The Threshold (25 page)

The man in the Bronco stepped out, folded his paper, and laid it on the car seat. He stuck a thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled twice. An answering two whistles came from down the road. Aletha knelt beside Cree and pulled him over on his back.

“Careful,” the man with the rifle said. “I think he might have some broken things.”

Cree had swollen lips and blood stringing down from his hairline. But he had a pulse.

“There was some information he refused to share with us,” Duffer explained.

“He doesn’t know where it is and neither do I.”

“I expect he’ll be slightly more helpful if he sees that you will be hurt far worse than he is now if he doesn’t help. Perhaps we could persuade you to persuade him even.”

“Why?” Aletha’s stomach cramped. “You’d just kill us all if you found it. You’d have to.”

“I’d certainly have to if I didn’t,” Duffer said pleasantly. Tracy made a noise in her throat. A third man walked up the road from the direction of Callie’s house. He had a handgun, out and ready, and an expression of detached disinterest. Duffer didn’t look up from his examination of Cree Mackelwain’s bruised face. “Wake him. His girlfriend’s here.”

The new man found an empty beer bottle in the weeds and held it down in the stream that flowed out of the mine’s entrance to let it fill with the milky-turquoise water. He poured it slowly on Cree’s upturned face, and clotting blood thinned to pinkish rivulets. Aletha reached up to push the bottle away and the man kicked her in the face with his boot before she had time to move or even think. Now Aletha lay on the ground, her mouth so alive with pain it made her nose run. When she wiped it away, blood mixed with mucus on her hand.

“Amazing how easy it is to make a pretty girl ugly, isn’t it?” Duffer said, and when Cree moaned he ordered the other two to get him on his feet. “He can see better what we do to the girlfriend.”

It was the total lack of emotion that deadened all hope around these men. They didn’t even seem to enjoy brutality that much. It was as casual as eating a sandwich. And killing would be too. Aletha could tell from Tracy’s expression that this had occurred to her as well. The two gunmen held Cree swaying between them each with an arm through his, leaving them a spare hand for their weapons. He kept coughing and gasping with the pain it brought. He wasn’t aware of much else yet. Aletha felt terrible for him but mostly worried she was soon to die while incongruously feeling for loosened teeth with her tongue.

“He thought it must be in the mine, but couldn’t find it there,” she heard herself saying as if a part of her imagined there was some use to even talking to these machines. And then she listened. Everyone but Cree listened. A car engine? Airplane?

“Into the tunnel.” Duffer grabbed the handgun and his friends dragged Cree away while the gun motioned Aletha to her feet.

“We told the sheriff we were coming up here,” Tracy offered as she squeezed through the opening between the metal door and the wall of the mine.

“Stuff it, dyke,” Duffer told her, and followed Aletha through the opening. The only light in the place came from that crevice they’d entered by, and it didn’t come very far. Aletha wanted to bolt for that light, but it would make her such an easy target. Cree moaned and coughed out of the dark.

“Put him down and those two with him. I’m going for the lantern.”

Someone grabbed Aletha’s hair, yanked her backward until she fell, stuck cold metal behind her ear. “Not one sound. You don’t want I should get startled.”

The pulled hair smarted and her nose ran again. The light blurred and wavered as her eyes watered, but shadowy objects appeared slowly. She blinked tears and a squarish thing sat in front of her on little wheels. The rock in her necklace lay warm and scratchy between her breasts and then grew almost prickly hot but she was afraid to reach for it with the gun at her head. Duffer returned with a light that hurt her eyes. “Just a pickup passing through to the lakes. Now, where were we?” The light came back to Aletha. “We were going to entertain the girlfriend. He conscious?”

“What the shit?” the man behind Aletha said as more lights appeared above them. Cruel fingers released her hair.

A string of lights appeared on the ceiling. And sounds—the background rumble of the mill in a mining town alive, a clanging of metal striking metal, men’s distant voices, the sneezy smells of raw timber and dusty hay. The iron door to the outside had dissolved and the gray-metal skeleton of the snowshed extended toward the mill. In the other direction the overhead lights stretched into the distance and disappeared. The cavernous tunnel had no end now. Duffer switched off his battery lantern and turned a complete circle, staring at the change in the scenery. The man with the rifle walked a short distance down the track.

“Aletha?” Cree was sitting up holding his head and squinting at her. “Run. Get out of here!”

