Twisted River Read online

  Her stomach fluttered with a feeling unrelated to pregnancy. Excitement wasn’t an emotion she had felt in a long time.

  “Have you found what you’re looking for?”

  The young researcher had abandoned his volumes and now stood at her elbow. Facing him, she instantly quavered. One shelf over, the leering stranger in the boater hat drummed his fingers against the book edges while darkened eyes stared intently at her. Correction, into her. As if she were one of the specimens and he a botanist anxious to dissect her.

  “Everything all right, miss?” asked the researcher. He slid the drawer closed which she had been viewing. The stranger didn’t move an inch. He didn’t even blink.

  She swiveled in search of Tena, but her sister had disappeared into the stacks like the ridiculous bibliophile she was.

  “There’s a man watching me ...” Maggie trailed off when her eyes flitted back to the stranger’s location and found only books staring back. She turned a complete circle, but for all she was aware, the mystery watcher had been engulfed by the shelves around them.

  “Which man?” the researcher asked. “We appear alone.”

  The breeze from a closing door swung her around.

  “Excuse me, please.” She hurried out of the Herbarium, a blast of summer heat knocking her back at the exterior door. Throwing an arm up to shield her eyes, she scanned the area. The mystery man hurried down the path into the garden, now holding his hat in his hands to reveal dark close-clipped locks. He stepped off the path into the trees.

  When she followed, he was gone. Not a whisper, not a sign. It was as if she imagined it. As if he never was.

  TWO

  Through the bookshelves, Tena watched Maggie chase after Mr. Tall, Dark, and—from what she could observe—Older than their father. Probably the next stop on her sister’s trail of one-night interludes. New country, but same distasteful parade of suitors as before.

  She had hoped her sister’s volatile flirtations would cease once they settled into their new home and Maggie understood how deeply Tena hurt from her fiancé, Charles’s death on Titanic. That what happened between Maggie and Reuben could become water under the bridge, Tena would forgive, and they could finally begin to heal. But how could she heal, how could she forgive, when her sister remained so unfeeling towards the repercussions of her actions?

  In under two months, a dense tension had filled the Kisch house like thunderclouds. No one was immune from Maggie’s narcissistic mania. She and Reuben were constantly at each other’s throats, which left Tena to claim sides between her sister and her closest friend. Inviting Maggie to the Botanical Gardens had been her last-ditch effort to salvage what was left of her sanity and their sisterhood. But it seemed that even Maggie’s love of flowers couldn’t quell her desire for masculine comforts.

  While Maggie was detained with her most recent conquest, Tena quickly penned a note explaining her absence—assuming her sister even noticed—and slid a quarter to the Herbarium researcher to pass it along. As luck would have it, the streetcar clanged down Shaw Avenue at that moment, and she was able to climb aboard as she reached the street. Pressing a coin into the conductor’s hand, she claimed an empty seat alone.

  Alone—what a word, what an awful depressing word.

  She closed her eyes and imagined Charles’s hand in hers, his breath warm on her cheek, his lips soft against hers. He’s simply waiting at the stop, she thought. Merely standing around the corner. Just count the minutes, Tena. You’ll be together soon.

  Such fantasies coaxed her feet out of bed in the morning and throughout the day. Pretending pushed her to the market, kept her fingers patching garments, and cooking dinner with Charles’s mother, Elsa. Every time Charles’s father, Karl, asked Tena how she was, she laced him with a lovely smile and replied, “Perfectly well, thank you.”

  Physically she was; her body felt perfectly healthy. It pressed on day after day without signs of fatigue. She hardly sat except for meals, and when she did, she ate with fervor. Always busy, never lax. It was pure and uncompromised denial and also the best recourse for grief she could muster.

  The sailors buried Charles at sea. His body had been too disfigured to send home, especially when resources must be saved for first class passengers. So they gave him back to the sea that claimed him. They buried him, and she wasn’t there. As much as she hated the sight of her father’s dead form, one couldn’t argue with the pallor complexion of a corpse. So who then could insist she give Charles up, to believe his death when she hadn’t seen it?

