Ivy asked, “Should we just allow the fire to happen? She told you the fire would reveal something to us.” She turned to Neil. “Can you ask Minerva?”
Neil rolled his eyes. “Ask her what? How?”
Ivy shrugged. “Just start talking to her?”
Harley said, “It’s not a bad idea, Neil. She talks to you. She obviously likes you.”
So, looking incredibly uncomfortable, Neil looked up at the ceiling, as though he’d find Minerva floating there. “Minerva?” he asked tentatively. “Are you here, Minerva? What else can you tell me about the fire?”
They waited several long moments, and no angel appeared by the ceiling. With his usual impatience for almost any sort of delay, Harley moved to leave the balcony, but Neil grabbed his arm.
“Why do you call me El Dekhal?”
Harley grinned. “I knew you were a housebreaker.” Neil froze in shock, so Harley continued, “No, I don’t mean the sort of chap who enters houses and steals things. Although that’s probably why you were sent to a penal colony.” He enjoyed watching Neil squirm in embarrassment. “No, in my Arabic manual of love, that means the sort of penis that knocks at the door of the vulva, demanding to be let in. The vulva says, ‘Impossible! I cannot take you in on account of your size.’”
Neil seemed to relax and even smiled a little at that. Ivy even giggled, but as both men turned to observe her, they stiffened to realize the giggle didn’t come from her.
“Minerva?” Neil asked.
The voice came, tinny and quiet, as though through a speaking tube directly behind Neil’s shoulder. “Yes, it’s me again, Neil Tempest.”
The trio inhaled in surprise. Harley nudged Neil to engage with the spirit. “I’m glad to see you, Minerva. Can you tell me about this alleged fire? Where will it start?”
“Well,” said the tinny voice. “I thought you could figure it out yourself, but you were too busy engaging in adulterous sex.”
“Adulterous?” Neil frowned. “No one here is married to anyone.”
“I wish,” said Minerva, sultry now, “that you would engage in sex with me.”
Another stunned silence ensued. Neil’s bulging eyes sought out Harley for assistance. Harley cleared his throat. “Minerva. You’ve gone to the other side. You’re no longer in this world, so Neil cannot engage in sex with you. He can only have sex with living humans. Otherwise, I’m sure he’d be glad to comply.”
Now the voice became angry. “Other side? What other side? I am still here with you in Laramie City. And if Neil cannot comply, I will not assist you!”
“Uh-oh,” said Ivy.
“Ivy!” Neil whispered. “You try talking to her.”
“Um,” said Ivy. “Minerva? If you’re still here with us on this side of the veil, why can’t you display yourself? I’m sure Neil would enjoy seeing how pretty you are. Maybe then he could—ah, engage in sex with you.”
“You cannot see me?” the tinny Minerva said. “Why can you not see me? I’m standing right here, next to my beau.”
Harley shoved Neil. “You’re her beau, Tempest! Do something!”
Neil reached his two hands out blindly toward the voice, as though caressing her shoulders. “I can feel you,” he probably lied, “but I cannot see you. Can you manifest yourself?”
“I am trying!” Minerva cried. Now the voice sailed into the wailing, keening realm that one expected from spirits, as though ready to smite anyone who crossed her. “I am using my love for you to manifest my form, but all I feel is emptiness and despair!”
“Don’t despair!” cried Neil, fondling the invisible shoulders. “Your husband Rodney would not want you to despair. If he knew you were here he could see you, take you in his arms, remind you of his love—”
Minerva wailed so loudly, the crystals in the overhead chandelier shuddered. “Aiiiiii,” she howled like an unseen banshee. “Rodneeee…”
“Yes, Rodney!” Neil encouraged her. “If Rodney could see you now, he would gather you in his arms and—”
“Rodneeeee! Rodney is a drunken, horrible brute! Why do you think I was out in the field with my shotgun when I died? I was running from him, about to shoot him if he assaulted me one more time!”
Harley tried to steer Minerva away from her despair. “Yes, about the shotgun and the field. You said you were strangled before you were shot. Who strangled you?”
Harley interrupted. “Was it a fellow wearing a derby hat?”
“Aiiiiii,” moaned the anguished spirit, and the three humans moved away from the awful sound. “A derby hat, yes! Do you say you do not love me, Neil? Is that why you mention that monster, Rodney? Aiiiii…”
“Oh, dear,” said Ivy. “Neil, reassure her! Do something!”
