The Trials of Nellie Belle

by Sydney Avey

  If John and Leota did marry, as the letter suggested they would, she hoped the young mother and her daughter would exert a civilizing influence on her son and his father. Johnny was falling into the ways of his father that Nellie had most disliked. He was the same dirt-under-the-nails drover. Even though the two of them no longer ran cattle, their free-range ways bonded them in a joyous boys’ club. They were impervious to the finer things in life.

  Truth be told, not all cowboys put her off. While Nellie indulged her newly acquired taste for the dining-car coffee that sloshed in her thermos cup, her thoughts turned again to Sheriff Mack McFarland. They had worked together before, and very pleasantly. Places in her body she thought she had tamed long ago sprang alive at the very thought of the lanky lawman, who was known as an independent sort who used his own judgment. Why he was still a bachelor, she could not imagine. He was catnip; not a ladies man, but a man who truly enjoyed female company.

  A sudden twinge in her lower back crowded out more pleasant thoughts. She’d best get up and walk through the cars to ease the stiffness long hours of travel imposed.

  R

  By the time Nellie reached Mack’s office late in the day, her limbs were trembling. The combined weight of the briefcase she carried, her heavy black skirt, and the stiff motor coat that had yet to soften even after two year’s wear weighed her down. Her toes, tingling in their tight boots, threatened to lose all feeling, and her fingers, armored in leather gloves, were nonetheless stiff with cold.

  The solid wood door to the sheriff’s office resisted her push, but she saw that Sheriff McFarland had spotted her through the window. He crossed the room in two steps and pulled the door open. Once inside, Nellie peeled off her gloves and beelined for the wood stove. The snap, crackle, and glow in the belly of the iron beast warmed her bones. Or was it the smile that spread across the sheriff’s face?

  “Good to see you again, Mrs. Scott.” He clapped her on the shoulder and sat back down at his desk. While Nellie defrosted, Mack rolled a pair of bullets around on his desktop and peered at them through a magnifying glass he held to his eye. “Look here.”

  Nellie hung her coat on the coat rack. She walked over and stood behind him, training her eyes on his hand as he examined the surface of each slug.

  “Do they tell you anything, Mack?”

  “All I want to know.” He craned his neck and swiveled his head around to look up at her. “But I can’t arrest a dead man.”

  Nellie walked around to the front of the desk. She pulled up a chair and sat down opposite Mack. He laid the magnifying glass aside and leaned back, keeping his finger on the bullets, rolling them back and forth on the ink-stained desk pockmarked with deep scratches. “The Carnagan case is closed as far as I’m concerned, so you might as well go ahead and file your report for the governor.”

  Nellie laughed. “I’ve got to put something more in the report than what the governor has already read in the newspapers. He wants to know what happened to his fishing industry expert.” Nellie let her bald request hang in the air for a moment. The clock ticked. The sheriff rubbed his stubbled chin. Outside the window, dusk turned to darkness and the street lights came on. “Say, when did you get electric street lights?” Nellie asked.

  “The town fought it, but the town council converted to electric a few months ago.” Mack shifted his gaze from Nellie’s face to the window. She pulled her steno pad and a pencil out of her heavy case and sat up straight in her chair.

  “The DA told me you knew the girl who was murdered.”

  “Sure I knew her. I’ve known Mary Marsh ever since she was a baby. Her mother keeps the Marsh House here at Silver Beach. But I imagine you already know that.”

  Nellie didn’t acknowledge that she had already checked into the Marsh House and had a disappointing conversation with tight-lipped Mrs. Marsh. “And Charles Hudson?”

  “Your government expert?” Yeah, I saw him a few times. He came out early one spring to look into some trouble with the fish. Flores Creek was full of dead fish. It created quite a stink.” Mack smirked and looked at Nellie to see if she caught his joke.

  “Funny.” She repressed a smile.

  “No, really.” Mack tried to look serious. “Dead fish littered the creek bank for miles.”

  Nellie wrinkled her nose dutifully. Her pencil remained poised at the top of her notepad. “So, what was Hudson like?”

