Laura's Shadow, page 3
What followed was a thrice-weekly feature: Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, space allotted for one to four panels. What didn’t follow was a paycheck, at least not one with a raise in salary that reflected Trixie’s new contribution to Neighborhood Newz. What started as a lark turned into a labor of sometimes love and finally settled into being its own creative reward. Early cartoons poked gentle fun at Minneapolis local oddities, but those with more generalized appeal were apparently clipped and copied and sent to citizens far beyond the fame-proof borders of Newz subscribers. To date, Lost Laura was featured in fifteen small Midwest publications, and the envelope dropped on her desk right before lunch promised to change that.
She recognized the return-address logo immediately, a prestigious publishing company, owner of countless papers across the country. And the addressee? Lost Laura c/o Trixie Gowan, the name signed at the corner of each final panel.
The envelope landed at the moment she was engulfed in a complicated design, drawing a series of dogs of various breeds leaping through a sea of bubbles for a local doggie salon. She ignored it at first, until Patrick, the Newz‘s mail clerk and sandwich runner, said, “You might want to look at that, Miss Trixie,” before moving on to the next desk.
Trixie set down her pen and took off her glasses, rubbing her eyes in recovery from the close work, and studied the logo, meaningless to anybody not in the newspaper business. To those who were, it was like a ring on an extended hand of royalty. Her hands were perfectly calm as she opened the envelope but were shaking by the time she read the final line of the letter within. The text was more genial than she’d imagined would come from a big name newspaper mogul, but apparently his daughter had been sending him Lost Laura comics for the past year, and he wanted to acquire the rights to feature them in his stream of publications. There was a name and a phone number for her to call and arrange a meeting—herself or her agent as might be applicable—and a sincere wish that Laura might become a new national treasure.
There was a reason she recognized the return address and logo beyond the industry fame of the company. This wasn’t the first letter she’d received. There’d been others—from editors, department heads, acquisitions—but this was the guy. The owner. The publisher. Over the course of the previous months, all of the other correspondences had gone unanswered on her part. They’d been vague, one-way missives about setting up meetings and talking through possibilities. This seemed serious. And urgent. And personal. This was the guy, who probably wasn’t used to being ignored. She’d kept the others as her little secret, tucked away in her desk drawer, waiting for … what? Luckily there was no one to ask her that question, because she wouldn’t have had an answer. For now, Lost Laura lived in a world firmly in Trixie’s control, peeking out in three or four panels at a time. Success would change that, and Trixie was not overly fond of change. Still, the tone of this letter promised something more. He wasn’t just the head of some conglomeration; he was a father. That paternal image of a man working on behalf of his daughter stirred a familiar longing that announced itself with a burning at the back of her throat and a shadow of pain wrapped around her breath.
She looked up after the third reading to see the entire office gathered at her desk. Ron, as managing editor, front and center, flanked by Joanie and Erin, the classifieds girls; Mack, the advertising sales guy; Bernard, the features writer; Emily, the queen of entertainment and reviews; Gale from recipes and cuisine; Dave from accounts; and Patrick, who must have told each one of them about the missive he delivered to Trixie Gowan’s desk. Each of them represented one or the other trajectory of a newspaper career—either young, hungry, and itching to move on to something bigger and better or older, tired, satisfied with a small market and smaller paycheck and a workweek that ended at five o’clock each Friday. Trixie herself sat somewhere in the middle, thankful to have a job that catered to her lifelong addiction to doodling, clueless as to how to turn it into a career. And Ron, she thought, was saddled there with her, content to head up a small staff that acknowledged him with equal parts respect and tolerance.
“So,” Ron said, hands thrust into his pockets to rattle his mid-morning Coke machine change, “are we going to lose you to the cutthroat world of national news?”
“He wants Lost Laura,” Trixie said, refolding the letter and running her thumbnail along the crease. “They’ve been asking about her for a while, but now I’m to contact my agent and arrange to fly out for a meeting to negotiate a contract.”
“I didn’t know you had an agent,” Emily said, breathlessly impressed.
“I don’t,” Trixie said. “I’m supposed to call this guy.”
“I could call for you,” Joanie said, “and pretend to be your secretary booking the appointment.”
“Are they paying for your flight?” Mack asked. “They’d better be paying for your flight. And your accommodations too. They can afford it.”
“And they should take you out to lunch,” Gale chimed in. “Dinner too probably. I can call around and get you some recommendations.”
“Stop,” Trixie insisted, rolling away from her desk and standing to meet their eyes. “I promise to keep all of you in mind every step of the way. But now I need to get back to this doggie shampoo or I’ll never meet the Saturday layout. Okay?”
They all murmured affectionately and dispersed, all but Ron. “Can I read it?”
“Of course,” she said, having no idea if he even had a right to make the request. She handed over the letter and watched him read, pleased to see his reaction mirror the one he’d had at his first glimpse of Laura. Right down to the chuckle.
“Who’d a thought? Our own Prairie Girl, the first of this place to get a big national nibble.”
“I don’t have anything yet.”
“A mere formality. Didn’t you notice the name at the bottom? The signature? Keep this for your memoir.”
