Seasons of Death

by M. K. Wren

  Delia smiled at Conan. “I don’t doubt she does have something to tell. She always did know more about other people’s business than they knew themselves. But she’s got a good heart, really; never was malicious.”

  Delia turned left down Morning Star Street in the direction from which Lettie had come. This was the same route Conan had followed when he first arrived, but the viewpoint from a car was very different from that of a pedestrian. On their left the sun etched the eroded walls of a row of small, steep-roofed houses, their boarded windows like blinded eyes. Jordan Creek chattered behind a screen of willows on their right, typical wild willows that seldom topped fifteen feet, whose slender, multitudinous stems and narrow leaves always reminded Conan of bamboo.

  “About Lee’s payday,” Delia resumed, “he didn’t plan to enjoy it all by himself.”

  “Enter the ‘other woman’?”

  “Oh, yes. Amanda Count. She was eighteen when she came here from Homedale. Took typing and shorthand in high school, and she was a pretty little thing. Beautiful red hair nearly down to her waist, great big brown eyes, and quite a figure. Well, Lee took one look at her and hired her on the spot as his secretary. She doubled as office receptionist. One thing led to another, of course, but it was two years before it all came to a head, and with Lee that meant it was really serious. He had plenty of little flings before, but none of them lasted more than a month or so. That’s the Masonic Hall there.”

  Conan was looking up at the building, another well-preserved, two-story structure, but this one had lost all its paint. Only one end of it was visible from this point, but as the street curved to the right and the growth of willows thinned, he saw that the building spanned Jordan Creek like a totally-enclosed covered bridge. He asked, “Was space so much at a premium when that was built?”

  Delia laughed. “Yes. Doesn’t look like it now with so many buildings gone. Winters got a lot of them. And fire. Whole towns have gone up in smoke around here. Silver’s been lucky that way, although it’s had its share of fires. That must be Mrs. Bonnet.”

  They were at the bridge crossing Jordan Creek, a simple affair built of four-by-twelve planks. There was no railing, and the bridge was only a few feet above the shallow, swift-running stream; refracted sunlight made pearl and amber patterns on its rocky bed. The woman Delia remarked was standing on the west bank near the Masonic Hall, and it was on the hall that her camera was focused. Her stylish poplin pants and jacket would be suitable on any city street, and her shoes, with their high wedge heels, looked positively dangerous, especially on the gravelly banks of a mountain stream. Her age was made indeterminate at this distance by shoulder-length blond hair whose color and style obviously did not come naturally, and by owl-lensed sunglasses that obscured her face. She didn’t seem to notice Conan and Delia; she was too intent on the viewfinder of her camera.

  “California,” Delia said by way of explanation as they left the bridge behind.

  Conan nodded. “That must be her Cadillac I saw in front of the hotel.”

  “Probably. She’s staying at the hotel. Told Jake she’s doing a picture page for the Los Angeles Times. The livery stable was over here on this corner, then there were houses for quite a way up Jordan Street.”

  Conan looked to the left, but all he could see was a vine-tangled depression and a few fragments of wood and rusted metal. The ground farther to the south looked as if it had never been turned, much less lain under the foundations of houses. On the right at the corner was a building that might originally have been two, but had merged into one, and across and well away from Jordan Street were the two- and three-story backs of a row of buildings that faced onto the next street. They were put together of aged wood and rusty corrugated metal in what seemed an entirely random fashion.

  “Delia, did Clare know about Lee’s little flings?”

  She nodded. “Most of them, I think, although she usually didn’t find out till they’d nearly run their course. Then there’d be a big argument, and sometimes if Lee’d had too much to drink, he’d start hitting her, and finally he’d end up on his knees begging her to forgive him and promising it would never happen again.”

  Conan frowned, thinking of the wedding picture. “What wouldn’t happen again—the little flings or hitting her?”

  Delia’s short laugh was eloquent of disgust. “Both, I guess, and poor Clare, she always believed him.”

  “But Amanda Count wasn’t just another fling?”