The growls of clearing throats, snorts, hacking coughs, laughter, boots crunching gravel—a group of men, perhaps twenty or more—moved along the tunnel toward them. They carried small round pails with lids and long hammers and other tools Aletha didn’t know. They wore droopy water-stained hats, a few with unlit candles in metal holders still in the brims. The man with the rifle raised it. His face had lost its mechanical look.

“Aletha,” Tracy said in a breathy voice, as if she’d been running, “I think for once you did something right.”

“You did this?” Duffer turned to Aletha and then quickly back to the advancing men. Their faces were so dirty they looked as if they’d tried to disguise themselves with blackface. The ones in front slowed and stopped, and were jostled from behind. They spread out. The laughter and coughing quieted. Eyes rested on the guns aimed at them.

“Hit’s the angel wot warned of the cave-in.”

“Angels don’t bleed.”

“Them women are wearing pants.”

“What do we do, Duffer?”

“We get out of here. Cover our exit.” Duffer was already backing down the tracks into the snowshed. He dropped the lantern. He turned and ran between stacks of lumber and baled hay to a side door. The other two followed, not bothering to keep their weapons trained on the miners, who were beginning to growl again, but not from phlegm this time.

Cree lay back down, coughing and groaning. As Aletha started for him, he and the light closed up in the cat-eye oval and disappeared. Tracy stood in the niche between the iron door and the earthen wall.

“Help me with Cree,” Aletha told her. “He’s right over here.”

But the muddied miners and the sounds and the smells and the injured Cree Mackelwain were gone.

28

Mrs. Stollsteimer met Callie O’Connell at the kitchen door off the alley as the girl tried to sneak back into the hotel after her visit to the shaded side of Telluride. The housekeeper gave Callie the nastiest duties available and promised to end her employment the minute she could contact one of her parents. But John O’Connell arrived in the next week to talk her into reconsidering. He promised Callie would never do such a thing again. “She’s but a child, ma’am, here to learn under your fine teaching.” He explained that his ailing wife and invalid son would soon be returning from Denver and he’d been able to find only a room to house them. They needed Callie’s earnings as never before. He’d found himself a place at the Smuggler and a bed at its boardinghouse. He took Callie aside and gave her a wink. “It’ll not be long and we’ll all be together, darling. You’ll do it for your Ma’am and your brother?”

“Why did you tell me Aunt Lilly was dead?”

“Did I ever say she was? Or that she wasn’t? Your Ma’am will explain such things as a man can’t. Are you not just filled with longing to see them, Callie?”

Her father hadn’t noticed that Callie was limping, but Aunt Lilly had and she’d measured Callie’s feet. One day a new pair of soft black boots arrived by way of a gentleman staying at the hotel. “I see that father of yours finally bought you some new shoes,” Mrs. Stollsteimer said when she noticed the boots. “They appear costly for someone in such a precarious financial state as he claims.”

Callie allowed the housekeeper to think what she would and reveled in her new comfort. But her general unhappiness grew at the thought of having to live apart from her mother and Bram when they moved to Telluride. Word came at last that they were settled in a rooming house in Finntown and Mrs. Stollsteimer gave Callie permission to leave the hotel to visit them. Finntown was a section around the depot inhabited largely by working-class Finns. It lay on the south side of town but was separated from the bawdy section by an invisible curtain of respectability and in some places by a buffer of warehouses.

Her mother was waiting for her on the landing of a staircase attached to the side of a house with pretty wood banisters around its front porch and a gleaming picket fence. Callie hid her face in Luella’s clothing. Her mother had never carried much extra flesh but now it seemed all that lay beneath the dress was bones. Finally Luella held Callie away and knelt in front of her. “Has it been so very bad for you?” There was a blackness to the skin around her eyes. “You’ve grown so since last I saw you.”

The room held two cots with a blanket hung between on a wire. It had a wardrobe, Ma’am’s trunk, a small table with two straight-backed chairs, an oval braided rug, and obviously no room for Callie. Bram’s liquid eyes looked huge in his skull-face and were about all that reminded her of him. A knitted cap covered his head. His hands hung massive at the end of stick arms. He was still very tall but seemed to have shrunk because of a rounded stoop. He lowered his eyes and turned away from her, folded himself onto a chair with odd jerky movements. Callie put her arms all the way around his shoulders, a thing she never could have done before, and clung to him without speaking as she had to her mother. When she didn’t release him he finally relaxed, laid his head against the side of hers.

