Shadow by the Bridge Page 2

  I turned back to the tub and pumped more cold water onto my clothes. Once the water was flowing, I switched to pumping with only one hand so that I could splash some fresh water on my face with the other. I needed to rub the dirt and blood off. The blood and dirt were dry and itchy—pulling my skin taut and reminding me of all that I had witnessed. After I was done rinsing my face, the dirt had come out of the trousers and the blood stains were starting to fade but needed to soak more. So I headed to my bedroom and lay down on my bed.

  How was I going to get my fox trap back? My father gave it to me for my tenth birthday, three weeks before he died. On our way to check his traps, my father would always say to me, “Ya know, Fritzy, it’s important to know how to live off the land.” He would run his hands lovingly through my hair as he spoke, going on to tell me about how he could count on a red fox or a rabbit being there the next day same as he could count on the sun coming up.

  For the past year, I’d been setting my trap in every patch of woods I could find… but all for nothing.

  I wrapped myself in the blue afghan my mother made me two Christmases ago as I tried to forget the morning that could have ended with my murder. So many questions spun inside my mind, turning and turning like a wheel. After hiding behind the rock the whole time, why did he have to see me after it was over? I thought he was gone. What could she have done to deserve such an awful death? Who were they? Where did they come from? And my fox trap. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook at the thought of him finding me.

  But being swathed in the blanket calmed me like a warm hug, and I finally drifted off.

  It must have been less than a half hour later when I heard my mother’s footsteps and the creak of each stair. Moments later, I felt her standing by my bed. She covered my shoulder with the afghan and left my bedroom. I heard the stir of the water.

  “What on God’s good earth did you get into?” Her agitated voice carried from the bathroom to my room.

  But I had learned that not all that happened on God’s earth was good.

  Three

  It was evening after three nights of hardly any sleep, and my mom was busy preparing dinner. I headed into the parlor and lay down on the floor in front of the warm crackling fire. I reached over and pulled the pillow off the sofa and rested my head on it as I listened to the wind howling. The texture of the floral embroidery against my cheek was cool and a little scratchy. My eyelids felt like tiny iron gates struggling to shut. The heat from the fire guided me to the edge of sleep. When I was wrapped up tight in this warmth, I tried to focus less on the sounds of the wind and more on my knowledge that my mother was in the next room. This helped me to finally shut my eyes. Then I prayed to God and my father thathe wouldn’t come looking for me, the boy he chased through the cornstalks. At the end of my prayer, I drifted off.

  “I’m about to dish the stew up,” my mother called out from the kitchen.

  I jumped and opened my eyes, “What?”

  “Supper’s ready.”

  “All right.” I rubbed my eyes and pushed myself up off the floor, shuffled into the kitchen, and sat down at the table.

  “Here you go, honey.” She set the bowl in front of me and sat down. “Were you asleep in there?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” I yawned.

  “I’m sorry. I would’ve let you sleep if I had known.”

  “That’s all right, I’m really hungry.” The taste of my mother’s beef stew had been on my mind all day. I put a heaping spoonful into my mouth. Also, I noticed the aroma of apples and cinnamon; I had forgotten that my mother had made an apple pie that morning. I looked over my shoulder and saw it on top of the stove warming up.

  As I stared at the pie, there was a quick, loud knock at the side door. I almost jumped out of my seat. My heart was on the run. Then I realized by the sound of the knock that it was Helen Wilson. She lived in the center of Linden, just a few steps up a hill from Morgan’s General Store. As soon as she collected her daily gossip at the store and the post office—which happened to be around the corner from our house—she was off spreading the neighbors’ business like milkweeds in the wind.

  My mother glanced over at the door and back at me. “It’s Helen.” She adjusted her dark brown skirt and answered the door. My mother was always nice enough to listen to Helen with an open ear, but she didn’t repeat it because she was much too respectful of people’s privacy.

  My mother opened the door. “Hello, Helen. We just sat down for supper; can you stop back in a little while or so for some tea, and we can talk then?”

