Bleeding Kansas Read online

  BLEEDING KANSAS

  ALSO BY SARA PARETSKY

  Fire Sale

  Blacklist

  Total Recall

  Hard Time

  Ghost Country

  Windy City Blues

  Tunnel Vision

  Guardian Angel

  Burn Marks

  Blood Shot

  Bitter Medicine

  Killing Orders

  Deadlock

  Indemnity Only

  BLEEDING KANSAS

  Sara Paretsky

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS New York

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by Sara Paretsky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Paretsky, Sara.

  Bleeding Kansas / Sara Paretsky.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1192-2

  1. Rural families—Kansas—Fiction. 2. Iraq War, 2003–—Influence—Fiction. 3. Iraq War, 2003–—Protest movements—Fiction. 4. Fundamentalists—Kansas—Fiction. 5. Conservatism—Kansas—Fiction. 6. Social conflict—Kansas—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A647B56 2008 2007035962

  813'.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Nicholas, Jonathan, Daniel, and Jeremy

  Fellow refugees from our own patch of bleeding Kansas

  The promised peace has not yet come to Kansas. With many fears, and

  many sufferings before them in the cold months coming, they will look

  forward to a day of deliverance, when the new reign of peace and

  righteous laws takes the place of oppression and tyranny.

  —Mrs. Sara Robinson, Kansas, 1856

  THANKS

  I attended a two-room country school but know nothing about farming. Without the help of the Pendleton family—John and Karen, their children, Margaret, Will, and Liz, and John’s parents, Al and Loretta—I could not have begun to write this book let alone finished it. Needless to say, the errors, which are doubtless legion, are all my own. Further, there is no resemblance whatsoever between any real Kansans, whether friends of my youth or the amazingly energetic Pendletons, and any of the people in this novel. All the characters here, especially Nasya, are creations of my own hectic imagination.

  Thanks to Karen Pendleton, I am a proud honorary member of the Meadowlark chapter of Kansas 4-H; the many skills Lara Grellier learns in 4-H in this novel are a real sample of what Kansas kids actually do learn.

  I spent an informative afternoon at the Newhouse Dairy near Topeka. I am grateful to a very overworked Will Newhouse for taking time out of a day that starts at four each morning, for the first milking, to talk to me. As he warned me, that was scarcely a beginning of understanding dairy farming, so I apologize for the numerous liberties I have taken with cows in this book.

  Professor Allan Lines, at Ohio State University, provided much useful information on farm economics.

  Sue Novak, at the Kansas State Historical Society, was generous with her time and resources as I began my research into Kansas pioneer history. Sheryl Williams, curator of Special Collections at the University of Kansas, was most helpful in directing me to sources on the early history of settlement in Kansas.

  My brother Jonathan helped in many ways, from talking over the book as it developed, introducing me to Douglas County DA Angie Wilson, who generously provided information and advice on Kansas law and Douglas County courts, to helping create the Hebrew-speaking heifer.

  I have taken a number of liberties with the Douglas County government, including times of bond hearings, and the behavior of the sheriff’s department, which I modeled more on Cook County, where I live, than on the real behavior of Douglas County deputies. In addition, for my own story needs I moved the county fair from August to July, which would never happen in reality. I have also added about a mile to the landscape between Lawrence and Eudora to accommodate the Schapens, Grelliers, Fremantles, Ropeses, and Burtons so that I need not displace the Pendletons, Wickmans, and other actual farmers in the valley.

  If you are ever in Douglas County, look up the Pendleton Country Market. My old two-room school, Kaw Valley District 95, where I played baseball with more zest than skill, is now a high-end prep school not too far from Highway 10. It now boasts many rooms.

  With the exception of Z’s Espresso Bar, every place and person mentioned in this book is fictional.

  BACKGROUND

  I grew up in eastern Kansas in the valley of two rivers, the Wakarusa and the Kaw. On maps, you’ll see the Kansas River, but we call it the Kaw, as the Indians who first settled there did, and that is the name I use in this book.

  I’ve been away from Kansas for forty years, but it still is in my bones. The landscapes of childhood are so familiar that it is hard to write about them. I see Chicago more clearly now than I do the prairies, where my brothers and I hiked and worked and played. It took eight years of thinking about the people and places I knew before I could write this novel.