  The White Star Line could, along with their white canvas bag hidden in her bedroom closet.

  Tena exited the streetcar, walked the final few blocks to 1282 Lemp Avenue, and climbed the thirteen stairs to the bedroom she shared with Maggie and Winnie, the Kischs’ eleven-year-old daughter. This time of day the house lay empty. Karl would return from work at six o’clock with his sixteen-year-old son, Emil. Twenty-year-old Friedrich lived in the heart of the city while studying at university. Elsa and Winnie would be at the market fetching dinner.

  Silence hung heavy when she opened the bedroom’s closet door almost as if the space could feel her heart.

  Lowering herself to the oak floorboards, she lifted the white canvas bag into her lap. Marked with the number 332 and a red seal, the rough fabric scratched her hands like the rope ladder she had climbed from Titanic’s lifeboat onto the rescue ship, Carpathia. After that day—the only time she ever experienced sedatives and determined she also despised them—Tena forced all raw emotions into some deep dark hole where hope goes to die.

  Then this bag arrived two weeks ago, placed by the hands of the handsome postmaster into her own without so much as a condolence. He knew its meaning; how could he not? The news plastered the newspapers as the world waited for bulletins of more recovered bodies, more information about the infamous wreck.

  Reuben read them aloud each night at dinner. Instead of listening, Tena focused on the back page advertisements. “When you buy at Famous & Barr, you buy clothes of the uppermost quality!” Karl and Elsa waited anxiously for news of their son’s recovered body, never knowing Tena’s closet held the solace they so desperately craved.

  Breaking the bag’s seal, she thrust her hands inside and retrieved each item—silver pocket watch, cigar case, soiled billfold, gold engagement band—everything in Charles’s possession before they surrendered him to the ocean.

  She hadn’t kept it from the Kischs to be heartless. They were as close to parents as she had. But she simply wasn’t ready to relive that night, to hand over the last pieces of her fiancé she would ever hold.

  “Please, Tena, step into the lifeboat,” Charles had pressed as they stood under Titanic’s deck lights in the midnight hour of April fifteenth. An hour had passed since encountering the iceberg, and the lifeboats were lowering, but she didn’t understand why he insisted she enter one without him. The situation couldn’t be as dire as all that. It simply couldn’t. Ships these days were designed to be their own lifeboats. Other ships stayed afloat with limited resources until they could be towed to shore; surely Titanic would too.

  Tena rolled her eyes and pulled his fingers to her lips. “Charles, you’re overreacting.”

  “Overreacting, am I?” Charles shook his head with a thin smile. “What must I do to make you see reason?”

  “I’ll see reason when you make me see it.” She smoothed their clasped fingers across the stubble on his cheek, and he closed his eyes with a sigh.

  “You are the best decision I ever made.”

  Bending, he pressed a kiss to her lips and an object into her hands. Looking down, she found her fingers wrapped around a lovely new book with only a small dent in the corner of the blue linen cover. She ran her fingertips delicately over the title stamped in gold print. In all of her nineteen years, she had never owned a new book; all of her father’s books were well-read and well-worn, unlike the one she held now. This one was pristine.

  “I know how much my darlin
g loves to read,” Charles told her. “I stole this for you from the ship’s library. Think of it as some good company while we are apart.”

  Tena’s eyes widened. “Thief!”

  “They will not miss it, will they?”

  Tena’s fingers caressed the cover’s lovely linen. “I suppose not.”

  “Good.” Charles stole her arm with a gentle tug. “Now, will you please go?”

  “If I go, will you miss me?”

  He tilted her chin upward, and her resulting shiver had nothing to do with the freezing night air. “Every second we are apart,” he promised. “Now please, Tena, you must leave. I will find you.”

