A Tyranny of Petticoats (22 page)

But at least they came only once a year, whereas suicide ghosts never went away. They wore their desperation soul deep, realizing again and again, day after day, that they were still trapped here. That there was still no way out.

Ghosts are drawn to
wu-
shamans like mosquitoes to an oil lamp. Here in Deadwood, I couldn’t leave the laundry without seeing their shadows from the corners of my eyes or feeling them tug at the hem of my jacket. I often took circuitous routes to try and lose them, as it was bad luck for a ghost to follow you home.

Even now I could feel the ghosts of Deadwood drifting toward me as I followed half a step behind James, my eyes downcast to keep from drawing attention, both from the multitudes of men who filled the streets and the spirits that gathered in my footsteps. When I was little, my mother always sent them away — sometimes with bribes of food, sometimes by chasing them off with a straw-bristled broom. I hadn’t realized what a nuisance they were until she was gone.

There was something unusual about the ghost of James Hill, though. Despite the arrow in his back, he maintained a light step as he walked down Main Street crisping on the apples I’d smuggled from my uncle’s stores. (After gifting them to his spirit, I’d stashed the physical apples under the walkway behind the laundry, hoping they would rot away before they were missed.)

We were two blocks from Star & Bullock’s hardware store when I noticed the commotion. A crowd of men was gathered in the street, screaming obscenities. The newspaperman was there too, trying to gather information from the shouting. Not far off, I spotted a finely dressed woman sobbing hysterically and clutching a boy — maybe seven years of age — against her hip.

Easing through the crowd, I spotted the source of the outrage. A wagon was being pulled by a couple of mules. It was loaded with two bodies and a swarm of flies.

My heart shuddered, but I didn’t look away.

James Hill’s eyes were faded in death, his corpse drained of color. Someone had snapped the arrow off at his back, but the broken shaft could still be seen protruding from between his shoulder blades.

The second body on the cart was one I didn’t recognize. A full-whiskered man with one boot missing off his stockinged feet. Two arrows were stuck in his torso, a third in his thigh.

I scanned the dozens of ghosts gathered in my periphery, but I didn’t see his spirit among them.

“Jeremiah was a good, God-fearing man!” one of the louder mouths was saying. “And his son, there, as selfless as they come! Now the Sioux come onto
their
land and murder them when they ain’t done nothing but work hard to provide for their family. I’ve had enough lookin’ over my shoulder for these savages. These murders must be answered!”

His words were met with a cheer and a gunshot that made me jump.

“I’ll offer a hundred dollars from my own pocket for every dirt-worshipper scalp brought back!” the loudmouth continued, to more cheering. The stench of alcohol was already heavy on more than one of them, and the sight of the bodies was spurring their bloodlust.

I turned to James, but he wasn’t watching the crowd. He was staring at the crying woman and the child. Her face was half covered by a handkerchief.

“Your mother?”

James gave a sad nod. “And my brother. Jules.”

They made a pretty family, all yellow hair and faces like you’d see in a painting.

With a start, I realized I’d seen the woman before. “She came to me once.”

James didn’t take his attention from them. “I know. About five months ago, when Jules was sick.” Some tension slipped off his shoulders. “None of the doctor’s treatments were working, and we were desperate. Some of the men in the camp told us you might be able to help.” His gaze slid toward me. “Ma said you called on the spirit of my grandmother, and she told her to make a special tea for Jules, out of plants she could only get from some of your neighbors. She followed my grandmother’s directions to the word. The very next day, Jules’s fever broke, and . . . there he is. Alive.”

I stared at the young boy, remembering how desperate his mother had been when I suggested the tea, a combination of ginger, cinnamon, peony, and licorice. It was a common treatment, used to improve the healing energy of the body.

“I’m glad,” I said.

“Me too.” James rocked back on his heels. “Though I wondered how my Irish grandmother could possibly have known to give him Chinese tea, of all things.”

James shifted closer to me. I looked away.

“Fei-Yen, I’ve spent five months making excuses to walk by your family’s laundry, trying to come up with a reason to go inside. I never imagined I would be dead before I finally had the courage to thank you.”

