My Calamity Jane Read online

  Anyway, back to this delightful scene of a boy and a girl, flirting with the rules of propriety and shooting guns at each other.

  It was a tight game. At one point, Frank did his signature move of standing on his head and shooting at the target using a mirror. Annie followed suit. So did her skirt. She made the shot, but not before Frank caught the briefest glimpse of her leg. The left one.

  He got very quiet.

  “What did you think of that?” Annie said triumphantly.

  “It was . . . I mean . . . ,” Frank stammered.

  At that moment, bells rang from some distance away.

  “I can hear the bells,” Frank said.

  “Me too,” Annie said.

  The longer they stared into each other’s eyes, the louder, and clearer, the bells got.

  “Do you remember that one time you did that flip thing and shot the gun with your big toe?” Frank said.

  “The thing I did five minutes ago? Yes, I remember.”

  “I thought that was just the darndest thing.”

  The bells were really loud now. So loud that Frank began to wonder if maybe they weren’t ringing for him and Annie. They were getting closer, and now they were accompanied by the sound of hoofbeats and the commotion of a speeding wagon.

  Realization dawned on Frank. “It’s the fire wagon!”

  “Yes,” Annie said, looking as if that were the last thing she’d expected him to declare.

  “George loves them!” Frank exclaimed.

  But it was too late. The truck rounded the corner and passed the range, and George went madly barking after it. Frank ran after him. He’d seen this happen before, and sometimes George ended up miles away. It was like fire wagons were dog hypnotists.

  “Come back!” he shouted. But neither dog nor truck listened, let alone obeyed.

  Frank ran and ran until he thought he’d collapse. He stood bent over on the dirt road, breathing heavily.

  Annie caught up to him seconds later, not breathing hard at all.

  “Mr. Butler, are you okay?”

  Frank was still gasping for air. “It might take me hours to find him.”

  Annie cupped her hands to her mouth. “George! Here, boy!”

  “That’s . . . never . . . going . . . to . . .” Frank panted.

  He didn’t get to finish the sentence because George was back.

  “It worked,” Frank said.

  “I have a way with animals,” Annie said.

  Frank had always thought he was the one who had a way with animals.

  Annie patted Frank’s back. She was either consoling him or trying to help him breathe.

  There was just something about this girl that spun his head around. When he’d watched her shoot, he’d felt like he’d been struck by lightning. So proper, so accurate, so prim, and yet she could shoot the shell off a snail, and the snail would crawl away unharmed.

  He liked her. He liked that fierce gleam in her blue eyes. That stubborn set to her jaw. The way her lips pursed slightly when she was making a decision.

  Her lips were doing that cute thing right now, as a matter of fact.

  (We pause here, dear readers, to acknowledge that insta-love is a literary trope too often used. But history is on the side of this particular connection. When the real Annie beat Frank Butler in that sharpshooting competition, his heart had skipped a beat, and he really did wonder if she was the girl he was going to marry. It was love at first shoot. You can look it up.)

  “Mr. Butler?” Annie said, and for the first time since he’d met her, she sounded out of breath.

  “Miss Mosey,” he murmured. Her skin was like porcelain. Tan freckly porcelain.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Ask me anything,” he breathed.

  “What is the Alpha?”

  “Huh?” Frank felt like she’d dumped cold water on him.

  “What is the Alpha?” Annie asked again. “You all seem very worried about finding it.”

  “Right.” Frank struggled to redirect his brain to the job. He wasn’t sure about how much he should share with her. But as long as she was part of their group, he supposed it was all right. “The Alpha popped up a couple of years ago, organized the garou into the Pack, and now they go around biting people. As you’ve seen.”

  “All this time and you haven’t caught him yet?” Annie frowned, as though she’d have found him the instant she heard the name.

  “Most people don’t know anything about him—not even most garou. Trying to find information about the Alpha is like trying to find . . .” He paused, failing to come up with an apt simile.

  “Like trying to find a needle in a haystack?” Annie provided.

  “Yes. That’s precisely it.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled broadly. “I’m the best at coming up with similes in my whole family.”

  Frank believed that.

  “So this Alpha,” she prodded.

  “Well, we’ve been chasing him for a while, but the trail went cold a couple towns ago, so we came to Cincinnati to do our show and make some money. It was pure luck that Jack McCall happened to have information on the Alpha. Well, sort of. He said Mr. Badd might be the Alpha, but clearly that wasn’t true. Still, we have leads now.”

  Annie nodded thoughtfully. “Very interesting. So this Alpha is bad, but not Mr. Badd. And the Alpha’s not the top hat man either, although the top hat man seems to be more important in the Pack than Mr. Badd.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But the top hat man might lead us to the Alpha.”

  “That’s the hope,” Frank said tonelessly. Yes, it would be great to have this hunt over with, and the evil Alpha off the streets, but that meant Bill would leave the show—and therefore Frank—to settle down with Agnes.

  Bill deserved to settle down.

  But if they found the Alpha and put an end to the Pack, it would be a bittersweet victory.

  Annie didn’t notice his melancholy. “So tell me more about the garou.”

  “Oh, okay.” Frank could hardly believe she had more curiosity left in her after that interrogation.

