Toward the edge of the activity, I saw Joe and the horse again. It was dark enough that they were very filled out and dimensional. The campsite lights were bright but they didn’t illuminate the space that stretched over the old stagecoach tracks and to the station. The outside of the station was lit by one weak light above its front door, and a little inside light escaped out of the small windows, but none of it was enough to lessen Joe and the horse’s three-dimensional forms. Had someone—Jake maybe—decided to leave the station open and lit during the evenings through the convention? There was also someone else walking toward the station. It took only a second for me to recognize Esther. I watched to see if she somehow acknowledged the ghosts, but she didn’t. They watched her, though, intently.
I looked around but didn’t immediately see Gram, Jake, or Cliff—or Jerome, for that matter. The station was set back enough that I would have liked to take someone with me to see what Esther was up to, but no matter how mixed up everyone’s stories were, I truly didn’t sense that she was dangerous. She went through the front doorway as Joe dismounted. He didn’t follow her, but went to one of the small windows, pulled himself up, and peered inside.
“Curious,” I said. I hurried across to the station.
“Joe?” I said quietly as I got closer.
He turned and looked at me. Did I see tears in his eyes?
“You okay?” I said.
“Betts. I’m fine. Just wondering what the young woman is up to.”
I inspected him and decided that he probably hadn’t been tearing up, but I couldn’t be sure. I lifted myself up on my toes to see inside the window, just like Joe had done. Back when the station was a true station, it was mostly empty, except for the things that the station keepers needed to care for the horses and riders. In its replica state, the informational plaques told a condensed yet historic version of the Pony Express story and were fascinating even to me. Esther’s interest in the story made sense.
“Why?” I asked Joe. “Why were you curious what she was doing?”
He looked away from me and then back inside the building, up on his toes again. The way his eyes landed on Esther and then seemed to pinch with some sort of longing sat funny and, frankly, was a little creepy.
“I remember her from the cemetery,” he said. “And she was talking to your friend Jake in his big room. When she left him I wondered where she was going.”
Had Joe been tailing Esther?
“I’ll go in and talk to her. You want to come and listen?” I said.
“I do,” he said, but his words were threaded with pain.
I blinked and inspected his face again.
“You okay, Joe?”
“Fine, fine. Let’s go.”
What was it about his face that I couldn’t distinguish? My lack of sight bothered me. Why couldn’t I understand or process exactly what happening? Or was nothing happening and I was imagining things? It felt like my perceptive abilities were set to slow motion when his face did what it did, and they never caught up to the answer.
“All right,” I said. “Follow me.”
The door’s noisy hinges prevented me from entering covertly. At the squeaks, Esther turned and smiled.
“Hi, Betts.”
“Hi,” I said as Joe and I came through and joined her at the back corner of the space. It wasn’t huge, only about twenty by thirty feet. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” she said, but much less enthusiastically than if she meant it.