(1) Sunday, it begins
Cora Countryman’s mother had been gone twenty-four hours before it crossed Cora’s mind to worry. Edith Countryman’s carpetbag, two dresses, and a few select items were the only things missing from their house at the corner of Main and Park Streets in Wanee, Illinois, a small town on the edge of the prairie where everyone knew everyone and noticed any goings-on. An influx of workers and their families to feed the burgeoning new businesses continued to turn the sleepy village into anything but, making it even more remarkable that Edith Countryman left without having been seen—if she had.
When her mother had not returned by Saturday night, Cora rented a horse and buggy from Wanee Livery Sunday morning before the liveryman went to church. She drove north two hours past rolling green fields dancing with yellow and lavender wildflowers to her brother’s farm in the next town to the north, Awan, hoping her mother was there. She was not. Jess Countryman hadn’t seen Edith Countryman, nor had she written to him in weeks. Jess rarely came to Wanee, preferring to attend the Evangelical Church in their tiny farming community with his new and pregnant wife on his one day off.
After a late luncheon, Cora headed for home. The rented horse plodded down the roadway under the dappled shade of native walnut, chestnut, and elm trees as Cora sifted through her memories of the weeks before her mother’s disappearance, searching for clues as to where Edith Countryman might be. Foul play seemed out. On the day of her disappearance, Edith had been alive, sharp-tongued, and baking when Cora left for Layman’s Dry Goods store to check if anyone had dropped off a dressmaking or mending commission for her. They had not.
When Cora returned, her mother was out. Cora presumed she was at work in the newly opened library located in Library Hall with the other village offices. When her mother didn’t appear by late afternoon to make dinner for their boarder, Cora did, assuming her mother was chatting with someone she met in the park that occupied the four blocks, about an eighth of a mile, between Library Hall and the Countryman house.
Cora knew little about her mother other than that Edith Countryman had attended a finishing school for girls in Chicago, matriculating with a high school diploma and the ability to quote poetry, embroider, play piano, and Whist. Skills, Edith often noted, that were of little value in Wanee, where few had more than an eighth-grade education, and all newcomers were illiterate heathens. She scoffed when the town broke ground for the library, proclaiming it would remain an empty shell until it offered dime novels for checkout.
Cora admonished herself to be circumspect. It would not do to get everyone all riled up, only to have her mother walk in the door. It was possible, for instance, that her mother had taken the Friday train to Chicago, intending to return Monday, though it was unlikely, since she would have told Cora of a weekend trip.
The hired harness horse stopped to nibble on leaves at an apple orchard at what had been the edge of town until a new village of shot-gun houses, built side-by-side in drained marshland, thick with immigrants and mine workers, grew unplanned, disorganized, and dangerous northwest of Wanee proper. Cora slapped the reins, urging the horse to a trot toward town. The steady clip-clop of its hooves, the huff of the wheels in the dirt, and the calm of the freshly planted fields soothed her.
When it was time, she turned right at Railroad Square, then pulled through an open barn door into the hitching area between the horse stalls at the Wanee Livery. Sun flitted through the gaps between the boards, lighting horses munching on hay. The liveryman gave her a hand from the buggy, motioning her into a small office carved from the barn. He unhitched the horse, tied it to a post, then used the singletree to steer the buggy into a stall. When his chore was complete, he joined Cora in the office.
She paid the day rate though she had used but six hours of it. The liveryman kept a finger on a line in his open ledger, rotating the book on the counter. At the man’s nod, Cora checked the line indicated. It read Countryman in one column and $10.50 in another.
“Do we owe you that?” Cora asked. When he nodded, she paid the added monies. “Did my mother hire a rig?” He nodded again. “When?”
He tapped the date written in her mother’s hand. Six-weeks ago. Cora scrunched her eyes, trying to remember the last time her mother had been absent for over a day. She could not. Even so, why hadn’t her mother paid for the rental upon her return?
“Please note in your book that I have paid our debt,” Cora said. The liveryman handed her a pen. She dipped it in the inkwell, printing paid in full next to Countryman as several others had done next to their names, then handed the pen to the liveryman. He stuck it in a stand and stepped back into the livery, humming to the horses.
Cora smoothed the skirt of her simple shirt-waisted blue calico dress, then walked up Railroad Square over to Main Street, crossing at the northwest corner of the city park that wandered eight blocks east-west between Church Street and Main Street. A lovely pond, acres in size, meandered through the grassy expanse, trees draping its banks and shading its paths. She skirted the park, walking along the roadway for the four long blocks south toward her home.
The Countryman’s three-story brick house with a wide front porch and white wood trim was, by Wanee standards, a palace. Her parents bought the property when they arrived in Wanee, then a speck on the edge of the vast western prairie, thirty-five miles east of the Mississippi River. Cora’s father, Frank Countryman, built the house to an architectural plan the newlyweds carted with them from Chicago. Jess and Cora had been born two years apart in the right upstairs bedroom.
Edith Countryman struggled to keep the house after her husband’s death at the Battle of Chickamauga, where he died leading a deadly charge that included local men. Edith’s solution was to take in boarders. There had been a host of them over the intervening twelve years.
Cora had few memories of her father, her brother a few more. According to Cora’s tall, dark-haired brother, their father was tall and dark-haired, as well. It was hard to know for certain as any portraits or images of Frank Countryman had vanished. Though over twelve years later, bright patches remained in the faded wallpaper where his picture had hung. Edith never mentioned her husband’s name or spoke of him, leading her children to believe that there was a stain on him and so on them. Though, if true, the locals directed their condescension toward their mother.