Luella didn’t notice the new boots until Callie’s second visit. Callie was sitting on the edge of Bram’s cot while he rested, telling him about the funny people who stayed at the New Sheridan Hotel and Miss Heisinger’s grand clothes, when Luella returned from helping Mrs. Pakka in the kitchen. A portion of their room and board was deducted for this service and Luella garnered extra scraps for Bram. But most often he refused them. “Callie, those are lovely new shoes but why would your father buy such dear ones when we’re in these straits?”

“Aunt Lilly gave them to me. And money to send Bram’s letter too.”

“But she’s dead, Callie.” Bram’s voice had deepened, seemed too powerful for his new body.

“She’s not, Bram. She’s just Floradora now and she lives right here in Tell—”

“She is dead.” Ma’am stood over them, arms folded and face ashy-colored.

“But I talked to her and she—”

“She is dead to us. And as good as dead to herself. You are never to speak to her again or to mention her name. And, Callie, you are never to go near that side of town again. Do you understand?”

Callie did not understand and on her next visit when she’d coaxed her brother out for a walk in the sun, he wasn’t much help. “She’s done something evil,” he said sadly. “I’m not to speak of her to you.” He scratched at the knit cap. Bram had caught a fever during his illness and wore the cap because he’d lost his hair. “Don’t go that way. People will see me.”

Her brother shuffled his feet now like old Mr. Macintosh. Ma’am had brought books home from the wonderful stone schoolhouse for him but soon he would have to join the other students in the classrooms and face the cruel stares his appearance elicited. When Pa had first seen him he’d gone out into the hallway and wept. Aspen flamed yellow and orange on the ridges that were too high or too far to have been cut away and the air was crisp and afloat with spicy, drying smells. But Bram just watched his boots crunch cinders along the railroad tracks.

“At least you don’t have to clean things,” Callie said, searching for something to cheer him. “And you have so many books.” She tried to keep the envy out of her voice. “Aunt Lilly, I mean Floradora, lives over there.” He still didn’t look up. “She paints her face now.” Callie tried a few skips and left him behind. It was like having a whole new brother to get used to. She slowed and let his misery overwhelm her.

Mildred Heisinger was not as pleased with the second group of young ladies she escorted to Telluride. She’d lost the sense of pride that accompanied her return the first time. Lawyer Barada was so insistent on numbers, Mildred had accepted all who had applied. There were thirteen, of every shape and size, and not one of them could be termed brilliant. Mildred stood on the station platform now waiting for the lawyer, who, his agent said when he came to collect her new charges, had found a house for her and wished to show it to her himself. He would be along shortly.

“You!” a hate-filled voice said behind her, and Mildred whirled to find Charlene Rassmussen in mild disarray. Charlene was one of her finds on the Kansas City trip. Her hair straggled down beneath her hat as if she’d lost her combs. Her travel suit needed sponging and her enthusiasm had turned to outrage.

“Charlene … are you not enjoying your new employment here?”

Charlene became white at the lips, widened her eyes in a maniacal manner. “I am more fortunate than the others, you bitch. I have a benefactor. Mr. Whipple has wired me fare home and offers marriage in spite of you.”

“Mr. Whipple … but isn’t he the neighbor with the bad skin, teeth, and breath and little hair? The one you fled here to escape? What has happened that would cause you to return to someone whom you loathed so?”

Charlene Rassmussen spit directly into Mildred’s face. “Audrey’s vowed to kill you. And I hope she does.”

Mildred wiped her cheek, unable to believe this carefully chosen young woman capable of such repulsive behavior. “Is Audrey unhappy with her employment also?”

Charlene gave out a choking sound and turned on her heel, leaving Mildred with that familiar snaky coldness in her middle. Deep inside, where she couldn’t inspect it carefully, there had been a suspicion that something was not quite right about all this. It was too easy, too perfect, paid far too well. She’d tried to convince herself that common shopkeepers could afford her extravagant salary and expenses to obtain clerks and bookkeepers. That they were sufficiently selfless to be concerned about the supply of marriageable females in the camp. She greeted Lawyer Barada coolly when he drove up in a smart little buggy with a black horse.