A Fireproof Home for the Bride (48 page)

“It means that your grandfather was a meticulously paranoid man.” Jim turned another page in the ledger, revealing a table of simple information, headed by the labeled columns
Bet, I,
and
M.
“I think it has something to do with this.” Running down the left side of the page were the numbers one through thirty-six. Under the
Bet
column were initials, and after that a small, tidy check mark in either the
I
or the
M
line. Next to this, running down the right side was a series of dates, and at the very bottom of the page was a number with a circle around it. Emmy’s eyes ran over all the information, her vision blurred slightly where it focused just off the page and back onto the map of Moland Township.

“There are thirty-six sections,” she said, once again sourcing the square she knew best. “Three
M
s here, and look, after the number six in the ledger, the checks are in the
M
column, not the
I
.” She then looked at the corresponding
Bet
column, and the chill she felt earlier came back in a rush at the sight of what was there:

M.G.

J.G.

R.G.

“Migrant workers,” she said, pointing at the checks in the
M
column. “The Gonzales family. They’ve worked for the Branns as long as I can remember. The
R
is Ramon, Pedro’s father, and those must be his parents.”

“He didn’t bother to fix the code.” Jim made a note of the names. “What’s curious is the dates—they’re all three the same: May 4, 1924.”

“Maybe it’s when they arrived in the spring,” Emmy conjectured. “For seeding.”

Jim pushed his chair away from the table and stretched his arms over his head. “All these dates are on or before May 4,” he said. “Why?”

“Have you looked at the other ledgers?” she asked, pulling the box closer to see inside of it. “Maybe there’s another clue somewhere.”

Jim nodded, and then shook his head. “One of them is an indecipherable collection of entries and dates that have my head hurting. The other is a detailed list of members and dues for the entire state, written in poorly imagined cipher so the names don’t match what’s in this book, but are easy enough to decode. But these names are real, from the survey maps, paired with initials—apparently of
betabeleros.
Why
M
and
I,
though?” He laced his fingers together and used his hands as a hammock for the back of his head to rest as he gazed up at the ceiling. “Unless …
I
stands for immigrant…”

“Still, they all had working papers,” Emmy said, feeling oddly defensive of people she didn’t really know that much about. “Do you think it was some way of keeping track of Mexicans?”

“No,” Jim said. “I don’t. I’m not sure what I think it is.” He moved forward again and drew the box nearer, standing up in order to reach into its depths and lift out the remaining contents: newspapers, pamphlets, and other propaganda from a failed movement, but no other ledgers. “This is going to take a while to sift through, but it looks like mostly more of the same.” Jim ran a hand through his hair and scratched his scalp. “Do you think your grandfather had any other journals, boxes of things, anywhere in the house?”

Emmy thought for a moment with her eyes closed, picturing the desk where she had done her homework in the fall. The image of an Indian popped up into her mind. “I think so,” she said. “But I don’t think I’m too welcome out there.”

Jim cocked his head to the left, a pose that reminded her of Coffee. He squinted. “One of the things you will learn the longer you do this job is the only thing that matters is the discovery of truth. Lead with that, and you’ll stop thinking about welcome mats. Use that nose.”

“Do you mind if I borrow your satchel?” she asked, standing suddenly, his faith in her abilities trumping her hesitation. “I left mine at home.”

“You’re going now?” he asked, with more than a hint of pride. He stood and followed her to the door, reaching an arm in front of her in order to open it as she strode through to the hallway.

She nodded. “I shouldn’t be long.”

Twenty-two

Life with God Forever

Enveloped by the blue gloaming of early evening, Emmy headed east. As dusty snow began to scatter in its headlight beams, the Crestliner rumbled over the Second Avenue Bridge, through the barren streets of Moorhead, and out past the town limits. Dilworth came and went without Emmy so much as noticing the hulking gas station on one end of town, nor the smattering of blank-eyed houses as she cruised past them. Another mile, two, and then she turned onto the road that led through Moland Township, past the town hall, past the old schoolhouse, its weathered paint gray in the increasing swirl of snow. She imagined these landmarks on the plat map, their tiny representatives cartoonish and quaint. The last light of day was doused by the time she turned left again, past the cemetery, the church, the Branns’ drive, over the creek bridge, and to the farm.

