Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky Page A

snow in the Ropes field like stubble in an old man’s beard. The dead stem grasses along the drainage ditches waved ghostly arms in the wind.
    Chip switched off his flashlight, and said, in a deep, soft voice, “They’re in there, you know, waiting to jump out at you.”
    “They are not,” Lara said, louder than she intended, because, in the dark, the towering grasses looked menacing. “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not stupid Janice Everleigh, who’s going to cling to you and screech, ‘Oh, Chippie, protect me, you’re so big and brave.’”
    Chip picked up a handful of soft snow from the road and tried to stick it down Lara’s back. She struggled with him and slipped in one of the deep ruts in the road. He grabbed her and pulled her to her feet.
    “You okay, Lulu? Don’t go spraining anything—I don’t want to have to explain it to Dad.”
    “Well, don’t push me, turkey.”
    They continued, arm in arm, skirting the holes, until they reached the Fremantle place. This was the part that Lara dreaded: going into the basement in the dark through the old coal chute. Dad had nailed all the basement windows shut, and seen to it that all the downstairs doors and windows were locked, when he was struggling to keep the cats out of the house. He’d even boarded over the coal chute and bolted it shut, but Chip had slipped the bolts free.
    He and Lara had been using the Fremantle house as their private clubhouse for the past two years. Chip did go there to smoke dope with Curly or occasionally with a friend from the baseball team. Lara kept her diary tucked behind the overmantel in the master-bedroom fireplace where it had slipped away from the wall.
    Lara loved the feeling of privacy, of owning the place, that she got when she went to the mansion. She could poke around in the rooms that hadn’t been used since old Mrs. Fremantle’s children left Kansas forty years ago. She’d found Mrs. Fremantle’s wedding dress in the back of one closet and preened in front of the watery mirrors in it.
    When Mrs. Fremantle died, her kids had taken most of the valuable furniture. They’d left a rolltop desk and a cherrywood table that dated to the Revolution, as well as a rickety piano that Susan thought could be valuable. All the windows had brocade drapes that now hung in shreds from the cats scratching them.
    Lara would sit in a window seat in the master bedroom, writing by candlelight, pretending she was Abigail Grellier listening for Border Ruffians, while Chip and Curly horsed around in the back parlor.
    Lara’s favorite thing in the house was a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room. It was made of stained glass, like a church window, only its six sides showed people doing things with grapes—planting or picking them or making wine out of them. A big piece had broken off, the piece that would have shown the tub with people stomping grapes to make wine.
    Before Prohibition, Mom said, every county in Kansas had at least one winery, and the chandelier commemorated the one the Fremantles used to own. You could see where they had grown their grapes, out behind the old hay barn at the back of the property. Mom said it would cost thousands of dollars to get the piece made to match the rest of the glass. Lara tried to make the broken panel in her art class at school, but she couldn’t get the colors to turn out right.
    Before she started the X-Farm, Mom had toyed with the idea of creating a vineyard and a winery herself: Château Grellier. Lara loved the idea of it, mostly because of the chandelier. She even designed a wine label in her art class, with a tub of grapes set in the middle of a wheat field. In the end, though, after going over the numbers, Susan had to agree with Jim that the payback horizon for wine was too far.
    When she was little, Lara had loved her mother’s stories about the early days in Kansas. Susan would copy pages from Abigail’s diary into her own commonplace book, because the diaries were so fragile she