  With another quick kiss, she accepted his hand and stepped into the lifeboat. Taking a seat beside a young mother and her tiny son, she sought out Charles as the boat lowered, not once believing it would be the last time to see him. Titanic had precautions: safety compartments and watertight doors. Mechanisms she didn’t understand but still trusted.

  Her eyes took in Charles’s dishwater blond hair and his lips raised into a broad smile. Nothing is wrong, she thought. See how he smiles.

  Denial. It could be the strongest force on earth. Then again, so could love.

  “Ich liebe dich,” she called in German.

  “I love you,” he returned.

  It was the first and only time he ever declared his love in her native tongue. He saved it for the only moment that would ever matter.

  Tena stared at the book in her hands now, hidden in the recesses of her closet since she arrived in St. Louis, the final lost item in the contents of Charles’s twenty-one-year-old life and the heaviest weight she would ever hold. Seventy-three pages of paper and half a heart.

  Slowly, she bent open the cover and ran her fingers across the title, Lilac Lilies: A Collection of English Poetry. To know Charles, she would never be surprised that he enjoyed the poets. Every word from his mouth flowed like spoken song. Or at least that was how she always heard him.

  She flipped the pages, the sound reminiscent of the wind on deck during their last night together, and stopped at the only dog-eared page.

  Wait not the night for me / If the sun refuse to shine

  If the grass does cease to grow / If the music loses rhyme

  Wait not the night for me / If my tomorrow never starts

  If the dark goes on forever / If death has pierced my heart

  The book slipped to the floor with a hollow thud.

  Charles knew, she thought. He marked this page on purpose intending for her to read it. He understood how dismal Titanic’s situation was, and he still continued to laugh and assure her they would be together soon. But with every breath, with every false smile, he broke every promise he ever made. For better or worse, that was how it was supposed to be. Together or not at all.

  Charles was dead, and Tena, in her unfathomable ignorance, left him to face it alone.

  She wanted to scream and pummel his chest until her fists ached with the effort. To hold him in her arms and flood his shirt with her tears. Let him steal her pain away. Kiss him with a fervor she never would have dared before. One final touch, one last laugh, one more ... anything. She longed to speak to him in the very German she never mastered, but nonetheless always stole her heart.

  But wants and wishes were for children.

  Tena was no longer a child. And the last remnants of her girlhood dreams were at the bottom of the Atlantic with Charles’s body.

  THREE

  Adjusting his flat cap, Reuben Radford exited the crowded streetcar and purchased the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from one of the newsboys yelling headlines on the sidewalk. He always read the front section on his three-block walk to work and stashed it in his satchel until he could read the rest on the ride home in the evening. His fellow reporters at The Mid-Mississippi Daily would butcher him if they learned he spent his wages on a competing newspaper.

  Except truth be told, the Post-Dispatch was the best news outlet there was. They could scoop stories the Mid-Mississippi couldn’t hope to grab, including breaking news regarding the recent Titanic sinking, a fact that Reuben’s chief editor found infinitely annoying.

  “Why do I keep you boys, if you let the Post-Dispatch take all the decent news?” Eric Smithson yelled the day Reuben walked in for his interview. Smithson sailed a pencil through the air, hitting a bald reporter flat on the head. “Get me something decent on Titanic or I’ll fire you all!” he roared. “And nobody gets a reference.”

  Reuben held up a hand. “Excuse me, sir. I believe I can help you there.”

  That was how Reuben landed a job at the Mid-Mississippi, for the same reason every other paper hadn’t hired him—by simply mentioning that his writing portfolio went down with Titanic and he conveniently missed the boat. Smithson had been so intrigued as to have Reuben write a special interest story then immediately after shoved him on obituaries between marriage announcements and advertisements for ladies’ shoes and gentlemen’s cravats.

  “Obits?” Reuben admonished after Smithson delivered the abysmal downgrade. “My Titanic piece was smashing. We had higher sales on that edition than any other day this week.”

