“Sorry to have caused such a fuss.”
“You have nothing to apologize for, my friend.”
“Did you give Elizabeth a bonus, too?”
“Better than that. We gave her three months’ paid leave.”
“Paid leave from the City?”
“She’s in North Carolina now.”
North Carolina of the twenty-first century, he meant. “Did she say anything about me before she left?”
“She was down here a few times when you were unconscious and sedated. That was quite a blow to the head you sustained. She was worried about you, but she was also anxious to get back to her family.”
“Naturally so.”
“As for you, you’re not just getting a bonus, you’re getting a permanent pay raise. You’ll be housed in Tower Two again, now that the investigation is over, but you’ll have a lot to show for it.”
“And will Elizabeth be coming back, when her leave is finished?”
“That’s up to her,” Kemp said.
* * *
He moved back into his old dormitory room in Tower Two. The room was unchanged since he had left it. What had changed was his social standing.
More than a few Tower Two employees had lost their jobs or been reprimanded for their role in the smuggling operation, even if all they had done was turn a blind eye to a dubious transaction. Many of them blamed Jesse for that. He was treated to cold stares along with his breakfast coffee; former friends were suddenly reluctant to exchange words with him. So he volunteered for night duty and fence-riding, both solitary jobs.
Riding the fence was thankless work, but he liked the open air and the company of his own thoughts. As the seasons changed and the mornings grew cold, the supply room equipped him with a plastic overcoat stuffed with goose down and a balaclava hat like the knitted hats British soldiers had worn to keep their heads from freezing during the Crimean War. In early December a storm blanketed the prairie with snow, deep enough that Jesse exchanged his three-wheeled cart for a vehicle with tracks and skis. Riding the fence took longer under such circumstances and seemed even more pointless: Any would-be trespasser who managed to trek all the way from the Union Pacific depot to the City’s borders in the heart of winter ought to be given a medal for perseverance, in Jesse’s opinion. Often during his work he saw the tracks of wolves. Once, a palsied old cougar met his eyes through the steel mesh of the fence.
During these expeditions Jesse had ample time for thought. He thought about Phoebe, and in his mind he composed the letters he would later scribble on paper (his handwriting was a schoolboy’s scrawl; he had never had much opportunity to practice it) and mail to her along with his bonus money. He thought about the guns and ammunition that had passed through Futurity Depot, and he wondered where they had gone, and who had paid for them, and whether the weapons had ever been fired. And he thought about Elizabeth. And tried not to think about her.
Most days, the sun was at the horizon by the time he headed back to the City, the last light obscured by clouds or diffused into bleak, brilliant prairie sunsets. He worked hard enough to exhaust himself, which ought to have helped him sleep but often did not. On those nights when his terrors woke him, he switched on his electric lamp and sat up—roused to an involuntary vigilance by his traitorous imagination—and waited for the deliverance of dawn.
After Christmas some of the animosity toward Jesse began to wane, and he joined the rest of the Tower Two staff for a New Year’s Eve party in the commissary. All the local employees not on holiday duty were there, every security person, every cook and housekeeper, every waiter and waitress and towel-holder and coat-check clerk, and there was much drinking and a great deal of singing. The hilarity and talkativeness of some of the partiers hinted that the influx of coca powder from Futurity Station might not have entirely ceased. But Jesse didn’t care about that. Some irregularities were to be expected, because everyone knew the new year, 1877, wasn’t just new. For the City of Futurity, it would be the last year. Twelve months from now there would no bunting, no confetti, no party hats or lewd songs. By the time 1878 rolled around, this circus would have pulled up stakes and moved on.
Doris Vanderkamp approached him when the electric clock on the commissary wall marked ten minutes to midnight. Doris had become something of a pariah, too, for her role in exposing the smuggling ring. They had been avoiding each other for that reason. “Dance with me,” she said, a little drunkenly.
She was pretty in her disarray, ringlet curls unraveling at her shoulders. “Are you sure you want that, Doris?”
“I would rather dance with you than not dance at all. I don’t want to be lonely when the year turns. Dance with me, Jesse, just for tonight. You owe me that much.”
The clock turned minutes into seconds, today into yesterday. The boundary between past and future was called the present, Jesse thought. It was where he lived. It was where everyone lived. He took her in his arms and danced.
PART TWO
Runners
—1877—
8
The town was called Stony Creek, but the name didn’t matter. Jesse guessed he’d forget it sooner or later, as he would forget the town itself. Stony Creek was a New England town like every other New England town he had ridden through by rail or buckboard in the last six months, not that he knew much about New England towns except by reputation: dour Yankees, whitewashed houses, teetotaling Congregationalist churches. And maybe that was the case; but the towns, as towns went, seemed pleasant enough from the perspective of an outsider. This one surely did, by the light of a late spring morning.
He stepped off the Pullman car into a chorus of birdsong. The trees on the north side of the tracks were full of birds, all vocalizing. It made Jesse wish he knew something about birds or their calls. He guessed some of the birds might be sparrows. He asked the uniformed stationmaster about it. “Sparrows,” the stationmaster said, looking him up and down, “bluebirds, goldfinches, ovenbirds, uh-huh—the whole choir.”
Stony Creek was a one-street town surrounded by smallhold farms, with a brickworks and a pottery factory on its outskirts, cut through by a river that turned all the requisite mill wheels. The train depot smelled of sun-warmed lumber, creosote, coal smoke, wildflowers. The stationmaster was a squat box of a man maybe ten years older than Jesse. His uniform was dusty black wool trimmed with gold braid, and he looked at Jesse’s canvas bag with an undisguised, almost avaricious curiosity. Jesse asked him about a residential hotel in town.
“Staying long?”
“Probably not more than a day or two.”
“For that, the Morgan House. For a longer stay, Coretta Langstaff rents rooms by the week. Depends on your business, I suppose.”
Yankee manners ruled out a direct question, and the stationmaster was clearly chafing under that constraint. Jesse said, “As a matter of fact, I’m looking for someone. Maybe you can help me.”
“I guess that depends on who it is you’re looking for. Do you represent the law?”
“No, sir, I don’t. But I don’t mean anyone any harm. There’s a family trying to find their daughter.” This much was almost true. “Not a child but a grown woman. They think she might have arrived here around this time last year. Unaccompanied.”
“This woman have a name?”
“She probably isn’t using her family name.”
“Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m not at liberty to say what drove her from her family. I’m to tell her they hold nothing against her and want to see her again, if she’s agreeable. I have a letter to deliver. That’s all.”
“Are you some kind of Pinkerton man they hired?”