Mining for Justice Read online

  “I know Raymo.” Blakely looked disgusted. “I’ve pulled him over for speeding in that Firebird more times than I can count. Got him once for a bar fight, and another time on weed possession. Real mouthy.”

  “That’s him.”

  “Tell your cousin to call if anything else happens. We can at least get a report written, establish some paper trail, in the event such a thing is needed.”

  “She didn’t want to call you, but I’ll keep trying. Don’t tell her I stopped by, okay? I wanted to ask if you’d keep an eye on the house.” He wrote down the address.

  “Will do,” Blakely promised. “Either Raymo will de-escalate on his own, or he’ll screw up and go too far. If he does, we’ll nail him.”

  “Thanks,” Roel­ke said. “Let me know if anything happens.”

  Blakely promised, and Roel­ke had to content himself with that. He gave me the same line I gave Libby and Adam, Roel­ke thought as he went back outside. But nobody wanted to specify what “going too far” might mean.

  Rain was still falling when Chloe arrived at Tamsin’s door looking like she’d just belly-crawled from a hog wallow. Before she had a chance to knock, her hostess opened the door. “When I got back from visiting Lowena and you still weren’t home, I got worried!”

  Chloe had decided that the best explanation would be short and sweet. “I’m terribly sorry. I went for a hike on Dark Hill, got caught in the storm, and slipped and fell in the mud.”

  “Well. I’ll get a plastic garbage bag for your clothes.” Tamsin bustled away, fussing under her breath.

  After a hot shower, and a supper of homemade vegetable soup and apple bread, Chloe felt better. When dishes were done Tamsin, with the aid of a magnifying glass, worked on a nativity scene done in cross-stitch. Chloe wrapped up in an afghan and settled into Tamsin’s antique rocker with her notebook, and pretended to work. The chair was gorgeous, black with ornate red and gold embellishments. She really shouldn’t sit in such a fine piece, but the chair felt comforting, somehow. Right now she’d take whatever comfort she could find.

  When ten o’clock rolled around, and long distance rates went down, she said good night and retreated to the guest room. She plopped on the bed and called Roel­ke.

  He answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

  She sat up straight. “It’s me. Is everything okay?”

  “I thought it might be Libby. She … she had a bad evening.”

  Chloe listened with growing dismay as Roel­ke shared the latest. “Has Libby’s ex ever stalked her before?”

  “No. He made the divorce as hard as it could be, but nothing like this. Libby thinks things changed when he saw her with Adam. Raymo was content when he thought she was lonely and miserable. Seeing her happy, moving on, made something snap.”

  “That’s sick.” Chloe closed her eyes. “And Deirdre and Justin are right in the middle. I don’t like this at all.”

  “Believe me, I don’t either,” Roel­ke said grimly. “I’m going to keep an eye on them. I asked the Palmyra cops to do the same.”

  “Good. Say, have you heard any more about that training thing?”

  “My interview with the Police Committee is tomorrow morning.”

  “You’ll do great.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “How are things in Mineral Point? Any more backlash about Old World Wisconsin?”

  “Not really. I spent the afternoon helping Claudia with collections stuff, which was good.” Compared to what Roel­ke was worried about, an unpleasant freelance historian, and her own tumble into a soggy badger hole, seemed unworthy of mention. “I miss you, though.”

  “I miss you too.”

  After hanging up, Chloe stared at the wall, thinking about Libby and the kids. She hoped that Dan Raymo, having had his fun with flowerpots, would retreat back into his hole. But the whole business of creeping into Libby’s yard, just to mess with her, was frightening. If Raymo really wanted to hurt Libby, and went after the children …

  Chloe popped to her feet. “Okay, that’s enough of that,” she muttered. If she didn’t distract herself she’d be awake all night imagining things she really didn’t want to imagine. She had unread research files from Pendarvis, and decided to get one and retreat under the covers.

