Yesterday's Magic (4 page)

Now, as she let Aunt Freida lead her down the
wooden sidewalk, she realized that Sheriff Jedidiah McNeil must be
the son of J.W. McNeil, the man who’d been sheriff in Mantosa for
twenty years before he’d suddenly died five years before. Mother
Bean’s eyes had cooled at the mention of this J.W. and she’d made
odd noises at the back of her throat. Thomas and String had assured
their mother that the son was made of better cloth than the father
had been.

Better cloth?
She didn’t know about
that but there was no arguing that Sheriff McNeil
was
very
handsome and very sexy with his lean hips, his long legs, and his
scuffed boots that seemed to scream
I’m the real deal.
He
had nice thick hair, good teeth, and those incredible eyes. His
looks were pure cashmere.

But she thought he perhaps carried out the
duties of his office more like a polyester blend. When her father
had come to town, Jedidiah had been in charge, responsible for the
law and order. As far as she could tell, he’d done a damn poor job
of it. She wondered if the sheriff had ever figured out what had
happened in his town on December fifth, 1877.

When her father, Averil, and she had been
debating the plan, her father had explained that he hadn’t wanted
Toomay’s body found near the saloon. He hadn’t wanted anybody to
connect the dead man with him. He’d quickly erased all memory of
the event from Delilah’s mind, sent her on her way with several
hundred dollars in her satchel, and
arranged
for Toomay’s
body to be in a deep ditch, outside of town. And then he’d gotten
on his horse and ridden out of town. And tried to forget. About
Rantaan Toomay. About the curse. But he never had because in his
soul, he’d known it was true.

Bella and her aunt passed an unpainted wood
building with its door wide open. She looked inside and could see
the sparks from a hearth and could hear the pounding of metal on
metal. It smelled even worse than the time she’d ironed her rayon
dress on high.

Next they crossed a wide alley. Then they
breezed past the saloon, with its swinging doors and big glass
windows. It looked like it had been plunked out of a movie set.
Bella wanted desperately to stop, to acquaint herself with the
place where her father had encountered the Bad Magic, but she
didn’t know how to explain her sudden interest to her aunt.

Next to the saloon was Stroganhaufer’s
Mercantile, which Aunt Freida waved a hand toward and said, “I’ll
show you my store tomorrow.” They continued on and passed a bigger
building, at least two stories, with nice windows and painted trim,
that had a sign that proclaimed it the
Mantosa Hotel
.

She was glad she’d come a few days early. It
would help her get the lay of the land. Her father, Averil, and she
had agreed that she needed to be in Mantosa before Toomay showed
up. He’d have no way of knowing that she wasn’t originally from the
area, no reason not to trust her. Then, on December fifth, before
he ever started playing that card game, she was going to lure him
aside and do the deed. She patted the pocket that Averil had
carefully sewed into her long skirt. She could feel the small,
round cylinder that held the pain pills that Averil had gotten when
she’d filled her prescription. Once she mixed the pills with a
bottle of whiskey, Toomay wouldn’t know what hit him.

Her aunt pointed to a building across the
street. “We’re headed that way,” she said.

The building looked like a big barn. Above
the wide doorway, someone had nailed letters into the coarse wood.
Livery
. The Y had lost a nail and hung at an angle. The
smell knocked her back when they entered. It was the
throat-clogging scent of dirt, the eye-watering smell of what was
probably horse poop, and then something a little sweeter. She
figured that might be hay or straw or whatever it was that horses
ate or slept on.

There were stalls around the perimeter, and
horses in more than half of them. Several wagons were parked
inside, too. One had two horses hitched up to it.

Directly in front of them, a man knelt next
to a horse. He held one foot in his big hand and used the other
hand to nail on a new shoe.

She hoped he did a better job with the horse
than on his sign. Otherwise, the poor thing would be lopsided for
the next month.

“Afternoon, Wymer,” Aunt Freida called
out.

“Afternoon, Freida. I got your rig ready,” he
said, nodding his head toward the wagon with the horse.

“Thank you. This is my niece, Mrs. Merribelle
Wainwright.”