Emmy eased the car into the sharp left turn after the bridge and cut the engine, letting the Crestliner roll to a stop a brief distance from the farmhouse. A light was on in the kitchen, another in Lida’s room. Emmy tapped a finger on the steering wheel, searching through the many pockets of possibility her mind kept emptying, sorting the reasons she had for showing up unexpected. Ultimately, she knew that none of them mattered until she saw Karin’s reaction, and so Emmy took a deep breath and stepped a foot into the snowy gravel. The kitchen door opened, casting a yellow slant of light onto the powdered yard, and there stood Karin in one of Lida’s old black dresses.

“Who’s out there?” she asked plainly, and took one step forward.

“It’s me, Emmy,” Emmy said, her voice unintentionally sweet and small. She was overcome by her desire to embrace her mother, yet held in place by the fear of seeking something that would not be there. That had never been there.

Karin moved into the shaft of light. “Emmy?” she whispered, as if to a person she had thought long dead, only to find alive.

“Yes,” Emmy said, encouraged by the echo of longing, and fumbling for more.

“Come inside, child,” Karin said in a slightly sterner tone while nodding toward the house. The rush of yearning Emmy had felt dissipated like bees caught in a strong wind.

“Thank you,” Emmy said, following her mother into the warm kitchen. The smells hit her like a wall built out of memories: the pungency of boiling cabbage slightly muted by the more seductive sizzling of roasting chicken and potatoes shot through with the hot vinegar of sautéed pickled beets. Over these, Emmy could detect the ammonia of the spotless floor and the faintest whiff of an odor she’d always related to her grandmother without having considered it before—one that she was incapable of identifying as created by any object in the room. It just smelled like Lida, a pillowy combination of flour, coffee, vanilla, wool, and roses that made Emmy’s eyes water as though she were cutting onions instead of simply standing in the middle of the room, not knowing where to turn in order to restrain the press of nostalgia. The table was set for two, as though her mother had been waiting seven months for this dinner, maybe even preparing it every night in case her prodigal daughter should return. But Emmy knew better. “Is Birdie okay?”

“She’s upstairs, lying down,” Karin said, casting her eyes to the floor between her and Emmy, focusing on it as though she had missed a spot of grime and was considering rushing to the sink to fetch a rag.

“Oh,” Emmy said, and took a step back. “Is it the baby?”

“She’s fine.” Karin’s voice cut through the room. “She just needs time.”

The clock ticked into the awkward silence that draped between them, neither seeming to know how to put down the first stone of the bridge that needed to be rebuilt. Karin sighed and turned away to the stove, and picking up a wooden spoon, she first stirred the cabbage, then the beets, and swiftly opened the oven with a thick cloth. She jerked the roasting pan from the interior, lifting it with one hand to the open burner, where it slammed to a rest. Emmy observed the wiry diligence of Karin’s form, wondering if perhaps her mother had been living solely on coffee and air. Nothing about the meal seemed to give Karin any appearance of appetite.

“Marriage is never easy,” Karin said without turning her head. Emmy studied her mother’s profile. Deep lines had etched themselves along the sides of Karin’s mouth, and her skin was stretched up across her sharp cheekbones to where it dipped into a hollow at the brow. It was equally tight and translucent at her jawline, where a blue vein meandered down to her neck and disappeared at the collar of the dark dress. It was almost as though the skull bones were patiently asserting their push toward revelation and after, the grave.

“I suppose it isn’t,” Emmy said, having only been a witness to two marriages up close, neither of which had seemed to her filled with joy or ease. It occurred to her that this might be a piece of her disillusion with Bobby. Perhaps she needed a better example on which to build a married life. “Will she stay here through the birth?”

Karin pressed the hand holding the dish towel to her lower back and hip, closing her eyes against whatever pain was surfacing there. “God willing. The baby will come and she’ll go back. I’m praying for them.” Karin went to the table and sat, lifting the family Bible into her lap and opening it, casting her eyes along a passage.

Emmy held quiet, gazing at her mother’s sunken eyelids. The world kills us through our children, Emmy thought, draining a mother’s love through a sieve of constant concern.

“I’m sorry,” Emmy said, surprised by how compulsively the words came out of her, and the great relief she felt upon saying them. “I disappointed you, and Father, and I know that.”