  “Just for research,” Annie went on, “since I intend to pull my weight in hunting the Alpha. Do garou have exceptional eyesight?”

  “Yes, from what I’ve seen,” he said warily.

  “And do they have unprecedented hearing?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s what I’ve heard, if there is something interesting they want to listen to,” Frank said.

  “So, this book I’ve read three times—Fearsome Garou and Where to Find Them—says that garou have a kinship with wolves. It speculates that garou can communicate with wolves, and maybe even dogs.”

  George glanced up at Frank, his tongue lolling out. Is she talking about me? he thought.

  Frank squeezed his eyes shut and scratched the back of his head.

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Also, it says garou are colorblind.”

  “Um,” Frank said. “I think they can see some colors, but not like humans see them.”

  “Right!” Annie nodded enthusiastically. “So a garou wouldn’t be able to tell what color dress I was wearing.”

  Frank really hoped she wouldn’t ask him what color her dress was. It looked sort of gray-yellow, with some blue in there, but who could say, really?

  Annie whipped a short pencil out of her pocket and a blank book. She started scribbling everything down.

  “The book claims garou can run fast,” Annie said.

  “Now that I can answer: not all of the time.”

  “Hmm,” Annie said. “I guess the book was wrong about that. There’s one other thing. Jane told me that it’s really hard to kill a garou, and that it takes special kinds of bullets. Silver bullets.”

  “Oh.” A pit formed in Frank’s stomach. This conversation was definitely taking a dangerous turn. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “That sounds expensive!”

  He nodded, imagining sunsets ag
ain. “That’s why we put on so many shows: to pay for the silver.”

  “Ah,” Annie said, writing that down. “Good time to own a silver mine, I suppose.”

  “That’s dark,” Frank said.

  “I bet it is dark in mines, yes. But the silver is undeniably needed now. I should get some silver bullets of my own. Where do I buy them? Or will I have to make them myself?”

  Frank’s heart kicked. Sunsets weren’t really working. Why couldn’t they go back to talking about bells? “Charlie can help you with that. Or Bill.”

  Annie nodded and made another note. “Great. I’ll talk to them.”

  “Annie?” He meant to call her Miss Mosey, but her Christian name slipped out. It felt right.

  She looked up, her eyes expectant. “Yes . . . Frank?”

  “You seem really excited to hunt garou,” he said.

  “Oh, I am.” She closed her notebook and put it in her pocket. “They frighten me, Mr. Butler—I mean Frank.” Her cheeks darkened. Were they pink to other people? “Garou are so much more powerful than we are. It’s terrifying what they can do. I don’t trust them.”

  “I see.” Frank knew as well as anyone how dangerous garou could be. After all, he’d been hunting garou for years—and helping them, too. Like that boy in Charlie’s room, and the others from the factory. Those garou hadn’t done anything wrong. They’d been scared. But Annie wanted to hunt all of them. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  Frank steeled himself and forced out the question. He didn’t really want to know the answer, but he needed it. “Why do you want to hunt garou so badly?”

  FIFTEEN

  Annie

  Why did Annie want to hunt wolves?

  Because she hated them.

  She’d been eight years old the first time she’d met a garou, although she hadn’t known it at first. No one had.

  Her family’s financial struggles were nothing new. Her pa had died when she was only five years old, and even though Mama had tried her best to keep the family afloat, she’d been forced to send the children away. Annie had gone to live with a family friend, where she’d taken care of their baby. Then, after a bout with scarlet fever, she’d stayed in the county home and helped with the children there. She’d made something of a name for herself, fixing a sewing machine that usually required a mechanic from the city to repair, and then—because simply fixing the thing wasn’t enough—she’d sewn two dresses each for all the girls in the home.

  That reputation for being good at fixing things, and being good with children, earned Annie her first paying job: a farmer had come to the county home looking for a girl who could help take care of his baby. Annie loved babies, and it was agreed she’d give the farmer and his wife a trial run of two weeks.

  Those first two weeks had been fine, as far as jobs for young children went, but as soon as a letter to her mother was sent—saying how happy Annie was there—the Wolves began to show themselves for what they were.

  At first, it was small things: they made her wake up early to prepare breakfast for the family, which involved slicing ham or bacon—they preferred their meats rare, we should mention—and paring and frying potatoes, and sometimes frying cornmeal mush or biscuits. They also drank coffee, although Annie was never allowed any (a fact at least one of your narrators finds completely unforgivable).

  It started getting worse after that, until her days looked like this: up before dawn to make breakfast, then milk the cows and do a bunch of other cow-associated chores, wash the dishes, care for the baby, tend the vegetable garden, get dinner ready, do more dishes, care for the baby more, prepare supper, do a third round of dishes, and then sleep for a few minutes to repeat it all the next day.

  Reader, we asked someone with kids how much sleep a nine-year-old is supposed to get (Annie was nine by this time), and they said more than ten hours. Annie was getting three.

  The Wolves (this wasn’t actually their family name, but Annie never thought of them as anything else) worked her like this for months, but at least she was getting paid. Or so she’d thought. They claimed they were sending her mama fifty cents a week, but that was a lie. They were also supposed to send her to school, but that never happened, either. Who had time with all the chores?

