Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I know,” I replied.

“There were times in the camp when I wished I had killed myself. If they had put me in the whorehouse, I would have done it. Even after the SS deserted the camp, I didn’t want to live anymore. Not with the memories I had. Not until I met you.”

“I was a poor catch.”

“They’re not going to take me alive, Weldon.”

As I looked into her eyes, I wondered if Bonnie Parker had thought the same thing on the blacktop parish road outside Arcadia, Louisiana. There was nothing more I could say. Sometimes death is preferable to life. Only a fool, or someone who has never seen suffering on an unimaginable scale, would say otherwise.

“We have to go,” Rosita said. “Snow is blowing at the top of the Pass.”

It was true. The sun was shining, but high up the grade, one of the steepest in the Rockies, snow crystals were whirling among the rocks and pine boughs like spun glass. Rosita backed out the car while I carried our suitcase and bag of groceries outside. We went through the intersection at the edge of town, and in under thirty seconds, we were climbing the incline toward the heavens, the bottom of the canyon dropping into shadow behind us. I reached under the seat and pulled out the Luger and set it by my thigh.

TOWARD THE TOP of the grade, I saw an old mining town surrounded by piles of rust-colored slag. The streets were made of crushed rock. On one of them was a white stucco church with a small tower that I thought might have been an eighteenth-century Spanish mission. Then I remembered the story. After the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, the Rockefeller family built churches throughout the West to rehabilitate the reputation of their patriarch. The site of the massacre was midway between Trinidad and Pueblo. To me, the white stucco building among the slag heaps told a story that probably few were interested in: an armored personnel carrier firing into striking miners, the burning of their tents, the asphyxiation of eleven children and two women in an earthen pit. Americans did this to other Americans. To me, it seemed a shameful business. But that’s not why I mention this instance of egregious cruelty. I felt that somehow Rosita and I were entering the past, stepping into the roles of people who had already lived their lives and were watching us replicate them.

Most of the streets in Trinidad were brick, the buildings constructed of heavy gray stones, the city spread across a broad knoll at the bottom of mountains that soared straight into the sky, more like buttes than mountains. I don’t know what I had expected. Perhaps roadblocks or the Colorado state police. I guess everyone believes during a time of duress that the rest of the world is focused on his or her problems. According to Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year, those afflicted by the Black Death wandered the cobblestone streets of London in 1665 shouting out their sins to anyone who would listen. No one was interested. The shutters of every house and cottage and apartment were slammed shut on their cries.

I pulled into a filling station and asked the attendant to change the oil in our car, primarily to get the Confederate out of view. Rosita and I walked to the public library and talked to the reference lady about the history of the city, all the time glancing out the windows for anything unusual on the streets or the highway. To the north was a huge cattle auction barn and, behind it, pastureland that was still green. The wind had died, and snowflakes were drifting down in the sunshine from a mountain that resembled a vertically serrated steel-blue skyscraper with no windows. I could not have imagined a more peaceful urban setting.

“Are you visiting?” the librarian asked. Her reading glasses hung from a velvet ribbon around her neck.

“We thought we might look around,” I replied. “Is it very difficult to drive out in the San Juan Mountains?”

“It can be. Up high, at least,” she said. “This time of year you have to be careful. The bad passes are Wolf Creek and Monarch. You’re not going there, are you?”

“No, we’re casual tourists,” I said. “We’re not looking for anything very adventurous.”

“Nothing exciting happens around here,” she said. “Maybe you should spend some time with us. If you like horse racing, summer is a much better time.”

“Thank you for the information,” I said.

“I hope I haven’t misled you.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“I said nothing exciting happens around here. Maybe it’s better you not pick up any hitchhikers today.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“A deputy sheriff was in the café earlier. He said something about a kidnapper on the loose.”

“Someone who kidnapped a child?” I said.

“I didn’t quite get it all.” The librarian put her reading glasses back on. “I hope you enjoy your stay.”

We went outside. Nothing of substance had changed in the streets. There was no police presence that I could see. But the day was not the same. The air smelled of tar and burned food and dust from a train yard; it had the dry smell of unending winter. The light was harsher, colder. The green pastures were dimmed by snow blowing down from the mountains. I saw cracks in the sidewalk and the asphalt that I hadn’t noticed earlier. The nineteenth-century buildings resembled prison houses and asylums rather than Victorian homes. A grayish-green twin-engine plane crossed the sky directly overhead, its color reminiscent of the camouflage paint on a German fighter-bomber. I wondered if doors were slamming all around us, as they had slammed on the afflicted in the time of Defoe.

“Where are we going?” Rosita asked.

“To get the car,” I replied, my voice sharper than it should have been.

“I mean after that.”

“There’s a town up the road called Walsenburg. We can take a train there. We’ll leave the car behind.”

She put her arm in mine. “Keep looking straight ahead,” she said.

“What is it?”