his roof. The loss of more than half his herd to a calamitous winter was as plain a sign from the Almighty as he needed. Josie would have to live elsewhere.
Nora had looked up from six crammed pages of Lenore’s atrocious penmanship to see Emmett smiling sheepishly at her. He drummed his hat. “We can scarcely turn away another pair of hands,” he whispered. “And I thought—well. I thought you might like a girl about the place.”
You have a girl about the place, Evelyn huffed in her ear.
Dwarfed by hat and carpetbag, and managing, by virtue of her pinched face, to look simultaneously anxious and contented, Josie Kincaid had hovered in the corridor like the chaff of some sad dream.
The sight of her filled Nora with dread. But Emmett was already seizing on her silence. “At least we’ll have spared her from the whorehouse. Can there be any doubt it’s where she would have ended up, had she made San Francisco?”
“You always were a soft touch for lost causes.”
Josie’s demerits manifested right away. Six months with Lenore in Wyoming had done little to harden her up for country life. She slept lightly, ate little, and swooned often. Ordinary ranch implements confounded her. She was likelier to use a hammer the wrong than the right way around. She had an aversion to killing anything, especially mice, which she caught and freed in the evening fields with the help of Dolan—who laid eyes on her, decided that theirs was a love preordained, and quickly became the world’s most knowledgeable and benevolent mouser. Her belief in the oracular power of birds enkindered her at once to Toby, who took to following her around as if she had just stepped forth from some storybook. Churning around in Josie’s mind was an almanac of tincture remedies, Oriental magic, occult notions, absurd natural histories—especially those detailing the monstrous lizards unearthed by Cope and Marsh—all of which she talked ceaselessly about, making household rides into Amargo unbearable.
But the girl was not entirely without use. For one thing, she talked to Gramma. Not in the way an ordinary person might address an invalid—which, during her lifetime, Nora had learned was similar to the way most people might address a dog—but conversationally: with accommodating syntax, pauses to allow for Gramma’s imagined reply. You’d round the corner to find Josie and Gramma in the kitchen, sphinxlike, locked eye to eye in wordless confab. Afterwards, Josie might say, “Missus Harriet don’t like the look of the garden this year. Says there’s not enough rain in the world to save them cabbages.” And for all of Nora’s aggravation, the old lady would seem a little more smug in her armored chair. A little more present. This was the sole, undeniable boon of Josie’s tenure: she kept the old lady’s cogs turning.
Owing to Gramma’s age, however, Nora had begun to suspect that this was a gift compromised by its connection to Josie’s cardinal power: communion with the dead.
The dead, whom Josie called the “other living,” were apparently everywhere. They announced themselves to her in town; on the road; at church. Their sentiments were revealed to her abruptly and unbearably. She might be riding along, content enough, and suddenly find herself so dismal that she would double over and whisper: “I feel a lonely girl here.” And then whosoever happened to have the misfortune of accompanying her would be obliged to stand there while Josie felt around for this unmoored soul with her mind, sometimes for hours.
This unwelcome eccentricity was further poisoned by the fact that the dead seemed outnumbered only by living affiliates who wished to commune with them. Word of a clairvoyant at the Lark place had gone roaring through town the instant the girl arrived. To Nora’s provocation, visitors began appearing on her porch with pies and pan dulce and other neighborly tributes. They lingered for hours, bashfully sidling up to the subject—could the mistress of the house possibly be persuaded, oh would she ever be so kind as to consider asking Josie to summon a brother, a mother, some friend long-deceased?
“Not in this house,” was Nora’s general position.
But Emmett was giving. Emmett was curious. Emmett was determined to see the girl in her element. “The Paloma House has offered to host a séance,” he told Nora.
“Now what on earth would possess Moss Riley to do a thing like that?”
“I believe he has some words for a cousin who passed on while Moss still owed him money. And