Two women were in the dark basement, their faces covered in grime and sweat. One had a shovel. The other had a gun.
“Did you hear that?” the one with the gun whispered.
The other,knee-deep in the hole she was digging, froze with the spade suspended over the earth. “Hear what?”
Mrs. Flora Mahoney pointed her pistol at the ceiling. It was a .42 caliber LeMat revolver that had been her husband’s. Her thumb rested on the rotating striker atop its hammer, which toggled between the pistol’s two barrels: the wider smoothbore underbarrel fired a shotgun load; the one on top fired regular cartridges. “My sister hearing us over her husband’s drunken snoring ain’t likely, but still. Try and keep it down, will you?”
“I’m digging as quietly as I can, Flora, I swear.”
Flora bent down and tookBess’s cheeks in both hands. Her friend was not unattractive, but she could not touch Flora’s own striking beauty. Flora wielded this difference like a cudgel. It had not taken long after their first meeting for Flora to beatBess into the shape most useful to her.
“You better,” Flora hissed.
“Are you sure we can’t go to California?” Bess said after excavating a few more shovelfuls of earth. “I hear there’s still gold there.”
“No more talk of California, now. I don’t want to spend all that time in wagons and horseshit before I start living. Train west from Philadelphia to St. Louis, then steamboat down to New Orleans. I worked in a fine French house on Rampart Street after my first husband”—she spit into the earth—“left me. I still have friends there where you need them. They can get us out, I’m thinking to Havana. As far as we can get from men and their idiocy before we die of old age.”
“Not California, though?” It was hard to hear Bess’s soft voice over the scrape of the spade.
“California can fall into the sea and sink all the way to hell for all I care. In Cuba we can get a young girl or an old man to wait on us, for a reasonable price. We can’t do that in California. As rich as we’re going to be, we’re supposed to live like animals?”
A thin sliver of moonlight through a narrow window was the only illumination in the cellar, but it was enough for Flora to see the glint on theoilskin-wrapped bundle when Bess uncovered it in the hole. Ignoring her own warning to Bess to be quiet, Flora leaped beside her friend with a cry and elbowed her aside to snatch up the packet. She set the pistol on the ground so she could unwrap thestill-crisp stack of bills from the Planters’ and Mechanics’ Bank of Charleston inside. She counted the bills twice with both hands. She got fifty thousand both times. She wrapped the money back in the oilskin and then put the package into an open carpetbag nearby.
After they helped each other out of the hole, Flora threw her arms around Bess.
“I would never have had the courage to do this without you,” Flora whispered. “Your friendship means
