For your reading pleasure and my absolute terror, I offer you the first chapter of Fall River! And don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter and pre-order the book. Links at the bottom!
Ignoring the nagging ache of her lower back, Clara Lodge hunched over her desk, trying to transcribe Josiah’s illegible notes into something readable.
The late afternoon sun splashed in through the narrow windows of the back room, highlighting the dust motes swirling like ghostly apparitions in the air. She knew she should clean, but most of Josiah’s patients—miners, ranch hands and the occasional prostitute—didn’t really care. Which was good because she’d never been much of a housekeeper.
A memory, unbidden and unwanted, flashed through her mind, and Clara shivered in spite of the dry heat that turned the room into an oven.
“He expects us to be unpaid maids,” her cousin had whispered of her father the first night they met, and Clara recalled how her voice, oddly devoid of emotion, had scuttled down her spine like a rodent.
Fourteen years and the thought of her cousin still twisted her stomach into knots. She turned back to her lover’s atrocious handwriting, struggling to keep the memories at bay—memories so dreadful that even Josiah, who’d had the blood of soldiers spill over his hands, winced the few times she’d mentioned them.
Clara shook her head, impatient with herself. “Did you prescribe Mrs. Silverman soothing drops or sooty hops?” she called through the open door to Josiah, who was still puttering about in the front clinic.
The tension across her shoulders eased at the sound of his laughter.
“The drops, though hops would probably be just as helpful. Her nervous troubles stem more from taking care of eight boys while her husband is in the mines than by anything physiological.”
Josiah continued his cleaning, and she listened to the comforting sound of his whistling as her best friend and lover moved about the clinic. He’d been her hero for most of the past fifteen years, ever since he found her broken and raving in a New Bedford alleyway. What would she have done without him?
Ended her days in an insane asylum, probably.
“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a Yankee Doodle do or die…”
The terrible whistling turned into terrible singing and her smile deepened.
Most of their afternoons were spent this way—Josiah cleaning while she finished up the paperwork. Because both were haunted by their pasts, they found the predictability of a routine a comfort. Josiah’s ghosts were rooted in the Indian wars while hers were best not spoken of. Clara knew that he was in love with her—just as he knew that her ghosts left her unfit for love.
The singing stopped and her pen paused as she waited for it to begin again.
“There’s a crowd down by the Herald,” Josiah said from the front room. “I think the newspapers came in. I’m going to go grab one before they’re gone.”
“Alright. Hurry back with it.”
It took time for big city news to travel from Boise or Portland to Baker City. The Baker City Herald did a respectable job of publishing important news items from back east, but new reading material was always welcome and more exciting than a church revival.
After putting the notes away, Clara opened the back door to see if Mother Nature had decided to bless them with a breeze. She usually didn’t in August, but one could hope.
When Josiah and Clara first moved to Baker City, they bought the wide lot on the corner of Valley Avenue and Resort Street, as much for the grove of birch trees that grew on it as its proximity to the makeshift hospital where Josiah worked. They’d designed the brick building so the clinic and office faced the street and the living area in the back opened up to the Powder River, though goodness only knew how long that would last. Baker City was enjoying its second gold rush, and the industrious sound of hammers and saws punctuated the afternoon. Every trip to Geddes and Pollman’s butcher shop or People’s Grocery and Glassware showed new buildings being erected as quickly as bricks could be formed and fired. She wouldn’t be surprised if she woke up one morning to find a three-story frame house blocking her view of the Elkhorn Mountains.
Idly, she watched a boy in a battered straw hat drive a pig down the trail next to the river. Occasionally, the young herdsman would give the pig a halfhearted thwack across the backside, and in response, the animal would jog a few dusty steps before settling back into a heat-induced slog.
On the back corner of their property a squat, stone building with a slanted timbered roof and thick wood door partially obscured her view of the river. More shed than house, the building was only about ten by twelve feet but did boast one small window next to the door, which gave it the look of a one-eyed sailor. She loved that building even more than she did the shiny new house or the view. Josiah had fitted it out with an icebox, shelves, a worktable, and her microscopes. She’d christened the building her laboratory and the word rolled off her tongue with all the intoxicating juiciness of a watermelon that had been left in the river to chill. Technically, she was a nurse, but she would always be a researcher at heart.
Across the fields, Mrs. Stevenson rang the supper bell for her eight boys, and down the street, music spilled out of one of the saloons where miners and cowboys were settling in for a slow night of drinking.
For a moment, Clara was tempted to allow herself to sink into the contentment that snuck up on her increasingly more often. The effervescent feeling that, if she would just allow it, she might actually be happy. The sentiment was always followed up with a nagging uneasiness that permitting such folly would only expedite the dropping of the other shoe— the shoe that would ruin everything. Most likely a dirty old miner’s boot, she thought sourly. Superstitious, she squashed happy feelings as soon as they appeared.
As if on cue, the mournful sound of a train rose above the sound of construction, and Clara’s hands clenched to keep them from clapping over her ears. As it did almost every day, the train was coming down from McEwen, hauling men, timber and gold.
She’d never get used to that sound. If Josiah were here, he would rub her neck until the whistle faded, his gentle fingers calming her anxiety.
Trains had defined Clara’s world—from her unexpected birth on the Pennsylvania Express, to leisurely trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard on her parents’ speaking tours, to the final journey that took her parents’ life in the bloodiest train wreck in US history.
Drawing in a deep breath, Clara stepped back into the house, wincing as another whistle rang out. She should start supper, but it was still too hot to light the stove. Maybe Josiah would be happy with bread and leftover beans from dinner. Or maybe he’d take her to eat at the Grand Hotel. Let someone else sweat over a stove.
But where was he?
Perhaps he stopped at the hospital to check on a patient on his way home. She’d strangle him if he made a side trip to Joe’s Saloon to read and discuss the news with the miners before bringing it to her.
As if she’d conjured him, Josiah stepped through the doorway. She turned to him, smiling. “It’s about time.”
Her smile faded as she caught sight of his kind, homely face, as pale as death.
An unnamed fear tightened her chest. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Lizzie,” he whispered.
The name slithered through the room like a serpent, and Clara gripped the sides of her desk to keep her legs from buckling.
“What is it?” she asked with increasing urgency, even though, instinctively, Clara knew that his next words would blow up the life they’d carefully built over two thousand miles away from Fall River. In her mind’s eye she saw a shoe wildly spinning through the air on its journey to the floor.
“She’s been accused of murdering her parents. With an axe.”
Josiah caught her moments before she hit the ground and gently settled her in her chair. Her hand clutched his sleeve as she sought the safety of his eyes. His gaze reflected the sickness that pierced all the way to her heart.
Though neither of them said it aloud, she knew they were both thinking of the jagged scars that ran from Clara’s shoulders to her lower back.
Scars she’d received at the hand of her cousin, Lizzie Borden.
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