The Name She Kept
Eddie stayed crouched in the road.
Behind the little girl, the last light from the smithy reached a wagon wheel and stopped. Beyond it lay the wash, the gorge road, and whatever had sent her down it.
“He said those words?” Eddie asked.
She nodded.
“Only meant to wake me?”
“Yes.”
Mary Jane touched his shoulder.
The girl was shaking.
He had been watching her face so closely that he had missed it. Dust trembled from the hem of her dress. Her bare toes had drawn together against the cooling ground.
Eddie stood.
“We’ll talk inside.”
“Is he coming?”
“Not with us.”
He offered his hand.
She studied it before taking two of his fingers.
***
Clara did not ask questions until the child had eaten.
She brought warm water, a clean cloth, bread softened in broth, and a pair of stockings from a drawer beneath the stairs. The stockings were too large. She folded them at the toes and found a cushion for the girl’s feet.
The shoe went on the table beside her bowl.
It was a small brown button boot. Three buttons remained. The leather had worn through beside the little toe.
Eddie sat where the girl could see him without turning.
Mary Jane took the chair beside her.
Across the room, the others had drawn together without discussing it. Esther held Benjamin’s hand beneath the table. Nathan stood by the stove. The old man had put his sewing away.
Clara watched the girl finish a second piece of bread.
“Better?”
A nod.
“What shall we call you?”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy what?”
“Vale.”
Eddie’s eyes lifted.
Mary Jane saw.
She gave the smallest shake of her head.
A name could belong to more than one family. He knew that. Still, for a moment he heard river water against a ferry landing and remembered Thomas standing beneath the lamps of North Lantern House.
Clara poured more broth.
“How old are you, Lucy?”
“Nine.”
“Do you live in Mercy?”
“No.”
“Where, then?”
“At the quarry.”
The old man at the far end of the table closed his eyes.
Clara noticed.
She kept her attention on Lucy.
“With your mother?”
“And Papa. And my brother, but he doesn’t live with us now.”
“Where does he live?”
“I don’t know.”
Lucy turned the spoon in her bowl.
“He went away to work.”
Eddie waited until she had taken another mouthful.
“Do you remember coming down the road?”
“Yes.”
“Did you walk the whole way?”
“Most.”
“Did someone carry you?”
Her fingers tightened around the spoon.
“The man helped me where the bank fell.”
“Was he kind to you?”
Lucy considered the question.
“He didn’t hurry.”
That answer settled over the room.
Eddie looked at the worn little boot on the table.
“Did he tell you his name?”
“No.”
“Did he ask yours?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
She looked toward Clara.
“My mother says I must tell a grown person my name if I’m lost.”
“You did right,” Clara said.
Lucy’s shoulders eased.
Then she added, “He said I had to say all of it.”
***
Marshal Hollis came through the door carrying a lantern and a shotgun.
Clara looked at the gun.
“Outside.”
“I’ve just walked the wash.”
“Then you can leave it on the porch.”
He saw Lucy at the table.
Whatever he had been preparing to say went unsaid.
He stepped back, leaned the shotgun against the wall outside, and returned with only the lantern.
“No one there,” he told Eddie.
“Tracks?”
“Several. Road’s been used.”
“Small ones?”
Hollis glanced at Lucy’s bare shoe on the table.
“One set coming down. I didn’t follow them far.”
“Why?”
The marshal placed his lantern beside the door.
“Because they began in the middle of the road.”
No one spoke.
“I went another fifty yards,” he continued. “Same dust. Same ground. Nothing small enough to be hers.”
Lucy had stopped eating.
Clara moved between her and the marshal.
“Upstairs,” she said gently. “We’ll find somewhere you can sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You can lie down without sleeping.”
“Will you shut the door?”
“Would you like it open?”
Lucy nodded.
“Then open it stays.”
Esther rose.
“I’ll come.”
The child picked up her boot before letting either woman help her from the chair.
At the foot of the stairs, she looked back at Eddie.
“He said you’d know why.”
Eddie stood.
“I don’t yet.”
Lucy studied him.
Then she followed Clara upstairs.
***
Hollis waited until their footsteps had crossed the ceiling.
“Do you?”
“No.”
“You recognized the name.”
“I know people named Vale.”
“The message, then.”
Eddie pulled his chair back from the table.
“A man once used my wish to get home to make me carry something I didn’t understand. I found out. We stopped him.”
“We?”
“People who had reason to help.”
“Is this that man?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
Hollis rubbed his jaw.
Mary Jane folded the page she had been writing on.
“What we have is a message delivered through a frightened child,” she said. “We haven’t heard him explain it, and we haven’t seen anything that proves it.”
“He knew Bone was coming.”
“Clara sent letters. We rode into town in daylight.”