  “No. Oh, it might’ve ended up the same finally, but Amanda was a cut above the others. I think she was smart enough to make sure it wasn’t just another fling.”

  “Did Clare know about Amanda?”

  They had reached the corner now, and Delia turned north up Jordan Street, her pace slackening as she considered that. Finally, she answered, “No, I’m sure she didn’t. She never said a word to me about Amanda, and with the others she always came to me as soon as she found out about them. I think Lee was a little more careful that time, although, Lord knows, everybody else in town knew about it.”

  Conan paused in the cool shade of two towering poplars growing beside the road. To the east there was a space empty of buildings for half a block, and the land sloped down to Jordan Creek and the Masonic hall. He reached out to touch the convoluted bark of one of the trees, then turned and looked across the street. The lay of the land was upward on that side, and they were approaching an open area occupied by only one frame building and a derrick-like structure at the edge of a gravel-filled concavity. There were buildings on the opposite sides of the streets around the open area, and he wondered if it hadn’t once been a town square.

  He put the question to Delia, but she shook her head as they continued along the street. “That was full of houses and shops at one time. Fire. Like I said, Silver had its share. There was a mine adit there, too. The ground under the whole town is like a Swiss cheese with all the tunnels. Anyway, to get back to the murder—before Lee left for the office, he and Clare had an argument. She never did tell me exactly what it was about, but it was a bad one.” Delia’s eyes narrowed coldly. “After we found out about the robbery and Lee—of course, we just thought he’d run off with Amanda—I was the one who had to tell Clare. She was—well, Lee really did it up brown that time. Her mouth was cut, and her nose had been bleeding—it’s a wonder he didn’t break it—and one eye was swollen shut. That’s how he left her—his wife, whom he promised to love and cherish.”

  “I think Lee would’ve been a very hard man to like.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t always that way; he changed over the years. Bad times bring out the best or the worst in people, and times were really bad in Silver then. That’s the store there.” She waved toward the false-front building on their right, which sported a wide overhang shading a plank walk and a sign proclaiming it the “General Store.”

  Delia added, “You’ll probably want to talk to Vern and Maggie Roseberry. They own the store, and they’ve been in Silver since twenty-eight. Ten years ago they bought a place in Homedale, and they spend the winters there, but up till then, they were here year-round.”

  “I’ll put them on my list—along with Lettie Burbage. And Dex Adler. Is there anyone else here now who was around at the time of the murder?”

  “No. Oh—I forgot Reuben Sickle. He’s a prospector; works a couple of placer claims up Jordan Creek. Well, it looks like Jake is having a lot of business.” They were at the corner of the street that formed the northern boundary of the “square,” and Delia paused, looking over at the hotel, which faced Jordan Street just north of the junction. Four cars were parked in front of the hotel, and two families of sightseers were taking advantage of the shade of the sagging porch.

  Conan asked, “Is Jake Kulik another native son?”

  Delia smiled as she turned west along the row of buildings on the right side of the street. “No, he’s from Seattle. An engineer of some sort; had his own company making special navigation machines. Sold them to Boeing.”

&n
bsp; Conan laughed, and now he understood why Kulik’s accent hadn’t quite rung true. “What brought him to Silver?”

  “Well, Jake always says he was born a hundred years too late. I guess this is as close as he can get to the good old days. His name is really John, you know; he just likes the sound of Jake. His son is John junior. But whatever he calls himself, he’s done wonders for the hotel, bless him, and he’s the kind of person who’d give you the shirt right off his back. Now, this is Avalanche Avenue. The Owyhee Avalanche—that was the first daily newspaper in Idaho—was there in that building on the far corner; the one with the gables. The one this side of it, that was the Knapp drugstore.”

  Conan studied the elaborately ornamented little false front appreciatively but made no comment, and after a moment Delia returned to the subject of the murder.

  “Clare said Lee left the house about eight-thirty that night, and Dex could back her up on that. He happened to be out on his front porch about that time, and he saw Lee drive up to the mill, then he saw a light go on in the office, so he knew Lee went inside.”