Wymer stood up and smiled, causing Bella to
note that he was shorter than her and had very few teeth. Those he
had were yellowed and stained brown at the edges. He looked to be
somewhere between sixty and eighty years old. “Pleasure, Ma’am,” he
said. “Good to see you made it safely.”

“Wymer runs the livery and handles all the
mail and telegrams coming in and out of Mantosa,” Aunt Freida
explained.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Bella said.

Freida motioned for Bella to climb up onto
the wagon. It had a narrow wooden seat that looked just big enough
for the two of them, with a ten-foot long flat-bed behind it. Bella
resisted the urge to rub her sore butt.

Once they were situated, Aunt Freida grabbed
the reins and the two horses, both brown with a hint of red in
their shiny coats, took off. Once outside, Freida clicked her
tongue and the horses picked up the pace, their hooves making a
dull thud as they trotted down the hard-packed dirt road.

As they left town, the dirt road grew
narrower and there were tall trees on both sides. She remembered
just enough of her junior-high-school geography to know that
eastern Kansas, where Mantosa was, was wooded, but the farther west
a person went, the trees almost disappeared and the prairie became
an endless stretch of land.

About ten minutes later, they turned into a
lane that led to a small log cabin. Aunt Freida pulled on the reins
and the horses stopped, giving Bella a chance to assess the
building. It was perhaps forty feet long and it had two windows,
one on each side of the wide door. It had a shingled roof and a
tall chimney made out of large stones.

It was sort of charming.

Twenty feet to the right was a barn. It was
twice the size of the cabin and constructed of wide, unpainted
boards, so gray that they almost seemed to fade into the winter
sky. It had a big door, that was closed, and no windows that Bella
could see.

The cabin and the barn were surrounded by
large trees that had lost their fall leaves. Long, barren branches
stretched to the sky. One especially tall tree, near the barn, had
a limb that was almost severed. There was just enough wind that it
gently blew back and forth, scratching against the barn roof. It
was a strangely rhythmic sound but it didn’t do much to put Bella
at ease.

She’d never felt so completely isolated.
Bella looked off to her right, then her left, but didn’t see any
evidence of neighbors. Aunt Freida lived in the middle of freakin’
nowhere.

Evidently sensing Bella’s concern, Aunt
Freida reached over and patted Bella’s knee. “I don’t like people
sniffing up my butt,” she said.

Yes, well.

Aunt Freida’s horses apparently knew the
drill. They pulled the wagon toward the barn and stood, their heads
twitching in anticipation, as Aunt Freida got down. Once she’d slid
open the big door, the horses pulled the wagon inside the dark
building.

Bella couldn’t see much. But the smell was
similar to the Livery, although not as strong. She heard the
scratch of a match and suddenly the building was bathed in soft
light. Her aunt stood next to the wagon, holding a lantern.

The building had a dirt floor and the roof
had a high pitch which allowed for a second story loft. She could
see bales of straw perched there. There was more straw scattered
inside the two horse stalls as well as buckets of water and some
sort of feed.

She managed to get off the wagon without
snagging her long dress on anything and then stood at its side,
feeling useless. It was like any other first day on the job. She
didn’t know where to stand, what to do, and she was filled with a
sudden desire to be anywhere else.

Aunt Freida hung the lantern on a wide post
and then stood in front of the horses. “This here is Sunshine and
this is Rain.” She patted the horses in turn and they tossed their
heads in response. Bella wondered if they were twins—they looked
exactly alike. Aunt Freida began to unhook the horses from the
wagon. “Come on, Ladies,” she said.

Bella was amused. She’d been
Girl
but the horses evidently warranted a higher level
of respect.

Once the horses were unhitched, Aunt Freida
grabbed their halters and led them past a wooden bin filled with
hay. It had wide slats, big enough for them to stick their heads
into. They opened their mouths and tore off chunks of hay with
their big yellowed teeth.

