Next to the stationhouse, on a small, gravel-covered lot, two vehicles sat thirty feet apart. The first was a brand new Cadillac limousine. Every inch of the limousine’s black paint gleamed with polish, as did every spoke on its wire wheels. The chauffeur in his gray-green uniform was equally spiffy. The peak on his cap positively glowed.
Not fifteen feet away, an older man wearing canvas pants, dusty boots, and a white undershirt that had seen better days leaned against the rusted fender of an ancient Chevrolet pickup truck. The man’s skin was a deep mahogany and his mostly gray hair, braided on both sides, hung below his shoulders.
Faith didn’t have to ask which vehicle was waiting for her and her mother. She watched Pauline emerge from the first-class car, accompanied by her governess, and run over to the Cadillac limousine. Naturally.
Pauline was fast, but not as fast as the chauffeur, who opened the car’s rear door just before his little mistress plunged inside. An instant later, before her governess joined her, the window on the far side of the Cadillac rolled down and Pauline’s face appeared.
“Oh, Faith...” Pauline waved gaily. “Do you see this car? Soooooo borrrrrring. I’ve been after my father to buy a Packard but he won’t hear of it. Well, goodbye. The train was late and my governess insists that I nap before I dress for dinner.”
The limousine’s engine was so quiet that Faith didn’t realize it was running, not until the vehicle described a wide circle, its tires crunching over the gravel, and pulled onto the road. Faith watched the car turn left and quickly accelerate. A moment later, it was gone.
“Faith,” Margaret said, drawing her daughter’s attention, “this is Ben Hightower.”
Ordinarily, Faith would have responded with a little smile and a pleasant hello. But the man with the braids, Ben Hightower, stretched forth a well-callused hand for her to shake. Women didn’t shake hands with men, at least according to Miss Jennifer Thompson. “It’s never done, girls”—that was how she dismissed any behavior deemed unladylike. It’s never done.
Faith looked to her mother for a signal, but Margaret was staring into the distance, apparently unaware. Finally, Faith took Ben’s hand—she could hardly leave it dangling in space—and squeezed gently.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Yes, pleased to meet you.”
Though Ben’s expression didn’t change, Faith recognized a hint of amusement in his tone. Most likely, he wasn’t used to polite conversation.
She watched him gather their bags, noting that despite his age, he was agile and graceful, his back straight, his stride firm. He tossed the bags into the truck’s bed as if they weighed no more than feather pillows, and then got into the driver’s side.
Again, Faith was taken by surprise. In polite company, men always opened the door for women. Now she watched her mother open the passenger-side door and signal her to get in.
Faith did as she was told, squeezing in next to Ben Hightower, while her mother took the window seat.
“All ready?” Ben asked. He pressed the starter button and twisted the key without waiting for an answer and the truck roared to life. And “roared” was exactly the right word. If the pickup truck had a muffler, it wasn’t functioning. The noise was ear-splitting and Faith flinched involuntarily.
“Been meaning to fix that,” Ben said. When he rammed the shift stick into first gear, the crunch was louder than the steady chug of the engine.
Faith felt her heart sink. What was she doing here, in her neat dress and her sun bonnet? How could this have happened? She’d been trained all her life to be a lady and she could curtsey with the best of them. So what? Her entire childhood was now irrelevant, all her skills rendered useless by her family’s unexpected, and undeserved, poverty.
Up until now, she’d more or less assumed that she was in control. Sure, she messed up from time to time, but the messes were of her own making. She had the power to correct them, or at least try not to get caught next time. Now she felt like a leaf in the wind or those canoeists she’d seen on her way here—whipped here and there by the wind or the water, a prisoner of circumstances so powerful that she could barely comprehend them.
Chapter Four
BEN HIGHTOWER MANEUVERED the pickup through the lot and onto the road, following the path of Pauline’s Cadillac limousine, long ago lost to sight. A marker by the side of the road read: “SR 115.” Faith Covington assumed that SR meant “state road” and she wondered why the road had a number and not a name. But she didn’t raise the question with her mother or Ben Hightower. There was no point. That was their road and they were going to take it: name, number, or nothing.
They drove the first several miles through a resort area. Most of the inns were little more than Victorian houses with deep gables and porches that wrapped around the fronts of the buildings. The one exception was the Pocono Manor Inn. With its fieldstone walls and rounded corners, the manor resembled a medieval castle. Faith spied a small lake behind the house.
For just a moment, she was cheered, but then the resorts dropped away and the forest pressed in on both sides of the narrow road. To her, the woods seemed impenetrable. The branches of the smaller trees intertwined at the level of her head and every inch of ground was covered with brush.
Thankfully, her mother’s attempt at conversation took her mind off the forest for a moment.
“Well, Ben, how have you been?” Margaret asked.
“I’m doin’ okay.”
“And Aunt Eva?”
“Eva’s her usual surly self.” Ben’s small mouth broadened slightly. He might have been smiling. He might have been nursing a toothache. Faith couldn’t tell either way.
“That bad?” Margaret asked.
“Eva is what she is. I’m not expectin’ her to change. No, ma’am.”
Margaret turned to her daughter. “Ben’s been staying with Aunt Eva for years. They’re a team.”
Staying with Aunt Eva? Talk about never done! In Faith’s world, a respectable woman would never think of sharing a house with a man she hadn’t married.
“What do you do?” Faith asked Ben.
“Whatever Eva tells me to.”
Ben and Margaret laughed, sharing a joke lost on Faith. Back in New York, there was a word for husbands who were bossed around by their wives: “henpecked.” Only Ben wasn’t Aunt Eva’s husband. He was some kind of employee, maybe like a ranch hand in a western movie. But in the movies, ranch hands were always white and Ben Hightower was definitely a red man. He had the small eyes and broad cheekbones of movie Indians, and his expression, now that he’d settled down, was so composed that New Yorkers would probably assume he’d lost consciousness.
“I guess I don’t have to ask how you been,” he said to Margaret. “From what I’m hearin’, things are mighty rough in the cities.” Ben shifted into third gear and the truck—though it blew out a cloud of black smoke in protest—slowly accelerated.
“‘Mighty rough’ doesn’t begin to describe the situation,” Margaret said, her voice flat. “New York is falling apart. We’re just part of the rubble.”
Ben ignored the bitter tone. “I remember them summers you passed with