The Claim (9 page)

“About what?” I asked.

“Star’s Dry Goods, of course.”

“It got robbed!” another of the Woodley girls said as she shoved forward.

“By a thief!” yet another little girl piped up.

“Someone stole a cask of whiskey during the night,” Mrs. Woodley explained, trying to corral her brood back into the cabin. “Can you believe it? A whole cask of whiskey!” She gave a wry smile. “At least we know it’s a man.”

“Did anyone see anything?” I asked.

Willard’s mother was shaking her head vigorously.

“Apparently Mr. and Mrs. Staroselsky slept right through it. Can you imagine the boldness of a man to steal an entire barrel from right under their roof!”

Actually, I could, I thought, considering a certain hairy fellow.

“I see,” I said with a forced smile. “Will you excuse me please? I need to get back to the hotel.”

“See you at the sewing circle!” she called.

I moved as quickly as I could down the walkway, dodging men and comments about my pie-making abilities. By the time I reached the hotel, my heart was pounding.

Mrs. Frink was sitting in the parlor, studying a ledger.

“Jane?” she called in concern. “Is everything all right?”

But I had to see, right then. I ran straight past her, down the long hallway, and flung open the door to the storage room.

Hairy Bill’s pallet was empty, and his things were missing.

He was gone!

*    *    *

News of what quickly became known as The Most Hideous Crime on Shoalwater Bay swept through town, and by suppertime it was all anyone was talking about. Stealing, all decided, was bad enough. Stealing whiskey, the men unanimously agreed, was an unforgivable offense.

“Jane,” Mrs. Frink murmured to me. “I see that our furry guest is missing.”

“Yes,” I said. “He left yesterday. He told me to thank you very much for your kind hospitality.”

She studied me. “You don’t think he had anything to do with the theft at Star’s?”

My face crumpled a little. “I certainly hope he didn’t.”

  Over the following days speculation as to the identity of the thief ran rampant. Red Charley said that it was all a plot by the British to scare the Americans off the bay. Mr. Staroselsky insisted that he had heard the voices of two men talking, not one. William contended that the whiskey had no doubt been taken by Indians and if it happened again he was sending a letter to the governor. Everywhere I went, I feared I would find a drunk Hairy Bill curled up in a corner, but it seemed that he had well and truly cleared out, like a ghost in the night.

Whiskey and Hairy Bill, however, were not the only things that were missing.

Mrs. Biddle appeared before me in the parlor one morning, with Sally hovering behind her.

“I am most distressed,” she announced in a quivery voice.

I looked up from my desk. “What can I help you with, Mrs. Biddle?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I have been robbed!”

My stomach fell.

“Robbed?” I said. Mrs. Biddle and Sally had a great quantity of jewelry, I knew, and I couldn’t help but picture Hairy Bill covered in pearls and rubies.

“Yes, robbed!” Mrs. Biddle insisted, wagging her head frantically.

Sally seemed to relish my discomfort.

“May I inquire as to what has been taken?” I asked.

Mrs. Biddle thrust a single glove at me. “There! There’s the proof. I feel weak,” she said, and collapsed into a chair, hand on her waist.

I studied the glove for a moment. It was a very nice glove. Finally I looked up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t understand. What does this glove have to do with being robbed?”

Mrs. Biddle fixed her eyes on me and said waspishly, “I should’ve thought it would have been perfectly obvious. Its match was stolen!”

“The glove was stolen?” I echoed.

“Yes! Are you deaf? There were two, and now there is only one. I left them with my other clothes to be laundered, and now one of the gloves is missing! Those are very expensive gloves!”

“And I am missing a stocking,” Sally added.

“A stocking,” I murmured. “I see.”

“Well?” Mrs. Biddle demanded in a haughty voice. “What are you going to do about this? I can’t possibly wear one glove.”

“Or one stocking,” Sally said.

“Perhaps it is still at the laundress’s,” I suggested in a reasonable voice. “I’ll look into it immediately.”

“I should hope so.” Mrs. Biddle huffed and turned. “Come along, Sally dear.”

As the two ladies walked away, I heard Mrs. Biddle say, “Really, it is so hard to find decent help!”

  Mrs. Dodd, the laundress for the hotel, was the wife of a stony-faced, hardworking oysterman. They were an older couple, with no children, and were originally from Maine. Mrs. Dodd in particular was very temperamental, but then doing laundry could do that to a person.

