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“God, what a dump.”
Larry Dunbar threw the Studebaker around yet another steep curve and looked at his employer out of the corner of his eye. “You never been in West Virginia before?”
Harry Harrigan barked his disapproval. “No, thank God; made my money in Chicago. Let’s get this over and done with. Get the kid and get out. Where is this goddam place?”
Dunbar brought the big car to a halt and pointed through the windshield at the valley below them. “Down there.”
Harry looked down into the narrow valley. A light snow was blowing across the treeless hillside, but even as the snow settled, it was blanketed in black dust from the coal smoke belching from the chimney pots below. A polluted stream, red with rust, ran alongside the narrow road. On the far side of the stream, a string of coal carriers shunted along the railway tracks, the steam from the locomotive making its own contribution to the layer of smog hovering over the valley.
“She lives here?” Harry exclaimed.
“Yup,” said Dunbar. “Blue house down there.”
“What blue house?”
Dunbar pointed again. “It’s blue, under all the dirt.”
“Could have fooled me. So what are we waiting for? Let’s go get her and get out of here. You’re sure it’s her?”
“Yes, sir. It’s her. Father was Nick Malloy, who served with Bradley’s division, stationed in Rose Hill, England, wounded in Normandy, and word is her mother was a war bride, name of Vera.”
“Was?”
Dunbar pointed up onto the hillside where the coal conveyor snaked its rickety way among the rocks.
“Nick Malloy was killed in a mining accident last year, and the mother, well, she went missing not long ago. Rumor is she went to Pittsburgh to earn some money, but no one knows for sure. They won’t give you any trouble about taking the kid, Mr. Harrigan. They don’t want her. The great-grandmother is pretty much convinced that she’s not Nick Malloy’s child.”
“So no complications?” asked Harry.
“None at all.”
“Okay.” He looked down at the squalid mining camp. “She’s a lucky kid, going from all this to being a highborn English lady.”
“And the granddaughter of a millionaire,” Dunbar added.
Down in the valley, the air was even more polluted than it had been on the hillside. Dunbar turned on the windshield wipers and quickly turned them off again, as they did no more than smear damp coal dust across the windshield. The headlights of the Studebaker barely pierced the enshrouding smog. They passed along the ramshackle main street, jounced across the railway tracks, and started to climb a rutted road on the opposite side of the valley.
With his head partway out of the window, Harry identified the Malloy homestead. From close up he could see that the paint peeling from the weathered boards had indeed once been blue, just as the picket fence around the tiny front yard had once been white.
Dunbar brought the car to a halt. The big car blocked the road, but Harry could not imagine that any other cars would be passing by. No doubt the road went from nowhere to nowhere; from one rat-infested coal camp to another; from one hopeless community to the next. There was no road here that would take residents to New York or Chicago, only, perhaps, to the coal-fogged city of Pittsburgh, where they would still feel at home.
“Do they know we’re coming?” Harry asked.
“I wrote,” said Dunbar. He pointed down into the valley where a US flag fluttered outside a small cinder block building. “They have a post office.”
As they climbed from the car, Harry saw that the front door of the ramshackle house had been opened. A woman stood framed in the doorway with a child at her side.
“That’s the great-grandmother,” Dunbar said.
Harry’s eyes were focused on the child. Could this possibly be his grandchild? He wanted to believe. His heart was pounding with hope, as it had been pounding ever since he had received the first communication from England. Jack had been everything for him, his golden boy, destined for a bright future in Harry’s increasingly successful business. Blanche had cried when Jack had told her that he had enlisted in the army, and Harry had responded with anger.
“You don’t have to go. We can get you an exemption.”
“I don’t want an exemption. I’m going.”
Less than a year later, two officers, solemn-faced and rigidly upright, had brought the news. Blanche had fainted. Harry had unleashed a torrent of curses, but nothing had made any difference. Not until now.
Dunbar pushed open the rickety gate and motioned Harry through. He fixed his eyes on the child, smudge-faced, her hair hanging in rat tails, her dress no defense against the chill wind. Anger welled up in Harry’s chest. Was this how they treated Jack’s child? How dare they?
The old woman looked at him with shrewd brown eyes, pinpoints of light in a weathered face.
“You want her?”
He tried not to sound too eager. Negotiations would take place, and he needed to be in a good position. But, really, how much could they possibly want? This was a place where they would be lucky to see a five-dollar bill, and he had a stack of them in his pocket. It was just a question of how many.
