The Threshold (35 page)

“Mildred,——are.”

Mildred jumped. How long had she stood here?

“– called———phone.———answer.” Doris Lowell led her back down the stairs. “Meal———nice. Mustn’t————stairs.” Doris helped her into her chair and the woman who brought her hot meal put the tray across her lap. Doris turned on the television too low for Mildred to hear it, but the vegetables looked soft enough for once. One of them handed Mildred her teeth. “Now,—–——a good girl.”

That wasn’t what they used to call her and Mildred hadn’t been a “girl” since most people around here were born. How long could she go on like this? Her age was unseemly. Mildred didn’t know how to stop being, and feared the alternative. She suspected she was eating some kind of fish, a square of something warm and salty. The buttered mashed potatoes and chocolate pudding were best. She felt so much better. Had she forgotten breakfast?

“——think? All right——stairs. –———worried.”

“I’m just fine, Doris. Don’t fuss.” Mildred removed the painful teeth. She must wash them more often. That ridiculous child on the television was going to have another baby. Illegitimate of course. Doris was still watching her. Doris thought herself old for a few gray hairs, but she could walk, bend, carry without pain. Mildred could remember when Doris moved to town. “You go back to your family.” That’s right, Doris’s family was dead or moved away. “I’ll be just fine.”

“——coffee.” Doris handed her a hot cup. Something was wrong. Mildred usually fixed her own coffee. Heat felt so good in her bones now that she was old. Letty carried pails and pails of water to heat for her baths. Something was still wrong. Doris was still here and the coffee was gone.

Tracy watched the same soap as was on Mildred’s TV while Aletha sketched Charles, who sat on the windowsill watching the lack of activity on Pacific Avenue. After their cemetery excursion she’d left Cree gorging at the Floradora and come home to Charles, depressed and fearful of setting things off by her mere presence, losing Cree to history again. She felt cursed.

“So you come back to lose
me
in the past,” Tracy said. “Thanks.”

The process of sketching was soothing, the sweep and jerk of the pencil, the shape of the cat taking form. “Kitty, hold your tail still.”

But the tip of Charles’s tail twitched like a worm caught by a shovel edge. His purring increased and softened during dramatic lulls in the soap opera and five-inch whiskers trembled slightly in the light. His front toes tightened and stretched, the claws sounding a thin scritching on the old wooden sill. He made the shabby crib cozy just by being content, being Charles sitting in the window.

Superimposed on the tranquil scene, Aletha kept seeing Cree sitting back on his heels, a dirt smudge on his forehead, looking up at her from the cemetery sod. She was becoming dangerously dependent on him for something to think about.

Charles stiffened. His tail began to swell. He moaned warning in his throat and stared into the room unblinking, owl-eyed. A haziness formed over his head. Aletha thought she saw a shelf with a candle burning in a candlestick, a beer stein on one side of it and a decorated plate standing on edge on the other. She blinked it away and screamed. Tracy came off her bed and Charles soared into the room like a flying squirrel. “Run out the back way, fast!”

Aletha snatched Charles by the hind feet as he fought to scoot under her bed. She carried him twisting and clawing into the kitchen. “Callie girl,” a voice behind her cried, a male voice, young, heartsick. “Callieeee …”

Aletha joined Tracy outside and righted the cat. He was so stiff he could have spent the night in a deep freeze. She looked around the corner of the crib. Pacific Avenue appeared to be the one she knew every day. She ran along the side to the street until she could see the Datsun parked where she’d left it. She fought cat claws to free a hand to open the door and hurled Charles in. He landed on Tracy, who was slipping in on the other side. Then it was a struggle to extricate the keys from her tight jeans pocket, and her heart felt like it was trying to pound its way up her throat. The Datsun tore up Pacific Avenue and headed for Colorado Avenue and out of town. Tracy heaved Charles into the backseat and braced herself against the dash like Cree did. “It was happening again, right?” Tracy shouted as if they were being pursued by the clamor of a hundred bombers. “I left the TV on. Where are we going?”

“If it happens because of me, maybe it won’t when I’m gone, maybe we can outrun it.” Aletha felt the quartz pendant hanging outside her shirt. It was definitely warm. Her hand came away with a faint rusty stain. “But I can’t go anyplace old. It’s old places, buildings—”

“Aletha, everything’s old in Telluride, except new houses, condos. Aren’t you supposed to report to the marshal before leaving town?”

