Sisters (28 page)

When Sophie could no longer
hear the fire, she struggled to her feet and went to the doorway,
pulling down the scorched blanket that covered it. The world had
turned black. From the soddie to the edge of the creek, there was no
other color. It was a sloping black expanse, with a mound here where
an animal had fallen victim to the flames, a larger heap where the
shack had been. She felt something move beside her, and looked down
to see the girl clinging to her leg. The child was black too, her
hands, her dress her face, even her hair covered with a layer of
black ash.

Sophie looked across the
creek. The brown prairie with its tinge of sagebrush green looked
colorful now against the nearer fire-blackened land. She could see a
plume of dust rising from the horizon across the creek, and leaning
against the doorway of the sod house, she watched it come closer and
closer. After a long while she saw a it was a wagon, and then it drew
close to the creek, and she saw figures in in. Two horses were
pulling the wagon, and they started through the creek, but when they
came to the other side, they stopped, seemingly unwilling to go
farther. Smoke was still rising from the land. Was it hot? Sophie
wondered. Is that why the horses hesitated? One of the figures in the
wagon--a woman, Sophie could tell by her skirts--jumped out into the
creek, filled a vessel with water, and poured it on the land in front
of the horses. She repeated the action again and again, until finally
the animals were persuaded to step onto the blackened land.

No sooner had the horses
pulled the wagon from the creek than another figure jumped from it
and ran to where the blackened shapes of Baby and Zack Wilson say.
Sophie saw her lean over the bodies, then turn away. She made jerking
movements, and Sophie realized she was vomiting. The figure that had
leaped into the creek approached her, and the two figures melted
together. After a few minutes they moved back to the wagon.

The horses, apparently
convinced now that walking on the still-smoking land would not hurt
them, pulled the wagon up the gentle slope. One woman was driving and
two were sitting behind, their arms around one another. Sophie
watched the wagon advance, feeling simultaneously exhilarated and at
rest, as though the ordeal she had been through had both lifted and
calmed her. Perhaps it was the psyche's response to physical pain,
she thought, a cool turning outward because concentrating on the self
was agony. Perhaps it was the sudden surge of air and blood and brain
when they had been deprived of it. Or perhaps it was the essentially
foreign nature of the fire-blackened landscape.

Whatever the reason, she
felt detached, almost as though she were floating, and for a moment
she imagined herself in another age. She was an onlooker to a
medieval mystery play, credulous, eager to grant mythic qualities to
the mortals before her. The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam
and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage--no, Eve and Eve, loving one
another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and
knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved,
curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden
a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naivete, but
she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy
forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

The wagon came closer, and
Sophie saw with surprise that it was Lydia and Amy sitting behind,
embracing and comforting one another. How very odd! She had thought
it was Helen and Amy. But that couldn't be. Of course it couldn't be.
Helen was dead.

It was then she realized
how thoroughly exhausted she was in body and soul. The wagon drew
close to the sod house, and she let the woman help her in. No, no,
not in front, please. She'd rather lie in back. They put the sleeping
boy on one side of her, and on the other the girl, who soon curled
herself into the hollow of Sophie's body. There were blankets which
reeked of the stable, but Sophie found she didn't care about the
smell in the least as the women arranged them under the children's
heads and then under hers. The boy still didn't waken, and almost as
soon as the wagon moved off, the girl slept too.

Sophie stayed awake,
looking at the sky, a wide blue vault without a single cloud. How far
from Park Place she was. How unbelievable that just a few weeks ago
she had sat in her spacious office, beautifully dressed and groomed,
editors, writers, and artists coming in and out, checking with her,
making sure everything was as she wanted. And now she lay covered
with dirt and black ash, dressed in men's clothes, lying on top of a
filthy blanket in the back of a wagon. And men had tried to kill her.
My Lord, people had wanted her dead.