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” She dropped her voice to a whisper, afraid to voice the hope.
“It might be, Trixie. It might be, and I couldn’t be happier for you.”
“Maybe I’ll take myself out to celebrate. Lunch or dinner? That new burger place Gale reviewed last week.” She envisioned a path of invitation between them.
“That’s a great idea.” He lifted to his toes, as if he needed any additional height to assert his presence in the room. He shouted, “Hey, Dave! How much do we have in the budget for a celebratory lunch?” When Dave shouted the figure back, Ron fell to his flat feet. “Deli sandwiches it is! Today, lunch is courtesy of the Newz. Give your orders to Patrick, and we’ll eat in the park.”
By now Trixie had settled back into her seat, pen uncapped, shrinking from the attention and her obvious inability to flirt her way into a date. Then Ron touched a finger to her chin and raised her face to meet his gaze. His eyes were brown and warm and full of an affection she couldn’t quite process. Friendly? Fatherly? She felt herself giving a weak smile in response.
“Thanks, Ron.”
“No thanks needed. It’s far too pretty a day to waste.”
Trixie finished the final details on the dog wash ad, cropped it, and sent it to layout for Monday’s paper. The clock read a little after four thirty, so she whiled away the time looking busy—straightening her perfectly straightened desk, washing her mug in the break room sink—all the while thinking about the letter now tucked away in her tote bag. She’d decided to take the weekend, at least, before calling. Maybe even Tuesday or Wednesday. This was Emily’s advice.
“Think of it like any other man. You don’t want to come off as too anxious. It devalues you.”
“So it’s like giving myself time to think it over without asking for time to think it over.”
“That’s right,” Emily had said. “It’s time for women to stop asking and start taking.”
Thus emboldened, Trixie popped her head into Ron’s office and told him she was cutting out thirty minutes early, if that was all right.
“Got big plans for a Friday night?”
“Yep. Frozen pizza and a bunch of Lost Lauras to catalog.”
“Sounds wild.”
“Couldn’t be wilder.”
The walk home worked the magic it always did. With each block, her shoulders straightened and the stiffness in her neck and back loosened after so many hours hunched at her desk. The air grew sweeter the closer she got to her home. Summer break in full swing, she dodged children on roller skates and interrupted a jump-rope game and stopped a rollaway basketball beneath her sneaker and held it until a boy ran up, breathless, and took it from her, shouting a thanks over his shoulder as he resumed his game. By the time she arrived at her front porch, the streets were much more sedate, and she hummed the little girls’ jumping song as she fished her keys out of her bag.
“Hello, House,” Trixie said to the cat who draped itself across the back of her secondhand sofa. In response, he stood, stretched, and walked out of the room without a backward glance.
The amber light atop her answering machine flickered with waiting messages. She dropped her bag in the chair next to the table and pushed the PLAY button, readying herself for her mother’s voice.
“Trixie, dear, it’s Mom. I know you’re at work, but call me as soon as you get home.”
A beep and then, “Trixie, dear. It’s me again. Mom. It’s a little after one o’clock. I’m sure you’re still at work, but if you happen to get home a little early, please call us here at home.”
A beep and then, “Trixie, dear. It’s your mother. I worry that the machine might erase messages after a time, so I just wanted to call again and ask you to call as soon as you get home.”
Over the course of the three messages, Trixie went from bemusement to mild irritation to nascent alarm. Her mother’s voice remained cool and controlled—as it did in all circumstances—but this was an unprecedented number of messages, and she’d not yet reached the end.
Beep and a new voice. “Trixie, it’s Grandma. Your mother is beside herself. For the love of peace, call her.”
“I’ve been at work,” Trixie said to the machine. “Why didn’t you—”
“We didn’t want to bother you at work,” her grandmother continued with eerily precise timing, “because we all know that’s important to you. But there’s important things here too. Call us.”
Trixie was poised to rewind the message tape when the single beep indicated one more message. Not her mother or her grandmother, or—of course—her great-grandmother, because by now she’d surmised that the urgent request for her to call home had to be connected with GG Mariah. No, this voice was deep and assured and achingly familiar. So familiar that her knees turned to sand and she clutched at the table to stay upright.
“Trix? It’s Cam. Well, Doctor Campbell Carter, I guess … but, yeah. Cam. And I think you’d better plan on coming home. Sooner the better. I think it might be … time.”
Two beeps indicated the end of messages. Trixie dropped her bag to the floor and sat in the antique straight-back chair, staring at the framed four-generations photograph on the wall. The photographer had arranged them into something like a diamond, with Trixie—tallest—standing behind her great-grandmother sitting stiffly in a wing-backed chair. Trixie’s grandmother, Eugenie, GG’s daughter-in-law, rested her sturdy hand on one of the chair’s wings, and on the other side, Trixie’s pretty, petite mother, Alma, looked like she stepped straight off the set of an old black-and-white television series. Not a man in sight. Eugenie was her usual dowdy, uncomfortable self, and Trixie remembered fighting away a blush at her mother’s unabashed flirtation with the photographer. She alone looked posed, with her hip jutting and her hand placed perfectly to enhance her narrow waist. Of the four women (Trixie was nineteen at the time), only Trixie and her great-grandmother shared any physical feature, both being tall and lean, their expressions set to something less of a smile and more to indulgence. Their faces so similar, yet separated by two generations, as if an artist had taken a break, experimented in different media, and came back to what was easy and familiar.