  Helen didn’t seem to have heard her. “Hello, Fritz.” She waved to me with mail still in her hand. “Ella, can I see you outside for a minute?” She motioned and pushed a long strand of gray hair back into the pile of her hair, which happened to look like a bird’s nest sitting on her head.

  “Can’t this wait?” my mother asked. “We just sat down to eat.”

  “No, something awful has happened,” Helen replied with urgency and gently grasped my mother by the arm and pulled her out the door onto our small porch.

  My mother glanced over at me and pointed to my stew. “All right, what happened?” she asked, and then shut the door behind her.

  I anxiously rose up from my chair, sat down on the floor below the door’s window and listened. I heard Helen say “Frank Harlow,” and then she mentioned his field, which sent a frigid chill over my body. I started to tremble, and my heart began to beat within my chest so hard I could hear it. I couldn’t make out all of what they were saying because they were talking quietly. After a few minutes of listening to muffled voices, I felt the door move. Swiftly, I sat back down at the table.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night now.” My mother pushed the door open; her face had lost its rosy color.

  My heart pounded. I felt my face flush.

  “What happened?” I asked in an unsteady voice. Bloody images flashed in my head. She didn’t even notice that my hand was shaking when I picked up my spoon.

  “Helen told me that Frank Harlow was out gathering wood and found a dead body near his field.” She shook her head in disbelief. “A woman, I guess, and she was in terrible shape.” She sat back down at the table.

  “He did?” The words barely came out of my mouth. My throat felt so tight.

  She didn’t answer me. I could tell her thoughts had escaped with her to another place.

  “Mom!” I raised my voice.

  “I’m sorry, honey—what did you say?”

  “Who was it?” My voice quivered.

  “Helen didn’t know. I don’t think they know yet. Helen said the woman’s face was badly beaten. She’s going to let me know when she finds out more.”

  I could feel my face turning white. “I’m scared,” I whispered. She nodded as if she understood, but I knew that she just didn’t know how scared I really was. Nor did she know who I was so afraid of.

  Quickly, my mother knelt down next to me and held me tightly. “Listen honey, Frank’s farm is almost two miles from here. And I’m sure whoever killed that poor woman is far, far away from here. He wouldn’t stay around here. Someone had to have seen him in that area.”

  I nodded.Someone did see him.

  She continued to hold me. “Just to feel safer, we’ll keep all the doors and windows locked, all right?” I nodded into her soft shoulder. “I’d never let anything happen to you. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “I’d never let anything happen to you either,” I whispered.

  My mother smiled softly and kissed my forehead. “I know.” She hugged me again for a moment and pulled away. “We’re safe here and we have a lot of good neighbors nearby. Now let’s finish up and we’ll have some pie.” She pointed to my bowl again and grabbed her own bowl off the table. Her stew was only half-eaten, but she placed it in the sink anyway.

  After I finished my stew, she cut the pie and handed me a slice. Pieces of apple were oozing out from each side. She looked closely at my face.

/>   “You look really tired,” she said. “I think we’ll skip your arithmetic lesson tonight and just read for a little while.” Since my mother was a school teacher before she married my father, Miss Murphy gave her permission to teach me my lessons at home so that I had more time to learn how to run the family farm. Even with all my farming responsibilities, Mom cared too much about education to give me the night off. She was right. I was really tired—too tired to think about numbers.

  “I want you to go to bed a little earlier tonight, too. You have dark circles under your eyes… probably from being sick. And tomorrow, you’re supposed to start working with Uncle John, remember?”

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I replied.

  “But I’m not so sure I want you to start tomorrow; you still look a bit run down,” she said. “We’ll see how you are in the morning.”

  After I ate my pie, I helped my mother lock the doors and all the windows. Mom lit the kerosene lamp in the parlor, and then added two more birch logs to the fire. We opened our books and began reading. I glanced up from the pages ofThe Scarecrow of Ozand noticed the book my mother was reading:A Cry for Justice by Upton Sinclair, her favorite author.

