Free Frog Music by Emma Donoghue Page B

petticoats.
    He tosses the lot onto the fire. Foul smoke billows and for a moment she thinks the clothes have suffocated the flames. Then John Jr. pokes the fire with his stick and it begins to lick busily again.
    Blanche stands as stiff as a fashion plate and keeps her eyes north on the distant hills that cut San Miguel Station off from the City proper. She’s gripping the wooden handle of her parasol, she finds, as if its spindly frame and thin dome of silk might somehow lift her out of here. “Thank you,” she says, so hoarsely that she’s not sure the boy can even hear her over the crackle of the flames.
    With no warning, he flings himself against Blanche, his head on her chest, so hard she can feel a button dig into her sternum, and his good arm pulls her tight. For all the clumsiness of his embrace, John Jr. is the only one in this derelict hamlet who seems to give a rat’s ass about Blanche. So she hugs him back.
    His words are muffled.
    “What?” she says, pulling away.
    “It’s all right, Miss Blanche.” The boy’s slate eyes are raging with misery. “Going to be all right now.”
    An odd phrase; a remark some lost-for-words adult would make. “Oh, I doubt that,” murmurs Blanche, and staggers away toward the Eight Mile House.
    Strange: the bicycle isn’t where she saw it last, tucked behind some dried-up bushes at the side of the building. What would have made Jenny move her high-wheeler yesterday? Blanche’s eyes interrogate the desiccated leaves. The porch has a gnawed-looking patch just under the shattered front, she notices. Was that always there? The window’s not a window anymore; it’s a ragged eye socket.
    It occurs to Blanche only now that Arthur might have had Ernest with him. Must have had, in fact; what does Arthur ever embark on without the help of his familiar, his boon companion, his comrade in pleasure and trouble?
    What would they have said to each other, these two men, creeping into San Miguel Station in the dark? She pictures Arthur as he was a week ago, elegant and snide at a faro table. Would he have ranted, abused Blanche, justified his bloody plan in a whisper as he and Ernest edged along the side of the Eight Mile House? No, Arthur wouldn’t have needed to say a word. Ernest, his longtime catcher on the high trapeze, would follow his old flier—his old master—anywhere.
    Looking back down the years, Blanche glimpses the tiny seedling of resentment Ernest must have been nursing from the moment he laid eyes on her. At the stage door of the Cirque d’Hiver, he was only a knock-kneed trapeze apprentice and she was the milky-skinned girl who caught and held the gaze of his beloved mentor. When Ernest shot up into a muscular young man, long-limbed enough to replace Arthur’s old partner in the catch trap—because the catcher has to be tall—the two friends and Blanche carried on living in one another’s pockets. And really, over the nearly ten years they’ve spent together, knocking about in Paris and then in San Francisco, has Ernest ever thought Blanche good enough for Arthur? Hasn’t there always been a jagged edge to his joking? And this summer, hasn’t he come to hate her just as much as Arthur has, on his own behalf as much as Arthur’s? Four days ago on Waverly Place, Ernest seized her by the jaw and called her an infernal whore . No, Blanche decides, he wouldn’t have needed any persuasion to help Arthur pay back every slight, to rid the world of Blanche Beunon once and for all.
    There’s a wagon outside the Eight Mile House, she notices with a jolt. Too clean to belong to a local.
    Don’t be ridiculous, Blanche scolds herself, why would the macs come back to shoot her in broad daylight, and with a wagon?
    She walks back into the saloon and has to stop her eyes from turning to the left, toward the front bedroom. A coffin sits on the exploded remains of the mattress. A plain wooden box, all angles, no handles, no ornaments. Two strangers in rubber aprons are