The Widow Nash: A Novel by Jamie Harrison

Author:Jamie Harrison [Harrison, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Westerns, Historical, General Fiction
ISBN: 9781619029286
Google: 9cvwDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1619029286
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

Mr. Maslingen, barricaded in his Butler castle, is rumored to have received a suicide note from Miss Remfrey, posted in Spokane. The Remfreys, wishing to end this sad chapter, have expressed frustration at not being allowed to read their sister’s last words.

—The Seattle General, March 1, 1905

chapter 12

Women of the World

•

Dulcy spent most of the morning after the stabbing flat on her back in bed, listening to her ceiling. Twice she left the bed to watch Lewis Braudel cross the street and disappear east, a third time in the company of a laughing Samuel Peake. Between these sightings, she never saw Braudel return to the hotel, and his pacing always caught her by surprise. He liked a counterclockwise pattern.

She didn’t know whether to stay or run.

Irving brought her coffee, but his jabber cleared nothing up. Between crime communiqués—the dead man had a pretty wife, and the killer had loved the pretty wife—Dulcy learned that the man from the train was from New York—a state Irving had left as a toddler, whose population and variety he could not parse—and that people paid him to write. Mr. Braudel liked women, but he was fairly discrete; he liked to drink but not to wretched excess. He had been in and out of the hotel for the last two years, since Samuel had moved to town, and he had otherwise traveled, and was often ill. Irving enjoyed Braudel tremendously and had been worried by the length of his last absence. As he said, over and over, without helpful details, when he delivered the day’s gore-laden newspaper.

“He travels for business? What sort of business? To Seattle, or San Francisco?”

“He travels for the sake of writing about things.”

“What kind of writing?”

Irving, who could not read well, looked annoyed. “Newspapers for sure, but a book, too.”

Dulcy was supposed to meet Margaret, but she sent word that she was ill. When Margaret came by, openly admitting curiosity about the knifing rather than concern about Dulcy’s health, Dulcy took a roundabout approach: why was Irving so worried about a Mr. Braudel?

Margaret was friendly with Samuel Peake, and she knew quite a bit about Lewis Braudel. Samuel and Braudel had gone to Columbia together, and Samuel said Braudel had caught malaria during the Spanish War; this explained much of Irving’s worry. There was a rumor—a flutter among the local women—that he’d been with the Astor Battery, the Ivy League crew of young heirs who’d volunteered to fight in Cuba, but Samuel had laughed at the gossips, and said that Braudel wasn’t quite an heir, and that after he’d fallen sick he’d simply stayed on in the Philippines as a reporter.

“Ah,” said Dulcy. “But why be here?”

Margaret stood at the window, watching the flash through the studio roof as Siegfried Durr worked. “Well, why not, Maria? He’s visited Samuel often, and he’s written quite a bit about Butte, Clark and all, and I’ve heard he’s having an affair with a woman in Bozeman. It doesn’t matter where he is between assignments, and now he writes his own books.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.