And why? Of all the
reasons, the one that astonished most was her Indian blood. It had
never made an difference to her; she had never felt it important.
Indeed, almost from the time she could remember, she had found her
grandmother's ways and ideas alien and turned away from them. But to
Rodman and his cohorts, the Indian blood made the difference between
respect and disrespect, and in a land where law was weak, that
translated easily into the difference between life and death.

Had Helen found that out,
too? It no longer seemed in the least likely to Sophie that her
sister had simply fallen down the stairs. It was much easier to
imagine a violent quarrel, and then hands reaching out, pushing, and
the gasp of surprise, the sudden intake of air as Helen had fallen.
Rodman could have done it, gotten rid of a nuisance as easily as the
children got rid of prairie gophers. Or Amy Travers could have done
it, this woman she had only to turn her head to see, whose soft
sobbing she could hear. She had loved Helen, but that could also be a
path to violence.

Sophie was in a frame of
mine which encompassed these contradictory possibilities without
demanding resolution. It would all come together in time, she was
sure. Her last thought before she slept was that she would know the
truth. Of that she was as certain as she had ever been of anything.

*

Sophie slept nearly
twenty-four hours. When she awoke Tuesday morning, she was very still
and very sore, but she felt herself again, was even able to see some
humor in her situation. Just yesterday morning she had been imagining
herself an investigator of sorts, a female version of Monsieur Dupin,
except superior, because she knew life didn't lend itself to logic as
readily as Dupin thought. Well, it didn't lend itself so well to her
brand of investigation either. She couldn't recall that Dupin had
even hobbled home in such a story state.

Mrs. Syms came in check on
her, and while the housekeeper was fluffing and bustling and
clucking, Sophie thought how safe Dupin had kept himself--and how
wise he was to do so. In Murders in the Rue Morgue , he'd gotten his
main clue by reading newspaper accounts of the witnesses who heard
the cries.

Witnesses who heard the
cries. The thought brought her up short. There might be two in
Helen's death. The landing was not so far from the front door. Voices
would have carried down the stairs, if not words, and Esther and
Sally playing on the front porch might have heard.

"Mrs. Syms, how is
Esther? Is she better now?"

"Much better. She's
slept almost as much as you. I wanted her to take another nap this
afternoon, but Sally came in to play with her after lunch, and when I
tried to shoo her out, Esther said she wanted her to stay, so they're
playing. I thought that's a good sign."

"I must talk to them."

"Oh no, you must rest
some more."

"No, I want to talk to
the girls."

"Mrs. Dymond, perhaps
you should... well, wouldn't you be more comfortable after you've
bathed and dressed?" The housekeeper paused. "Well, what I
mean is, we couldn't get you very clean last night."

Sophie looked down at her
hands and arms and saw what the housekeeper meant. There was still
soot embedded in her skin and under her nails. She'd be lucky if one
more bath took care of it.

In fact, she bathed twice
before she felt clean. Then she put on the cream-and-lavender dress.
It wasn't the time of day for it, but it was Esther's favorite.
Before Sophie left her room, she pinned the bold butterfly brooch to
her left shoulder.

Esther was sitting up in
bed--perhaps because there was no room for her to lie down? Sally's
crazed-looking dolls had the pillow, and Sally herself was sitting
cross-legged on the end of the bed. She was looking into a
stereoscope. "Here, this one's Niagara Falls. You can
practically see the water move!" She handed Esther the
stereoscope, and then she saw Sophie. "Aunt Sophie, what
happened to your cheek?"

Sophie put a hand up to a
large ugly-looking bruise, one of many she had, but the only one of
which showed. "I fell. It will go away." She moved some of
the stereoscopic photographs on the bed so she could sit by Esther.
"How are you feeling?" she asked the girl.

Esther only nodded.

"It's a very sad
thing, Tom dying. I'll miss him very much. But he had a nice life. He
was happy when he was alive, and that's what we should remember."

The girl was silent, then
asked, "What did you do with him?"

"Sally and I buried
him out behind the carriage house. We picked some petunias and put
them on his grave, and maybe when you feel like it, we can plant some
flowers there, pansies maybe, something that will grow in the shade."