  In the 1850s, the ferocious struggle over slavery in Kansas earned the territory the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” The wars fought on that soil were among the bloodiest in our nation’s history, as pro-and anti-slavery forces battled over whether the territory would join the Union as slave or free. John Brown’s name is well known, but at least a thousand anti-slavery emigrants were murdered in cold blood by “border ruffians,” as they were called, who poured into Kansas Territory from the neighboring slave state, Missouri, with the tacit consent of territorial governor Wilson Shannon, himself a slave owner. In 1861, Kansas came into the Union as a free state, but Lawrence suffered a bloody massacre in 1863 in which hundreds were murdered by raiders led by the Missouri slave supporter William Quantrill, who took advantage of most of the able-bodied men being away fighting for the Union.

  I grew up on that history, on knowing I shared a heritage of resistance against injustice. Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, sent “Beecher’s Bibles” into Kansas Territory: trunks full of rifles for anti-slavery forces covered with Bibles so they could get past the slavers who controlled access to Kansas. I grew up proud of the role of pioneer women, who sewed bullets into their crinolines to smuggle them past the slaver guards.

  A century after Kansas came into the Union as a free state, it was painful to acknowledge that Lawrence was a segregated town. In the 1960s and ’70s, in a reprise of Bleeding Kansas, the town of Lawrence and the University of Kansas became the site of some of the bloodiest campus battles in the nation—over segregation, over women’s rights, the Vietnam War, American Indian rights, African-American rights. Some of the town reacted in alarm, convinced that Communists had taken over the town, the university, and the county. The Republican revolution began then. People who thought African-Americans and women were out of line demanding their rights began taking over government at the grass-roots level to ensure that old-fashioned values would prevail.

  This novel is set in the present, against the backdrop of that history. It is set on the farms of the Kaw Valley, where I grew up. In 1958, my parents bought a farmhouse east of town to escape the poisonous segregation of the era, which affected African-Americans the most but, to a lesser degree, Jews as well. The house we lived in had been owned by the Gilmore family, who at one time farmed ten thousand acres in the Kaw Valley. My family lived in that house for forty years, but locals still call it the Gilmore house, never the Paretsky house, and in this novel the Fremantle house is treated in the same way. Like the Fremantle house, “our” house had a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room, a silver-backed water fountain in the upper hall, and many beautiful fireplaces.

  CONTENTS

  Part One PROTEST

  1. THE CORN IS GREEN

  2. LOOKING TO THE PAST

  From Abigail Comfort Grellier’s Journal

  3. THE PASSIONS OF SUSAN

  4. FIRE BOMB

  5. FAMILY THANKSGIVING

  6. DRUG BUST

  7. BEING NEIGHBORLY

  8. UNDERGROUND WARS

  From Abigail Comfort Grellier’s Journal

  9. THE MILKMAN

  10. THE RED HEIFER

  11. CAPPUCCINO AND ITS MAKER

  12. NOT RICHARD BURTON

  13. THAT OLD HOUSE

  14. THE COVEN GATHERS

  15. FIRE DANCE

  16. RAMPING UP THE ARGUMENTS

  17. OUT OF THE TANK

  18. ONE LAST FIGHT

  19. THE LONG GOOD-BYE

  20. TAPS

  Part Two FALL

  21. THE QUAGMIRE OF YOUTH

  22. TEACHER OUT OF SCHOOL

  23. WITCHES’ BREW

  24. WHO WAS THAT…INTRUDER?

  25. ADOLESCENT FURY

  26. THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE

  27. NIGHT VISITORS

  28. WEIRD—REALLY WEIRD—NEIGHBORS

  29. SUICIDE TRY

  30. SUNFLOWER CROP

  31. PENNED IN

  32. PHOTO OP

  33. A SHOT IN THE DARK

  34. ACTION IN THE HEIFER’S BARN

  Part Three MIRACLE

  35. TALES FROM THE CRYPT

  36. MAN IN THE MIDDLE

  37. MANGER WARS

  38. COLD COMFORT FARM

  39. MURDER ABOUT

  40. A GIRL’S “FRIEND”

  41. COLLAPSE

  42. HAUNTED BY THE DEAD

  43. MORNING AFTER

  44. PUPPY LOVE?

  45. VISITING HOURS

  46. TALK, TALK, TALK…NO ACTION

  Part Four HALLOWEEN

  From Abigail Comfort Grellier’s Letters

  47. HIDEAWAY UNCOVERED

  48. WORD STORM

  49. GRAFFITI ARTIST

  50. HEIFER CLEANING

  51. A CHRISTIAN SERVICE

  52. SACRIFICIAL CALF

  53. SAMHAIN

  54. BURN, BABY, BURN

  55. THE AWAKENING

  Part Five CODA

  56. HISTORY LESSON

  57. TIDYING UP

  58. SPRING

  Part One

  PROTEST

  One

  THE CORN IS GREEN

  HEAT DEVILS SHIMMERED over the cornfield. It was late July, the midday sun so hot that it raised blisters on Lara’s arms. It turned the leaves into green mirrors that reflected back a blinding light. Lara shut her eyes against the glare and held out her hands, trying to reach the edge of the cornfield by feel, but she tripped on the rough ground and fell, grazing her knees on the hard soil. She’d had plenty worse falls, but this one so humiliated her that she started to cry.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” she whispered fiercely.