  “Did Dex see anyone else?”

  “No. He had to—I guess he went inside his house then. About ten o’clock he looked again and saw the light was still on. Lee’s car wasn’t back at his house, and when Dex walked up to the office, it wasn’t there, either. The front door was unlocked, like I said, the safe wide open, and the payroll gone. Well, Dex had heard the gossip about Lee and Amanda, so he went down to Mrs. Sparrow’s. She ran a boarding house on Washington Street—that’s this next street here—and Amanda was living there. Well, of course, Amanda had packed up and gone. She left a note in her room for Mrs. Sparrow saying she wouldn’t be back, with some money to pay what she owed on her rent. So, Dex came to the same conclusion everybody else did, and he hightailed it up to our house and told Tom that Lee had run off with Amanda and stolen the payroll. Another artist. Amateur, probably. You can always tell; the more fancy equipment they have, the worse the pictures.”

  Conan smiled at that, eyeing the middle-aged woman sitting on the other side of Washington Street rendering the granite arches of a fallen building in oil. Her folding director’s chair had the name “Betty Potter” emblazoned on the back, and her canvas board rested on an aluminum easel shaded by a striped umbrella. Delia turned left on this street, but stayed to the east side well away from the painter.

  “That’s the courthouse,” she said, nodding toward the arches. “Not the original one, though; that burned down in eighteen eighty-four.” She smiled to herself. “Kind of an interesting story about that fire. Seems there was this horse thief—and some said he was a murderer, too—in the jail in the old courthouse when a Chinaman was brought in on a petty theft charge. Well, there was a lot of prejudice against the Chinese, and the horse thief didn’t take to being locked in with one of them, so the fool set fire to his bedding, thinking he’d get the jailer’s attention with that so he could complain. Trouble was, the jailer was over town, probably in one of the saloons. The courthouse burned to the ground, and the horse thief and the Chinaman with it.”

  Conan had to laugh at that macabre tale. “Is it true?”

  “It probably is, sad to say. Anyway, when Dex told Tom about the robbery and Lee, Tom went up to the office, then he called the sheriff. The police looked for Lee for months, but never found a trace of him. That’s understandable now, but they didn’t find a trace of Amanda or the money, either. Lee’s car showed up in Reno, Nevada, the day after the murder, abandoned, the police said; no suitcases in it or anything.”

  Conan frowned. Reno was at least 350 miles away. “Delia, maybe we’re dealing with an outsider, a stranger who stole the ten thousand dollars, killed both Lee and Amanda, then escaped in the car.” There were holes in that theory, he knew, even before Delia began pointing them out.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. “A stranger would’ve been noticed around here—it was a small town, even then—and afterward the sheriff questioned just about everybody in town. The only way a stranger could get into Silver without being noticed is if he came after dark the night of the murder. He’d have to go to the mill at exactly the time Lee was there and had the safe open, and then he’d have to find the tunnel where the body was left, and that’s not easy even in daylight. Then he’d have to take the boards off the adit—it’d been boarded up for years—nail them back on, then get rid of Amanda somehow, and drive Lee’s car to Reno. Now, even if all that was possible—and I think it’s stretching things—how would this stranger get to Silver in the first place? On foot?” She gave that a curt laugh. “It’s a long walk to Silver from anywhere. But if he came in a car, what happened to it? I mean, if you figure this stranger escaped in Lee’s car, he’d have to leave his own car in Silver, and an abandoned car would certainly be noticed. If you’re thinking he might’ve hitched a ride here with one of the townspeople—and who else would be coming up here that time of night?—that would guarantee somebody knowing he was here.” Then she waved toward a ruined foundation on the right. “That was the brewery. One time, they had a pipeline running under the street across to a storage vat. The Sommercamp Saloon used to be right over there.”

  The street sloped upward past the ruins of the brewery, and Conan was surprised at his breathlessness, but considering that the altitude was nearly seven thousand feet, and he’d come from altitude zero, it was to be expected. On the right as the ground leveled, there was another ruin of fallen stone walls.

