Free Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky Page A

woman said.
    “Autumn, I think they’re different. Susan’s a neighbor. She baked a pie in the best tradition of the Old West. She’s a historian—at least, she’s an amateur historian—and she knows a lot about the house. She came over to tell me about it.”
    Once again, Lara couldn’t decipher what Gina was saying. She sounded as she had when they first came in, as though her meaning didn’t lie in her words but in her inflection. The woman in the bed seemed to understand her because the angry lines had smoothed out of her face, making her look younger.
    “Autumn Minsky runs Between Two Worlds in Lawrence,” Gina said. “We met when I went in for—supplies last week.”
    “As the sheriff was at pains to find out early this morning,” Autumn snapped, but then suddenly laughed. “You should have seen his face when I gave him one of my business cards—he acted as though it would turn him into a toad. Which I wish it had, once he told me he’d been keeping an eye on my store!”
    Lara knew Between Two Worlds. It was a New Age store where you could buy incense or books on pagan religion, but they also sold jewelry, little gold suns on gold chains that cost hundreds of dollars, earrings in the shape of crescent moons with turquoise or lapis set in them. Some of the things weren’t so expensive, though. Her friend Melanie Derwint had four piercings in her ears and wore silver moon-shaped studs she’d bought at Between Two Worlds.
    “The sheriff?” Susan asked. “Has Hank Drysdale been out here?”
    Gina shrugged. “I didn’t catch his name. He stopped by at eight in the morning because he saw Autumn’s car in the yard. He claimed to be worried about my safety.”
    “He wasn’t as bad as the other one.” Autumn shuddered. “At least it’s possible the man was a sheriff, although he didn’t have a uniform or a marked car.”
    “What was he driving?” Lara asked at the same time her mother asked, “What other one?”
    “Some horrible-looking lout straight out of Cold Comfort Farm had climbed up the big tree outside the bathroom window and was peering in when I got up to pee around six this morning,” Autumn said.
    Lara was startled to hear a grown-up woman use that word boldly in the middle of conversation: I have to pee, she rehearsed in her mind. Would Kimberly and Melanie go, “Ooh, gross,” or would they think she was totally cool?
    “What happened?” Susan asked.
    “I opened the window and shouted at him. He grinned as though he’d just done the cleverest thing on the planet and kept hanging on the branch while I kept shouting, until I suppose his hands froze and he more or less fell out of the tree. And then got up and ran away.”
    Lara said, “Was he about twenty, maybe? With dark curls and red cheeks?”
    “He had on a stocking cap, and anybody outdoors on a December morning would have red cheeks,” Autumn said impatiently. “Is he your boyfriend? Did you two dare each other to spy on us?”
    “No!” Lara cried. “I don’t have a boyfriend, and it wouldn’t be him if I did, if it’s who I think it might be.”
    “Calm down, Autumn.” Gina walked to the bed and put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Who do you think it was, Laura?”
    “Lara,” Susan corrected automatically, while Lara said, “Mom, don’t you guess it was Eddie? It’s the kind of thing he does.”
    “Who’s Eddie?” Autumn demanded. “Remember, we don’t have a playbill.”
    Lara blushed again. “Eddie Burton.”
    “Lara,” Susan said warningly, meaning don’t say something you can’t back up with facts.
    Lara knew her mother didn’t like to hear about perverse acts. Susan wanted to believe that people had pure and ardent spirits, that no one, from her beloved abolitionists to the most tiresome of her neighbors, ever abused their children or raped a heifer or did any of the other grotesque things that went on day in and day out somewhere in Kansas, even right here in Douglas County, if