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Yuletide 2013
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Published:
2013-12-25
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2,393
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1/1
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If Only

Summary:

Hector and Stanley have a different kind of digging to do.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

“Stanley,” Hector Zeroni said as he drifted on the purple innertube, staring up at the sun-dappled leaves of the nearby trees. “I think we should find her.”

“Find who?” Stanley Yelnats, half-asleep in the aftermath of a snorkel race around the edges of the pool, had his head pillowed on his arms on the long green pool mattress, but he pried open one eye to look at his best friend. “We already found your mom.”

“Find her,” Hector said, flipping over to give Stanley the intense look that meant he’d been thinking about what he was about to say for a long time. “Find Kissin’ Kate Barlow.”

“Find her grave, you mean?” Stanley asked, turning carefully onto his side so he could prop up his head with one hand. “Because I’m not even sure she has one. And even if she does, I don’t want to dig her up. I’ve done enough digging.”

“I wouldn’t mind the digging part,” Hector said. “But that’s not what I meant. I meant we should find out about her. Find out who she was before she started kissing men and killing them.”

“I think it went the other way around.” Stanley gave up on sleeping and sat up, letting his legs dangle over the sides of the air mattress into the cool water. Even after all this time he found himself wiggling his toes, just for the feel of the water moving around them. He didn’t think he would ever get tired of the sensation of water against his skin, not ever. “And you might mind the kind of digging we’d have to do to find out about her. It will be a lot of reading.”

Hector made a face obligingly, but Stanley could tell he was only doing it for the sake of habit. “Reading, huh?” He sighed. “Oh, well, I probably need the practice.”

“We could hire detectives to do it,” Stanley pointed out. He knew that, even with a private tutor, Hector was finding it difficult to catch up on so many lost years of schooling.

“No,” Hector said. “I think we need to do it ourselves. But maybe we can hire a detective to help us figure out where to start.”

“I already know where to start,” Stanley said.

***

The library in town had two books about Kissin’ Kate Barlow. One of them was for little kids, and it didn’t have very much to say about anything except bank robberies and train robberies. The one for grownups wasn’t much better, although it did have Stanley’s grandfather in the list of victims in the back with his name misspelled. Stanley and Hector did find out that Katherine Barlow had been born in Kansas, but her family had moved to Texas when she was a little girl. She’d been the schoolmistress of the town of Green Lake before turning to crime. The author of the book speculated that she’d lost her mind after her school had burned down, then blamed the townsmen for not putting out the fire.

“I don’t think that’s enough of a reason to start killing people,” Hector said, when Stanley read him that part. “I mean, not unless they started the fire.”

“Maybe they did,” Stanley said. “The author says that the news accounts of the period are contradictory.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think it means we need to read those newspapers and find out.”

At the end of the book they found out how she died. “She was bit by a yellow spotted lizard. And a man named Trout Walker turned in the body for the reward.”

“Walker. Walker.” Hector’s eyes widened. “The warden’s name is Walker, isn’t it?” He dug one hand into his curly hair. “Maybe Trout Walker is the warden’s grandfather. The one who made her dig.”

Stanley turned to the index of the book. There were a lot of pages indicated for people named Walker. He flipped to the earliest one. “A man named Walker started the town,” he told Hector. “So that makes sense.”

“I bet he hushed up what really happened,” Hector said. “I bet he didn’t want anyone to know why Kissin’ Kate started killing people. That’s why the newspapers are contrawhosit.”

“Contradictory.” Stanley bit his thumb thoughtfully. “Okay,” he said, after he’d thought about it a while. “Okay. So the newspapers are maybe a dead end. Maybe one of them has the real story, but maybe not. How do we find out what’s true?”

Hector shrugged. “I don’t know. What other things would there be besides newspapers?”

“People’s diaries. Letters they wrote. Old photographs.” Stanley turned to the bibliography of the book on the table. “See, here’s a list of the ones this author used.”

Hector scanned the page, hoping to find words he knew. “What’s an arch ivy?” he asked, pointing to a word that kept showing up.

“An archive,” Stanley said. “The e is silent and makes the i long.”

Hector wrinkled his nose. “Oh, that again. But what is it?”

“A kind of library where they keep letters and diaries and old photographs,” Stanley said, noting down the name of the archive that appeared most frequently in the list. “And I think it’s going to
be our next stop.”

***

The archivist was a tiny woman, even shorter than Hector, who looked to be about a million years old. She remembered the author of the book Stanley had borrowed from their local library coming to do his research. “That was ten years ago,” she said. “Before we catalogued the Henderson papers. Not that he would have taken the time to look at the Henderson papers.” She tsked, and pushed the book back into Stanley’s backpack, as if it might contaminate her library if it were allowed to stay out. “I’ve seldom seen such a careless researcher. Do you know he didn’t read a single account by a woman?”

“No ma’am,” Stanley said, bouncing a little on his toes with excitement.

Hector tugged at his sleeve as the archivist vanished back into the depths of the shelving. “Is that good?” he asked.

“Yes,” Stanley said. “It means that the author missed things. Things we might find.”

***

When he saw how much material there was to go through, Stanley’s excitement ebbed. Sarah Henderson had written about everything she had seen or felt or heard or smelt or touched from the time she could first lift a pencil, and so had her daughters. It was going to take weeks to read all of that material, and it wasn’t going to help that most of it was handwritten, even if the handwriting was pretty nice. And it wasn’t just the Henderson women’s papers that the archive had. There were still all those other things that the book author had found.

“I’ll help,” Hector offered, touching a careful finger to one of Sarah’s diaries, as if it were going to run away if he startled it.

Stanley almost asked how Hector could possibly help when he still couldn’t remember the silent ‘e’ rule all the time, but he caught the words back before he could say them. “You could read the diaries from when the girls were little,” he said. “That would help a lot.”