  The bright sun sliced through my drapes, and I heard my Uncle John’s voice downstairs. I climbed out of bed feeling rested and ready for my first day on the farm.

  “Fritz,” my mother called up the stairs.

  “I’ll be down in a few minutes.” The smell of sausage and fresh baked bread made its way to my room.

  Quickly, I splashed my face with cold water, changed, and headed downstairs.

  “Hey, Fritzy.” Uncle John patted my back as I sat down at the table and drank my milk. He brought fresh milk over every morning.

  He always reminded me of a big friendly bear, because of the way his beard covered most of his face. My mother told me that he’s a lot like my grandfather, who was also a big, strong man.

  “Morning, Uncle John,” I said. Then I began cutting into my sausage patty.

  “Well, you slept late! It’s almost nine,” my mother said as she pumped water from the cistern into the sink.

  “You should have woken me up earlier.”

  “No, I let you sleep in a little longer. You needed it.”

  “Fritz, there’s been a change in plans this morning,” Uncle John said. “Your mother and I have to go into Batavia for a little while before you and I head back to the farm. I stopped in to see Martha on the way over here, and she told me that the sheriff came by the store last night. He told her that the district attorney is having the woman’s body shown at Turner’s Funeral Parlor today. They want to see if anyone recognizes the woman they found in Frank Harlow’s field, and this morning is the best time for your mother and me to go.”

  I froze for a moment. “What?” I asked. “They still don’t know who she is?”

  John shook his head. “No, they don’t. She wasn’t carrying any papers with her name.” He bit into his sausage. “I guess the district attorney thinks that someone around here may have known her.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “But her face,” I said under my breath.

  “What did you say, honey? Please speak up so I can hear you.”

  “Didn’t Helen tell you that she was in really terrible shape?”

  My uncle gave my mother a quick look as he took a sip of his coffee.

  “Honey, I’m sure the morticians cleaned her up and made her presentable for the public to view.” She pulled the towel off the cupboard handle. “They wouldn’t be asking otherwise.”

  I stared down at my plate, and suddenly I was back in Harlow’s woods staring at the lady’s bashed-in face. Feeling sick to my stomach, I sat there in silence for a minute.

  “Honey, are you all right?”

  I turned to her. “Yeah, I’m all right.” I nodded my head. “I’m just not awake yet.”

  “You’re starting to worry me. Are yousure you’re all right? You look a little pale.”

  I rubbed my face. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Let me feel your head.” She reached her hand over and placed it on my forehead. “Well, you don’t feel warm.”

  “No, really, I’m okay, Mom,” I said eagerly.

  My mother looked over at Uncle John, and then back at me. “A lot of people get off the train here. And I might have seen her at the store.”

  “Maybe you did,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  “If it were me lying there, I’d hope that there would be good people who would take their time to help me reach my final resting place and take me back home to my family.” She wiped the frying pan with her dish towel and placed the pan in the bottom cupboard.

  I turned to her. “But you can’t stand to see a dead animal. You wouldn’t even go into the barn last year to see the deer Dad killed. So I just thought—”

  “Fritzy, your mother will be fine. They’ll clean her up, as they do with all bodies.” John patted me on the shoulder.

  “By the way, I ran into Junior on the way over here this morning.” Junior was Senior Kessler’s twenty-eight-year-old son from his first marriage. His first wife died. Senior and his second wife, Mertie, lived down the road from us. Senior and Mertie had a daughter, Valerie, who was my age and also happened to be very pretty. “He told me that he is working over at Flo’s this week, and he could use your help with the hay this morning. Walter is working another farm and he’s a little shorthanded.”

  “Walter is working another farm during apple season?” I asked. Walter, Florence’s brother, worked a lot of other farms. I never understood why he didn’t just stay and help his sister with her farm. She had to hire Junior to do her brother’s work, and Junior would come and find me to help.