  Mack leaned back in his chair and delivered the deliciously slow grin he was famous for, the one that let Nellie know she was in for a fish tale. She met his teasing eyes with a direct gaze that told Mack it better be a good story.

  “Hudson was a standoffish sort. A real cold fish, you might say.” Nellie winced, and Mack chuckled. “He did a little investigation and was getting ready to slip out of town when Mary Marsh came home from college. One look at Mary and he unpacked his bags and stayed the summer.”

  “So, not that standoffish.” Nellie ran her pencil across the paper in quick movements.

  Mack laughed and shook his head. “Mary had a sweetheart, Glen Carnagan. Hudson knew about that. Mary told Hudson she was going to marry Carnagan as soon as they’d saved up a little money. It made no difference to Hudson. He was one of those quiet fellows with cold gray eyes and a determination to have what he wanted.”

  “And he wanted Miss Mary. How did Carnagan handle this state of affairs?”

  Mack’s blue eyes twinkled. “There was no affair, Mrs. Scott.”

  “May I suppose, though, that little Mary practiced her Cleopatra arts on our handsome stranger?” Nellie rose from her chair and came around the desk to stand behind the sheriff. She bent over his shoulder to take another look at the shiny brass bullets.

  Mack swiveled his chair around and pushed back to where he could get a good look at her. “Well, she was pretty, if that’s what you mean.” His eyes traveled from Nellie’s face to the buttons on her blouse to her waist. Nellie took a small step backward and waited. Mack dug into his pocket and retrieved his pipe. Waving the pipe stem in the air, he continued his story.

  “Anyway, the three of them were at the Marsh House, fishing and tramping the woods all summer. Hudson and Carnagan seemed to be pals. But along in August, Hudson got word that his father had died, so he went back to New York. Before he left, he told Mrs. Marsh he was coming back for Mary.”

  “But Mary married Carnagan.” Nellie reached across the desk for her notebook. She flipped through it, checking her facts.

  “The very next month.”

  Mack stood up, reached for a stained coffee mug sitting on a stack of papers on his desk, and headed for the coffee pot on the stove. As he moved about in close quarters, smells of tobacco, leather, and pine wood displaced the warm air around Nellie. There was a time when John had smelled of the earth and roused the same unsettling feelings she felt now. When had that stopped? In Los Angeles, when he came home every night smelling of tar and sweat, cigarettes and cheap whiskey. Her involuntary shudder at the sudden emergence of the country girl she had once been caught Mack’s attention.

  “Want some?” Mack put his nose close to the mouth of the pot, inhaled deeply, and clicked his tongue. “It boiled awhile ago, but it’s still nice and hot. Do you good on a day like this, Mrs. Scott.”

  Nellie shook her head. “No thank you, Sheriff. I hold myself to one cup a day, and I had my ration on the train.”

  “You sure?” He held the pot up.

  “One more and I’d be awake all night.”

  He was silent.

  “Truly. A good night’s sleep will do me better.”

  “Hmm.” He poured the hot liquid into his mug and raised it to his lips. “That would do us all good.”

  What would it feel like, to have those warm lips tasting of coffee pressed to hers? Nellie’s cheeks grew warm. If she didn’t take control, she would not get what she was after. She walked around to her side of the desk and sat down. Tapping her pencil on the desk and nodding in the direction of his empty chair, she su
ggested that they resume the interview.

  “What happened next?”

  Mack walked past his chair to the window and stood to look out. “They spent their honeymoon on Carnagan’s claim up in the mountains.” His warm breath formed a mist on the cold glass. He gestured with his mug toward the Cascades, where the outline of the snow-capped peaks was visible in the light of a full moon, just now rising due east.

  “It was just about this time last year. Fall equinox.” Mack seemed to be talking to the mountains. He fell silent once more. Logs that had burned to ash settled in the iron stove, and it creaked as it began to cool. Mack set his cup down on the desk and walked back to the stove.

