House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

She also wondered what she should say to Maggie Bassett. What did you say to someone you quietly and dispassionately despised? She knew there must be words that were appropriate, perhaps created especially for this type of situation, maybe vituperative, maybe rigidly formal. Unfortunately, she didn’t know what they were. The working girls she had tried to help over the years came from mill towns and skid-road logging camps where the timber beasts slid the logs down a mud-slick gulley lined on either side by brothels and saloons. The girls who worked in the cribs had grown up poor and unwanted, and most of them had been molested or raped by age fifteen, usually by a relative or a friend of the family.

But how could anyone explain Maggie Bassett? Educated at a boarding school. A schoolteacher. Heartbreakingly beautiful in the eyes of any man or woman. Her family rich. Yet she rented her body to scum like Butch Cassidy’s gang, a collection of throwbacks who convinced themselves they robbed trains and murdered people because they represented the oppressed. If that weren’t enough, she had been the consort of Dr. Romulus Atwood, who thought he was a shootist of world importance until Hackberry blew him out of his socks.

Then Ruby realized she was thinking in a proud way about Hackberry, and she forced herself to remember his abandonment of her and their son when they needed him most.

Maggie Bassett opened the door, her eyes full of daggers. “What do you want?”

“I’m Ruby Dansen.”

“I know who you are. I said, what do you want?”

“I’m looking for my son, Ishmael Holland. May I come in and speak with you?”

“Yes, you may speak to me. No, you may not come in.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“How did you know where I live?”

“I suspect I could answer your question in several ways. Perhaps I asked others if they knew a local woman who was the town pump for the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Instead, I looked in the city directory, which is what most people do when they want to find someone’s address.”

Maggie Bassett’s face never changed expression. “I don’t know where Ishmael is. He went for a walk. He’s rather moody sometimes. I suspect it has to do with his upbringing.”

“You kidnapped a disabled man from a hospital and took him a thousand miles away on a train, and now you have no idea where he might have gone? Does that sound convincing to you?”

“He left earlier this evening. I didn’t want him to, but that was his choice.”

“Left with whom?”

Maggie’s eyes were as unreadable as a cat’s. “With whom? Your grammar is so impressive. I imagine that’s a great source of pride for you.”

“Why did you go to Denver to see him?” Ruby said. “Why did you take him out of the hospital? The orderly you bribed was fired.”

“I didn’t bribe anyone. I tipped an orderly who helped us.”

“Why did you bring him to San Antonio?”

“To offer him an executive position with an international company,” Maggie said. “To make up for the childhood that was denied him.”

“He had the best childhood I could give him. He’s also a friend to the working people of the world, something I don’t think you could teach him.”

Even before Ruby had finished speaking, she knew how foolish and self-righteous she sounded. Maggie had led her into a rhetorical trap.

“I forgot. Your friend Bill Haywood blew up the governor of Idaho,” Maggie said.

“Those were false charges.”

“If Bill Haywood and your greasy cohorts aren’t the ones planting bombs in mailboxes, then who is? John D. Rockefeller?

J. P. Morgan? The pope?” Maggie Bassett waited, her head cocked. “Cat got your tongue?”

“I’d like to slap you.”

“I suspect you would. When people of low intelligence run out of words and can’t think very fast, their first option is usually to hit someone. It must be a terrible way to live.”

Ruby felt small and cold on the porch, shrunken by the long train ride and the fatigue of the day, the pitiful amount of money in her purse and the fact that she hadn’t eaten supper, all of it like a great iron chain weighing on her shoulders. “I started going to a Dutch reformed church for a while.”

“I’m so happy to know that.”