Free Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman

possessed an inner void of her own, created by the death of my sister and bored deep by longing.
    Thus I suddenly understood my father’s need to bring Savage Girl with us, not out of any special idea to study her as a feral child—because he believed, at that point in time, that she was a fraud—but quietly to put her forward as some sort of replacement for my lost sister.
    Virginia, my mother wanted to call her. The transubstantiation of this child for the one vanished into death had already commenced. Savage Girl would be around the same age as my late sibling, had little Virginia lived.
    My father poked the trap window open to the driver. “Stop at the International,” he said, “and then we go on to the train.”
    Why did we make that fateful detour to our hotel? My father neverexplained. Halting in front of the busy hostelry, he leaped out and vanished within. My mother made a move to leave the coach also, and there was a moment of confusion.
    I definitely did not want to be alone with Savage Girl, and neither did I think she should be left without a watchful eye trained upon her. Climbing out to accompany my mother, I thought to ask Colm Cullen to transfer himself from the driver’s bench to a post inside the coach.
    Doing so, I left her alone but for an instant. When Colm moved past me, he suddenly stopped. “Where is she?”
    Startled, I looked back. The coach’s interior was empty.
    “Mother,” I said sharply.
    We had her, and then we lost her.
    On the seat, left behind when she vanished, her precious hand mirror.
    “Oh, no,” groaned Anna Maria.
    I was forlorn after our panicked search turned up nothing, not from a sense of losing Savage Girl herself but because I knew that her disappearance would disappoint my mother.
    I had failed my parents once more. In a cruel replay of her earlier grief, Anna Maria would see an already beloved daughter taken from her.
    We reunited with Freddy. Colm and I scanned the crowded street to no avail. I kept assuring Anna Maria that Savage Girl would be found but finally agreed with Freddy. We had lost her.
    As of that moment, my parents and I were seized with the same feeling, a sense of unhappiness with the International Hotel, the scene of bad luck and misfortune, up to and including murder in the club dining room. It was agreed: We would move back into our private train, which was parked on a siding at the northern end of “C” Street in the lower part of town.
    I was sure Freddy would be totally crestfallen, but I was mistaken. My father took the news of Savage Girl’s disappearance with disturbing composure.
    “No doubt she returned to Scott,” he said. “The devil she knew being preferable to the gods she did not.”
    I don’t often feel this way, but at that moment I wanted to sock my father. Such an incredible masterstroke, extricating her from Scott’s clutches, and then to be so blasé about losing her!
    “If she does not want to stay with us, Hugo, we can’t attempt to imprison her,” he said wearily, covering his eyes with his hand. “If we did, we would be exactly like Dr. Scott.”
    “We can snatch her back again,” I said. Thinking of my poor mother, who had the look of someone bearing up under hardship.
    Freddy remained silent.
    We continued, without speaking, to our cars on the Virginia & Truckee siding.
    •   •   •
    Two days on, I sat in the second-to-last car on our train, the parlor car, brooding, staring out at a bleak landscape of mill piles, smokestacks and tailing dumps that represented the effluvia from the Virginia silver mines.
    Sandobar, Freddy had named the twelve-car consist, with sleepers, a galley, parlors, a shooting car and a six-man crew to keep it running. But a train car at rest, I discovered, resembled a coffin. We remained stranded on the siding, provisioning for the epic trip across the continent, Freddy commissioning some work on the interiors. He was always remodeling.
    Virginia City was right there,