Riddle of the Prairie Bride Page 5

  Papa stood up. He bowed to the women and shook hands with all the men at the table, then fetched the nearly empty bowl of potato salad from the buffet.

  Ida Kate said polite good-byes to everybody, then slowly followed after Papa and Caroline. Ida Kate’s head was pounding now with thoughts that made her feel slightly sick.

  Later in the afternoon, while Hanky napped, the wind picked up and blew colder. Ida Kate shook the wire basket of corn over the fire and made a mountain of crisp, fresh popcorn. Papa mended a broken harness, poking into the leather with his sharp awl and threading a leather cord through the holes. Caroline brought out a green striped dress from her trunk and offered to alter it to fit Ida Kate. It would be a good school dress, she said.

  So Ida Kate thanked her and tried the dress on and stood still while Caroline measured and tucked and pinned. Evening shadows began to fall as Caroline hemmed the green striped skirt. Hanky woke up, and Ida Kate showed him how to play with the little wooden Noah’s ark that had always been her favorite Sunday toy. She marched the carved animals two by two up the ramp and let Hanky dump them inside the boat. She made the giraffes peek out the little windows at him. Hanky chuckled, Caroline smiled, Papa ate popcorn and gazed around the room at his family.

  Everything looked cozy. Everything seemed so peaceful.

  Papa looks so content, thought Ida Kate, and the observation filled her with despair. She stacked the little wooden animals in a pile for Hanky to knock over, then set them up again and again. Outside, the wind rattled the window-panes and the sky grew dark. She felt that she and Papa and Hanky and Caroline were all sitting together inside one of the thick, impenetrable clouds that could sweep across the prairie without warning. A storm cloud.

  Ida Kate shivered and let the unwelcome niggles in the back of her mind take shape. Everything seemed peaceful, yet something was not right.

  Something was very wrong about Caroline.

  CHAPTER 6

  SCHOOL DAZE

  Ida Kate hurried along the trail to school, anxious to talk to Martha. She had left home as early as she could, unable to eat the hot mush and fried egg that Caroline set before her. She needed to be away from the house, away from her growing dread. But the dread traveled with her as she walked the packed dirt trail.

  I’ve got to talk to Martha, Ida Kate told herself. Maybe she’ll tell me I’m imagining things …

  But she knew she was not imagining things.

  Old Hickory had wanted to trot along with her to school, but she’d ordered him to stay home to keep watch. He thumped his tail and waited at the fence.

  The path that Ida Kate now walked stretched miles across the prairie toward Hays. The vast grassland had a life of its own and was never silent. As Ida Kate walked she heard clicks and whistles, rustlings and murmurings. These noises made some people nervous, but to Ida Kate they seemed a kind of music. Prairie music. The song comforted her now as she hurried along the rutted wagon track.

  She stopped when she reached the Ruppenthals’ sod house, one very much like Ida Kate’s own house, but still in the process of being framed in with wood. Mr. Ruppenthal, high on a ladder propped against one wall, waved.

  “I missed Martha at church,” Ida Kate called up to him as she reached the house. “I do hope she is well enough to come to school today.”

  “Martha’s just fine,” he assured her. “It was little Davy and Edmund who were feeling poorly. So Margaretha and Martha stayed home with them and the baby.” He climbed down from the ladder and led Ida Kate to the door of the little house. “Little fellas seem better now.”

  “I am very glad to hear it,” said Ida Kate sincerely. All the settlers feared sickness. Every season brought its illnesses, and so often the doctor was not able to help. The graveyard at the edge of town increased in size every year, and after the last hard winter, some people joked that the cemetery was growing faster than Hays City itself. Fortunately this wasn’t quite true. But Ida Kate was glad no one was ill now at the Ruppenthals’ house.

  All six Ruppenthal children were clustered around their large table in the small dark kitchen when Ida Kate poked her head in the door.

  “You’re nice and early,” Mrs. Ruppenthal said in her strong German accent as she buttered a wedge of bread for Ida Kate. She was a plump woman with yellow braids coiled around her head like a crown. “All right, Jimmy and Johnny, don’t forget your lunch pails. Martha, dearest, you and Ida Kate see that they remember to bring them home again!”

