Excerpt from A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The talk went on, though. Monterey was curious about the girl, perhaps because there weren't many women around. Someone heard that she had a relative in the U.S. Congress who had pushed hard for the Compromise. As Eliza remembered it, when California had become a state, no one in the delegation had voted to become a slave state, but lots of folks in Alabama and Texas were determined to have access to the Pacific, and had pushed to separate northern California from southern California. But the south was all Mexican (some people said "Spanish," because that was their tongue, and anyway, California was not Mexico any more than Texas was), there were no slave owners, and Texas had some debts from when it was its own nation, so the government had paid those debts in order to persuade the Texans to shut up and leave California to decide for itself. At any rate, that's what Eliza remembered, and Peter, for all his faults, was very much against extending slavery to the west; what she knew about it, she'd learned from him. The girl, whose first name was Theresa, was a cousin, or second cousin, something like that, to this New York Congressman. After that went around, it was assumed that some renegade Southerner from Tennessee or Missouri had uncovered her and done her in for political reasons, as a way of getting back at her cousin, but after that it went around that her real cousin had the same name as that Congressman but wasn't the same person.

Over the summer, the gossip continued, but now it focused on whether any group of vigilantes in Monterey was going to pursue this question of what happened to the girl, and it appeared that no one was. What everyone said was that that was a shame, but resources were thin, life was chancy, the girl had no relations nearby, no one had stepped forward to advocate for her, and that was that. One evening, Olive did catch Eliza's glance, and they both grimaced, and then shook their heads, but no one talked about the event at Mrs. Parks's establishment. Mrs. Parks became even more careful about the customers she allowed, and she hired a big fellow, Carlos, to sit in the corner of the parlor, not far from the girls' rooms, as a guard. He said nothing, but he was visible to every customer. Eliza liked him. When the customers weren't around, he was friendly and relaxed, smiled often, and spent a lot of time improving his English so that he might eventually get a better job.

Excerpted from A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley. Copyright © 2022 by Jane Smiley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.