  When she opened her totebag, however, the first thing she saw was an unfamiliar piece of folded paper. She pulled it out, opened it, and stared at the words printed in ink:

  Go back to Old World Wisconsin or you’ll be sorry. You are not wanted here, bitch.

  Chloe had read the note several times before she realized that her skin was prickling and she felt mildly nauseated. Don’t be such a wuss, she told herself. This was the stuff of fourth grade playgrounds. Honestly, she should laugh it off.

  But a memory popped unbidden into her mind—the sensation of a hand against her back earlier as she stood braced against the whipping wind on the edge of the badger hole. Had someone pushed her? If so, had that person also written this half-stupid, half-chilling note?

  She tried to consider who could have left such a thing for her to find. Like an idiot she’d left her totebag in the entry room for much of the day, providing easy access to any staff member, volunteer, or visitor. Gerald was the most vocal in blaming Old World Wisconsin, and by extension her, for the threat to close Pendarvis. But others might be harboring just as much resentment, and keeping it to themselves.

  Twelve

  august 1835

  “Why are you angry?” Andrew asked.

  Mary looked up from the skillet she was scouring with sand. “Angry?”

  “You’re scrubbing that like the devil.” He gave her a crooked smile. “I know you.”

  She sat back on her heels. Since settling into the diggings something had been building inside, but it wasn’t anger. Resentment, more like. And it wouldn’t do to keep it to herself.

  “I apologize,” she told him. “And … you’re right. I do have something on my mind.”

  Andrew scraped the last bit of porridge from his plate. Jory had left for the mine, and Ruan was firing up his forge near the badger hole, but Andrew had lingered. “Best get it out, then.”

  Mary looked at the ridge Cornish miners called Mena Dhu, ugly and scarred. “Mining lead is your dream, Andrew. Yours and Jory’s. I have my own.” Her dream had been born of her mother’s whispered words, shaped in the presence of Mrs. Bunney, nurtured during the long journey from Camborne to the territory.

  Andrew frowned. He and Jory had been digging a shaft, pitching out the lead they found, but the deeper they went the harder the work. “We need you to work the surface, Mary. If you cob and clean what we send up, we’ll be able to get it to the smelter sooner.” Lead didn’t require as much surface labor as they’d been accustomed to in Cornwall, but there was still a need to break large rocks down to manageable size, and to remove clay and debris from the mineral.

  “I’ll gladly help this afternoon,” Mary said quietly. “Just not all day.”

  It was rare for Andrew to express irritation, but he did now. “Winter will be here before we know it. We need a windlass, and they cost forty dollars!” Until they could get a windlass in place, which would let them haul stone from the shaft efficiently, the men had to climb up ladders with an achingly heavy bucket in one hand.

  “I said I will help.” Mary folded her arms. “But I have another idea. Just give me a chance.”

  After Andrew stormed off to the mine, she picked her way down the ravine, paying attention to the camps she passed. She saw miners spooning cornmeal mush, or gnawing at blackened bits of skillet-fried cornmeal cakes. She was betting that many of them would be willing to pay her for a taste of real bread.

  Sweat trickled down her spine as she walked for the first time into Mineral Point. She passed “The Mansion House”—several crude cabins linked together by walkways—operated by a fat Co
rnishman. Fiddle music, drunken laughter, and angry voices screeched from the open doors. I’d rather sleep in a badger hole, Mary thought, and kept walking.

  A handful of log cabins and stone structures stood, with men putting up more. The place smelled of dust, horse and oxen droppings, and rotting garbage. Mary passed drovers carrying long whips coiled over their shoulders, French trappers in greasy leathers, a few better-dressed men who might have been geologists or Yankee businessmen. Or possibly lawyers, Mary thought. She’d heard that a court had been established here. Lawyers and businessmen hoped that when Wisconsin became its own territory, the settlement would be named the capital. Some passersby spoke dialects she recognized: Cornish, Irish, English. Other snippets of overheard conversations were incomprehensible.

