Passing a photographic studio, with a handsome gilt sign that read Gilbert Beaufort & Son, Caroline paused. Inside the cluttered, stuffy shop she recoiled from the vinegar stench of the developing chemicals. Not quite finding a smile for the camera, she commissioned several portraits of herself and William, arranging to have them delivered to the Westchester when they were ready.
Her fingers shook as she opened the package. She had hoped to create something permanent, to prove to herself, in some way, that she existed; and that even though she was widowed, she had Corin’s child, the child that was rightly hers, to show for her marriage. She was part of a family. She would have some record of herself and of her life, which she was so unsure of that she sometimes wondered if she might still be lying out on the prairie somewhere, dreaming everything that had happened since. But in nearly every picture William had moved, blurring the image of himself so that his face was tantalizingly obscured; and in nearly every picture Caroline, to her own eyes, stared out from the paper every bit as ghostly and insubstantial looking as she felt. One photo alone had captured an intangible trace of what she’d hoped to see-in one shot she looked like a mother, proud and calm and possessive. She slid this picture into her case and threw the rest into the grate.
On the fourth day she saw Joe. She was walking with William in search of a park or a garden, a green space of some kind to feel a breeze and, she hoped, to calm the child. Fully recovered from his illness and returned to his strength, William was loud and unsettled. He cried in the night and snatched his arms away when Caroline tried to comfort him, squirming in her embrace as she rocked him and tried to sing to him as Magpie had done. But she could no more capture the Ponca girl’s odd melodies than she could howl like a coyote, and her efforts were drowned out by William’s shouts. Thinking it was the open prairie he missed, Caroline walked him most of the day, growing increasingly aware of how different the noises and smells and sights must be for the child, and how heavy the unclean air must feel in his tiny lungs. This was not his home, any more than it was hers, she realized; but unlike herself, William did have a home. She should take him back. The thought stung her like a slap to the face. Even if he was Corin’s, even if he should have been hers, he belonged in Woodward County. She stood rooted to the spot, knocked senseless by this realization, while pedestrians flowed around her like a river. But how could she? How could she explain-how could she be forgiven? She could see the pain, the accusation in Hutch’s eyes, the anger and fear in Magpie’s. All the times they had helped her, all the times they had encouraged her. And this was how she had repaid their belief in her-she was an outrage, a despicable failure. It was not possible. She could not face them. There was no going back.
And then she saw Joe, coming around the corner toward her, his face set into a grimace of hard fury, his black hair flying behind him as he strode toward her, knife ready in his hand to kill her. Caroline went cold from her head to her toes and stood petrified as the man walked past her, the black hair in fact a scarf, the knife a piece of rolled up paper, the face not Joe’s at all but belonging to a swarthy, Mexican-looking man who was late for something and hurrying. Shaking uncontrollably, Caroline sank onto a nearby bench, the din of the city receding as a strange, muffled thumping invaded her head. Black speckles swirled like flies at the edges of her vision, and when she shut her eyes to be rid of them they turned brilliant white and danced on undeterred. In the distance, a passenger liner sounded its whistle as it slid gracefully into the docks. The deep blast echoed all around and brought Caroline back to herself, and to William’s cries. Swallowing, she stroked his cheek, made some broken, soothing sounds, and then she stood up, turning to cast her eyes southward toward the docks, the ship, and the sea. Five hours later she was aboard a steamer, bound for Southampton.
Joe was indeed in New York, but not on that very day. He and Hutch arrived two days after Caroline’s ship had departed, where they made their way directly to the home of Mrs. Massey, Corin’s twice-bereaved mother, ignoring the stares that their country clothes and Joe’s Indian blood elicited. No trace of Caroline or William had been found since she had been seen taking breakfast at the hotel, the morning after she’d left Woodward. The manager of Gerlach’s Bank confirmed that there had been no transactions on the Massey account since the recent wages withdrawal. Word was sent out with every passing traveller, and to every outlying rancher, to report any sighting or signs of her; and although the ticket office clerk at the station swore that no fair-haired women carrying babies had bought a ticket for any train from him that day, or indeed that week, Hutch followed a hunch of his and took Joe and himself to New York, making fruitless enquiries at each station after a Mrs. Massey.
Mrs. Massey Senior had not, of course, seen or heard anything of her daughter-in-law, and was most distressed to hear that she and a young child had vanished. She was able to supply the men with Caroline’s maiden name and former address, but their enquiries in the city after Miss Fitzpatrick were every bit as fruitless. They retraced their steps, trying the name Fitzpatrick instead of Massey, and then had little choice but to return to the ranch, to where Magpie had fallen into a trance, at times tearing at her hair and making long cuts down her arms with a blade that sent rivulets of bright blood to drip from her fingertips. Joe let his wife mourn in this way; he was impassive, the rage had burned from him, and his own heart was empty without his son. Between them, the men raised the money to pay a Pinkerton man for one month, but this was just enough time for the detective to follow the same path that Joe and Hutch had, and he finished the term unable even to say whether Caroline and William had been abducted or had run away. Hutch lay awake night after night, mystified and suspicious at once; scared for Caroline and for the ranch, which, having no owner, no longer had a future either.
Dreading her arrival more with each mile that passed, Caroline took the train from Southampton to London, and upon arriving found a hotel she could afford once the shrinking packet of dollars from Gerlach’s Bank had been converted into pounds sterling. William was heavy in her arms and his cries made her ears wince, as if withdrawing inside her skull to protect themselves. During the long days of the sea crossing she had felt sick, distracted by a pounding at her temples that made it hard to think. William had cried for hours at a time, seemingly without pause, and although Caroline told herself that he must be feeling the same sickness as she, the same pain in his head, she could not shake the belief that he somehow knew he was being carried further and further from home, and that his cries were of rage at her for doing it. She saw an accusation in his face each time she looked at him. She stopped trying to quiet him, to sing to him or to hold him, leaving him instead to cry in the carrycot that he was rapidly outgrowing, so that she herself could remain in bed, curled against the cabin wall in misery.