  Smithson ground his cigar in the ashtray on his desk. “You still don’t have a portfolio, Radford,” he growled. “One article isn’t enough for me to cast all my lots on you.” He pointed his cigar in Reuben’s direction then at the door. “You’ll take obits or you can take your pretty British behind back to the street.”

  Folding the front page of the Post-Dispatch over, Reuben scanned for any more information on Titanic. He had watched the news day after day since he arrived in St. Louis, sharing updates with the family over dinner and hoping one of the recovery ships would find Charles’s body soon. Tena usually remained quiet while he read, and it split his heart wide open the few times she said, “If they haven’t found his body yet, then perhaps there’s a chance he’s still alive.”

  No one believed that, and nearly everyone in the Kisch family told her as much, but insisting she see reason only resulted in her lips tightening. Two weeks ago, she stopped commenting on the news articles altogether. Reuben could never bring himself to tell her what he thought, even during all the nights they stayed up talking long after the others went to bed, her head resting against his shoulder until the living room fire reduced to embers.

  If she wanted to be in denial, he would let her. Her nonsensical hope might be the only way to bring them all through Charles’s death in one piece. Or at least many pieces held together in the name of family.

  “Good morning, Mr. Radford,” Miss Newton called out from the reception desk as he pushed through the Mid-Mississippi’s revolving door. She held up a battered portfolio folder. “Mr. Frye left some more photographs. Looks like they’re from yesterday’s Independence Day celebration. Would you mind taking them up to Mr. Smithson?”

  “Certainly, Miss Newton.” Reuben took the folder on his way to the stairs, flipping through black and white photographs sure to impress Eric Smithson, and he was a difficult bloke to please. The man even made his feature writers cry in the alley on their lunch breaks. Nevertheless, if there was one thing Smithson approved of, it was positive numbers and the smell of cold hard cash. In the months since Hugo Frye began selling his photos to the paper, they had seen a significant increase in sales, especially in editions when Mr. Frye’s work landed on the front page. Enough of an increase to even temporarily quell Smithson’s rants about the Post-Dispatch. It was a lousy shame then that he refused to pay the photographer even a fraction of what his work was truly worth.

  Reuben sprang up the next two flights of stairs, past the composition shop of the second floor and on up to third. Right on cue, the left side of the typists’ room looked up in excitement at his entrance: Phoebe, Rosalea, Hazel, and Luella. Far younger and vastly prettier than the other matronly typists, they were reduced to fervent fits of giggles when he strolled through the office on his first day ... and every day after.

  Despite
being unfairly deposited on the lowest rung of the reporting ladder, he genuinely enjoyed his job. And not only because he garnered the attentions of four lovely women every morning. His minuscule desk was still his own even while crammed in a room far too small to comfortably seat twenty-two men. His fellow reporters—all solid born and bred American men—harped on him for his youth and his “redcoat” accent on day one, but Reuben earned their trust the minute he joined in that first cigar. After that, he was as much a part of the newsroom as the perpetual smoke and coffee-induced haze they worked in.

  Sliding his fingertips along his hat brim, he threw the typists his usual winning smile. “Good morning, ladies.”

  Four cheery voices sang back in unison, “Good morning, Mr. Radford.” As he reached the frosted glass wall of the newsroom, he caught Hazel Vine’s usual follow up of, “Have a fascinatin’ day, sir!” With a final glance over his shoulder, he cast her a sly wink and closed the newsroom door behind him.

  “What are you smilin’ ’bout?” Stanley Leonard asked as Reuben dropped his satchel under the desk which butted against his own.

  As usual, paraphernalia covered Stanley’s desk from his current assignments along with yesterday’s publication of the Mid-Mississippi. The newest edition of The New Websterian Dictionary saved the stack from blowing out the open windows. All around them other reporters bent over their desks, either scribbling with or chewing on their pencils, while the furious click clack click ding of typewriters kept pace from the other side of the frosted glass.