The Inn at Hidden Run Page 5

  Jillian followed.

  Nia handed her a scrap of paper. “I have her Social Security number now. You can find out stuff with that, right?”

  “Some things, yes.”

  “Then do it.”

  “We’d be crossing a line here, Nia.”

  “Call it some kind of employment background check or something.”

  Jillian sighed. She could find out felonious activity without digging too deep. “Or something. Did you ask her for her actual Social Security card? A lot of employers do that to confirm identity.”

  “She said she didn’t have it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Memphis, August 13, 1878

  Her mother’s telegram was of course meant to taunt Eliza into boarding the next train north.

  “‘Refreshing breeze off the lake Stop,’” she read aloud. “‘Come Stop Callie due for leave Stop.’”

  “No, ma’am.” Callie set Eliza’s lunch plate in front of her. Cold ham, cut melon, and a pea salad with a dressing containing a secret ingredient Eliza had been trying to finagle out of Callie for the last six years. “The others have their leave. When dey be back, I go for a week. Dat be how it is. Your mama know.”

  “You could have your leave now, if you want to.” Eliza picked up a fork, spread the pea salad, and sniffed it. “I do not require the tending my mother thinks I need.”

  She spent most of her days away from the house and could just as well spend more time at the orphanages. With school out of session for the summer, some of the teaching sisters from the day school were on their own break at the Mother House in Peekskill in New York, but the orphans had nowhere to go, and the staff who remained at Church Home appreciated extra hands.

  “No, ma’am.” Callie wiped both black hands on her crisp white apron. “I be right here, lookin’ after you and da house and helpin’ you get in your dresses. You just eat da pea salad. No need to bother ’bout what’s in it.”

  “Callie.”

  “Miz Eliza. Dis be da way it be.”

  “You could sit down and have your lunch with me.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “We could eat in the kitchen if you’re uncomfortable in here.”

  “Your mama would not abide it.”

  “My mother is not here.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Callie glided out, leaving Eliza alone at a dining room table that could easily seat twelve for a formal dinner. At least it was the coolest room in the house. Eliza did as she was told and ate her lunch.

  Curry, perhaps. Just a pinch. Callie was not live-in help. She left after supper. Before she went to bed, Eliza could check the spice rack in the kitchen and see if it held curry and if it seemed like the tin may have been used recently.

  “Miz Eliza.” Callie stood in the doorframe, her narrow face squeezed even further.

  “What is it?” Eliza pushed her plate away.

  “The butcher’s boy come with the order. He say Kate Bionda die.”

  “Oh no.” Eliza had dreaded this news—the first death of someone who clearly contracted yellow fever in Memphis rather than carrying it up the Mississippi. It was no surprise when the Appeal reported Kate’s illness and the others that followed. William Warren had violated the quarantine for his own pleasure. Kate had done nothing but serve him a meal without knowing he was sick.

  “I made a lemon custard cake for dessert,” Callie said. “Vanilla cream frosting, just the way you like.”

  Eliza pushed back her chair. “Save it for supper, please.”

  “You goin’ out, ma’am? The orphans?”

  Eliza met the servant’s dark eyes. “Another errand, I believe.”

  “Again?”

  “There are streets I have not tried.”

  “Mama not goin’ like dis.”

  “Unless you have taken up writing letters to my mother behind my back, Mama is not going to know.” Callie was literate enough to cook and shop, but in all her years working for the family, Eliza had never seen her write a full sentence.

  “She have her ways,” Callie said. “You know that. You not invisible in those parts of town. People talk. Word get back by da help.”

  Callie had a point.

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “I hope so. I hate to think I waste perfectly good lemons in dat cake if you not here to eat it.”

  Callie could be cheeky for someone who drew the line at eating with Eliza in the kitchen during the weeks alone in a big house together.

  “Perhaps you would do me a favor and go out to the street to wave down a cab while I get my hat and bag.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When Eliza exited the house a few minutes later and descended the front steps, Callie was holding the horse’s bridle to the consternation of the driver.

  “I just makin’ sure he wait for you.” Callie glared at the driver.

  Eliza recognized him. He often drove slowly through her downtown neighborhood trolling for daytime fares.

  “Hello, Harry.”

  “Miz Eliza.” He tipped his hat. “I explained to Callie that I can’t take you today.”

  “Do you have another fare waiting?”

  “It’s where you goin’ he don’t like,” Callie said.

  “I haven’t said yet where I’m going.”

  “He know.”

  “Harry, is this true?”

  “Miz Eliza, there’s fever over there.”

  Eliza twisted the handle of her handbag and sucked in her cheeks. Harry drove an open cab. The risk was low. Besides, how many people did he shuttle around all day? He was hardly insulated from infection.

  “Of course I don’t want to endanger you, Harry. I’m not asking you to even get down off your driving bench. Just park at the end of the block and wait for me while I knock on a few doors.”

  “And what if you bring the fever to me?”

  “How about this? If I find what I’m looking for and the news is bad, I’ll give you a signal, and I won’t ask you to bring me home.”

  “No, ma’am.” Callie shook a finger. “No one goin’ leave you there if dat happen.”

