On the evening of July 1, they joined the Akif family in the shaded courtyard of the white-walled Hotel Leonidou near Apostolon Square. They ate cheese and eggplant, game and fish and fruit, paper-layered cakes of honey and nuts, while doves rustled in almond trees, people laughing in air that felt silky on the skin. Walton was in the midst of an elegant toast when Dulcy realized that her straw-colored glass of wine was sliding away from her. Walton paused. There was a sense that the air in the town was sucking inside itself, that the trees were shrinking and the tiles of the courtyard swelling. Then everything broke apart and shattered, and the family and their guests threw themselves under the long oak table while windows and plaster descended from the hotel above.
The smell of dust, the beginning of smoke. The members of the dinner party stayed entwined under the table, all of them spackled with shattered glass and sticky wine. Dulcy’s ears made a grinding noise, like a boat sliding on a gravel bank, in the very momentary silence before someone began to scream. Marble dust settled onto her arm, and she watched the shadows of birds veering about in the last of the sun. A donkey brayed, and she thought of how they’d once come upon a half-dozen starving goats in Turkey, marooned from their flock by a quake slide. No one ever talked about the animals in newspaper accounts, but in fallen towns, she’d seen people weep while they listened for the sounds of trapped cats and dogs.
The Hotel Leonidou had shifted two feet, but the pillars stood. A few blocks away, a pension had collapsed and caught fire, trapping and killing a group of Danish tourists.
“We are very fortunate,” said Walton, later. This careful near-piety may have come out of the shock of seeing Mr. Akif drop to his knees and pray to the invisible new moon. When they returned to the clinic, they found the springs had cracked open, and the water had disappeared. Walton vanished, too, off with the caramel-haired girl, and when he was located, Dulcy herded him onto a ship bound for a fever clinic Mr. Akif had suggested, north of Naples.
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On January 17, 1905, while her old life rolled on toward St. Paul, Walton’s runaway daughter took the line west as far as Spokane, then changed to a Utah train at dawn. She wore her hair up to show diamond earrings above the red collar and blue dress, a blaze of color in a bleary morning. She sat with a nice woman named Lahey from Chicago and introduced herself as Anna Mendelson. She talked about visiting an aunt in Houston, about music (no, not those Mendelssohns, sadly), about the weather.
Mrs. Lahey would remember “Anna,” who had brown eyes, dark brown hair, and a face and nose that had previously been described as long and English, as that nice Jewish girl heading home to California. Dulcy took a train to Pocatello, instead, then Omaha, where she spent a day writing and destroying apologies to Carrie. In the morning, she boarded a Topeka train, wearing a new wine-red dress.
She left a ribbon of fibs across the West for eight more days. In scrubby towns, the hotels all seemed to have the same carpet, the same lurching Otis elevators and anxious guests. Dulcy lay on identical beds, watching cooks drag garbage down alleys, pale men leave Chinese basements or tiny apartments with polka-dotted curtains. Stray dogs, dirty snow, women walking alone, wearing black; every city was populated by an identical army of men in black bowlers and black suits. She began to have an eye for the strange as it blurred by: there would be one bright dress besides her own in every crowd, one misshapen face or body; the odd cow in every herd—a monolithic black Angus changing out a herd of scrubby longhorns, a Holstein or Jersey Sabine in a gang of orange Herefords—would be the only one that bothered to lift its head to watch the train pass. In Colorado, she saw a bear sit back on its haunches, taking a pause in a menu of train-splattered carrion. She saw many small children, alone. She saw no one she recognized, anywhere, but every other day, she glimpsed Walton from behind.
She headed west to Denver and checked into the Brown Palace. She bought a plain gold ring, a shearling coat, a pretty blue tapestry purse, and black and mauve dresses to be tailored quickly, and she scanned newspapers while the order was tallied: two earthquakes on January 18, in the Caucasus and Veracruz. Walton would have maintained that the same great sucking gob of magma had caused both events.
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The shock of the first account of the missing Leda Remfrey, found in the late edition of the Omaha World Herald:
The sisters Remfrey were accompanying the body from Seattle to New York. It is believed that the missing girl de parted the train between Miles City and Dickinson, though no witnesses admit to seeing her after Butte, when she stated she felt unwell. It is hoped that she became confused, and will be found in one of the towns along the Northern Pacific route, but though Miss Clarissa Remfrey denies that her sister was distraught following the death of their father, an official allows that evidence found in Miss Remfrey’s cabin—a lowered window, fabric caught in one corner—suggests that the poor girl flung herself from the train, to her certain death, her body lost to wolves on the prairie.
This satisfied Dulcy, though she wished she could save Carrie and her aunts from the image. “Lost ” was fairly gentle; soon vultures would pluck her eyes out, which was better than Victor finding her and doing the same thing. She ordered a tray, put a quiet sign on her door, drank most of a bottle of Corton-Charlemagne, and lay in the bathtub, adjusting the temperature with her toes. She dripped water across the room and stood naked at the window, at least for a moment. She danced, she lounged on the chaise and the bed, she played with herself, she felt some self-disgust but finished the wine.
She flipped through the newspapers and scribbled down ideas on the hotel notepad. She didn’t want a tinny name.
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The snow began in earnest, weighing down the hotel awnings. It fell too quickly to be colored black by coal and wood smoke, but at night all the frozen dust combined with streetlights to turn the city a glowing rotten lilac. The staff muttered about train delays, guests who were unable to leave, guests who failed to arrive. The bar and restaurant downstairs grew louder, and the room-service menu slid inexorably from shellfish and salads toward beef and potatoes.
On the third day, when the trains stopped entirely, the doormen looked at her in disbelief as she headed out: to a bookstore, to keep from losing her mind; to a stationer to have calling cards and notepaper and luggage tags printed. At the last moment she had the initial D inserted, then tried to beat down her panic as she floundered on to a picture show. Cleopatra, staged with midget pyramids and a bantam Marc Antony, palm fronds everywhere—she sat there, befuddled in a miasma of clove cigarettes, and wondered at people who seemed to believe a chubby woman in a horsehair wig had something to do with Egypt. Henning would never have inflicted such crap upon the world.