The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,154

it. Float off on it like the big water Grandmama used to tell of. I go all the way to Africa where the grass grows red and brown and gold by the acre and all the blue beads are back together on a string, and they hang on the neck of a queen.

This place is like Africa. It’s the last thought I have. I laugh soft as I sail away over that grass. Here I am in Africa.

A touch on my arm startles me awake. I hadn’t been there long, I can tell by the sun.

Elam Salter is standing over me. He’s got Missy by the elbow. She’s carrying a handful of wildflowers, some pulled up by the roots. Dry soil falls down and glitters in the sunlight. One of Missy’s fingernails is bleeding.

“I found her wandering,” Elam says from under the trimmed mustache that circles his lips like three sides of a picture frame. He’s got a pretty mouth. Wide and serious, with a thick, full bottom lip. His eyes in this light are the brown-gold of polished amber.

Even as I notice all that, my heart jumps up pounding, and my mind spins so fast I can’t catch a single thought. Every last tired shred of me comes alive at once, and it’s like I been woke up by that swamp panther I once thought he was. Don’t know whether to run or stand and stare because I’ll likely never again be this close to something so beautiful and so frightful.

“Oh…” I hear my own words from far off. “I didn’t mean her to.”

“It isn’t the safest place for her, out past the fort,” he tells me, and I can see there’s more he won’t say about the danger. He guides Missy to the bench. I noticed how he sits her down gentle-like and shifts her hand to her lap, so the flowers won’t get ruined. He’s a good man.

I stand up, straighten my sore neck, and try to take my courage in hand. “I know what you done for us, and—”

“My work.” He stops me before I can go on. “I’ve done my work. Not as well as I would’ve liked.” He nods toward Missy in a way that says he takes blame for the shape she’s in now. “I didn’t know of this until after the thing was done. The fellow you followed here, William Gossett, had entangled himself in some way with the Marston Men, and it was for that reason they took his daughters. I’d understood that they meant to hold them at the river landing in Louisiana. I’d left a man there to free them after the Genesee Star departed upriver, but when he attempted it, they were nowhere to be found.”

“What’d they want from him…Old Gossett?” I try to imagine the man I knew tied up in such a thing, except I can’t.

“Money, property, or if he was already an ally, perhaps just to ensure his further and complete cooperation. It’s by those methods they’ve fattened the finances for their cause. They often make use of young folk from well-provisioned families. Some are hostages. Some are volunteers. Some begin as one and become the other once they’ve caught a case of Honduras Fever. There’s temptation in the idea of free land in Central America.”

I turn my eyes downward. I think of Missy’s troubles, of the baby she’s carrying. Heat comes into my face. I stare at the cream-colored dust covering his boots. “That was how Missy Lavinia got tangled up with these people? Thinking to serve her own purposes at first, but then it went wrong?” Should I tell him about Missy’s brother? Or does he know already, and he’s testing me out? I watch him sidewards, see his thumb and finger smooth his mustache, then stay there pinched over his chin, like he’s waiting for me to speak, but I don’t.

“Quite likely so. The Marston Men devote themselves to the cause in all manner of thought and deed. This idea of returning to old times and cotton kingdoms—of new land to rule as they see fit—gives them something to believe in, a hope that the days of the grand houses and the slave gangs aren’t