  “It’s not so far,” Eliza said. “I can’t expect him to wait for me, in any event. If it happens, when I’m finished I’ll walk a few blocks and hail another cab.” Or she would walk home. It would not be the end of the world.

  “I’m agreeable,” Harry said.

  “No, ma’am,” Callie said.

  “Harry, the step please,” Eliza said.

  Harry pulled down the step while Callie glowered.

  “Remember the lemon custard cake,” Callie said.

  “If I won’t be here for supper, I will send word.” Eliza gathered her skirts into the open carriage and turned away from Callie’s scowl.

  Robert and Hank, the two men from that night at the hospital, had never left her mind. She was right about William Warren even before the doctors arrived at the conclusion he carried yellow fever. Dr. Erskine, from the Board of Health, transferred him back to the quarantine hospital on President’s Island. She’d tried the very next day to find Robert and Hank, starting with the neighborhood around Kate Bionda’s restaurant and gradually moving outward. She didn’t know the area well. Four decades living in Memphis, a city of forty-seven thousand people, had afforded her the privilege of choosing her service in the community. She chose the orphans, not the dockworkers. She’d never eaten in Kate Bionda’s restaurant or anywhere near it. The goods that came into Memphis on the cargo ships, unloaded by Robert and Hank and their many coworkers, made their way by wagon to the network of shops where her family shopped at their convenience or, more likely, where they sent their servants. This wasn’t a part of Memphis she’d needed to know well at any part of her life before this.

  But she was getting to know it now.

  Kate’s restaurant was shuttered, probably for good. Without Kate, would anyone want to operate it? Would anyone want to run a business of any sort in the place where yellow feve
r had come again to Memphis and taken its first life?

  “Miz Eliza?” Harry twisted on his bench. “How many blocks this time?”

  Too many and he might turn the horse around before her home was out of sight. Too few and she might come close to answers and never know it.

  “Six.”

  Silence.

  “Five, then, but that is firm.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you certain you do not know these men?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I had another driver the other day. I’ll have to show you where we left off.”

  He dropped her, as agreed, at the end of a block, and Eliza knocked on doors asking not only for Robert and Hank but whether anyone inside had symptoms of the fever. She wasn’t a nurse. She wouldn’t go inside willy-nilly, but if she discovered someone was ill and without care, she could at least gather basic information to alert someone in the medical profession and arrange help. Officially the city was still under quarantine. Surely the Board of Health had some sort of plan for handling the cases that had erupted so far. The papers were vague about opinions of members of the Board of Health. Memphis physicians did not seem to be of uniform mind about the threat of yellow fever, nor appropriate treatment, but surely someone in charge would know how to dispatch help. Eliza strongly suspected Kate Bionda was not the first yellow fever death of a Memphis citizen, despite the official records. Callie was right. The help talked, and they’d been talking about a rash of illnesses on Second Street after a man came by riverboat to visit his wife, a cook in Mr. Turner’s home. Two feverish deaths in four days, the visiting man and an innocent child, raised alarms. Eliza blinked away the image in her mind of Callie’s disapproval and proceeded with her task.

  Knock after knock either brought no one to the door or opened to people, mostly women, shaking their heads at the descriptions of Robert and Hank. One or two seemed to know who she was talking about but hadn’t seen them for certain in a couple of weeks—not since the quarantine began—and weren’t sure where they lived. As Eliza moved through the blocks, Harry followed in his cab, staying at the end of each street but always within view. Eliza wasn’t worried. He wouldn’t abandon her. But he would get antsy.

  Dock slips had two conditions, those that stood empty because ships had not been permitted to enter the city with their goods, and those that had been full for too long with ships trapped by the quarantine and not permitted to leave—especially now that multiple cases of yellow fever had broken out. Some guarded lengths of the river were more given to recreation, and Eliza knew them better. Boat rides. Views. Pretty sunsets. Private estates. An evening picnic to escape the summer heat with a breeze off the water. But much of the shoreline was devoted to industry and trade, and normally Eliza had little reason to observe it. As she moved closer to the river, water slapped against the piles on a stretch that ought to have been bustling with enough commerce to disguise the subtle sound.

  One more house, and then one more, before she was testing Harry’s patience. It was as if Hank and Robert had disappeared into thin air. If William Warren could slip through the quarantine to get into Memphis, perhaps they had slipped through to get out.

  Eliza went home to her lemon custard cake.

  The true exodus began the next day. The commotion in the street woke Eliza even before Callie arrived to cook breakfast, and she leaned out her second-story bedroom window at men loading wagons up and down the street.

  Without Callie, she’d never get into her corset, and without a corset her clothes wouldn’t fit. Eliza ran to her mother’s bedroom and flung open the wardrobe, seeking a more loose-fitting garment to get into without assistance. She piled her mahogany hair under a roomy out-of-fashion hat and went outside.

  Callie met her in the street. “Miz Eliza!”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Dey leavin’.”

  “But the Board of Health has the city under quarantine.”

  “Dey don’t care. Bad enough folks gettin’ sick. Now Kate die and the Appeal print it. Everybody know.”