  It was hardly ideal.

  Then the real trouble came.

  It had been a frigid winter night when Mrs. Wolf threw a pile of stockings at Annie for her to mend. Somehow, the heels of every single sock had been torn out, as though by claws. That was weird, but Annie hardly registered it. She’d been working all day, so she was having trouble keeping her eyes open, but when Mrs. Wolf caught her starting to doze off, she slapped Annie so hard her cheek bruised.

  Annie startled awake and bit off a scream, but Mrs. Wolf still wasn’t happy. She tossed Annie outside, into the freezing-cold weather, and shut the door fast.

  This was the snot-freezing, eyeball-chilling kind of cold, and as Annie huddled inside her threadbare dress, a heelless sock shoved over both feet, she knew she would die. Her pa had died like this, lost in a snowstorm on the way home from hunting, wandering the farm because it was too dark, and the snow was too thick, for him to see the house. He’d died just outside it, frozen, reaching for home.

  And now Annie would follow him.

  She tried not to cry, because the tears would freeze on her cheeks, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was only nine, after all. So she hunched under her dress and half-darned stockings, watching smoke rise from the chimney, watching the cheery light from the fireplace bounce across the windows. And she thought about her pa, and how her mama needed that fifty cents a week, and what she wouldn’t give to be able to defend herself from these Wolves.

  As the cold stopped hurting and Annie started to fall asleep, Mrs. Wolf brought her inside again and stuck her in the attic.

  For the next two years, the Wolves kept her prisoner, flat out refusing to let her visit her family. In fact, they kept writing letters to her mama, saying how happy she was there. Annie didn’t know about those letters until much later, but she did see the replies from her mama, encouraging her to stay since she was doing so well.

  When Annie asked about going home, the Wolves threatened to eat her liver.

  She’d thought that was only a scary threat until the day some of their relatives visited, and that was the day she saw them . . . change.

  Annie had been working in the kitchen for an hour, cooking a whole cow for everyone. (Cooking being a generous verb; remember, they liked their meat extra rare, so Annie was mostly just warming it up.) Anyway, she’d been heading into the parlor to tell everyone supper was ready, but before the door was fully opened, it happened: their faces elongated and grew fur, which shouldn’t have been possible. But then their arms and legs bulked up and turned furry as well. And then their feet grew longer and burst clean out of their shoes and stockings.

  That answered all her questions about busted-out socks.

  She must have gasped, or made some other small noise, because one by one, Mr. Wolf, Mrs. Wolf, and their relatives looked at her, and all Annie could think was what big eyes they had.

  What sharp teeth they had.

  What long claws they had.

  They didn’t eat her liver, thank goodness. She somehow managed to squeak out that supper was served, and they sat at the table like this was normal.

  The next day, when the Wolves were out doing whatever they did when they weren’t tormenting her, she wondered what would happen if she just . . . ran away.

  So she did.

  At that point, Annie had no money, no clothes beyond what she wore, and barely an idea of where this farm was relative to her own family’s farm, but even so, she left the house and started walking.

  She soon found the train station and planned to ask the conductor if she could pay him back when she got home, but when she climbed onto the train, an old gentleman sitting across from her inquired about her situation. He had a shocking amount of facial hair, but Ann
ie told him everything, too scared to think that someone might give her back to the Wolves if they knew she had run away. But the kindly gentleman—whose name was Oakley, he told her—said, “You’re safe now, little one. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  When the conductor came by, Mr. Oakley paid for her ticket.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Annie said. “I’d have— When I get home—”

  The old man smiled. “It never hurts to show a stranger a bit of compassion. I hope one day you heal from all this.” And then he gave her a peppermint candy from his pocket and talked with her for the rest of the ride to Darke County.

  Annie never forgot that kind man, but neither did she forget the Wolves and how they’d treated her.

  Why did she want to hunt wolves?

  Because they’d nearly killed her.

  “Annie?” Frank’s voice was rough.

  “Hm?” She looked up from her memory and shook off the sick feeling she’d had earlier, when the wolf-boy with the eyebrows had gone through the door—passing by her too closely. He might not have killed Mr. Utter, but that was only because Frank had bravely stopped him.

  “Why?” He looked at her with those warm eyes. “Why do you want to hunt garou?”

  She could tell him, and he would try to make her feel better. Or he would tell Mr. Hickok and perhaps that would be enough to get her kicked out of the posse, if Mr. Hickok believed it was too personal a reason to hunt garou. She couldn’t risk losing this job.

  And it was personal. She’d just met Frank. As much as she admired him, as much as she wanted to grow closer, she’d been weak during her two years with the Wolves. She wasn’t ready to share that with him yet (even though they were already on a first-name basis!).

  “It’s not that I want to hunt them,” she said finally.

  Somehow, his gaze warmed even more, and he leaned toward her a tiny bit. Maybe he wanted to kiss her? Maybe she would let him.

  Right after she finished what she needed to say.

  “It’s that I have to,” Annie continued. “They’re a plague on the world. They’re vile, monstrous creatures, and I hate them.”