  “I guess so, which leaves Florence shorthanded this week, so I thought of you. I knew you’d be available now that we’re heading in for the viewing. So as soon as you’re finished with breakfast you can head over there until we’re back,” Uncle John said.

  “Are you feeling well enough to help Florence out for a couple of hours?” my mother asked.

  “Yeah, I told you that I feel fine, so please quit asking,” I replied in a tightened voice.

  My mother shook her head.

  Uncle John stood up from the table and set his plate and cup in the sink.

  “I’ll go,” I said, and handed my plate and glass to Mom. With my heart starting to race, I anxiously threw on my muddy boots and yanked my jacket off the hook by the door. My mother leaned in and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then she handed me the key to the door.

  “Fritzy,” my mother said in a caring voice.

  I turned back and saw concern etched in her face. “What?”

  “I’m starting to worry about you. You don’t seem like you’re back to yourself just yet. Don’t overwork yourself this morning.” She glanced over at Uncle John. “If you’re too tired later, you can rest and start on the farm tomorrow, or next week.”

  I clutched the doorknob and opened the door. The cool air rushed past me into the kitchen. I looked over at my mother as I grabbed my tweed cap off the hook and placed it on my head. “Mom, quit worrying about me…please!”

  “That’s what mothers do; they worry about their children.” She tilted her head slightly to the left. Her gaze filled with question. “Also, I know my son.”

  Her words cracked the wall I was hiding behind. “Just stop at Flo’s on the way back,” I said, ignoring her prying words. I walked out the door and ambled down to the end of the driveway.

  I knew my mother, too. If I told her that I saw what happened in Harlow’s woods, she’d want to do one more right thing and take me to see the sheriff so I could tell him everything. Then everyone would know Fritzelle Reynolds was there in the woods and saw the lady get bumped off. My guess was that the man read the newspaper every day, trying to find out who that boy was—the one who could tell his secret.

  The sound of a train whistle startled me. I watched each car pass, counting the cars, waiting for the
red caboose.

  After a couple of minutes, the train passed, and its rumble disappeared into the distance. Once again, the hamlet returned to its peaceful state. I took a deep breath and grasped my pocket watch that was, as always, in my front pocket. I stared at the bridge and listened to the water flowing beneath it.

  Suddenly, I remembered my father carrying me down our driveway and over to the bridge with my mom by our side. He pointed to the sky, telling me with excitement in his voice to look up. We watched brilliant flashes of yellow, red, and green lights shoot to the top of the sky. It looked as if there was a glowing green curtain dancing across the night sky. Mom explained that they were Northern Lights from the sun reflecting off the ice at the North Pole.

  I pulled my hand out of my front pocket, still holding my pocket watch. As I headed toward Florence Kingsley’s farm, my body tingled with warmth. I stared off into the blue skies, knowing my father was looking back at me.

  Four

  After talking to Junior about the viewing, I no longer thought locked doors and windows were enough to protect me and my mother. Ifhereally wanted to break in,heknew how to use a tree branch really well. And there were plenty of them to pick from around our house.

  It had been about an hour since they left for Batavia, so I figured I had a little time to find extra protection before they returned home. As I ran home from Flo’s, I pulled my key out of my pocket. I looked through the kitchen window and didn’t see my mother. Nervously fumbling with the key and almost dropping it, I placed it into the keyhole and opened the door.

  “Mom,” I hollered into the house as I stepped into the kitchen. There was no answer.Good! I locked the door behind me. Then I dropped the key back into my pocket. I grabbed my watch, which read 12:05.

  It didn’t look like she’d been home yet, so I ran down into the basement and grabbed my father’s shotgun off the far wall, loaded it, and ran up to my bedroom. I held the gun for a minute, staring at it.

  I never held a loaded gun with the thought that I might have to use it on a person. What if I had to shoot him on the way up to my bedroom? What would my father say? He only used guns for hunting animals. He would never shoot at another man. Killing was a sin, the worst kind of sin. The words “Thou shall not kill” were in the Bible.