  Eliza hitched her skirt and strode down the street. If the families on her block—households of money and privilege—were leaving, who else was trying to go?

  “They have tents now,” Eliza said. “The Appeal published that too. They’re setting up Camp Joe Williams miles away from the infected neighborhoods. The paper said they have a thousand tents. People will be safe there.”

  “Don’t matter. People be leavin’. Dey not tent people.”

  “Don’t they understand? They’ll carry the disease wherever they go. They could be infected and not know it yet.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Don’t matter.”

  “It does matter.”

  “To you, mebbe. But some say it better to get out. Dat way not so many get sick.”

  Eliza leaned her head into one hand. That theory could work if they could be sure only healthy people left Memphis.

  “Besides,” Callie said, “people like me got no place to go. No money to go with. But dem folks? Dey can go.”

  Eliza was nearly jogging down the streets now, and Callie kept up. What Callie said was true. Colored men might be loading the wagons and driving the carriages, but it was the well-to-do white men coming out their front doors and locking up. White shopkeepers hung the CLOSED signs in the windows. White women huddled with their children, leaving the colored housekeepers behind.

  The wagons were loaded with trunks packed for long stays away, and every cart for hire in Memphis made one trip after another from affluent homes toward the train depots.

  Eliza raised her hand to hail a cab. Four clattered past her, full-up inside and piled high outside. Then she saw Harry among the chaos—and his cab was empty for the moment.

  “What are you doing way over here, Miz Eliza?”

  “I want to go to the train station.”

  “Where are your trunks?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to leave. I just want to see for myself what is happening.”

  “I mean no disrespect, Miz Eliza, but if you not leavin’, let me take you home. That be safest.”

  “Harry be right,” Callie said.

  “Let me see the depot first.” Eliza raised her hem and climbed into the carriage unassisted. “Then I’ll decide.”

  At the station, men jostled each other in line for tickets, at first to their desired locations and then for whatever train they could get a seat on, reasoning they could get another train later from another city to get where they really wanted to go.

  Just out of Memphis.

  “Now, Miz Eliza?” Harry said.

  Defeated, Eliza nodded and got back in the cab.

  Carriages lined the streets over the next two days in a steady stream of departures on roads leading north and east. The river cut off travel to the west without requiring unavailable ferries to the Arkansas side, and no one wanted to go south where the fever was already spreading. Horses pulled wagons crammed with beds and small furniture, some men having decided they would not bring their families back to Memphis, at least not anytime soon. Small children were nestled safely among the household goods. Women and older children walked beside the wagons in the unending procession. Eliza wondered where thousands could be going in so few days.

  Just out of Memphis. Away from the river. Away from the fever.

  “The sad case of Mrs. Bionda,” the Appeal published, “who left two little children and a grief-stricken husband, does not prove necessarily that others will follow. There is no need of a panic or stampede.”

  Readers were unconvinced. By Friday the Board of Health gave up and lifted the quarantine. It had been ineffective anyway, many reasoned. Yellow fever had come and had begun killing, so how could they justify confining healthy people to await a raging epidemic? It probably was better if people left. Trains rolled in empty and rolled out full, regardless of what the Board of Health said.

  By Sunday Eliza walked empty streets. Hardly
anyone was in church at St. Mary’s for the morning services. Few shops would open on Monday. The faces left to meet her eyes and nod somberly at her were dark, or if they were white, they were drawn and Irish poor.

  New cases of yellow fever sprang up by the dozens within days.

  Callie managed inventive meals even without the shops, thanks largely to the household vegetable garden and root cellar.

  “You should stay here,” Eliza said one day at lunch. “You’d be safe. Most of the neighbors are gone. There’s plenty of space. Just a couple of weeks to ride this thing out.”

  “Mebbe.”

  This was frankly more than Eliza had hoped for.

  “Bring some of your things tomorrow,” she said. “Keep your options open. Choose any room you want.”

  “I be fine in the old maid’s room behind the kitchen.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I have done the requisite research and have credible information.” Nolan drummed his fingers across the top of Jillian’s computer screen.

  She glanced up. “Meaning?”

  “I have conferred with Kris Bryant, and two scoops of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in a waffle cone are yours for the taking as long as we get down to Ore the Mountain in the next twenty minutes.”

  Jillian pushed the papers on her desk to one side. “It is Saturday.”

  “And a fine weather Saturday. Afternoon tourists will be out in droves just to enjoy the day.”

  “And my ice cream.” Jillian picked up her phone and grabbed the sweatshirt off the back of her chair. “What are we waiting for?”

  “Indeed. We could drive.”

  “Too much trouble to park. Just try to keep up, old man.”

  When Jillian meant business, she could flip the switch from couch potato to former high school track star. Fortunately, Nolan was the one who taught her to run. He kept pace. Fifteen minutes later he caught Kris’s eye at the ice cream counter. The shop was packed. The fall day was just sunny enough, and free of breeze, to make ice cream appealing. Children and adults alike hunched against the glass considering the two dozen flavors on offer in cones, dishes, and shakes.