Year’s Best SF 15 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer Page A

the night was not fancy, which made me feel better about leaving my employer to sleep out-of-doors. It was debatable which of us was better off. The carriage seat where Percy curled up was not infested with fleas, as was the mattress on which I lay. Percy customarily slept on a folded jacket, while my pillow was a sugar sack stuffed with corn huskings, which rattled beneath my ear as if the beetles inside were putting on a musical show.
    I slept a little, woke up, scratched myself, lit the lamp, took a drink.
    I will not drink, I told myself as I poured the liquor. I will not drink “to excess.” I will not become drunk. I will only calm the noise in my head.
    My companion in this campaign was a bottle of rye whisky. Mister Whiskey Bottle, unfortunately, was only half full and not up to the task assigned him. I drank but kept on thinking unwelcome thoughts, while the night simmered and creaked with insect noises.
    â€œWhy do you have to go away for so long?” Elsebeth asked me.
    In this incarnation she wore a white dress. It looked like her christening dress. She was thirteen years old.
    â€œTaking pictures,” I told her. “Same as always.”
    â€œWhy can’t you take pictures at the portrait studio?”
    â€œThese are different pictures, Elsie. The kind you have to travel for.”
    Her flawless young face took on an accusatory cast. “Mama says you’re stirring up old trouble. She says you’re poking into things nobody wants to hear about any more, much less see photographs of.”
    â€œShe may be right. But I’m being paid money, and money buys pretty dresses, among other good things.”
    â€œWhy make such trouble, though? Why do you want to make people feel bad?”
    Elsie was a phantom. I blinked her away. These were questions she had not yet actually posed, though our last conversation, before I left Detroit, had come uncomfortably close. But they were questions I would sooner or later have to answer.
    I slept very little, despite the drink. I woke up before dawn.
    I inventoried my photographic equipment by lamplight, just to make sure everything was ready.
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    It had not rained during the night. I settled up with the landlady and removed my baggage from the room. Percy had already hitched the horses to the carriage. The sky was drab under high cloud, the sun a spot of light like a candle flame burning through a linen handkerchief.
    The landlady’s husband was nowhere to be seen. He had gone down to Crib Lake for supplies, she said, as she packed up two box lunches, cold cuts of beef with pickles and bread, which I had requested of her. She had two adult sons living with her, one of whom I had met in the stables, and she felt safe enough, she told me, even with her husband absent. “But we’re a long way from anywhere,” she added, “and the traffic along this road has been light ever since—well, ever since the Lodge closed down. I wasn’t kidding about those sand hills, Mister. Be careful up there.”
    â€œWe mean to be back by nightfall,” I said.
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    My daughter Elsebeth had met Percy Camber just once, when he came to the house in Detroit to discuss his plans with me. Elsie had been meticulously polite to him. Percy had offered her his hand, and she, wide-eyed, had taken it. “You’re very neatly dressed,” she had said.
    She was not used to well-dressed black men. The only blacks Elsebeth had seen were the day laborers who gathered on the wharves. Detroit housed a small community of Negroes who had come north with the decline of slavery, before Congress passed the Labor Protection Act. They did“the jobs white men won’t do,” for wages to which white men would not submit.
    â€œYou’re very prettily dressed yourself,” Percy Camber said, ignoring the unintended insult.
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    Maggie, my wife, had simply refused to see him.
    â€œI’m not some radical old