  The way she pronounced it, “Martha” sounded like Marta. She pronounced “Ida” Eeda, which always made Ida Kate smile. But today Ida Kate couldn’t smile. She was desperate to talk to her friend alone.

  “I wanna go, too,” said Edmund, eyeing the older children wistfully as they left the house.

  “Next year, lamb,” Ida Kate heard his mother say soothingly. “When you are old enough to walk the whole way.”

  The schoolhouse was three miles from the Ruppenthals’ house. Ida Kate knew they were lucky to be so close. The children who lived in Hays City attended school in a fine new stone building, but the children who lived out on the prairie attended the one-room sod schoolhouse, and some had to travel many miles to get there.

  “I’m so glad you’re coming back to school,” said Martha, reaching over and squeezing Ida Kate’s hand. “It’s just not been the same since you had to leave.”

  “I’m glad, too,” Ida Kate said. “I’ve missed everyone, even Miss Butler—can you believe it?” Then she lowered her voice. “But, Martha, I’m dying to talk to you.”

  “Yes, you must tell me everything! What are they like together, your father and Mrs. Fairchild? Are they romantic?”

  The twins made kissing noises at their side. Martha shoved them away. The boys had identical round blue eyes and identical crops of yellow hair that stuck up even when their stepmother wet it down. The twins seemed to have perpetually sticky fingers and moved in a whirlwind of noise and dust.

  “Oh, marry me, my darling bride!” cooed Johnny—or was it Jimmy?

  “Oh, my true love!” sighed the other twin. They fell into a fit of giggles.

  “Oh, get out of here,” groaned Martha. “Leave us in peace!”

  “First one to the schoolhouse wins the pie in my lunch!” Ida Kate told them. Food was a great motivating force for Martha’s twin brothers.

  Jimmy and Johnny whooped with delight. In seconds they were off, hurtling down the path.

  “That was inspired,” said Martha. “I can see you’ll make a fine big sister.”

  “You’re moving things along too fast—Hanky’s not even really my brother.” Ida Kate swung her lunch pail in agitation.

  “Not yet. But you already know that bribery is a big sister’s most important trick.” Martha laughed. “Bet it feels odd to have a baby in the house, doesn’t it?” She was always avid for details, always as excited about other people’s lives as she was about her own. “Having a baby brother’s bound to feel strange since you’re an only child, but soon it’ll feel so right …”

  Ida Kate watched the dust fly up behind the boys. They rounded a curve in the track ahead and then were out of sight. Ida Kate took a deep breath. “Martha, there’s something so wrong.”

  “Wrong? With Hanky?”

  “With Caroline Fairchild.” Somehow Ida Kate felt like a traitor saying even this much.

  Martha looked intrigued. “Uh-oh, no romance after all? Your father doesn’t like her?”

  Ida Kate shook her head. Her brown braids, neatly fixed before breakfast by Caroline’s deft fingers and tied with the new ribbons Caroline had brought, swung across her shoulders like ropes. “Papa likes her very much,” Ida Kate admitted, remembering the long looks and the feeling in the air that a connection had been made. “And so do I. She’s such a help at home. And we took a picnic to Castle Rock on Saturday—Papa hasn’t laughed so much since Mama was alive … and maybe not even then. Mama was a more serious type—you remember—but Caroline is always
joking and smiling. She’s fun to be with.”

  “So what is the trouble?” pressed Martha.

  Ida Kate pulled her shawl tightly around her, feeling a chill pour across her shoulders even though the morning was mild. “Well,” she said slowly, “there are just so many things that don’t add up … that aren’t what I expected or was led to expect from her letters …” She bit her lip. Maybe Martha would just think she was imagining things. But I know I’m not!

  “Do you mean to make me beg for the details?” asked Martha in exasperation.

  “Well, for instance, Caroline sings like an angel, Martha. You should hear her! Her voice fills the house with the most wondrous songs. And as we drove home from church, she taught us some new hymns, and we sang all the way. Even the horses seemed to be trotting in time to the music.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Martha. “Why are you worried?”

  “Because Caroline Fairchild doesn’t sing! She specifically wrote to us that she can’t even carry a tune. And she’s a wonderful cook, yet she wrote in her letters that she’d never learned cookery because her family had servants.”

  “Could be she’s just very modest …” Martha said slowly. “Some people are blind to their own talents.”

