silver Bronco sitting alone by the commissary. She wondered what Callie’s world would do with Cree and how it would handle those three goons. As Tracy said, they had to eat and pay the rent, so they’d come back in time to go to work.

Aletha, however, had decided to search for some old-fashioned clothes, at least a long coat, to cover her modernness, and the next time that time decided to do its thing, she’d walk off into history and try to find Cree. She just hoped somebody was tending to his injuries. Since the odd occurrences seemed to happen around her, maybe she could be with him when the hole opened again and bring him home. This was not exactly the kind of problem she could take to the county sheriff.

Aletha had had a small brownish patch where the pendant lay against her skin when they came down from Alta that she’d thought might be a burn but found was just a stain that washed off with a little scrubbing. She wore the pendant outside her blouse now and wondered if, because it seemed to heat up at times when history opened up, it had some magical property that caused the phenomenon. Which was silly, but she continued to wear the pendant just in case it was her only way of making contact with Cree.

The Floradora had a less expensive menu than the Senate and attracted more of the working locals. Backpacks instead of purses, big mongrels tied up outside, sad-eyed and patient. “What’d your friend Mackelwain do, bust you in the mouth?” A man swung around on a bar stool in time to catch her arm as she headed back to the kitchen for some Tomboy Chili and Prospector Bread. He had blond hair down to his collar, the requisite flannel shirt and work boots, and very professional eyes. He was trying to look like just one of the guys but had a few more years on him than most everybody at the bar. “Know where I can find him?” he asked. “He could be in some bad trouble.”

“The last I saw him he was up in Alta. Maybe you should start there.”

The county sheriff stopped by and introduced himself as Tom Rickard. He had big shields sewn to the sleeves of his shirt that said
“SAN MIGUEL COUNTY”
and a white star patch in the center that said
“SHERIFF’S DEPT.”
He had crinkles around his eyes and fluffy hair cut a little short for Telluride. Aletha told him the whole story. Except about Tracy, no sense getting her involved. And except about the hole in time. Which left some fairly large holes in her story.

“Get any names?” The crinkles stayed around the edges of his eyes but the expression on the inside flattened out to weary boredom.

“The other two called the chief honcho ‘Duffer.’”

“And they walked Mackelwain into the mine and never came out.”

“Right. And their Bronco was still sitting up there when I left.”

“And it never occurred to you to seek help for Mr. Mackelwain.”

“No. I mean yes. But I didn’t know who to go to. I didn’t think you could do anything.”

“You’d be surprised what I can do. For instance, I understand you spent some time in the Federal Correctional Institute in Fort Worth. Didn’t seem to teach you enough to stay away from drug dealers, did it?”

Aletha felt a protective numbing. When life went downhill, it accelerated like it was on wheels. “That conviction was reversed.”

“But not erased,” Sheriff Tom Rickard said. “Don’t leave town.”

The next day when she stepped out of the dentist’s office a sheriff’s deputy was waiting to drive her up to Alta. The dentist’s prognosis had been the same as Tracy’s.

The black-and-silver Bronco still sat by the commissary. All its doors stood open. Other officers and a number of nonuniformed men poked about the ghost town. One held out a jacket for a hyper dog to sniff. They disappeared into the mine and the dog’s incessant barking sounded suddenly remote.

“Thought you might be able to remember a little more if you came up here.” The sheriff had shields sewn on his jacket too. It was cold and cloudy and trying to rain. A dispatcher sputtered over a patrol-car radio nearby. The sheriff’s sunglasses kept studying her. An officer with a flashlight came out of the mine where the dog still barked far away. “Gets to one spot and stops. Keeps going back to it.”

“Get a shovel.”

“Area’s hard as rock, hasn’t been disturbed in years. It’s like they got to that one spot and vanished into … someplace else.”

“Wonderful.” A great drop of rain slid down one lens of his sunglasses. Sheriff Rickard turned to another officer coming up the hill. “Watcha got?”

“Newly disturbed earth. Under a falling-down shack.”

Aletha followed them to Callie’s cabin. She knew it wasn’t Cree in that disturbed earth. All she wanted was to go back to Telluride and find that coat.

“Too small for a human grave.”

“Some animal digging maybe. Or drugs. Or drug money.”

They’d dug less than a foot when they came across a rock the size of a small football wrapped in a rag. It was milky speckled quartz on one side and a dull gold color on the other.

The sheriff of San Miguel County in 1901 wore a three-piece suit and tie. Cree counted seven buttons on his vest alone. He wore a watch chain and a mustache and smelled of sweet cigar. A big man compared to the others around here.