  “It’s pretty up there in the fall, so they decided to stay all winter. That was foolish.” He unlatched the heavy door. “No one stays up there in the winter but trappers.” He added a few sticks of wood to the ash. “You can’t get in or out after the snow starts.” He poked and stirred the ash until sparks flew and the kindling flamed. Then he shut and latched the door.

  Nellie took a cue and did a little poking of her own. “Did Hudson return?”

  “I’m getting ahead of my story.”

  Nellie took a long, deep breath. One thing she had learned, a key to good standing in the legal community was the ability to hold an audience captive for as long as possible. Mack was a member in good standing.

  “Mrs. Marsh sent Hudson a wedding announcement and invited him to join them all in the spring. Hudson wired his congratulations, and that’s the last they heard of him.”

  Mack sat down and looked up at the clock. He rolled his chair forward, set his elbows on the desk, and leaned over them. “The young couple got their supplies and their phone in, and they settled down. Mary phoned her mother every day. They seemed well and happy. Carnagan set his traps, but the snow came early. A big storm hit on November sixteenth. That’s the day I got word that somebody had been killed at the Carnagan cabin.”

  Mack took a long draw on his coffee and made a face. “Gets bitter when it gets cold.” He eyed her mischievously over the rim of his mug.

  Nellie avoided his gaze, focusing on the broad expanse of sienna-toned skin that stretched across his prominent cheekbones. Nez Perce? Paiute? Where did the blue eyes come from? My goodness. Just as she was wondering how to get back on track, he set his mug aside, reached for his Dunhill Shell pipe, and picked up his story.

  “It took the county coroner and me two weeks to get up there. Hardest trip I ever made.” He rubbed his thumb against the pebbled surface of the Algerian briar bowl and stood up again. Lighting the contents of the pipe with all the ritual of a baseball pitcher alerting the catcher to his intentions, he paced the floor, puffing his pipe.

  “I’m glad to see you are enjoying my Christmas gift.”

  “Nice stuff,” Mack nodded. He puffed until he had a good draw going. Then he began to describe what he’d seen.

  “We found Carnagan up there in the cabin, crazy as a loon. He’d been alone all that time with his wife’s body.”

  Nellie’s eyes widened. She became so engrossed in the grisly story that her pencil stopped moving while scenes of the crime played out in her head like a silent D.W. Griffith film.

  “He told us he’d gone out the morning of the sixteenth to check his traps. When he came back that afternoon, he found Mary lying dead on the floor, shot through the heart.”

  The sheriff sat down again and folded his arms on the desk. He let his pipe smolder. He shook his head slowly and looked up at the ceiling. Nellie couldn’t be sure, but she thought his eyes glistened.

  “There was no struggle.” He was silent for a moment. “She hadn’t been … touched.” He returned his eyes to Nellie’s. “Nothing had been taken.” He shook his head again. “The dog had been shot too.”

  “Oh, my stars. Mack, this is the worst story I have ever heard. Who would do such a thing? Surely you don’t think—”

  Mack held up his hand. He tapped the ash out of his pipe and laid it on top of the humidor filled with his Elephant Butts tobacco, a noxious novelty that allowed gentlemen who preferred cigars to pack cigar butts into a pipe when lighting up a stogie might offend.

  “I didn’t find any footprints. The snow likely covered any tracks. I did find these two casings though.” He pulled the spent cartridges out of his pocket and placed them next to the bullets on the desk. “Look here.”

  Nellie took the magnifying glass he offered and peered at the array of brass and lead.

  “See the lines on bullets and the casings?”

  She squinted. “Oh yes. I see.”

  “Those rough etchings tell me the killer used a rifle with a barrel that had been had re-bored by hand.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Okay, now this is where you want to make careful notes.”

  Nellie put down the magnifying glass and picked up her notebook. Finally. Something new she could use in her report.

  “The barrel of any rifle can be hand re-bored to a larger caliber, but the work is not smooth like a machined bore. The cartridges will bear marks every time.”

  “Okay, that’s interesting, but I don’t see what …”

  Mack pulled his handsome eyebrows together in a frown. Nellie returned her attention to the evidence and then back to the storyteller.