***

It was a week later, when Stanley was almost getting used to spending all his hours breathing paper dust, that Hector looked up from the Indian Chief notebook he was studying and asked,

“Who was Onion Sam?”

“What?” Stanley dragged himself out of a letter about the state fair. “Who?”

“Onion Sam. She says he’s sweet on Miss Katherine.”

Stanley looked for the census list of the town of Green Lake that the archivist had dug out for them. “I don’t see anyone named Sam. Or Samuel. He must not have lived in Green Lake.”

“But he keeps coming back. Look.”

Stanley put aside his work and went over to read with Hector. The notebook was Hannah Henderson’s, Sarah’s daughter, and it had both school work and stories as well as the occasional comment about the things which were happening around Hannah. She mentioned Onion Sam fixing the roof, and a few pages later mentioned Onion Sam and Mary Lou, which made both Hector and Stanley excited, because they remembered the name Mary Lou from the boat that had sheltered them on the lakebed. But there was a drawing of Mary Lou two pages later, and she turned out to be a donkey.

“Could Onion Sam be a donkey?”

“Donkeys can’t fix roofs.”

“Right.”

And then, just when it seemed like the notebook was going to tell them everything they needed to know, there were two pages torn out. The next entry was about going to school at the saloon because no one wanted to build a new school if it wasn’t going to rain.

There were a few other references to Sam in some of the other letters and diaries from Green Lake, mostly to his lizard repelling tonic and his sweet onions, but not a single reference after the day that Kissin’ Kate Barlow walked into the sheriff’s office and began her reign of terror. There were references to the burning of the school, too, but they were made in roundabout ways. Whatever had happened, the town had tried to forget it, and the lack of rain and the receding shoreline of the lake gave people plenty of other reasons to leave.

Stanley asked the archivist if there were any other places to look. “There would be,” she said, “If I could only get my hands on the Walker papers. It was the most prominent family in town. But who knows what became of them after the lake dried up.”

Hector looked at Stanley. Stanley looked at Hector. “We know,” they said together.

***

“Do we really want to talk to the Warden again?” Stanley asked at the dinner table that night. Hector and his mom were guests, as usual, and Hector’s mom had brought over a goulash that was making everyone feel contented. He kind of hated to ruin the mood. “I mean, ever?”

“What is she like?” Mrs. Zeroni asked.

“Hard,” Stanley said.

“Mean,” Hector said. “Her grandfather made her dig holes all the time in the lake, looking for Kissin’ Kate Barlow’s hidden loot. Even on holidays.”

“That is a hard life for a child.” Hector’s mother sat back in her chair and folded her hands. “Like growing up under a curse.”

Stanley thought about that all night. At last he got out of bed and went to the living room, where they kept the trunk that had been his great grandfather’s and a few of the pieces of Kissin’ Kate Barlow’s loot that had never seemed to be worth selling. There was a coral necklace among the other bits and pieces. He picked it up and put it into his pajama pocket, and then went out the side door, across the dew-damp lawn, to tap at Hector’s window.

***

Louise Walker, much to their surprise, was serving her sentence in the same house where she had lived when she was the Warden of Camp Green Lake. It was separated from the rest of the camp now, by a high, barbed wire fence, and there was a guard who had to approve any visitors.

“I told the judge he could send me anywhere but back here,” Louise Walker told the boys as they followed her inside, with their lawyer tagging along behind not in the least bit discreetly. Louise was wearing an electric radio ankle bracelet so large she’d had to slit the end of her jeans to put them on, but otherwise she was dressed much as she had always been. “He had a sense of humor, so here I am.” She settled into a chair and waved them to seats. “What can I do for you?”

“We’re trying to find out about Kissin’ Kate Barlow,” Stanley said.

“And Onion Sam,” Hector added.

“And no one seems to know what really happened. The people who did are all gone. But we thought maybe you’d let us look at any papers that your family left behind.”

Louise folded her arms. “And why would I let you do that?” she said. “Why would I want you to dig up the past after all these years?”

“Because if you dig it up, maybe you can bury it the right way this time?” Stanley said, wishing it hadn't come out as a question.

Louise only snorted and stared at the wall behind their heads. “I don’t think so.”

Hector shrugged. “Well, we tried.” He got to his feet.

“Yeah.” Stanley had to stand up to get his hand into his pocket and pull out the coral necklace. He put it on the coffee table.

“Is that... is it... ?” Louise put her hands together like she was praying, as if she were afraid to reach out to the necklace.

“Part of it, yes. And it’s yours, if you want it.”

“A bribe?”

“No,” Hector said. “It’s just yours. We think... Well, my mom thinks, that maybe after all that digging you did when you were little, something got broken. And maybe, just maybe, if you didn’t need to dig any more you could fix it.”

“At least we hope so. Goodbye, Warden. Miss Walker.”

They’d reached the gate in the electric fence before she came to the door. “You don’t need any papers,” she called. “I know what happened.”

When they were back inside, she pulled out a photo album and turned back through yellowing pages to a large group picture of the town, taken on the Fourth of some July. As Stanley and Hector looked on, she pointed to a tall, dark-skinned man who seemed to have wandered into the corner of the frame, standing next to a donkey cart. “That,” she began, “is Onion Sam.”

The curtains at the windows began to flutter with wind coming across the spreading waters from the lake and for a moment Stanley thought he could hear a man and a woman laughing together. There was something in Louise Walker’s voice that he’d never thought he’d hear. Something like a need to be heard. He bent his head to listen to her story and rested his hand on Hector’s shoulder. It was only right, after all. All curses should come to an end.

Notes:

beta thanks to MadameHardy