Imogene located their belongings on a far platform in front of one of the storage sheds. The warehouses were open to the weather, the roof on the open side sloping down above a raised platform and out over the tracks. Imogene ducked under an angled support beam and climbed the steps.
The men who were working there stopped what they were doing and eyed her askance, clearly undecided what the occasion of a woman visitor called for, not to mention the visit of a woman of Imogene’s stature. One of them spat decorously over the side of the platform, two pulled their hats off. Two others, fortunate enough not to be confined to the platform, scurried off, leaving their companions to fend for themselves.
Imogene had no difficulty procuring storage space for her furnishings. She promised to call for them as soon as she had found permanent lodging, and offered to pay a rental fee in the interim, but the man in charge refused, insisting that they took up no more room than a cat.
On her return she found Sarah huddled on top of the suitcases, hunched almost double. Vomit stained the front of her dress. “Oh, my poor dear,” Imogene murmured, ineffectually dabbing at the dress with her pocket handkerchief.
Sarah looked at her listlessly. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’ll get you someplace you can lie down,” Imogene promised, and hurried into the shadowy recesses of the station.
Behind a long counter partitioned off into several working areas, three men, wearing collars, their sleeves held up with garters, went about the business of the railroad. A knot of men at the counter were arguing vehemently over a missing shipment of harness leather. Imogene skirted them and located the clerk who seemed least concerned with the fray.
“Pardon me.” She raised her voice to get his attention. “I am just arrived with another lady. She’s ill. Is there a place nearby that would be suitable? We’ll be staying here indefinitely.”
The young man she addressed was absorbed in the argument. “Where’s your menfolk?” he said absently.
“We’re traveling alone.”
“They ain’t come to meet you?”
“We are not expecting to be met.”
His face crinkled into a practiced leer and he turned his eyes to her for the first time. Immediately the half-smile disappeared with all thought of fancy ladies. He was all repentant respect under the unflinching gaze of the definitive Schoolteacher. “I beg your pardon, ma’am. I was woolgathering. Expecting those fellas might come to blows. Two lone ladies, you say. I expect the Broken Promise’d be the place. Fred and Lutie run a nice clean house, and nobody’d think the worse of you for staying there. Lutie’d see to that. It’s just down the main street to your right. Everything’s on Virginia Street, pretty much.”
Imogene thanked him and left the hand luggage in his car. With Sarah leaning heavily against her shoulder she set out for the Broken Promise. It was about a quarter of a mile from the station, set back from the street behind a white picket fence. A weathered rocking chair graced the narrow veranda, and an ample woman with faded brown hair and a friendly, fleshy countenance was stooped over, planting bulbs along the lattice skirting. The woman straightened up and pulled off her gardening gloves as Imogene opened the gate.
“The mite looks a bit poorly,” she clucked, and without further ado she shored up Sarah’s other side and bustled them in out of the wind. She settled them in the second room off the top of the staircase, saying, “I only got a couple of rooms at present, and this’n is the nicest.”
Sarah’s skin was hot to the touch and she shook with chills. The two older women stripped off Sarah’s soiled outergarments and put her to bed. The stocky innkeeper was Lutie Bone; she and her husband, Fred, owned and ran the Broken Promise. Lutie sent a boy to fetch their luggage and went down herself to find a cot that Imogene had requested.
Imogene looked at her watch. It was just half past four. Sarah was dozing. For a few moments she regarded the sleeping girl indecisively. Then she wrote a quick note and pinned it to the cloth cover on the bedstand, where Sarah could not fail to see it if she awoke.
The wind had picked up, scouring a fine dust from the streets and driving it against the wooden façades of the buildings. Imogene let herself out the gate. To the right, Virginia Street petered out into scattered homes and disreputable-looking shops. To the left was the bulk of the town, with its stores and eating houses. Holding on to her hat, she turned resolutely left in search of Isabelle Anne and her husband.
It took an hour to canvass the post office, the courthouse, and finally the stationer’s where Isabelle Anne Close’s husband had worked. The Englewoods had moved to Sacramento.
Letting the wind snatch her hat awry and whip her hair from its pins, she trudged back to the hotel. Mount Rose threw its shadow across the wide valley floor, and without the sun, the wind lost every vestige of spring and blew bitterly cold. Exhaustion drew down Imogene’s cheeks and deepened the creases around her eyes and mouth; she looked like a woman in her forties.
Several people were gathered around the fireplace in the parlor: a man and his wife and an elderly woman with thinning white hair piled elaborately, if inexpertly, on top of her head. Avoiding their curious glances, Imogene went straight up to the room. There was no light showing under the door and she turned the knob slowly, careful not to make too much noise. The room was deep in dusk and shadow. “Sarah, are you asleep?” she whispered. There was no answering rustle. She closed the door quietly. Without lighting a lamp, Imogene unpinned her hat and sank into a chair, her shoulders stooped. She rubbed her eyes tiredly. “What to do, what to do,” she muttered to herself. Gray in the evening light, her face in the looking glass caught her attention and she stared at her reflection. Hair stuck out from her head like straw, one strand falling down over her eyes. “Double, double, toil and trouble,” she said wryly, and turned her back on herself, massaging her temples.
When Imogene’s eyes had adjusted to the half-light, she noticed that Sarah was not in the bed. “Sarah?” she called, and stood to walk around the footboard. A candle was extinguished on the floor, a scar burnt in the hardwood. Sarah was sprawled beside it, her petticoats tangled around her knees, her hand outstretched toward the candle. Imogene knelt and cradled her in her arms.
Sarah’s eyes fluttered open and she looked around her with the gaze of a stranger. “I fell,” she murmured. “I have to get Matthew inside before the storm hits; I can hear the wind.”
Imogene pressed her cheek against the girl’s burning forehead, rocking back and forth. “Oh dear God,” she whispered. “Oh dear God.”
18
SARAH THRASHED IN A PRIVATE NIGHTMARE, SOMETIMES RECOGNIZING Imogene but more often calling for people who were familiar to her childhood. Always she cried for her mother and David and begged for her son. Imogene stayed awake through the nights, watching the thin, tortured face by the light of a shielded lamp.