  “We buried Mary right beside the cabin, and then had to stay there until we could get Carnagan in shape to get him out. He was a wreck.” He shook his head, and Nellie nodded her sympathy.

  “Two trappers who lived ten miles away came up one night. They hadn’t heard of the murder, but they had found a badly mutilated body. They thought it might be Carnagan. It took them two days to travel up to the cabin to see if that boy had gone missing. We followed them back to where they’d set their traps, and sure enough, we found a dead man. You know what else we found?”

  “The murder weapon?”

  “A hand-re-bored rifle and some cartridges.”

  Mack gave a sideways glance in Nellie’s direction while he busied himself sweeping the evidence back into his desk drawer.

  “Did you identify the body?”

  “We did not. Like I said, animals had gotten to whoever was foolish enough to be out in that weather.”

  Nellie raised her eyebrows and waited.

  “The man had been dressed well, but not for the mountains. We found a compass and a wad of cash in his coat pocket. He was wearing a fur coat that had a New York label, but lots of those around.” Mack rolled back his chair, shoved the disarray of papers and pencils in front of him into the drawer, and shut and locked it. Then he stood up and leaned back against the desk, arms folded across his chest. “There was no other identification. No real indication it was your missing guy. Those are the facts.”

  Nellie nodded slowly. “And if that wasn’t Hudson’s body you found, where would you suggest we look for him?” She closed her notebook.

  “Oh, there’s no telling.” Mack grabbed his pipe and the keys to his office. He helped Nellie into her coat and guided her toward the door. “If you were to check the passenger lists on the ships that sailed to Europe about that time, you might find a Charles Hudson listed as a passenger. He was an independent sort, after all. Want to get some dinner?”

  How tidy. Stepping into the street, Nellie breathed the cold evening air. The breeze that swept up from the beach below the Marsh House tasted of salt. Behind her, the lock turned in the door, and Mack fell into step by her side, adjusting his Stetson against the gusts of air that were gaining strength. They walked together in silence.

  Had justice been served? Perhaps so. Another lesson learned. Sometimes discretion was the better part of a full accounting for the truth. She would write her report, just the facts, and lay the issue of the government’s expert to rest.

  8 - Hopes and Dreams

  8

  Hopes and Dreams

  It was the rare occasion that Nellie allowed herself to accept an invitation to dine alone with an attractive
man, but she had forged a friendship with Mack that, despite the amusing flirtation, she knew how to handle. Once inside the Flying Coffee Pot, Mack headed in the direction of an empty table for two in a dimly lit back corner of the small dining room. Before he could claim the table, Nellie caught the eye of the waitress and nodded in the direction of a front-window table set for four. The waitress glanced at Mack.

  “Whatever the lady wants.” Mack grinned and followed Nellie to the table of her choice. He seated her, set his hat on the empty chair next to Nellie, and sat down opposite her.

  “The Flying Coffee Pot, an odd name for a restaurant.”

  “Might be a nod to their quick coffee service,” Mack spoke from behind the menu he was studying, “or”—he lowered the menu and raised his eyebrows—“it might refer to one of our local ghosts.”

  “Oh, I think I’ve heard that story. Some phantom malingerer throws the carafes on the floor at night?”

  “That’s the story.” He closed his menu and slapped it down on the table. “Now it’s my turn to ask the questions. What’s your story?”

  No one had ever asked her to explain herself. “How far back do you want me to go?”

  The waitress set cups of coffee in front of them and took their order. The coffee smelled so delicious that Nellie broke her one-cup rule. Her first sip of the fresh, strong brew flipped a switch in her senses. Did they come suddenly awake or take leave of her altogether? What brought her out west, Mack wanted to know. That was a story she had never told anyone. A haunted coffee shop seemed as good a place as any to exorcise the restless spirit that had possessed her from such a young age.

  “I suppose it began with a book …”

  R

  Kansas, 1876

  The pastor of the Presbyterian church the family attended made the announcement. The town fathers called for the return of a book that had been donated by mistake.