I dared to look up and hold his gaze again, even though my heart was thrumming as I thought of him walking by our laundry all those times. It was a strange thing to think — that
he
had wished to speak to
me.

Our conversation had tugged us closer. We were standing nearly toe-to-toe.

I inhaled sharply and pulled back.

My heel crashed into a feed bucket and I gasped, arms flailing. James caught my elbow and pulled me upward, locking me firm against his chest for merely a heartbeat before he flickered and vanished.

I stood on the street, alone, my pulse in my ears. It was difficult for ghosts to affect the physical spaces of our world. Between frightening the prospector earlier and now bracing my fall, he must have used up too much energy. It would take some time before he returned.

I was almost grateful —
almost.
At least it gave me time to think, to let my mind clear without being pulled off course by his friendly smile and too-easy gait.

Five minutes passed before he began to appear again, more faded than before.

I greeted him with a nod, but I didn’t smile or thank him for catching me.

“You want me to be your voice,” I said, as James gathered his spirit back together. “So you can tell your family good-bye.”

To my surprise, he shook his head. “No, Fei-Yen. I want you to help me give them a future.”

“A future?”

His voice crackled at first but became stronger as he watched his family. “There’s a businessman in town named George Rinehart. He arrived a few months back and has been buying up claims ever since, mostly placer mines that already ran dry. Turning unlucky prospectors into paid miners. He’s offered to buy our claim. Not for much — says the land is barely fit for goat grazing — but enough that Ma and Jules could pack up, go back to New York. She signed the deed this morning, within hours of hearing about the attack. Heartbreak, I suppose.” A line formed between his eyebrows. “I need you to get that deed back and destroy it. She can’t sell the claim.”

“Why?”

“Because we found it, two days ago. There
is
gold. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” He hooked his thumbs behind the suspenders. “Enough to live comfortably — here or New York or wherever she wants to go. Jules could go to school. If you got that deed . . .”

A needle inside me said that Mrs. Hill had willingly sold the claim, so why should this businessman lose just because her son was stubborn enough to wander around after being shot rightfully dead?

“I don’t owe you any favors, James Hill.” I recited the words I’d silently rehearsed after he’d vanished. “You may have saved me this morning, but I already saved your brother. Five months ago.”

His face showed no surprise. “I know. I needed to repay my debt to you.”

“And I owe you
nothing.
” I wanted to hear him say it. Freedom from a spirit’s control was a valuable thing to someone like me.

“You owe me nothing,” he admitted, his body no longer vague and wispy. “But I will beg you on my knees to do this, Fei-Yen. Please. Help me.”

Sympathy seeped through me, and my hand twitched toward him, but I locked it firm against my side. Across the street, his mother was kissing Jules’s head. The driver of the wagon was getting ready to haul the bodies of James and his father away to be prepared for burial.

Maybe, if she did end up the owner of a working gold claim, Mrs. Hill might be willing to pay a commission off it. In gratitude. Not just for saving the claim but for saving her son’s life when he was sick.

Maybe it would be enough to take me back to California. I hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place. I tried to persuade my uncle to leave me behind — my skills were more suited to the city — but he insisted we stay together. He believed he could provide for us both, and his laundry was doing well enough, but we both knew I didn’t belong here. Whether or not he regretted bringing me, it no longer mattered. There wasn’t enough money to send me back.

All I needed was a ride on the stagecoach and a train ticket out of Cheyenne. Enough to let a room where I could conduct the
wu-
shaman rituals.

Maybe, when I got there, I could find another shaman to complete my training. Maybe I could even find my mother’s spirit, if she hadn’t yet departed. Oh, how I yearned to see her again. To be home.

“All right, James Hill,” I said. “I’ll try.”

I made myself small as James and I darted through the alley between a saloon and the newly constructed hotel. The sounds of clinking glasses, the hollow clatter of dice, and an upbeat piano melody spilled from open windows.

I was clutching a stack of rough-spun linens in both arms. It had been easy enough for me to persuade the man at the hotel’s desk to give me a key, explaining in poor English that I had to deliver laundry to a guest. All he’d cared about was that I go in through the back door and stop taking up space in his lobby.