Hollis looked toward the stairs.
“He sent a dead girl to fetch him.”
Eddie met his eyes.
“That part concerns me.”
The old man made a sound at the end of the table.
They turned.
He had taken off his spectacles and was rubbing them with a corner of his shirt.
“I knew her father.”
Hollis pulled out a chair.
“What was his name?”
“Samuel Vale.”
Eddie felt the familiar surname settle into an unfamiliar place.
“What did he do?”
“Kept the quarry stores. Powder, tools, meal. Wrote a good hand.” The old man replaced his spectacles. “His wife took washing from the camp.”
“And Lucy?”
“She used to bring her father his dinner.”
He looked at the stairs.
“I remember that boot.”
Mary Jane waited.
The old man swallowed.
“Not that one, perhaps. Those little buttons. She was forever asking someone to fasten them.”
“When did she die?” Hollis asked.
Clara’s voice came from the stairway.
“That can wait until you’re somewhere she can’t hear you.”
Hollis lowered his head.
The old man put both hands flat on the table.
“She ought to have grown,” he said.
***
Clara gave Lucy the narrow room at the head of the stairs.
A lamp burned on the landing. Esther sat just inside the doorway, mending the loose seam of a pillowcase because Lucy had asked what she was doing and seemed comforted by the answer.
Eddie stopped outside.
Lucy lay beneath a quilt, watching the open window.
He knocked softly against the doorframe.
“May I come in?”
She nodded.
He sat on the chair Esther vacated.
For a moment, he said nothing.
Below them, a door opened and closed. Hollis speaking to someone outside. The ordinary sounds of a house trying to settle.
“Did you find my mother?” Lucy asked.
“No.”
“She’ll look for me at home.”
“Where is home?”
“Past the cookhouse. Ours has a blue door.”
Eddie pictured the abandoned camp beyond the gorge.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Anna.”
“And your brother?”
“Will.”
He repeated both names.
Lucy watched his mouth while he did it.
“Will you remember?”
“Yes.”
She rubbed the quilt between her fingers.
“The man said people forget if you’re gone too long.”
Eddie leaned back enough to ease the chair’s creak.
“What else did he say?”
“That you could put things right.”
“Did he tell you how?”
“No.”
“Did he ask you to bring me anything?”
Her hand stopped moving.
Eddie waited.
From the hall came the soft scrape of Esther’s chair.
Lucy looked at her shoe, standing beside the bed.
“He said I was to give it to you when you asked.”
***
The paper was folded beneath the loose lining.
Eddie did not take it straight downstairs.
He carried it into the hall, where Mary Jane was waiting, and laid it on the small table beneath the lamp.
“Did she say what it was?”
“No.”
He opened it carefully.
The paper was thick and yellowed along one edge. A narrow red rule ran down the left side, interrupted where someone had torn it from a larger sheet.
Only four lines had been written on it.
*Edward Bone.*
*At the quarry bell. Before sunrise.*
*Bring the name you were buried under.*
*Come while they still remember their own.*
Mary Jane read it without touching it.
Below them, Clara was banking the stove.
Eddie turned the paper over.
Blank.
“No signature,” Mary Jane said.
“No.”
“Convenient.”
He looked toward Lucy’s door.
“You think it’s a threat.”
“I think he wants you in a particular place before you’ve had time to learn enough.”
“He might know what’s happening.”
“He might.”
She rested one hand on the table.
“We can go to the quarry. That doesn’t mean we go because he rang for you.”
Eddie studied the torn edge.
There was a gray smear near the bottom.
At first he took it for dirt.
He tilted the paper toward the lamp.
A thumbprint, dragged slightly across the grain.
White dust had settled into the ridges.
Chalk.
***
They spread Clara’s largest table with everything they had.
The letters. Mary Jane’s notes. The paper from Lucy’s boot.
Hollis returned with a rough map drawn by the old man, who insisted on correcting the road twice after seeing it on paper.
“The newer track washes out,” he said. “You take the cut past the powder house.”
“Does the powder house still stand?” Mary Jane asked.
“Some of it.”
“Enough to recognize?”
“If it doesn’t, you’ve gone too far.”
Clara brought coffee.
Outside, two of Hollis’s men had taken positions where they could see both the front door and the yard. He had given them strict instructions to report anyone approaching with a lamp.
Eddie had asked him to include anyone approaching without one.
The marshal had looked at him for a moment, then repeated the order.
Now he stood over the map.
“We go at first light.”
Eddie glanced at the note.
“Before sunrise is what he wants.”
“That’s his concern.”
Mary Jane nodded toward the old road.
“I want to see where I’m putting my feet.”
The old man drew a square beside the marked quarry face.
“That’s where the bell stood.”
“What held it?” Eddie asked.