Trixie stared into GG’s eyes, the only ones like her own. The only person in her life not connected to questions and shame. The woman responsible for all the peaceful, quiet moments of her childhood. The one who would let her read at the table, waste a Saturday away with a book, and hide a flashlight under her pillow so stories could last long after bedtime.
“What is it, GG?” she whispered to the photograph. “What’s up with you?”
But there was only one way to get an answer to that question. Trixie picked up the phone and dialed.
CHAPTER 2
MARIAH
Silver Meadow, South Dakota Summer 1891
I pushed a damp mop across the floor. “We need to close up soon or we’ll miss the first inning.”
My brother, Charles, remained hunched over the clock, his brow furrowed in the same serious expression he always had when working on something delicate and precise. “Relax, Sister.” He spoke in such a way that the movement of his lips was nearly undetectable. “I’m playing today, so they can’t hardly start without me.”
“You’re playing?” I didn’t even try to keep the note of surprise out of my voice. Charles was good at many things—there was nothing he couldn’t repair or build, but his mechanical skills did not often bring success on the baseball field. He was dreamy and lost whenever his hands were idle, and nothing brings about idle hands like a summer afternoon in left field. Our entire town of Silver Meadow was planning to shut down for our match against De Smet.
To his credit, Charles was not offended.
“I suppose I can hit and run and throw as well as the next fellow.” The clock clicked and whirred beneath his touch, and he set it down with satisfied reverence.
“If we want to win, you have to hit and run and throw better than the next fellow.”
“Any fellow in particular?” He still wasn’t looking at me, but his mouth had loosened up enough to hold a loopy grin.
I flushed and stomped a bit, dragging the mop—nearly dry—to set it in the bucket in the corner. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you know who I’m talking about.”
“As if he would ever give me the time of day.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s a man. You’re a woman.”
“I’m not the type—”
“From what I’ve heard, just about any—”
We hadn’t noticed the door opening (the broken little bell above it proved to be one of the few projects Charles never got around to fixing), so we were both taken by surprise when a sweet voice joined in asking, “Who are we talking about?”
The voice belonged to Katrina Rose, and no name had ever so suited a woman. Not much more than a girl, really. Without ever asking directly, I’d worked it out that she must be older than seventeen but younger than twenty. Her hair was a shade of strawberry blond that looked positively pink in certain light, and her cheeks had a pleasant, perpetually matching tint, as did her lips, though darker. If I were her mother or sister or even friend, I might have told her that because she had such a natural rosiness about her, she might steer away from dressing in all shades of pink, because very little of what she wore complemented her coloring.
“Hello, Katrina,” I said. “And we were just talking about the baseball game.”
“Oh yes!” She clapped her hands, the pink lace muffling the sound. “I’m going there now. Papa said for me to check and see if our clock is ready first. He’s an hour late getting the paper printed and says if he misses the evening edition, he’s going to blame me and make me hand deliver the thing myself.” The Rose family owned a small printing press and published a small weekly paper that carried as much news as possible for a town of fewer than five hundred people to have. It listed births and deaths, weddings and funerals, baseball scores and national news gleaned from larger papers in which Mr. Rose was heavily invested, thus allowing himself to be one of the wealthiest men in town while still working fewer hours than any citizen would think possible.
I knew of course she was joking by the lilt in her voice and the ridiculousness of the claim but feigned shock anyway. “How could it possibly be your fault?”
“Because I’m the one who broke the clock.”
Katrina smiled at her joke, I smiled at her, and Charles scowled at the illogic of it all. He placed the intricate piece he’d been repairing on the shelf behind him and took down the smaller, cheaper, happily ticking clock Katrina had come to collect.
“Like I told you the last two times,” he said, “be careful not to wind it too tight or you’ll break the spring. Lucky I had one around, but if it happens again, you’ll have to buy a whole new clock.”
“I shall do my level best, sir,” Katrina said with a motion that combined a curtsy and a salute. “And how much do I owe you for your labor?”
I bit my inner cheek, knowing he would quote a price that valued neither his time nor expertise, and was proven right when he asked for fifteen cents.
Katrina unsnapped her small pink handbag and extracted two dimes. “Maybe instead of giving me change, you can buy me a lemonade at the baseball game? I haven’t even spread my blanket out, and I’m already parched.”
The way Katrina Rose said spread my blanket offered all manner of invitation, reinforced by the trail of her fingers along her throat at the word parched. Charles, of course, saw none of this.
“Can’t. We’re supposed to keep company with the other players during the game.” He held out his oil-stained hand for the money. “I’ll be back with your nickel.”
“Sorry,” I whispered as he ducked under the counter. “When he sets his mind to something …”
Katrina sniffed in a disgruntled way and let the forceful click of her purse speak for her irritation before declaring that she’d be back for the clock tomorrow morning. “Early,” she said over her shoulder, and I knew she would come with a plate full of sweet breads for her trouble.