When I reached Mrs. Dodd’s at the other end of town, I heard shouting before I even opened the door to the cramped-looking little cabin. The strong scent of lye hung in the air.

“You can’t quit and leave me with all this work!” Mrs. Dodd shouted. “You work for me, you got that? I make the rules!”

“
Wēk!
” a voice said firmly.
Wēk
meant no.

The door opened abruptly and a young Chinook woman walked past me, her face set.

Mrs. Dodd shouted after her. “And I ain’t paying you for this week, you hear me?”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Dodd,” I said uncertainly.

Mrs. Dodd was a stout woman with thin graying hair pulled back from her forehead in a damp mess. Her apron was streaked with thick brown stains, and I half shuddered, imagining what they might be. But it was her hands that gave me pause. They
were a bright red from the lye soap and hot water required for washing.

“Second one I lost this month.” She wagged her finger after the departing young woman. “Them savages won’t work hard, that’s their problem. They’re lazy!” She turned on me with a snarl. “What da ya want? If you’re looking for Willard, he ain’t here. He’s probably running after that half-breed girl.”

I almost said, “What half-breed girl?” when I realized that she must have been referring to Katy, M’Carty and Cocumb’s daughter. It made me wince to hear Katy described in such a manner, no matter how often I might hear people like Mrs. Dodd and Mrs. Biddle speak unkindly—and unfairly—about the Chinook.

I forced a smile. “Actually, I’m not looking for Willard. I just wanted to speak with you for a moment about the laundry for the hotel.”

“Come on in,” she said, opening her door reluctantly. “I don’t have all day. I have twice the work now, thanks to her.”

The cabin was a ramshackle mess. Filthy laundry lay heaped in piles, and the smell of the unwashed clothing combined with the harsh scent of lye was so powerful that I had to hold my breath for a moment. Clotheslines hung haphazardly back and forth across the cabin. It was nearly impossible on Shoalwater Bay to hang clothes out to dry, what with the eternal rain, and so the Dodds were obliged to live with other people’s laundry hanging from the rafters of their small cabin. It was little wonder that Mrs. Dodd was temperamental.

I followed her, ducking under a wet sock.

“One of our guests has had some clothing go missing from her laundry. A white glove,” I called after her. “Oh, and a stocking.”

“Are you ’cusing me of being a thief?” she barked.

“Of course not,” I said, waving a hand at the mess of clothes. “Perhaps it’s hanging somewhere in here? Maybe it’s still drying?”

Her face was set like a belligerent bulldog’s. “You know how much laundry I do? I wash the clothes for that whole hotel and all these men, and I ain’t got no help! And I tell you right here and now I ain’t being paid nearly enough for all my troubles. Why, my man says I should be charging double for all the work I’m doing for the hotel. My man says—”

I blanched. Charge double? This was not going well at all.

“I understand completely,” I said soothingly. “It’s just that this is a rather important guest, and I thought I’d—”

“You thought you’d come over here with your hoity-toity ways and accuse me of stealing, didn’t ya?”

“Not at all,” I said nervously. “I just thought it might have been misplaced in all the”—I almost said “mess” but caught myself in time—“work.”

She waved a red, bony finger in my face. “If you don’t like how I do the laundry, you can take it somewhere else!”

As I stood there pressed against a damp sheet that smelled of old dog, I reconsidered my earlier opinion of Mrs. Dodd. Mrs. Dodd wasn’t temperamental.

She was terrifying!

“You’re perfectly right. So sorry to take up your valuable time,” I said quickly, stumbling backward through the door.

“I’ve a good mind to let you do the laundry yourself!” Mrs. Dodd shouted, following after me.

I smiled overly widely. “Oh no, please, we’re just thrilled with your work.”

“Humph,” she said. Then she turned and stomped away.

As I watched Mrs. Dodd waddle back inside, I complimented myself on discovering the location of Mrs. Biddle’s missing white glove.

It was stuck to the sole of Mrs. Dodd’s muddy shoe.

A break in the
case of the whiskey thief came the next morning.

Willard came running into the kitchen, breathing hard. “There’s been another robbery! But they caught the thief this time! He was trying to steal whiskey from Mr. Russell, and Mr. Russell caught him red-handed! There’s gonna be a trial at Star’s!”