Then Aunt Freida picked up a small tool that
was sitting on a shelf. She knelt down next to the horse closest to
her and picked up his leg. She used the tool to pick out the rocks
and dirt that had accumulated in the hoof. She repeated the action
until all eight hooves had been cleaned, pausing only once when
Rain or Sunshine, Bella wasn’t sure which, decided to poop.

She made a mental note never to bitch about
having to put gas in her car again.

Her aunt led the horses to separate stalls
and Bella heard the sounds of water getting slurped up by huge
tongues. Finally, her aunt hung the lantern back on the wall,
turned down the wick until the light was extinguished, and led
Bella out of the dark barn.

“Let’s get inside,” her aunt said. “Daylight
is about gone.”

When Aunt Freida reached the cabin, she
opened the unlocked door and motioned Bella to precede her. Now,
given the grip and stride she witnessed in Mantosa, and the
austere, no nonsense attitude of the barn, Bella expected the
inside of the cabin to have a similar look. It would be Spartan,
perhaps even a little masculine.

One foot inside, she realized she couldn’t
have been more wrong. It was one big room. On the left side was the
kitchen. Well, sort of. It didn’t necessarily look like her and
Averil’s kitchen but there was a big black stove, some cupboards, a
sink, and a small rectangular table with six straight-back,
unpainted, wooden chairs.

Towards the center of the room sat two
upholstered chairs in a gray fabric that was shiny from use. The
sofa next to the chairs was a pale blue. On the far right hand
side, there was a bed—with sheets and a thin blanket that looked
like they’d been hastily pulled up. It was not nearly as wide as
the full-sized bed she’d left behind, a full 130 years in the
future. There was a closed door on the far side of the cabin,
almost directly across from where they stood.

She thought it was just short of amazing that
she could catalog all these things. It wasn’t amazing because there
were so many things—after all, it was just a table, a few chairs, a
couch, and a bed. What was amazing is that she could see past the
collection of hand-painted dolls, in various stages of dress and
condition, and china tea cups that seemed to take up every square
inch of available surface.

Dolls and tea cups?

There had to be more than a hundred of each.
“My,” she said, unable to think of any other word. Her aunt was
full of contradictions.

“I started collecting them after my Herbert
died. I get them shipped from back East, all plain, and then I
paint them. I make clothes for the dolls, too.”

“They’re beautiful,” Bella said, stepping
forward to finger the skirt of one of the porcelain beauties.

Aunt Freida shrugged. “I just needed
something to keep my hands busy. I suppose you know about things
like that.”

After her mother had died, her father had
dragged his teenage daughters from place to place. They’d had
dinner in a different part of the world every night for three
months while he grabbed on to one activity after another.
Bullfighting. Auto racing. Mountain climbing. It had stopped as
suddenly as it had started and the three of them had returned home.
And tried to pretend everything was okay. “Yes, I think I do,” she
said. She held up her small hard-sided case. “Where should I put
this?”

Aunt Freida pointed to the closed door. “When
me and Herbert first built this cabin, we had our two children
still living with us. We had ourselves our own room,” she said
proudly. “It’s yours while you’re here.”

Which meant that Aunt Freida was giving up
her bed. For her niece. Who wasn’t really her niece. “I don’t want
to take your room,” Bella said. She should probably sleep outside
with the horses.

“You’re not taking my room. I haven’t slept
in there since Herbert died. And since I don’t have much company,
I’ve been airing it out for the better part of a week.” Aunt Freida
walked as she talked and Bella followed her across the room. When
her aunt opened the door of the small bedroom, a blast of cold air
hit Bella.

It looked like this room had escaped the
chaos that permeated the rest of the house. There was a white bowl
and a matching pitcher, both delicately painted with blue flowers,
which sat on the plain wood dresser, but nothing else. She sat her
case on the narrow bed that had a heavy pale gray bedspread and
turned to close the open window. “Smells great to me,” she
said.

Her aunt nodded, as if she was satisfied.
“Privy is out back and so is the pump.”

Privy
.
Outside
. Swell. The
Girl
and the
Ladies
would both be doing their thing
outside.

It wasn’t like she’d never used an outdoor
toilet. She’d done summer camp, after all. But even at twelve,
she’d thought it was disgusting.