Esther jammed the
stereoscope to her face and didn't respond.

"There are some
questions I want to ask you girls. I hope they won't be too hard for
you to answer."

"What, Aunt Sophie?
Ask me! Ask me!" Sally demanded loudly. "I bet I can answer
anything!"

"I didn't mean 'hard'
because you might not know the answers, but 'hard' because it may be
difficult to talk about. It's about the day your mother fell down the
stairs."

Sally looked her
expectantly. Esther kept the stereoscope pressed to her face.

"You two were playing
on the front porch after school, and then, when you came in, you
found your mother."

Sally nodded. Esther didn't
move.

"What I want to know
is whether you heard anything while you were on the porch."

"Like what?"
Sally asked.

"Oh, voices from
inside, maybe."

"Sure we did,"
Sally said.

Sophie looked at Esther.
She had still not moved. She seemed frozen with the stereoscope to
her face. "Whose voices were they, Sally?"

"Oh, I don't know
that. I mean, one was my mother's, I'm pretty sure, but I don't know
about the other one. All we could hear were just like, you know, the
sounds of the voices going up and down."

"The one besides your
mother's. Was it a man's voice or a woman's?"

"Oh, a man's voice,
for sure."

"No!" Esther
shouted. She dropped the stereoscope and it fell clattering to the
floor. "You're a liar!" she screamed at Sally, her face
contorted, the tendons standing out in her neck.

"What's wrong with
you, Esther?" Sally asked, bewildered.

"You're a liar!"

"I'm not lying, I'm
not," Sally said, her eyes appealing to Sophie.

Sophie put up a hand out to
Sally to be silent; then she asked Esther, "What do mean? Did
you hear something else? Another voice?"

"It wasn't a man! It
wasn't! It was mother and some lady, yes, one of her friends."

"Esther, that's not
true!" Sally interjected. "I remember you said it sounds
like mother and father quarreling again, like they used to do at
night."

Esther's eyes flew to
Sophie, her entire face taught and terrified.

And suddenly Sophie
understood. "Oh, Esther, oh, dear little girl. It wasn't your
father. It wasn't." She saw suspicion join the fear in the
girl's eyes. "He was somewhere else," Sophie said. "When
it happened, he was somewhere else, and people saw him. He couldn't
have been here."

Esther shut her eyes and
leaned toward Sophie, then collapsed against her and began to sob.
Sophie stroked her hair, wiped her tears. "Oh my dear, my dear
little girl, you've thought that all along. How hard it's been, being
afraid someone would ask about the voices and loving your father so
much, and thinking he'd done something dreadful. But he didn't hurt
your mother, he didn't. And it will be all right for you now."
The girl's body was against her, warm, with fast-beating heart.
Sophie rubbed her back, felt the delicate ribs and vertebrae, thought
how fragile she was, how fragile she was.

There was a touch on her
arm, adn when Sphie turned her head, she saw Sally looking forlorn.
She gathered the younger girl into her arms, and the three of them
embraced on the bed, finding comfort and warmth and closeness.

When Esther had fallen
asleep, Sophie loosened the child's arms from around her, moved the
dolls, and gentle laid her head on the pillow. Sally was still very
much awake, so Sophie took her hand and they tiptoed from the room,
Sophie the slower because she was limping slightly.

Donwstairs in the drawing
room, Anna May was waiting. "Oh, Sophie, I called, and Mrs. Syms
said you were awake and feeling so much better. I knew you'd want to
know about Amy."

I know about Amy, Sophie
thought. She wasn't here. She didn't kill my sister.

"She's still very
upset, but Lydia's with her," Anna May was saying.

Anna May was talking about
yesterday, Sophie realized, about Amy's reaction to Baby's death.
"I... I was surprised she reacted so strongly. I never sensed
that she was... well, involved with Baby personally. Helping her was
simply a duty, and not a very pleasant one for her. Or at least
that's the impression she gave."