  “The old Heidelberger store,” Delia said. “Over here on the other side, that was a butcher shop, then Hawes’s dry goods, and the little one on the end was a barber shop.”

  Conan studied the block of three buildings, realizing after a moment that these were the fronts of the haphazard, multiple-storied structures he’d seen from the rear on Jordan Street. The barber shop, seemingly tacked onto the others as an afterthought, was tiny, with a peaked false front, at the apex of which a birdhouse was mounted. “That one’s marvelous, Delia. Looks like a dollhouse.”

  She smiled. “It’s one of my favorites. Over here in this vacant lot next to it—that was where the Chinese Masonic Hall was.

  “I didn’t know there were Chinese Masons.”

  “Well, there were enough to build a hall. Used to be a couple of joss houses in Silver, too. That little white house across the street is Lettie Burbage’s place.”

  The house, small and fussily neat, seemed to fit its owner. They walked on to the corner of a cross street that connected Washington with Jordan Street, and Delia paused. On the right beyond the corner was a cluster of three buildings, then Washington faded rapidly as it sloped up to a more distant house, tall and spare, that seemed to be the last lonely outpost of the town. Delia had stopped by a cast-iron fire hydrant with the legend, WILLAMETTE IRON AND STEEL WKS. in high relief on the rim below its domed cap.

  Conan laughed. “I’ll be damned. That’s a Portland company, Delia. They’re still in business.”

  She didn’t seem surprised. “I guess they put out a good product. This is left over from when we had a water system. Silver was quite the little city at one time.”

  Conan studied her wistful expression and asked, “Do you regret it—I mean, what’s happened to Silver?”

  She looked up at him, head tilted. “Oh, I suppose so. It’s hard not to regret seeing things change, getting old—including yourself.” Then with a shrug she started down the street toward Jordan. “But that’s the way of things.”

  Conan walked beside her silently, considering the poignant stoicism in that phrase. He didn’t pursue it.

  “Delia, I’d be happy to accept the premise that the murder isn’t the work of a casual stranger, but that still leaves—well, how many people lived in Silver at that time?”

  “About a hundred, I guess, but I really don’t see how it could’ve been one of the townspeople.”

  Conan felt a hint of annoyance at that. If it weren’t an outsider or a resident, who was lef
t?

  “Why not, Delia?”

  “Well, the money, for one thing. Whoever killed Lee must’ve taken the money, and after the robbery—the murder—nobody moved out of town suddenly or showed up with any unexplained windfalls of cash. That sort of thing definitely gets noticed in a small town. Besides, you have to look at the robbery, the way it happened. When I said whoever killed Lee took the money, I meant whoever took it from Lee. He opened the safe.”

  At the corner of Jordan Street Delia turned north, and Conan realized they had almost completed a loop; a short distance ahead was the street that would take them back over the bridge to the other side of Jordan Creek.

  Delia continued, “The reason I don’t think it was one of the townspeople is I can’t figure any way he’d know Lee was going to have that safe open and when. Even if this person did happen to stumble on Lee at the right time, then decided to kill him—”

  “Did Dex or the sheriff find any evidence of a struggle in the office?”

  She turned right at the bridge street. “No, they didn’t, which makes you wonder if Lee handed over the money without putting up a fight, and I find that hard to believe. It’s possible, I suppose.”

  “Well, the robber-killer might have threatened Lee with a gun, or if there was a struggle, it might have taken place elsewhere.”

  “Yes, but there’s still the problem of getting the body to the mine—which wouldn’t be so hard for a local, I admit, since he might know where to find it—but what about Amanda? And how would the killer get Lee’s car to Reno? Not to speak of why he’d take it there. If he drove it there himself, what would he do for a ride back to Silver—before anybody noticed he was gone?”

  On the bridge Conan stopped to look at the Masonic Hall. The California photographer had departed, he noted. “All right, Delia, you’ve made a convincing case against a passing stranger or a resident. Who do you think killed Lee?”