“Timber frame. Heavy.”
“Any buildings close?”
“Office on one side. Storehouse on the other.”
Hollis followed the road with his finger.
“An hour from here on horseback.”
“Longer if the cut’s gone,” the old man said.
Clara set Eddie’s cup down.
“Then you should sleep.”
He almost laughed.
She did not.
“You’ve ridden all day. Whatever’s out there will still be out there when you’ve had three hours with your eyes shut.”
Eddie looked at Mary Jane.
She was already gathering the papers.
***
He woke to someone saying his name.
For one brief, ugly moment, he was back beneath the mine.
Then he felt the mattress, the blanket twisted around his leg, the wooden wall against his knuckles.
Mary Jane stood beside the bed with a lamp.
“Get up.”
He was on his feet before she finished.
“What?”
“Lucy.”
Downstairs, a chair scraped across the floor.
Someone was crying.
Eddie pulled on his boots without fastening them and followed her into the hall.
Lucy's door remained open.
Clara knelt beside the bed. Esther stood near the window with both hands pressed to her mouth.
The child was sitting upright.
She looked annoyed more than frightened.
“I’m not being difficult,” she said.
“I know,” Clara told her.
“I just don’t know.”
Eddie stopped beside the bed.
Clara looked up.
“She woke asking where she was. I told her. Then I asked if she remembered telling us her mother’s name.”
Lucy looked between them.
“I said I didn’t.”
“Do you remember me?” Eddie asked.
“You’re Mr. Bone.”
“And Mrs. Mercer?”
Lucy nodded.
“The woman downstairs gave me stockings.”
“What’s your brother called?”
Her mouth opened.
Nothing came.
She looked down at the quilt.
“I have a brother?”
Eddie heard the house around him: quick footsteps below, Nathan calling for a lamp, Hollis entering through the front door.
Mary Jane crouched beside Lucy.
“Your name is Lucy Vale,” she said.
The child frowned.
“Yes.”
“Your mother is Anna. Your brother is Will.”
Lucy repeated the names obediently.
Then she looked at Clara.
“Did I tell you that?”
Clara took her hand.
“You did.”
The child searched their faces.
Eddie could see the effort. The same helpless reach he had once made for his mother’s face, for a kitchen, for anything that belonged to him.
He knelt.
“Tell me about the blue door.”
Lucy’s expression brightened.
“It sticks when it rains.”
“What else?”
“Papa kicks the bottom. Mama says he’ll knock it off.”
Clara closed her eyes.
Eddie kept his voice steady.
“And the room inside?”
“The table is by the window.”
“Who sits there?”
Lucy looked at him.
The brightness left her face.
“I don’t know.”
***
It was happening downstairs too.
Nathan remembered the smell of his wife’s hair but could not tell them her name.
Benjamin knew Esther was his sister. When she asked about their house, he described the stove, the broken back step, and the tree beyond the fence.
He could not remember which room had been his.
The freighter had written his own name three times on a scrap of paper and was staring at the last attempt.
The letters were perfectly legible.
He said they looked like somebody else’s.
Clara opened her account book.
They began reading the names aloud.
Some brought recognition.
Some did not.
Eddie stood at the foot of the stairs while the room filled with quiet, urgent questions.
Mary Jane came beside him.
“The note isn’t proof he’s doing it,” she said.
“No.”
“It doesn’t prove he can stop it, either.”
Eddie looked toward the front window.
Beyond the glass, Mercy lay under red light.
“But he knew.”
Hollis had heard.
He reached for his hat.
“I’ll saddle the horses.”
Clara turned from Nathan.
“What do I do?”
Eddie looked at the open account book, then at the people gathered around it.
“Write down what they remember. Their words, as near as you can.”
“And when they forget?”
“Keep the pages.”
Clara held his gaze.
Then she dipped her pen.
***
Jack waited outside, restless beneath the saddle.
Mary Jane checked the fastening on her tool bag while Hollis gave orders to the men on the porch.
Eddie went back once.
Lucy sat at the dining table with the oversized stockings tucked beneath her chair. Clara had placed a sheet of paper in front of her.
At the top, in careful block letters, the child had written:
*LUCY VALE.*
Beneath it she had drawn a crooked rectangle.
The blue door.
“I’ll look for the house,” Eddie told her.
She nodded without lifting her pencil.
He had almost reached the porch when she called him back.
“Mr. Bone?”
He turned.
“The man told me something else.”
Clara’s pen stopped.
Lucy frowned at her drawing.
“He said I’d forget the way.”
“What way?”
“To go home.”
Her pencil pressed harder against the page.
“But he said that wouldn’t matter once you came.”
Eddie waited.
Lucy looked up.
“He said you could remember it for all of us.”
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