“Barbree,” said Dunbar, “this is Mr. Harrigan.”
“Does he want her?” The old woman’s voice crackled with impatience.
“I want to look at her,” Harry said.
“You’d better come in.”
They stepped inside, and Barbree Malloy led them through a cluttered hallway to a lean-to kitchen at the rear of the house. Onions hung from the rafters, along with rabbit pelts and the hide of some larger animal. Light filtered in from a dirt-streaked window above the chipped kitchen sink. Harry looked at the little girl, hoping to see Jack’s features beneath the dirt.
“Are you sure this is her?” he asked.
“This is her,” Dunbar confirmed.
“I knew she wasn’t our’n,” the old woman declared.
“Her father was Nick Malloy,” said Dunbar.
“No, he weren’t,” said Barbree. “That little English tramp said he were, but he weren’t.”
“Do you think that the Englishwoman was her mother?” Harry asked.
The old woman looked at him for a long moment with a thoughtful expression on her weather-beaten face. “Could be,” she said at last, “but maybe not. Who can say?”
“We hoped that you could say.”
Barbree sniffed. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her born, but even if that little tramp is her mother, I know Nick ain’t her father. She don’t look nothing like our Nick. Cuckoo in the nest, that’s what I think.”
“And where is your grandson now?” Harry asked. “Perhaps if we could speak to him ...?”
“Dead,” said Barbree. “A year agone, up at the coal tipple. Him and four others. Crushed.”
“My daddy was crushed,” the little girl said unexpectedly and with very little feeling.
“He weren’t your daddy,” said Barbree, giving the girl’s shoulder a rough shake.
“Hey,” said Harry.
“He weren’t,” the old woman repeated.
“Are you sure this is the right Malloy?” Harry asked. “There could be more than one.”
“No,” said Dunbar, “this is him. He was at Rose Hill in 1944, married a village girl called Vera Chapman, and brought her here in 1946.”
“This ain’t our Nick’s child,” Barbree declared. “Look at her, don’t look nothing like him. That’s what I said, right from the beginning. She didn’t fool me.”
Harry fixed the old woman with a stern stare. “Tell me about the Englishwoman. What makes you think that she might not be the mother? I don’t want you to say something just because you think it’s what I want to hear.”
“I don’t care what you want to hear,” Barbree snapped. “You ask me if she’s the mother of this brat, and all I can say is that she ain’t much of a mother; she don’t care for her like a real mother. A real mother wouldn’t go and leave her child behind.”
“Where has she gone?”
Barbree shrugged her shoulders. “Dunno.”
“When did she go?”
“Right after Mr. Dunbar there sent us the first letter. Like as not she knew the game was up, so she took herself off; gone to Pittsburgh most like.”
Barbree looked slyly up at the battered kitchen clock hanging above the kitchen range. “You want her or not? Make up your mind.”
“Are you in a hurry?” Harry asked.
“Don’t got all day to waste,” Barbree replied. She turned away and lifted the carcass of a dead animal from its resting place on the floor. She laid the unfortunate creature on the kitchen table. Harry’s stomach lurched as he realized that her victim was a possum.
“I have supper to make,” Barbree declared. “If you don’t want her, then I’ll send her to the orphan home in Wheeling. We don’t want her here.”
She picked up a hatchet and lopped off the possum’s head with one practiced blow. “Make up your mind.”
“Perhaps we should go to Pittsburgh and find Miss Chapman,” said Dunbar. “Should we do that, Barbree?”
Barbree’s eyes slid sideways. “You’re welcome to try. Pittsburgh’s a big place. She could be anywhere. And who’s to say she’s even in Pittsburgh? Could be gone somewhere else by now. Could have changed her name.”
Harry looked at the old woman, her blood-covered hands pulling entrails from the possum.
“Does the child have a coat? It’s cold outside?”
“You can wrap her in that one,” said Barbree, pointing to a tweed coat hanging on a peg. “It belongs to the Englishwoman, fancy thing, fancy label.”
Harry felt a cold chill creeping along his spine.
“She went to Pittsburgh without her coat?”
“Seem so,” Barbree agreed.
Harry patted the little girl’s tangled hair. “We’re not going to find her, Dunbar.”
“We can try.”
“No, we’re not going to find her. No one’s going to find her.”
“So what shall we do?”
Harry thought of Blanche, waiting back in Chicago, her heart full of hope. He pulled a handful of five-dollar bills from his pocket.
“We’ll take her.”