  Ida Kate shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s it. And there’s more. She wrote that she was tall with auburn hair. But you saw her—she’s short, and her hair is as brown as mine is. And, and … well, there’s Hanky.” Ida Kate felt all the confusion of the weekend swirling around inside her. In the distance the girls could now see other children on the path to the schoolhouse.

  “Babies can be nuisances,” Martha said. “Believe me, I am in a position to know! But Hanky seems like a sweet baby, nearly as nice as Gloria. I bet you’re just not used to having a baby around.”

  “I don’t mind having him around,” Ida Kate said earnestly. “I like him!”

  “Well, what’s the trouble?” demanded Martha. “Doesn’t Caroline look after him properly?”

  “No, it’s not that.” Ida Kate frowned. She started walking faster, and Martha hurried to keep up. “Caroline is perfectly good to him, very kind and gentle. But she looks awkward holding him. And she feeds him milk from a cup rather than nursing him as mothers do, and she offers him bits of food, saying, ‘Maybe he’ll eat this,’ as if she doesn’t quite know which foods he likes.” Ida Kate shook her head. “She can’t get his garments on him very well and is hopeless at fastening his diapers so they stay on. I do a better job, and I’ve only ever practiced on Gloria! It’s as if, oh, I don’t know, sort of as if she’s not used to him. I get a strange feeling when I see them together.”

  “Hmm,” said Martha thoughtfully. Up ahead the girls could now see the schoolhouse, its thick earthen roof sprouting grass and clover. “You told me she’d had to board the baby out while she was working all the time in that factory. Maybe the baby just isn’t used to his mother being with him all the time.”

  That made a kind of sense. Ida Kate felt relieved. She hoped Martha could just as deftly make sense of the other problems.

  “Well, here’s another strange thing,” Ida Kate continued. “Caroline wrote to us that she came from North Carolina—but then at Castle Rock on Saturday, she said that she was from South Carolina!”

  Martha stopped. “That is odd,” she agreed. “How could she forget where she came from? Did you ask her about it?”

  Ida Kate shook her head. “No,” she murmured. “Papa heard her, too, and he didn’t say anything. And then on Sunday …” Her voice trailed off as she remembered the strange conversation at the church luncheon. How could Caroline Fairchild’s slave-owning father have been an abolitionist? It just didn’t make sense.

  The list of things that didn’t make sense was much too long.

  They’d reached the school yard now. Ida Kate saw the twins up ahead, and one of them—Jimmy? Johnny?—waved to her.

  “I won! I won!” he yelled, pelting over to the girls. “I win the pie!”

  Ida Kate duly uncovered her lunch pail and handed him the piece of apple pie Caroline had wrapped in paper. Yodeling his thanks, he sped away in a cloud of dust. The tumult of children’s voices rose around them. Miss Butler came out of the schoolhouse. She stood in the doorway with her arm raised, ringing the school bell.

  “Martha—there is one more thing.” Ida Kate grabbed her friend’s sleeve. “Caroline wrote that her husband was named Clivedon Fairchild. Then yesterday she said Hanky was named Henry Claude—after his father. But his middle name should be Clivedon, not Claude, Martha! How could somebody forget her dead husband’s name? Do you think Papa would refer to Mama as Elizabeth instead of Eleanor? Of course he wouldn’t!”

  “My mother’s name was Harriet Louise,” said Martha. “There’s no way my father would ever forget her name, even as much as he loves Margaretha now.”

  “So what would you think if you heard him calling your mother Hannah? Or Hortense?” cried Ida Kate.

  Martha stared at Ida Kate with wide eyes. “I would say … I would think he had suffered a terrible blow to the head. I would think he had lost his memory. Remember when Maisie Groninger’s father fell off the roof of their barn? He has no memory at all of anything from that day. He doesn’t even recall that the roof had a hole in the first place.”

  Ida Kate’s heart was thumping hard, and it wasn’t just from the fast walking they’d been doing. “Papa told me about how dangerous the work in factories can be, but I don’t think Caroline has suffered any recent injury. She would have told us if she had.”

  “Not if she couldn’t remember it,” Martha pointed out grimly.

