Mission of Hope. Allie Pleiter

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      Mama came over and readjusted a curling tendril that fell from Nora’s chignon. “You look lovely,” Mama said. “But I think,” she said delicately, “that it would be kindest to tuck the locket inside your dress.”

      Nora’s hand came up to touch the locket. She’d already been gratefully amazed that Aunt Julia let her keep it. In her joy over recovering the locket, she hadn’t even considered that Aunt Julia might want her lost daughter’s necklace for herself until Papa brought it up on the ride home. He’d gone with Nora to show the locket to Aunt Julia, and it had taken every ounce of will Nora had not to beg Aunt Julia to let her keep it. It would be wrong to deny a grieving woman any remnant of her daughter, but the necklace couldn’t come close to meaning to Aunt Julia what it meant to Nora. She needed to have it. Needed to feel the only tangible evidence of that sweet friendship around her neck, close to her heart.

      Aunt Julia had clutched the locket for a long moment that made everyone in the room hold their breath. Papa kept his hand on Nora’s shoulder, as if to say, be strong, but said nothing. After a hollow-sounding breath, Aunt Julia let it slide back into Nora’s hand. “You keep it, dear,” she said with an unnatural calm. Nora and Papa waited there for a moment, thinking she meant to say something else, perhaps to cry or to say how glad she was to have the locket found, but she never said anything else. She just straightened her shoulders, touched Nora’s cheek in a way that made her shiver and walked on to the porch to sit staring out over the city.

      Nora went after her to thank her, but Papa’s hand held her back. “Let her be,” Papa said quietly. “It is a terrible thing to bury a daughter. And it is a far more terrible thing to not have a daughter to bury.”

      Of course Nora would tuck the locket out of sight. And Mama was right—it was by far the kindest thing to do.

      Chapter Five

      “It’s hopeless.” Quinn’s ma stood at the opening of their shack and rewound her graying red hair up into the ever-present knot at the base of her neck. “You can’t expect children to run around such filth all day long without shoes and not cut their feet to ribbons.” She looked up and saw Uncle Mike coming up the path. “Did you find any, Michael?”

      “It’s just as I thought, Mary. Only the sisters in the other camp have any iodine left.”

      His mother blew out a breath. “The sisters. Well, that’s all well and good for them, but we’re on the wrong side of the street to get much of that, aren’t we?”

      “And they don’t come over here ’til Thursday.”

      Quinn watched his ma look at poor Sam. He’d cut his foot yesterday morning on a nail, and it was an angry red this afternoon—a bad sign. “It hurts you, don’t it, boy?”

      Sam, smart enough to see the bad news in Ma’s eyes, put on a brave face. “Not so much.”

      Quinn sat down next to the boy. “Your limp says different, Sam. If it hurts a lot, my ma should know. Ma’s are smart that way, besides. No use fooling them about things like this.”

      Sam swallowed hard. “It hurts a lot,” he admitted.

      “I reckon it does,” Ma said, her smile softening. “You’ve got a man-sized wound in your foot, and you’re just a tiny one, you are.” She put Sam’s foot back into the bucket, which was really just a large tin Uncle Mike had found and washed, and motioned for Quinn to stand.

      “I’ll take it you’d know where to find a shot or two of whiskey,” she asked.

      Quinn raised an eyebrow at his mother. Given the damage alcohol had done in this household, he knew his mother’s disapproval of drinking. “For the wound,” she clarified in an exasperated tone. “Iodine would be better, but we can hardly get persnickety now, can we?”

      Uncle Mike put his hands into his pockets while Ma reached for the small pine box she kept under her trunk. Quinn knew they were searching for a coin or two—the man at the far corner of Dolores Park, who’d opened an undercover tavern, brooked no charity whatsoever. Even if he carried Sam bleeding and screaming in pain to the man, Quinn doubted the profiteer would spare a tablespoon for medicinal purposes. “I’ve got one,” Quinn said, producing the silver coin he’d found under a beam two days ago. He’d had his eye on a pair of hose for his mother—her fifty-first birthday was next week—but Sam seemed a more pressing cause.

      Ma sighed. “That’d buy a whole bottle of iodine before.”

      “Before.” Quinn echoed her sigh, tucking the coin back in his pocket and tussling Sam’s hair. “Before” didn’t even need words around it anymore. It had become an expression unto itself. Everybody knew what you meant when you said “before,” especially when you said it that way. As he walked out of the tent toward the rowdier edge of the camp, Quinn wondered if the time would come when someone said “before” like it was a bad thing. Like things were so much better now. That day will come, won’t it, Lord?

      As he picked his way through the moonlit alleys—lamps or any other open flames were scarce and outlawed after sundown besides—Quinn was almost sorry he’d said that prayer. It kept ricocheting back to him somehow, as if the answer to it lay within his own reach. He was one man, barely able to scrape up enough whiskey to treat a boy’s wound, much less make things better than before. Right now, with the wind rousting up an uncomfortable chill, San Francisco was a problem that felt even too big for God, and Reverend Bauers would surely scold him for thinking that way.

      Reverend Bauers.

      Quinn thought of the boxes they’d discovered in the Grace House cellar. Did he even dare think one man could make things better?

      Bauers would undoubtedly argue that Quinn did know one man who had made things better than before. Quinn shrugged and pulled his thin coat tighter around him. Had he really? Or was he just remembering the daring Black Bandit exploits with the easily impressionable eyes of youth? He’d thought the Bandit’s weapons giant-sized, but they weren’t when he held them yesterday. Matthew Covington was clever, yet hadn’t Nora Longstreet called him clever to realize the children needed playthings?

      Am I clever enough, Lord? The question seemed to shoot right through him, like an electric current. Donated medical supplies were supposedly pouring into the city. They had to be going somewhere. Perhaps a clever man need only help get such things from one place to another. And these days, with as few people watching as possible. That, Quinn surmised with a low churning in his chest, was most definitely the job for one clever man.

      Quinn Freeman couldn’t really be the Black Bandit. That was fine, however, because San Francisco didn’t need a Bandit. It needed a messenger. An invisible transporter, getting things from those who sent them to those who needed them. He could do that.

      I can do that. Quinn had to stop for a moment, reeling from the weight of the idea. Actually, he reeled from the lightness of the idea. Quinn had just answered the question burning in the corner of his heart since the fires. The question everyone asked but no one dared to voice. The thing niggling at him, keeping him up nights, making him stare off into space for hours instead of sleeping: Why am I still here?

      “That’s why I’m still here?” His chest began to lift as he said the words aloud to himself. It made perfect, ridiculous sense. He knew the streets in a way a wealthier man never could. He had size СКАЧАТЬ