“But the land they’re on is old. We have to get away from Telluride. Someplace … I know, Renata’s. That area is all new, isn’t it?”

“The land is old everywhere. Who knows what was on it? It’s Renata’s day off.”

“Good. Then she’ll be home. We’ll call the marshal’s office from there.” Renata didn’t answer their knock, but she hadn’t locked the door. “Renata? You home? It’s Aletha.” The refrigerator hummed on the kitchen mezzanine above. The heating system clicked and crackled softly. Sun bathed the greenhouse area, and the place had a slight muggy-jungle smell. Aletha released Charles, who plomped up the central stairs with a parting grainy “Waaaaa.”

“Hey, Aletha, come see.” Tracy stood between two cascading house plants at the front wall of windows and pointed to the deck outside that held a round picnic table and several lounges. An aluminum contraption that fanned out toward the angle of the sun contained a naked woman stretched down the middle.

“So that’s how she keeps her tan.” Aletha pulled the pendant up over her head and slipped it into her pants pocket, feeling a little silly, but maybe … She found a door to the side of all that glass and stepped out. “Renata, I hate to bother you on your day off, but I’ve got trouble.”

Renata, with a white towel wrapped around her head and a white bathrobe, looked like a blue-eyed Indian as she handed them Perrier with ice and lemon. “You saw a shelf with a candlestick and beer stein on the wall and decided you must escape Telluride,” she summed up what Aletha had told her with a studied blankness. “Aletha, there’s a woman in town, a sort of counselor. I wonder if you’d consider telling her your story.”

“It’s not just her, Renata. Cree and I can vouch for this stuff,” Tracy said as Renata led them down the staircase from the kitchen.

“That’s my father’s,” Aletha said when she came abreast of Jared Kingman’s pueblo scene. “I mean, he painted that.”

“You’re that Kingman family? Any idea where I can get more of those? They’re worth a fortune now.”

“How can you afford this setup on Renata’s Helpers?” Tracy asked bluntly.

“Business”—Renata settled on a couch, drew her legs up under her robe, and stared Tracy down—“is good. And with two marriage settlements, the sale of a business in Aspen, and some wise investments I assure you I can afford my life-style. I do not deal drugs, if that’s what you were thinking. And, Aletha, please tell me why you honored me when you decided to escape Telluride.”

“I thought if I came someplace where there wasn’t any history it couldn’t catch me. There’s no history here, is there?”

“As I remember, there used to be a sawmill on or very near this site, and for all I know, Indians camped here while hunting before that.”

“You see a buzz saw coming out of a wall,” Tracy warned, “don’t stand around and try to figure it out.”

Renata called the marshal for them and then she called Cree to persuade him to prepare dinner for them all. “He’s one of the best chefs in town.”

She drove in to pick him up and buy some groceries and he made them a creamy lobster-and-vegetable casserole. He and Tracy went over their experiences in old Telluride while Renata came up with sarcastic remarks. They were finishing their coffee when Doris Lowell called.

“Mildred Heisinger is poorly. Mrs. Lowell’s worried.” Renata held her hand over the mouthpiece. “The old lady keeps asking for ‘Snoop.’ Doris thinks she means you, Aletha.”

“Tell Mrs. Lowell I’ll come in tomorrow. I’m afraid to go back to Telluride tonight. It’s like things are starting to happen again, and—”

“At Mildred’s age, Aletha, there may be no tomorrow.”

40

The O’Connells finally decided that after Christmas, when the new school term began, Callie could give up her work and go to school. Both Pa and Bram were earning now, and most of their debts had been paid. Mrs. Pakka had agreed to allow Callie to share her mother’s tiny room off the parlor. Callie danced from cot to cot in the hotel’s third-floor room when she surprised the rest of Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls with her wonderful news. She vowed secretly to end her visits to Aunt Lilly’s.