  A cool breeze played across the prairie grasses, and the wildflowers danced. Ida Kate, lining up with the other children and marching into the schoolhouse, felt dazed. Her doubts whirled in her head as if they, too, were being tossed by the wind.

  CHAPTER 7

  TEA PARTY TERROR

  Miss Butler clapped her hands smartly. “Take your seats, boys and girls!” she called. She directed the children into the schoolroom. The students filed inside, all of them laughing and talking, except for Ida Kate and Martha. Ida Kate felt vaguely sick to her stomach, as if she had eaten a bad egg for breakfast. She could tell from the frown on her friend’s face that Martha was troubled, too.

  Ida Kate left her lunch pail with the others at the back of the room and settled into her old seat next to Martha at a long wooden table. The tables were arranged in two rows with a center aisle. Girls and boys turned to greet Ida Kate.

  “We thought you’d left school forever!” called Tommy McGruder from the front of the room, where he was made to sit in the first seat under Miss Butler’s watchful eye. “Thought maybe some ol’ grasshoppers had eaten you,” laughed Tommy’s brother, Sam. “Crackle, crackle, crunch!”

  “Crunched her up for lunch,” cried Horatio Jones, clacking his teeth to demonstrate.

  “Oh, ignore those awful boys,” said Mae, Horatio’s sister, with a toss of her long hair. “We’re surely glad to have you back, Ida Kate. And that’s the truth.”

  And Maisie and Clara Groninger, sitting at the table in front of Ida Kate, turned around and begged, “Eat lunch with us, will you, Ida Kate?”

  Ida Kate smiled at everybody, even the boys. But she didn’t chatter with them all as she normally did. Her head was too full of dark thoughts.

  Miss Butler was standing up at the front of the classroom with her hand raised for silence. Any student who didn’t obey quickly would find himself—or herself—ordered to sit in the corner wearing the “Chatterbox” sign.

  “We want to welcome Ida Kate,” Miss Butler began. “There have been some happy changes at home that allow her to return to us. A Mrs. Caroline Fairchild has journeyed all the way from Massachusetts to marry Mr. Deming and take over the housekeeping responsibilities that have kept Ida Kate from her studies.” She nodded at Ida Kate. “I heard from my parents that they met Mrs. Fairchild at church yesterday. I do hope to meet he
r myself very soon.”

  “Thank you,” Ida Kate said politely. “You must come to call.”

  “Yes, indeed, I should like that,” said Miss Butler. “In fact, I hoped to call this very afternoon. Perhaps I might drive you home in my wagon?”

  “Um—certainly, ma’am,” Ida Kate said.

  “Very well, then.” The teacher clapped her hands. “Let us resume last week’s lesson on geography. Who can name the oceans of the world?”

  Ida Kate thought she knew the oceans of the world, but she was distracted by Martha’s hissing: “I know my stepmother hoped to call on Caroline today. Perhaps I can come with her after school so we can work together on the mystery of Caroline Fairchild!”

  The mystery of Caroline Fairchild. Those words that made Martha’s voice thrum with excitement turned Ida Kate cold. Why did there have to be a mystery? Why couldn’t Caroline just be the way they’d expected her to be—the way she wrote that she would be? Ida Kate felt a flash of anger at her father’s intended bride.

  Martha’s hand crept over and gave Ida Kate’s fingers a reassuring squeeze under the table.

  After school, Ida Kate set off for home sitting high on the buckboard seat next to Miss Butler. Martha and the twins crowded in back. They stopped first at the Ruppenthals’ farm to see if Martha’s stepmother wanted to join their party. Mrs. Ruppenthal said yes, this would be a fine time to meet Caroline Fairchild.

  Soon the Ruppenthals’ cart and horse were harnessed, and the two wagons set off with Miss Butler’s in the lead. Now Martha rode with her stepmother, helping to look after her three excited little siblings. The twins stayed home to get their chores done, but Mrs. Ruppenthal promised to bring them each a treat from the tea party.

  At last the wagons pulled up in front of the Demings’ house. Miss Butler craned her neck, looking all around as if she expected to see Caroline hiding behind a fence post. “Where is the bride?” she asked Ida Kate. “That is why we rode all the way over here—to meet this adventurous young woman. Though I must say, I find it hard to understand how anyone would travel a thousand miles to marry a man she does not know!”