I rounded the corner and spotted a figure outside the hotel’s door, her dress gauzy and her bone-thin arms wrapped around her hips. She was staring up at the second-story windows.

We both stopped, but it was James who spoke. “Millie Ann?”

Her head turned, although it took her haunted gaze a moment to follow. “James Hill,” she said in her usual meek voice. “You found her.”

“I did.” James tipped his nonexistent hat. “She’s been as kind as you told me she would be.”

A frown carved its way across my brow. I didn’t like to think of the spirits talking about me around town, appointing me their personal telegraph into the realm of the living.

“What are you doing here, Millie Ann?” I asked, never having seen her so far from where she died.

“I was looking for the post office . . .” Millie Ann scanned the walls of the alley. “I wanted to post a letter to my mother. But I seem to have taken a wrong turn.”

I sighed. She’d most likely been pulled off course because of me. Even as I thought it, the faint ghost of a dark-skinned man in a derby hat drifted into the far end of the alley.

More would follow.

It was time to finish this task for James Hill and return to the sanctuary of my incense and altar, where only the strongest spirits could follow me.

I curled my shoulders over the linens and shoved through the hotel door, certain that Millie Ann would either find her way back on her own or still be waiting there when we returned. She could have followed me into the building, but passing through walls cost so much energy that most spirits never bothered.

The hotel was eerily quiet. James and I climbed to the second floor, where the walls smelled of fresh timber. I knocked when we reached Rinehart’s room, but there was no response. Balancing the linens again, I slipped the key into the lock, heart pounding.

The room was furnished with a four-poster bed, a pedestal sink and mirror for shaving, a writing desk, and a reading chair with an ironed newspaper draped over one arm. A round-topped trunk sat at the foot of the bed, fastened with brass buckles and stuck with a dozen labels of different cities — San Francisco among them. My heart squeezed with homesickness.

“Try here first,” said James, standing at the desk.

I set the linens down on the bed and joined him, opening the top drawer. Inkwells and envelopes. In the next, blank stationery. The bottom drawer held a newspaper clipping with a photograph of a well-dressed man who James told me was George Rinehart himself. Beneath the paper was a stack of document files. I pulled them out so James could puzzle out the labels printed in a neat hand.

One window was cracked open, and I could hear men down below, discussing weapons and horses and raving about the godless savages they’d soon be hunting.

We reached the last file, and James shook his head. “Accounting and travel papers. It’s not here.”

Leaving the papers, I crossed the room and dropped to my knees beside the trunk, pressing up the latches, grateful to find it unlocked. Inside, a bundle of heavy cloth was rolled up and tied with twine, and tucked beneath it — more papers.

James hunkered over them, attempting to decipher the tiny print on the top pages. His eyes brightened.

“This is the deed to the Johnson claim, just upstream from ours.” He looked at me. “Albert Johnson was killed a little over a month ago, also by the Sioux. There’ve been lots of attacks lately, but things had gone quiet long enough that Pa and I thought . . .” His jaw tightened, but he shook the regret away. “I hadn’t realized Johnson was looking to sell his claim too. Rinehart must be buying up the whole valley.”

“Does he know gold’s been found?”

“Could be. If we found it on our land, it’s likely there’ll be more deposits all along the creek.”

“He can’t be pleased that the Sioux have suddenly become so territorial over it too.” I frowned. “Have all the killings been done by arrow?”

James shrugged. “Far as I know.”

“Strange, isn’t it? They have guns. But it’s as though they want it to be known —
we’re
killing you. This is our land.”

“You said yourself, it is sacred to them.” James dragged a finger along the lettering on the first page. “Can you pull out these papers? Maybe our deed is here too.”

Nudging the bundle of fabric aside, I lifted the first stack and deposited it on the rug. The English alphabet swam across the page.

When I looked up, I saw that James wasn’t studying the papers, though. He was still staring into the trunk. The bundle of fabric had fallen at an angle, revealing the feather-tipped shaft of an arrow.