“You told Sheriff Rink what you saw?”
She nodded. “I always enjoyed Joe’s good looks, but what I found him doing . . .” She shook her head, as if she still didn’t understand what she’d witnessed that Christmas Eve. “And then the idea of him killing your father . . . I blurted out, ‘I hope Deputy Fortaine told you he found Joe and some other fellow with their pants down together.’”
She wrapped her arms around herself and fell silent with an abruptness that made me again aware of the band and the picnic. All the Fourth of July noises rushed back into my ears.
“I bet they treated Joe worse than they treat most people arrested for manslaughter,” said Mildred. “He was just sixteen at the time of his arrest, I think, and I probably made his life hell.”
I slid my hands down my face to my cheeks, and a damp chill rose to the surface of my skin. I thought of the bruises I’d seen on Joe’s ribs, and the scar near his eye, the healed wound on his lip.
“Maybe . . .” She sniffed again, her eyes rimmed in red. “Maybe I should have just kept riding my bicycle after your father. Maybe it’s my fault that he died. I got so distracted with Joe, I didn’t warn your father about that terrible, premonitory pain. And if Joe would have just stayed with that boy without my bicycle attracting the deputy . . . Maybe that’s why your father’s storming into my house these past few nights. Maybe it is because of me, not you.”
I struggled to find my voice. “H-h-how long did it take you to recover from that premonition pain before you hopped onto your bicycle?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “A little while.”
“Do you think my father made his delivery before he encountered Joe?”
“Why does that even matter, Hanalee? Who cares about that delivery?”
“I just want to fill in all the missing pieces. There’s talk of a doc being involved, and I don’t know if my father means ‘Dr. Koning’ or ‘the Dry Dock.’”
“Ask your father.”
I nodded. “I will. Tonight.”
“If he’s not gone by tomorrow, I swear, Mama will summon that Spiritualist—”
“I said, I’ll ask him tonight,” I said with a sting to my voice.
“Good. See as you do.” Mildred wiped her eyes with the tips of her fingers and staggered back over to the festivities.
CHAPTER 16
NOBLE DUST
UP AHEAD, TO THE RIGHT OF THE church, stood the wrought-iron archway that marked the entrance to the cemetery in which we’d buried my father two days after Christmas 1921. Joe had sat behind bars in the local jail while his father presided over the memorial service with a voice that cracked with emotion. Uncle Clyde and Fleur’s mama, both friends with my mother since they were all children, had to revive my mother when she fainted by the graveside, and I remembered Uncle Clyde lifting Mama’s head, whisking smelling salts beneath her nose, and murmuring, “I’m here, Greta. I’m here. You’re not alone.”
I peeked again across the grassy grounds, toward my mother and stepfather’s picnic spot. I found them chatting with other members of our congregation. Mama glanced once my way, but then she returned to her socializing, neatening a lock of hair that had fallen out of her chignon.
I wandered into the graveyard with the horns and the drums of “The Yankee Doodle Boy” ringing in my ears and vibrating up the bones and muscles in my calves. The grounds grew cooler. Or, at least, the chill of silent graves spooked me into imagining a drop in the temperature.
We treated our dead in grand style in Elston, with polished gray obelisks and thick marble headstones marking the names of the deceased, from our Oregon Trail pioneers to those who died in recent years from the Spanish flu and other calamities. The conjoined graves of our former reverend and his wife lay to my right, no more than ten feet beyond the iron archway. I saw their surname, YORK, carved in block letters that felt smooth and solid beneath my hand, as well as the matching date of their deaths: October 8, 1918. The flu had snatched them both in the middle of the night when the pandemic ambushed Elston. Those two gentle souls—people who could have counseled and comforted me at the moment—had turned to dust, while the physician who couldn’t save them still roamed the earth.
Tears burned in my eyes, for I remembered Mrs. York pulling my parents aside after church one Sunday morning during my second year at the schoolhouse. Her face was lined in soft wrinkles, and she had kind blue-green eyes shaded by a homespun bonnet. She stood no more than four foot ten, and yet she possessed a sturdiness to her voice that made her appear six feet tall.