  She passed several boarding houses and shops, trying to puzzle from signs which sold boots or mining tools or groceries. She ventured into a log cabin that appeared promising, but inside she found only a man dispensing grog from behind a board propped on two barrels. Several men sat drinking in morose silence. Two more were playing cards on a barrel in one corner, and a fat man lay snoring in another.

  Mary approached the bartender and spoke carefully. “Do you sell food?”

  “Only the liquid kind.” The man looked her up and down with a suggestive leer.

  She ignored his lewd look. “Where can I buy food?”

  He said something she didn’t understand, tugged on his vest, and sent a stream of tobacco juice to the dirt floor.

  “Where?” she demanded.

  Scowling, the man held up two fingers and jerked his thumb: Two doors up, that way.

  Mary went back outside. She found the store, such as it was, set up in one corner of another log building. Food for sale sat in kegs, barrels, and sacks. The rest of the room was living space, with a bed built into one corner, a small table, and empty kegs that served as seats. The room smelled kewny—sour and rancid.

  “I need wheat flour and salt,” Mary told the storekeeper. He had sunken eyes and was cadaverously thin, a combination that did not inspire confidence.

  “A bushel of salt is twenty dollars,” the man said. “Flour, one hundred fourteen dollars per barrel.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Aye?”

  “It ain’t easy or cheap to haul food out here.” He shrugged, unmoved by her distress. Then he reached into a barrel of cornmeal and lifted a handful, letting it sift down through his fingers. “Just ten dollars and forty cents a bushel.”

  Mary turned away. Maybe, she thought, I should just get cornmeal. But her plan didn’t involve cornmeal.

  Wheat flour it must be. Her stomach twisted nervously as she contemplated Andrew’s dismay when he learned how much money she’d spent. I’ll make it work, she promised herself, and emptied their cash pouch of the bits of mineral that passed for currency in the diggings. The storekeeper weighed it and fetched as much salt and flour as she could afford.

  Back in camp, accompanied by the metallic clang of Ruan’s hammer on anvil nearby, she fetched the cup where she’d been nurturing a sourdough starter, made with the last of her barley flour. The wheat flour she’d purchased was of poor quality, full of lumps. She tried sifting it through her finest ore sieve. Finally, flushed and furious, she took her cobbing hammer to the hard bits. Once the flour was of reasonable consistency she mixed up a batch of bread dough and put it in the sun to rise.

  When the dough was ready she put it into her spider—an iron pan with three legs—and nestled it over the glowing chirks of her cookfire. She put on the lid, covered the lid with more coals, and left it to bake.

  The large loaf that emerged from the makeshift oven was golden brown, crusty, and fragrant. With the bread wrapped in her apron and a knife in hand, Mary set out, meandering through the scattered huts and mines. She offered miners slices of the steaming bread, slipping their coins and lead gravel into her pouch. In ten minutes her apron contained only the three slices she’d saved for her brothers and Ruan.

  At their mine site, she found Andrew dumping stone from the bucket. “I brought you a snack,” she called.

  He was still annoyed with her, but he accepted the bread. “Wheat bread? You spent money on flour?”

  “Just tell me if you like it.”

  He took a bite. “It’s very good,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “The Yankee miners seem to think so too.” She held up the plump pouch.

  Andrew stared at her, eyes widening. “You’ve been selling … ?”

  “I have. Most of the men on this hill have been cooking for themselves all summer. Flour is dear, but I can make money doing this, Andrew.”

  “Mary Pascoe, you are clever.” He shook his head.

  “I’m determined,” she said. This was just the beginning. One day she would offer saffron buns and clotted cream, and tea served in pretty china cups.

  But she wasn’t there yet. “Now I can work,” she told Andrew, pulling her cobbing hammer from her basket.

  The men dug down thirty feet, cribbing the shaft with timbers to prevent rock falls. They followed horizontal veins east and west as they appeared, looking for a good drift—a horizontal run of lead branching off from the main shaft. They had some success, more disappointments. “I thought this one was promising,” Andrew said one evening, clearly tired and discouraged. “But it petered out.”