Arthur Collins left a wife and two young children. The vicious murder sickened union and nonunion men alike. Vincent St. John, president of the local chapter of the Western Federation of Miners, offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for information that would lead to the capture of the murderer. This worried Duffer and Maynard, who hid their blood money under a floorboard in Mrs. Pakka’s attic and took jobs carrying crates at the Telluride Transfer Station across the street from Mildred Heisinger’s haven. A grand jury convened to charge Vincent St. John with the murder of Arthur Collins. A district judge threw out the murder charge for lack of evidence. However, in the minds of the majority in Telluride, the “Western Federation of Murderers” had been tried and found guilty. Mr. Bulkeley Wells, a man Callie had merely glimpsed during his stays at the hotel, arrived in his personal railroad car with his family and valet. He moved them into Collins’s house and took over management of the Smuggler-Union. He closed operations down for a month in mourning for the slain manager, and John O’Connell had no work. Callie’s reprieve was postponed for another school term.

“You’d be so far behind now, they’d just put you in with the little kids,” Opal Mae Skoog said, thinking to comfort her friend.

“Don’t know what you’d want to waste your time with books and figures for anyway.” Olina Svendt stroked Callie’s head in a motherly way. She’d begun to notice Callie’s brother. The sun had mysterious ways of highlighting the bones in his face under the colorless, unruly hair when he met his sister in the alley behind the kitchens. Callie always found unused food, bread or meaty bones or cake, to take to him, and Olina had learned to hunt such things herself, to step out and offer him extra. His eyes said more than a schoolboy’s should and his hunger intrigued her. Olina wore her long braid coiled on top of her head now.

Callie became a woman that winter, going through the messy menstrual rites with the aid of the other girls, who taught her the proper shame of it. This winter was not as harsh as the previous one and melted away sooner. When it did, the body of W. J. Barney was found in a ravine, nearly destroyed by predators and weather. Barney had been a Smuggler-Union shift boss missing since the 1901 strike during Callie’s first summer in Telluride. She and the girls took turns sneaking out to see the horrible skull with a matting of red hair displayed in the window of a store. The sign next to it announced that this was the work of the union murderers.

Sometimes, when Callie had leave to visit her mother, she’d take roundabout routes between the boardinghouse and the hotel. This served to lengthen her time away from both. Luella had become difficult to talk to. Often Callie would go by way of the railroad station and clear up to the magnificent schoolhouse, then back down to the hotel. One of these times she noticed Miss Heisinger on the front of a livery buckboard, her huge trunks in the wagon bed behind. She’d not stayed at the hotel in a very long time. Curious, Callie followed and stood in the shadows of the stone Transfer Station as the liveryman handed Miss Heisinger down at the gate to a pretty white house.

Callie remembered Bertha Traub saying that the teacher had many fine books in her trunks in Alta. Perhaps that’s why the liveryman struggled with them so now. Perhaps Callie wouldn’t be as far behind in school if she could do some reading.

“Callie, why should she give you books?” Olina said when Callie discussed this with her friends that night. “And if she’s a teacher, she might need them.”

“Don’t you think she might lend me just one?”

“Well … you might have to give her something of yours to keep so she’d know you’d bring it back and not damage it. Like the men leave a deposit at Van Atta’s when they rent a suit.”

“I don’t have any money for a deposit.” Callie reached under her cot for her carpetbag and looked through it. “What about Aletha’s drawing book?”

“I can’t think what she’d want with that.”

But Callie took the sketchbook with her on her next trip out and marched right up to the pretty white house. A Negro woman answered the door and stared at her as if no one had ever visited here before.

“What is it, Letty?” Miss Heisinger called from the interior of the house.

“It’s me, Miss Heisinger. I mean it’s I, Callie O’Connell,” she shouted past the black woman, who was clearly not going to invite her in.

Miss Heisinger appeared and nodded Letty away. She had a flush in her cheeks and no welcome in her voice. “What would you want here, Callie O’Connell?”

“Please, ma’am,” and Callie told her ex-school mistress about her desire for books and her offer of a fine book of drawings as a deposit. Mildred stood poised and still as Callie rushed her sales pitch. She barely blinked all the while Callie talked. “If I’m to ever begin catching up with—”

“Ever begin to catch up.” Miss Heisinger took the drawing book. Her face looked cold as marble as she leafed through it, and did not change when she finally looked over it to Callie. “Do you treasure these drawings for some reason, Callie O’Connell?”

“Oh yes, they’re very grand. Everyone says so.”

Miss Heisinger smiled a tight little smile and closed the door in Callie’s face. She still had the drawing book and Callie had nothing.