I would get no satisfaction from Rose Greenhow. She remained in the Old Capitol Prison, along with her poor daughter, awaiting trial. I desperately wanted to see her hanged with my own two eyes, but even in wartime, our justices insisted on process to fight off the madness. It could be months before she was brought to justice and sentenced for her crimes. I would have to content myself with her imprisonment for now.
I knew I could not stay. I would drive myself insane being in the same city with her, knowing she lived and breathed, waiting for the hammer to fall at last. Nor did I want to stay here for my father’s wrath, whatever form it would take. I wanted him to come and find me gone, cursing himself for letting me slip through his fingers. No money, no daughter, no victim. He taught me the world was all winners and marks, so let him recognize himself as the mark for once.
But I did not know where to go. Chicago was my place of employment, and I didn’t want to be employed there anymore. I had no home. No Tim, and no home.
I lay on my bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, wondering if maybe a jump into the swift-running James River would have been the best way to solve my problems after all.
Instead, I retrieved my horse from the stable and packed my saddlebags with a few of Annie Armstrong’s belongings, leaving the rest behind. Pinkerton, or rather E. J. Allen, would come and clean up after me, I knew. I would leave him the mess. He had certainly left me one.
Riding for hours while the air grew colder and the sky darker, I bore due west until both the horse and I were exhausted. The country slipped past me, unobserved, while I kept my eyes only on the road ahead of me, without knowing where it was leading. I stopped for the night and rested. In the morning, we started again. I repeated the process until one night we stopped in St. Louis, and I knew anywhere after that would be frontier. I sold the horse. From here, I would stick to stagecoaches and trains, safer ways to travel. Without the protection of a roof over my head, closing my eyes to sleep west of the Mississippi was an act too foolhardy even for me.
That night, I stayed in a small roadside inn owned by a Polish couple, and I nearly wept when the wife served me a bowl of buttered potato dumplings smothered in onions, the first pierogi I’d seen since I’d left Mrs. Borowski’s boardinghouse. My path finally came clear. I would head for the Dakota Territory and wouldn’t stop until I reached Bright Hope.
Mrs. Borowski was surprised to see me, to say the least. Eventually, I told her what had happened, though the telling of it was interrupted by tears and wailing and several sunsets. She had found a place for herself among the miners and frontiersmen. It seemed strange, in such a wild place, but I envied her comfort. The life clearly suited her, and the shaggy, unkempt men who pulled their chairs up to her table for the evening meal did so with quiet grace. She had obviously had an effect on them. The dinner included pasties, meat-and-vegetable pies in a delicious crust, which the Cornish miners especially seemed to appreciate, leaving nary a crumb behind. All told, her dinner guests were more polite and mannerly than many of those I’d observed in Washington. Civilization, I told myself, was not what it used to be.
She waved me away from helping to clean up after dinner but invited me for a tumbler of plum wine once the dishes were cleared. I gladly accepted. She told me I could stay as long as I liked and did not press me for answers. That was good, since I had none.
The Dakota Territory was like nowhere I had ever been, which helped tremendously. It felt like the war was a world away. I came to love the wild hills, the miles of open space. I even loved the unrelenting brownness of everything. Brown dirt, brown clothes, brown buildings. Only the wide-open sky was blue and gray.
And for a while, I found a way to live. It wasn’t the life I wanted, and most days, I didn’t recognize myself, but it was something.
After a few weeks, I didn’t wake up panting in the middle of the night, seeing Tim’s dead body swaying from the gallows, deathly afraid my father would find and reveal me, even in this hamlet. I fumbled my way toward some small amount of peace, however fleeting, however small.
Unfortunately, that was just when I was found.
I had spent the day looking for work. My salary had added up to a pretty penny, but I wanted to keep my hands off it as long as possible. I would be easy to trace if I started communicating with the bank in my own name. I should have set up an account with another alias, one I had never used on a case, but I’d left in too much of a hurry. So I had gone around offering my services as a shop clerk, a bookkeeper, anything I felt I could do without needing to truly reveal the depths of myself. For a while, I wanted to be a woman without depths.
As I entered the lobby of the only hotel in town, I was looking forward to another night of falling asleep shortly after sunset, two fingers of brandy aiding my journey toward Morpheus. Alas, it was not to be.
“There she is now,” said the hotel clerk, and the man waiting at the counter stirred and turned toward me with a look of expectation.
It was too late for me to run, and in any case, I wasn’t sure what the right reaction was. I thought I had already run far enough. I thought even if he looked for me—and why would he?—there was little chance he would find me. But I should have known there was no point in hiding from the world’s greatest private investigator.
The man in front of me, travel-worn and determined, was Allan Pinkerton.
I wanted to fall upon his broad chest crying, and I also wanted to cringe away from him like a disobedient dog. In a way, it was a relief. Now that he was here, I didn’t have to fear his arrival. This new life I had begun to assemble was no kind of life. I was only wasting time. Of course he had come.