to figure when white robes start popping up between the pines . . .”
“You’ve seen them?”
He nods, mouth twitching with disgust. “Sure, plenty often. Sometimes just a coupla good old boys swigging rotgut. Sometimes a regular tent revival.”
“Davy’s ghosts in the woods,” I realize with a shiver.
Max shakes his head fondly. “Yep. Musta overheard one of us some weeks back, way I figure it. Kid could make a fairy tale out of a rock.”
“Oh, rocks are easy as anything. There are far less enchanted objects.”
He shrugs, conceding.
When staring goes out of style, I ask, “But what do you think of the old bird’s idea? Writing an article? Asking around? Snooping, to use the accurate moniker?”
Max pushes to his feet. “It ain’t baked, not by half, but then again you just put it in the oven. Worth a try. This shit’s got me up nights and no mistake. Anyhow, I’m for the bathhouse, Alice. Ain’t no getting actually clean on a cross-country train, and I’m due on the eleven ten sleeper tomorrow. Can you make it back to your bunk?”
Say my name again. And while you’re granting favors, please don’t go.
“Oh, I’m a regular textbook of health.” Trying for a jazzy twirl in languid fingertips first, I slide the glasses back on. “See you on the morrow?”
“S’pose so.”
“Topping. Max?”
He stops and his body is angled just so, that little bit closer, knee cocked and his cream-and-sugar-coffee face tipped down—I’m not inventing it.
And then it hurts so I can hardly breathe.
“I’ll do the best I can to help while you’re gone,” I vow. “If not for you, I’d have played proverbial taps.”
When he leaves, he doesn’t say goodbye, but he does brush thumb and forefinger against my chin in an affable fashion and I gaze after him, feeling the prints. Thinking the money in my room could easily pay for eleven-thousand-mile stints with Max if not for the fact that I got my wish.
I’m trapped here, Overton would retaliate somehow if I went missing, and Max would hate me for it.
* * *
—
When I catch my first face full of Portland in blazing daylight, I gape up at it like a salmon, fish mouthed and reeling.
We’re standing outside the Paragon Hotel the next morning, Blossom and Davy and Miss Christina and myself, and my eyes swell at the carnival of color. Everything I’ve ever seen, from Tobacco Club chorus girls to Central Park in July, was in black and white. And now I’ve fallen headfirst into a box of oil paints.
“The mountains are out!” Blossom rejoices.
“When the clouds break and you can see the peaks,” the cook explains. “Too many buildings on this street, but Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Saint Helens . . .”
Blossom waves her fingers like a magician, the bell sleeves of her mustard coat sliding down a switch-thin arm. “Welcome to Portland, Alice James. Now let us make the most of it before the dying of the light. Oh, easy now—you’re not long out of bed and this is a marathon, not a sprint.”
When Blossom informed me last night after pan-fried trout stuffed with wild mushrooms that if the next day was fine, they were taking Davy to the Elms, I lost no time hitching myself to the wagon. For several reasons. By now I itch to get my bearings; my constitution requires, as it is said, bolstering; I like Blossom in the child-bright way of being surprised someone you admire is letting you share their orange.
And if I quit the Paragon Hotel, I am less likely to make an uninvited guest of myself in Maximilian’s bedroom.
We stand at the corner of Northwest Everett and Northwest Broadway. The skies are enormous, flung open and sprawling. A bucket of spilled cerulean. Stately brick and stone buildings tower above us—the Paragon seems small with its fifth-story gable points and its carefully hosed pavement—and pretty iron streetlamps with triple lights blooming from their sturdy metal stems dot our path. A horse-drawn cart sagging under its load of flour sacks passes us, but so do sleek automobiles, Fords and Daimlers with wheel spokes blurring and cloth tops flapping in the crisp wind. Broadway is wide and teeming with locals. Men wearing double-breasted suits in fawn checks and sober pinstripes, carrying copies of The Oregonian. Brisk women with bobbed hair, stenographers hunting down coffee and egg salad sandwiches, one meltingly boneless flapper whose lips have likely kissed things of far greater interest than the cigarette she sips from an ivory holder.
Aside from the