My apartment’s just around the corner,” Quake said. “Come up with me.”
This was as they left the restaurant, Quake holding the door for her.
“Just for a quick minute. Nothing improper,” he added.
She didn’t believe him, but she said all right and followed him anyway. Quake had finished his second bottle of wine and Roslyn had watched his developing drunkenness with interest. She’d managed to keep her hand steadily clasped around her tumbler of water in his presence. But she feared if she was left alone, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from drinking. Just like on her last night in Spokane Falls. The impulse was so strong as to feel like someone pushing her from behind, or pulling at her feet by the buckles on her shoes. She’d buy a bottle of her own on the way back to the hotel and that would be it.
Going with Quake seemed the safer option. At least whatever happened with him, she could tell herself it had not been entirely her fault.
They walked the short distance in silence, which made the arrangement seem all the more ominous. In the restaurant, there had hardly been a pause in the conversation, as if they had both been so eager to divulge the secrets they’d acquired in Spokane Falls. Though Roslyn hadn’t told Quake everything. She’d left out the details of her time as a captive in Barton’s home.
Maybe it’s not just sex he wants, she worried. But still, her fear of the alternative—being alone—was greater.
The building he led her to was inauspicious, but inside, the apartment revealed itself to be quite large, taking up an entire floor. It was airy with big windows. Furniture and decoration were minimal, though clearly of good quality.
“Wait here,” Quake said, gesturing to the expanse of his living room. He disappeared down the hall. Roslyn remained standing in the entryway and wondered what he would return with. More alcohol? A weapon? Or would he simply come back without any of his clothes on? Some men moved so quick.
He reemerged, and there was something in his hand.
“Here,” he said, extending it toward her, and when she looked down, she saw it was money.
She laughed. She knew right away where it had come from: the First Bank of Spokane Falls. What had her life become that she so often dealt in stacks of cash from the First Bank of Spokane Falls?
“It’s your cut,” he said. “If it weren’t for you, there’d have been nothing for me, after all.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’re the one who broke Heydale. Were he not so badly damaged, no one would have believed what I said about him.”
“I didn’t break Barton,” Roslyn said, and she wanted to believe herself.
“Well, you did something,” he said. “I want to thank you for that.”
She pushed the money back toward him. “I can’t accept it,” she said.
He shrugged. “Okay then, back to the vault with this,” he said, gesturing to the cash, and turned again toward the hallway.
In his absence, she wandered the living room, examining the few objects in it: a bookcase, a trunk that proved empty when she opened it, a long oak table with photographs in frames perched at one end. One was of Quake as a boy sitting astride a mule. She picked up the frame and undid the hooks. “Dan Kite—Black Hills” was written in faded script on the back of the picture. Of course Quake Auchenbaucher wouldn’t have been the man’s real name. Roslyn felt it gratifying to have gained this little bit of insight on him. And when he returned, his face displaying the stoic confidence he’d worn all through dinner, even when she’d first approached to say she knew him, she felt again the desire to shock him.
He started to say something, but she held up a hand, pretending to study him. She furrowed her brow and leaned close. Then she snapped her fingers. “Wait a minute, are you Dan Kite? I thought I recognized you! Oh, one of my old students from the Black Hills, after all this time.”
Quake looked as if he might tip over. “No,” he said. “I didn’t go to school. I don’t think I went to school.”
Roslyn laughed. “Relax. I’m only fucking with you,” she said.
“Then how do you know my old name?”
“I have mastered the ancient Eastern art of soul reading,” she said, thinking of words Ernest might have used. “I can see into your innermost core. I can see little Dan Kite there in his short pants.”
He looked ashen. Could it really be so easy to dupe a man who made conning others his life’s work?
“You can see that?” he asked.
“No! I’m fucking with you again.”
She picked up the small photo and told him she’d looked beneath the frame and seen the inscription on the back.
“It’s the only picture ever taken of me,” he said. “How did you know I was the boy?”
Roslyn studied him a moment and decided the question was genuine. The man had no idea how he looked, or that the look had always been with him, even when he was little Dan Kite.
It was in his eyes, mostly. Deep set and haunted. Like fear turned to rage turned to indifference. As an adult, he wore the look well. He was not unattractive. But it was an unsettling thing in the face of a ten-year-old child. She set the photo down.
“You were willing to believe I could peer into your soul?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “There’s something a little mystical about you.”
He was the first person to ever see it, this thing that pushed and pulled at Roslyn’s life without discretion or direction. She thought of how she’d labored unsuccessfully to make the people of Steilacoom heed her dire adolescent warnings, and then the ill-conceived work it had taken to convince Ernest she could levitate. And how she’d kept those secrets ever since. Now here was Quake, a man she’d known just a few hours, who was not only willing to believe something extraordinary about her, but claimed to know it for himself.
She felt something should come after this. Sex or a fight or a long evening spent telling each other everything there was to know about themselves, things they wouldn’t have dared admit in the restaurant. None of that happened. Instead, Quake offered to hail Roslyn a carriage back to her hotel, which she accepted. So that was it, she thought. Her single, strange evening in the company of the con man.
But then, three days later, she walked out of her hotel and found Quake leaning against the building near the front door. Waiting for her.