The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco

Author:Katrina Carrasco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18

JANUARY 19, 1887

Another snowy morning, the streets gauzy with refracted light, building eaves festooned with crooked icicles. Alma pulls open the post office door. The air inside is warm, reeky with mildew, tallow, unwashed woolens. Two men wait ahead of her. A dingy grimness seeps from the plain planked walls, the green-shaded lamps with their deep coats of dust.

She doesn’t make a habit of checking the post herself, not when any boy will do it for two pennies. But she wants to be quick about it. She wants to get to Wheeler’s offices.

The door opens, a cold rush of wind on the back of her neck, then another. Three men crowd in behind her. She peers into the glazing at the counter, trying to make out faces in the reflection. Strangers. Not Sloan’s men. Not McManus, though he likely isn’t walking so well this morning.

“Anything for J. Jones?” she asks when it’s her turn before the grille.

While she waits, she takes out a cigarette, her matchbox, so she can lean against the counter and look back at the line without simply gawping around. Over the flare of the match are seven faces. Still no one she knows.

“This came yesterday.” The clerk slides an envelope under the grille. “Special Delivery.”

The envelope crinkles as she shoves it into her vest. Her tongue ticks over her back teeth. There’s no need for Pinkerton to send mail Special Delivery. Unless something is changing, and changing fast.

Out into the freezing street. The bright window display of the notions shop next door. A good place to stay unseen. In the back, at a tiered table of sweets, she rips open the envelope.

Too much delay; Prime orders move. Kennedy and Grove en route, arrival Jan. 23.

It is not signed. It is not coded. Alma reads it again. Counts off the days between now and then. She has to try twice before she can swallow, her throat is so tight. Prime is agency slang for the president of the United States. This assignment just hit the big time.

“Hello, Jack.”

She looks up from the paper, queasy with the sugar pall rising from caramels and cream candy and chocolate hearts. Nell stands beside the sweets. A basket is hooked onto her forearm. She wears a ribboned bonnet. Her pale green wrap and darker green dress set off her eyes.

“Morning,” Alma says, still stupid, still holding the letter in full view. She doesn’t know Kennedy and Grove, but she’s heard of them. They’re new agents, no friends of hers. She needs men who will listen, who will wait in Tacoma or Seattle until she’s ready for them to come to town.

Nell raises an eyebrow.

“I got your flowers,” she says. “At least, I think they were yours.”

“They were mine.”

Nell sifts through a dish of caramels, her eyes on Alma’s, her gloved fingers ghosting over the twisted paper wrappers.

“I wish I’d been there to accept them,” Nell says.

“I’ve got to go.” Alma folds up the letter, stuffs it into her jacket.

“Jack, I arranged

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