Mrs. Frink and I stared at each other.

“What does he look like?” I asked.

He scratched his head. “I dunno. Like a normal fella, I reckon.”

“Is he …” I swallowed. “Hairy?”

Willard scrunched up his face at me. “Hairy? Whadya mean? Like he don’t shave?”

“You ought to go take a look, Jane,” Mrs. Frink suggested.

“Come along, Willard,” I said, and we started down the street.

“He’s been locked in Mr. Russell’s cowshed,” Willard said. “They’re gonna hang ’im!”

“Willard,” I said in exasperation. “They’re not going to hang a man over a barrel of whiskey.”

He nodded his head vigorously. “They sure will, Miss Jane. All the men been saying that stealing whiskey’s a hanging offense if ever there was one!”

By the time we reached Star’s, a large crowd had already gathered and was spilling out the door. Clearly no oysters would be harvested this day, for it seemed that every unwashed oysterman in the territory had decided to observe the spectacle. Star’s often stood in for a public meeting place, as we had no proper courthouse. Two men carrying a large barrel preceded me up the steps and into the store.

“This way,” Willard whispered, and I held on to the boy’s shirt as he pushed his way through the throng, deliberately stepping on men’s feet. Amazingly, the crowd parted in the wake of Willard’s single-minded attack, and he pulled me over to the wooden counter and nimbly hopped up.

“Come on,” he urged. “You can see everything up here!”

I climbed up gingerly onto the counter and took a seat. He was right. The counter gave a perfect view of the proceedings. There were Mrs. Woodley and her husband and their girls, who were hopping up and down trying to see what was going on. Mrs. Hosmer gave me a little wave from the other side of the room, where she stood next to her adoring husband. Red Charley and his cohorts stumbled in, looking drunk as usual. He blew me an elaborate kiss.

Mr. Staroselsky was behind the counter doing a brisk business selling coffee and biscuits to the waiting crowd as Mrs. Staroselsky tried to calm a fractious Rose. Farther up front, Mr. Russell sat on a bench, chewing tobacco, and next to him was M’Carty, who had an arm around Cocumb. Behind them sat Father Joseph and Auntie Lilly. Even Mrs. Dodd was there, with her equally dour husband next to her. At the rear of the store, William entered with Mr. Biddle at his side. Right on their heels came Jehu and Keer-ukso.

Jehu met my eyes across the room. I saw a hint of wariness in his gaze and wondered at the cause. I rather abruptly remembered what had happened the last time I had seen him, and smiled to assure him all was well. His blue eyes immediately filled with warmth.

Suddenly a man shouted, “They’re bringing him in!”

I closed my eyes. I could not bear to see Hairy Bill in chains.

“Look, Miss Peck. Thar’s the fella. He ain’t too hairy,” Willard said.

My eyes snapped open and I found myself staring not at Hairy Bill, but at another man I vaguely recognized. The man in question was well trussed with rope and had great dark circles under his eyes. He had a gold tooth and a bald head.

It came to me at once that this was the man who had been lingering behind the hotel with his friend that evening. By the barrels, no less. No doubt they had been intending to steal them, too. I felt a pang of real regret for thinking Hairy Bill the thief.

Two burly men hauled the culprit through the parting crowd to the front of the room, where Mr. Swan was already sitting at a
makeshift desk. They pushed the fellow down onto an upturned wooden box and stood on either side of him to prevent his escape.

“Order, order!” Mr. Swan called, banging his pipe on the desk.

Mr. Swan waited until the room was quiet and cleared his throat. “Now, we have gathered here concerning the matter of a cask of stolen whiskey, a particularly grave offense, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.”

“Hang ’im!” Red Charley shouted from the back.

“Whip ’im!” another cried.

I rather doubted there would even have been a trial if the fellow had stolen a cask of molasses.

“Yes, well, before we settle on the punishment, we must first bring charges against this gentleman, called …,” and at this Mr. Swan squinted at the paper before him. “Bowman? Is that your name, man?”

“It is, and what of it?” the man said belligerently.

“Have you a Christian name?”

“I already told you my name is Bowman.”

Mr. Swan pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “Very well. Perhaps, Mr. Russell, if you could be so kind as to relate the events that transpired last evening?”