  She sat up to inspect the damage. Her dress had a long streak of dirt up the front, and her knees were bleeding. She’d made the dress as part of a summer 4-H project for the county fair. It was pink lawn, with a placket up the left side edged in rose scalloping, and she’d won first prize for it. She got up, her knees stinging when she straightened them, and hobbled the last few yards into the cornfield.

  The corn was so tall that walking into the field was like walking into a forest. After a few dozen steps, she couldn’t see the house or any of the outbuildings. The rows looked the same in all directions, neat hills about two feet apart. If she turned around in circles a few times, she wouldn’t know what direction she’d come from. She’d be fifty yards from home but would be so lost she could die in here. Probably she’d die of thirst within a day, it was so hot. Blitz and Curly would find her bones in October, picked clean by prairie hawks, when they came to harvest the corn.

  She lay down between the rows and stared at the sky through the weaving of leaves and tassels. The corn was as tall as young trees, but it didn’t provide much shade: the leaves were too thin to make a bower overhead the way bur oak would. She scooted close to the stalks so that leaves covered her face and blocked out the worst of the punishing sun. It was a close, windless day, but when she lay completely motionless she could hear a rustling in the leaves, a sort of whooshing, as if they created their own little wind within the field.

  Grasshoppers whirred around her. A few birds sang through the rows, pecking at the corn. The ears were just taking shape, the kernels at blister stage. The smell was sweet, not like the icky, fake-flavored corn syrup you got with your pancakes at the diner, but a clean, light sweetness, before anyone took the corn and started manufacturing things from it.

  She lay so still that a meadowlark perched on the stalk right above her. It cocked a bright eye at her, as if wanting her opinion on the world.

  “They’ll make the corn dirty,” Lara told it. “Here in the field, it’s clean. But then they’ll take it to their stupid factories and turn it into gasoline or plastic or some other nasty thing.”

  The bird chirped in agreement and turned to peck at one of the ears of corn, trying to get through the thick husk. When Lara reached up an arm to strip the husk back, to help out, the bird took off in fright.

  In the distance, she heard her father calling her name. She squinched her eyes shut again, as if that would shut out sound and sight both, but in a few minutes she heard the louder crackling of his arms brushing back leaves.

  “Lulu! Lulu!” and then louder, closer, more exasperated, “Lara! Lara Grellier! I know you’re in here. Blitz saw you go into the field. Come on, we have to get going.”

  With her eyes shut, she felt his shadow overhead, heard his sudden intake of surprised breath. “Lulu, what are you doing down there? Did you faint? Are you okay?” And he was bending over her, smelling of shaving cream—so strange, Dad shaving in the middle of the day.

  It didn’t occur to her to lie, to say yes, the sun got to her, she fainted, she was too ill and weak to go. She sat up and stared at him, imagining how she must look covered with dirt and blood.

  “I just fell, Dad. I’m okay, but I wrecked my dress. I can’t go like this, I wrecked my dress.” She burst into tea
rs again, as if the loss of a stupid dress mattered. What was wrong with her, to cry over her dress at a time like this? But she sobbed louder and clung to her father.

  He stroked her hair. “Yeah, baby, you look like you decided today was mud-pie day. It’s okay, the dress’ll clean up fine, you’ll see. You run in the house and wash up and put on something else.”

  He pulled her to her feet. “No wonder you fell, wearing those crazy flip-flops in the field. I keep telling you to put on shoes. You could step on a nail, get tetanus or ringworm. Aphids could lay eggs under your skin.”

  It was a familiar litany, and it eased the worst of her sobs. When they got to the house, he hesitated a moment before letting go of her arm. “See if your mom needs any help getting dressed, okay, Lulu? And don’t forget your trumpet.”

  LATER, WHEN SHE’D been away from Kansas for years and finally came home again to run the farm, with children of her own who couldn’t tell the difference between a stalk of corn and a sheaf of wheat, the colors were what Lara remembered from that day. Most of the other details she’d forgotten, or they’d merged in her mind with all the other shocks and horrors that made up one long year of grief.