“Would you be willing to let someone else be the builder if it meant the school could get started sooner?” The mayor watched Sam’s reaction with a raised eyebrow.
The new school was Sam’s idea; he wanted to build it for his daughters, and he said so. “There’s no rush. School’s almost over for this session. We have until fall to build the new one.” He was going to build it, no one else. The mayor nodded.
Throughout the remainder of the day, Sam considered what materials he’d need for the school and how much of everything and what kind of roofing he wanted and where he might buy a potbellied stove cheap. They’d need desks and a chalkboard.
When the noon whistle blew, he remained up on the Dryfus roof to eat his lunch. Angie had packed him a glass jar filled with the beef stew and noodles and gravy that he’d missed last night. The meal wouldn’t be hot now, but he anticipated it would be delicious. He also had bread and a generous pat of butter wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth. The apple must have come from the root cellar and then from the bottom of the basket. But the skin wasn’t wrinkled too badly, and it still tasted sweet when he bit into it.
While he sat in the sunlight on Reverend Dryfus’s half-shingled roof eating his lunch, Sam gazed out at the low hills rolling down the valley. Willow Creek was growing by leaps and bounds, spreading down and out over ground that cattle had recently grazed.
His gaze settled on two blackened ruins, not far from each other. The burned-out union Hall, and down three blocks and over two blocks, the charred remains of the Whittier house.
There was no doubt about the destruction being deliberate. The arsonist hadn’t bothered to make the fires appear accidental or a result of natural causes.
As Sam had told the mayor and the councilmen, there were reasons why the new union Hall and the Whittier mansion might have been torched. His guesses could be correct. Certainly it was possible.
But Sam’s gut said otherwise. Frowning, he sent his apple core sailing off the roof toward the scrap heap.
Following the noon break he assembled his crew. “From now until the reverend and his missus move in, I want a watchman on duty every night. I’ll pay time and half.” The extra pay would come out of his pocket. “Any volunteers?” The added expense made him inwardly cringe. But another fire could destroy his livelihood.
If the mayor and the sheriff were correct that Sam might be the reason for the fires and if the Dryfus place burned, then he’d be in real trouble, because he agreed that three fires exceeded coincidence.
Worse, if the fires were not coincidence then he had a gut feeling that he might know who was behind them and why. If he was right, then he also understood the message.
Chapter 5
By Saturday Angie was grateful that Sam’s house wasn’t any larger, and she had developed a new appreciation for Mrs. Dom, who had cleaned the Bertoli residence for so many years. After Sam and the girls left in the morning, she allowed herself another cup of coffee, often with Molly Johnson, then she launched herself into an exhausting day of dusting, polishing, washing, sweeping, scrubbing, shopping for provisions, and cooking.
Everything revolved around cooking. When Angie wasn’t actually cooking, she was preparing to cook, cleaning up after cooking, or thinking about what to cook next. All her other tasks were sandwiched between the unrelenting demands of cooking.
This morning, while her bread loaves were rising, she had rushed up to the grocer on Bennet Street and bought carrots and potatoes since there weren’t any more vegetables in the root cellar. The items cost the Earth, which irritated her since she used her own money to buy them.
From there, she hurried to the butcher shop, where she purchased two chickens, one for tonight and one for Sunday dinner. Which she also paid for with her own money.
When she arrived back at the house, the iceman was at the door with the weekly block of ice and demanding payment on delivery. There went another fifty cents.
After she put away her hat and gloves, she punched down the dough for rolls and let the dough rest while she shook out the floor rugs. Then she shaped the dough and covered the balls with a towel for the second rise.
Next she sat outside on the kitchen stoop and plucked the feathers off the chickens, saving the feathers in an old pillowcase. She hated plucking feathers, but it was pleasant to sit in the thin mountain sunshine, listening to the traffic spinning along Bennet Street and the dynamite blasts in the hills, which had taken a little getting used to.
Many of the mines had coal-fueled pumps to keep water out of the shafts. Plumes of smoke curled from the stacks, sulfurous and dark, drifting south along the mountain ridges. The ore trains also added smoke to the valley haze, as well as contributing the noise of whistles and squealing wheels. Dust hung above the streets dividing rows of houses and shacks and tents.