Karin’s eyes glistened as she folded her hands together on top of the Good Book. “I prayed for you, too, Emmaline,” she said, and Emmy glimpsed in her mother’s fixed gaze the depths to which all the loss had trenched inside of her, the gaping wound of it raw but dry. “The Lord has His ways.”

“I’m just sorry if I caused you pain,” Emmy said, fighting against the pangs of guilt that gathered into a thick clump in her throat, making it hard to talk.

Karin smiled, a slight turning up of the corners of her narrow mouth. “Rejoice with me,” she said, holding a liver-spotted hand out to Emmy. “For I have found my sheep.”

Emmy took the hand and folded it into both of hers, hoping some of her warmth might seep into Karin and shore her up. “Let me help you with dinner,” she offered. “Like I used to do.”

Karin smiled a bit wider, releasing Emmy’s hand and smoothing the pages of the Bible. “I forgive you,” she said plainly. “As God directs.”

Emmy slung Jim’s satchel onto a chair, unbuttoned her coat, and moved to the cupboards, instinctively locating a platter for the chicken and bowls for the vegetables, setting about her work as though the months since Easter hadn’t passed. Even so, a kaleidoscope of images crowded into her head piecemeal: Svenja’s tearstained face; Lida’s last words; Christian’s confession; Josephine’s story; John Hansen’s murder; Jesse’s death.

“He was so young,” Karin said, as though reading the tail end of Emmy’s thoughts. A beet slipped off the wooden spoon and onto the floor, where it splattered its scarlet stain against the pale linoleum, the white cabinets, and Karin’s light blue apron. Karin moved to the sink for a damp rag to swipe up the trailing stain.

Emmy knelt beside her. “Who?” she asked quietly.

“Daniel.” Without physical alteration, Karin’s smile turned sad. “I know that Jesus needed him in Heaven. I’m just sorry that He didn’t give me back my heart. It’s the one thing I’ll never have, no matter how much I pray or how much good I try to do. He gave me you, and then Birdie, and you were both as beautiful, but I just didn’t … have anything for you other than ordinary affection. I did my best, though, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you certainly did,” Emmy said, and wrapped her mother in a firm embrace, feeling Karin’s hands flutter against her back like small birds lost in the wrong hemisphere, in the wrong season. “I have enough heart for us both,” Emmy whispered in her mother’s ear. When the awkward hug ended, Emmy was moved to see her mother’s eyes were still dry. How broken must a person be not to mourn the thing that did the breaking? Emmy lifted Karin’s hand to her own cheek. The phone rang, startling them both into standing.

“Please answer that?” Karin asked as she returned the beet-red rag to the sink. “It’s probably your father.”

Emmy grabbed Jim’s satchel from the chair and reached the telephone table in the living room on the fourth shrill ring, lifted the heavy handset, and said hello.

“Emmy?” Jim asked.

“Yes.”

“Look.” His voice stopped and then rushed. “I want you to come back here right away.”

Emmy turned away from the kitchen. “I haven’t gone upstairs yet. What is it?”

“I talked to Stan Lewis down at the
Trib
in Chicago
,
” Jim said, the urgency in his voice thinning Emmy’s blood. He cleared his throat and continued, “In 1929, Davidson kidnapped his secretary, and it gets worse from there.”

“Just tell me,” Emmy whispered. She wound the phone’s cord tightly around her free hand.

“He allegedly drugged her. Bit her numerous times. Raped her. Left her body on her parents’ doorstep.” Jim cleared his throat again. “She died before they could get a statement, and he claimed that anti-Klan socialists within the Cleveland government framed him. But there were teeth marks.”

Emmy pressed a hand to her mouth and swallowed hard. She thought she heard a car in the yard, and she lifted the phone from its small table and moved to the window with it while Jim continued.

“By the time they arrested him, he’d had all of his teeth pulled, and they couldn’t find his dentist.” Jim cleared his throat. “Served some time for obstruction of justice, but nothing else. His supporters never faltered in their faith in him.”

The memory of Mr. Davidson’s perfectly aligned smile made Emmy flinch as she looked out the window. Her car sat where she’d left it next to Karin’s in the snow-blown yard. There were no other vehicles in the yard. Still, Emmy couldn’t shake the feeling of another presence on the farm.