Cora lifted her skirt and climbed the front stairs to Countryman House. A note in the door jamb announced that the remaining boarder, Josiah Randolph, was at the Sunday congregant dinner at the Methodist Church. Cora checked the small watch pinned to her dress. By now, the congregants at the church dinner would have reduced the shared dishes to scavenged ruins. If she intended to eat, she would need to make her own dinner. She lit one of the kerosene lamps in the front parlor, carrying it with her to the dining room, where she lit a second lamp. The wick in that lamp needed trimming but would serve for the night.
In the kitchen, she counted pre-cut wooden sticks, then stacked them in the wood-burning stove, started the fire with crumbled paper, nursing it until it caught, and put a kettle of water on the burner. Cora grabbed a blue everyday plate from an open shelf and sliced two pieces of bread from what remained of the week’s loaves on an oak wood counter running the length of the opposite wall ending at the icebox. She carved a length of ham from a cured hock hung in the larder in a lean-to out the back door and to the right, finishing by wrapping the hock back up. When the water on the stove was hot, she made tea to accompany her ham sandwich slathered with mustard and ate at the small table in the kitchen.
The evening breeze began to tickle the branches on the apple tree outside the kitchen door until they rattled on the roof. An occasional sharp thwack broke the silence in the house, reminding Cora that she was alone and on her own. It was daunting to consider what faced her, taking care of this house, feeding Josiah, and mounting a search for her mother. If she searched. Edith Countryman had walked out the door without saying goodbye or leaving a note. And it was even possible she had no desire for her children to find her.
Cora took a huge bite of her sandwich. As she ate, she made a list on a piece of torn butcher paper that came wrapped around the week’s sausages bought at the grocers on Chestnut. The first item on her list was to interview Edith Countryman’s friends. The second item was to check with the ticket agent at the train depot for anyone who might have seen Edith Countryman step aboard a train, which train it was, and where it went. Third on the list was to talk to Josiah Randolph in case Edith had bid him farewell. Cora penciled in her brother’s name at the top of the list, adding a checkmark next to it, then added the Trustee of the Library, Mr. Sullivan, to the bottom. The list grew disheartening but manageable.
Still, Wanee was a small town, someone must have seen her mother leave and would know if she was alone or accompanied, or if she had ventured unchaperoned across the tracks into the tumble-down shanties where the miners and immigrants lived cheek by jowl. The War had left a countrywide restlessness in its wake. Young men, uprooted by the violence, wandered, some headed west, some joining bushwhackers there. Most went home, grew restless, and set out to begin anew, anything to forget what they had witnessed, some coming to roost in insignificant towns like Wanee.
The railroad arrived soon after the War, bringing access to and from Chicago and San Francisco, followed by tracks north and south. Because of the railroad and the growing workforce, a new wagonmaker set up shop, coal mining took hold, and a boilermaker chose Wanee to build its business. A large plant sprang up on a triangular piece of land carved from the railroad tracks that ran at the diagonal through town and Main Street, the road leading to the next villages north and south of town.
The front door opened with a whoosh of wind. Cora called out, “Mr. Randolph?”
“Call me Josiah, Cora, please.” Josiah lit the second lantern kept in the hall. Soon a yellow glow announced his steps through the formal dining room into the kitchen. “We missed you at the church hall.”
Cora had no idea of Josiah’s age but knew he had been in the War, on which side, she was unsure, but suspected by a softness in his voice, that he had worn gray. He had straight brown hair, which he still wore long, wrapped in a leather band that dangled down his back. His blue eyes danced near green in the yellow light. He was of average height with big, capable hands. Now he brightened the kitchen with his smile, banishing Cora’s blues.
“Any of those cookies left?” Josiah asked, one hand in the cookie jar, reminding Cora that having skipped baking day on Saturday, she needed to bake on Monday. “I haven’t seen your mother for a couple of days, is she well?”
“Nor have I, not since Friday when I left for the dry goods store to check on my dressmaking commissions.”
Josiah humphed. “Well, several of the church women mentioned seeing Mrs. Countryman in the park on Friday. But not since.”
“Did any of them mention speaking to her?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Have you checked with young Jess?”
“I’m just back from Awan. Jess hasn’t seen Mother, spoken to her, or received any mail from her. I can’t imagine where she has gone.”
Josiah humphed again, adding raised eyebrows. “This cookie tastes good. All they had for sweets at the church were autumn apple pies. Can’t wait for the new crop.”
“Josiah, do you think something has happened to my mother?”
“I suspect not, at least nothing she didn’t want to happen.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I always believed there was more to Edith Countryman than met the eye. Secrets kept.”
Cora cocked her head at that. “I thought I might talk to her friends tomorrow.”
“Good idea,” Josiah said, readying to go up to his rooms for the night. “Good idea. So’s, you know, I have paid my room and board for the month.”
It seemed an odd thing to say. The light retreated as Josiah went through the house to the stairs. Cora listened to him huff up the stairs. When the door to his rented rooms shut, she returned to her list, which grew to include baking on Monday, putting her a day behind her chores until Wednesday. Josiah required meals twice a day and his rooms cleaned weekly. At the bottom, she noted playing Whist as her mother had on Wednesday, and Friday afternoons.
Cora sat at the kitchen table, warmed by the fire in the stove in the cooling spring night, and wondered how possibly Edith Countryman found the time to plan her disappearance.