  They were sitting around their campfire beside the badger hole, sharing a supper of boiled rice and treacle-smeared bread. A breeze stirred up the rotten egg smell drifting from the smelters. The wood-fired furnaces burned impurities from the ore miners brought by the barrowful. The melted lead was formed into ingots, ready for market. Smelting was necessary, but Mary hated the smeechy yellow smoke and stink.

  “We’ll find a better drift,” Jory said. Mary had to smile. Jory was a miner in his heart, in his bones.

  Ruan stood, climbed down into the badger hole, and emerged again with something in his hand. “I made you a sticking tommy,” he said, holding out the candleholder. The brothers only had one between them.

  “Thank you,” Jory said with a delighted grin. “Say, it’s a fine one.” He passed it to Mary.

  Mary hadn’t paid much attention to Ruan’s smithing, but she saw at once that he did good work. He had taken the time to put a few decorative twists and flourishes in the iron. She’d never seen a sticking tommy that was beautiful as well as functional.

  “Do you think it’s silly to decorate a tool, Mary?” Ruan asked.

  “Not at all.” She ran one finger over the twists before passing the candleholder to Andrew.

  That night, in the badger hole, Mary lay awake and listened to the boisterous shouts and drunken laughter drifting over the hill, and to the deep breathing of the three men sharing this shelter. Some of her friends from Wheal Blackstone were already married mothers. Mary hadn’t given much thought to marriage. She’d been too busy trying to take care of her brothers. Besides, she’d always known that when Mama had spoken of her dreams for her eldest daughter, she wasn’t talking about marrying a laborer and settling down.

  But a blacksmith’s skills would always be needed. The work was safer than mining. And, Mary thought, Ruan is a good man.

  The next morning she followed her new routine: make breakfast for her men, then begin mixing dough. She wished she had butter or jam, but those niceties would come in time.

  When the bread was baked she set out in a different direction. She sold bread to a miner manning a windlass, and to another who was shoveling ore into a wheelbarrow. It was a fine day, not as hot as the past few had been. Fluffy white clouds dotted a sky as brilliant a blue as Ruan’s eyes.

  She passed by the entrance to a small stone shelter built into the hillside, assuming that it was empty at this hour. Then she heard the unexpected sound of a thin and shaky child’s voice. “Good morning.”

  Mary stooped by the entra
nce, trying to see into the gloom. “Who’s there? Will you come out?”

  “My papa says I can’t.”

  “Is your papa there?”

  “No. That’s why I’m not allowed to come out.”

  “How about if you stay inside, but come closer to the entrance so I can see you? I’ve got some nice fresh bread with me, and I’d like to give you a piece.”

  For a moment there was no response. Then Mary heard a little shuffling sound. Finally a girl with enormous brown eyes appeared. She looked to be maybe five or six years old. She wore a faded cotton dress that had probably once been deep green. Her brown hair straggled down her back, in desperate need of a comb. One thumb was in her mouth.

  Mary felt as if someone was squeezing her heart in a vise.

  Her hand trembled as she sliced off a generous piece of bread and extended it toward the child. The girl hesitated before taking it. She took a tentative nibble, then gobbled the rest. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “My name is Mary Pascoe. What’s yours?”

  “Ida Penberthy.”

  “Is your father working a mine?”

  Ida nodded.

  “Where’s your mama, Ida?”

  “She died last year.” Sudden tears glimmered in her eyes, visible even in the shadows.

  So, Mary thought, this child is likely left alone in a cave all day, every day, while her father works his mine. And right this minute, there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  “It was that nice to meet you, Ida,” she said. “I’ll come visit again, all right?”

  Ida put her thumb back into her mouth and nodded.

  Mary thought about Ida for the rest of the day. After feeding her men at suppertime, Mary walked back to the cave. Ida and a man sat by a small cookfire outside. The aroma of fried salt pork sizzled from a skillet. Ida waggled her fingers in greeting before leaning shyly against her father.

  Mary introduced herself. “Are you Mr. Penberthy?”