But there came an enormous whoosh of an explosion, and the stained glass window was blown out, toward the balcony. Slivers of colored glass rained down on the trio as they instantly scattered down the stairs toward the Grand Hall. Here, they could look up at the stained glass window and see flames shooting and darting, completely obliterating the artwork of the angel with the tablet.
“Minerva!” Neil yelled. “Can you stop the fire?”
Harley rattled Neil by the arm. “Tell her you love her, you blockhead!”
Neil complied with hands raised to the ceiling. “I love you, Minerva! I love you eternally, forever and a day! Please stop the fire!”
“Ivy, go get help,” Harley instructed. “We need a bucket brigade.”
As Ivy dashed out the door, Neil continued his entreaty. “Minerva! I, Neil Tempest, declare my undying love for you!”
“Put more emotion into it,” Harley advised as the flames began consuming the beamed ceiling.
Neil turned on him. “How much more emotion do you want? ‘I love you’ isn’t good enough?”
Harley took a turn at it. “Minerva Shortridge! Neil has locked up Rodney so he cannot hurt anyone anymore! So you see, he truly does love you! He has made it impossible for Rodney to ever come between you again!”
The flames did seem to back down a bit then, revealing the artwork of the mortal still unscathed. Encouraged, Harley shouted, “Neil needs your help to arrest whoever killed you. You have to give us some more clues. Help us out! Who is the fellow wearing the derby hat?”
Suddenly Minerva’s voice was so loud it occupied the entire ceiling, and it was impossible to discern where it emanated from. It was as though she had ten speaking trumpets and shrieked into all of them at once. Harley and Neil didn’t know where to look, as the voice seemed to come from all four corners of the vaulted room. “Neil Tempest! A herd of bison will change the course of the Laramie River! Like the waters of the Red Sea, the river will stand up like giant walls and allow the bison to cross.”
Harley and Neil exchanged quizzical glances. “This sounds like witchcraft,” Neil uttered.
Harley shoved him aside. His lack of belief would ruin this entire enterprise. “Minerva, we believe you!” Harley shouted. “Where will this occur on the Laramie River, and when?”
“At Neil’s ranch,” she answered before a great swell of flame shot out from the stained glass and torched the chandelier, blackening it.
“We’d better get the hell out of here,” Neil advised. “We don’t have any water, and this is not going to get any better.”
“Yes,” Harley agreed. “With your luck, we’ll be accused of starting the fire anyway.”
As they rounded the corner of the Elks Club, they bypassed a contingent of those members hauling buckets of water at full chisel. As head of security, Neil wanted to assist them, but Harley convinced him the Elks would just wax suspicious if they discovered they were there when the fire started, and they’d just have a lot of funny explaining to do, especially when it came to the part where a spirit had warned them about the impending fire.
So they headed for the Union Pacific office instead, but Ivy waylaid them and suggested they duck inside the Bucket of Blood saloon. The place was nearly empty, as most of the a
ble-bodied Hell on Wheels men were putting out the fire. The saloonkeeper Ace Moyer served them personally, although Neil said Ace was usually too busy to spend much time at the Bucket.
“He’s buying up all kinds of land around here,” said Neil, sipping his coffee. “Just yesterday he asked me again if I wanted to sell any of my land.”
“So you have a ranch,” said Ivy. Tonight she wasn’t drinking forty rod. She had asked for some Mexican agave liquor that was nearly as potent, though. “I presume you have a ranch foreman, too?”
Neil put on his bragging face. “Yep, I’ve got four hundred acres up toward the Snowy Range. I call it the Serendipity Ranch, just because it was such luck that I bought it. No one wanted it, see, because it’s so windswept and gets a lot of snow. Why, the—”
“Wait a minute.” Ivy spread her hand out on the table. “Wait. Remember that letter that Rodney Shortridge wrote to my father? Where we discovered his Cow Palace brand on that piece of paper?” Her face screwed up as she tried to recall the wording of the letter. “He said some sinister characters approached him about selling his ranch.”
Harley said, “Probably this same Ace Moyer cove.”
Neil protested. “Ace Moyer, sinister? Hardly. He’s one of the upstanding pillars of this community. Just ask your father, Ivy.”
“I shall,” she said simply. “I can send him a telegram right now, asking him.”
“Anyway,” said Neil. “I can hardly see him wearing a derby hat. Look at him. He’s born and bred right here in Dakota Territory. I’ve seen him wearing a sombrero and a slouch hat same as we wear, but no derby. Hey, listen. I told Shortridge we’d let him out of lockup if he let us exhume Minerva, and he said fine.”
“Yes, your belle.” Ivy smiled. “I doubt she’d take kindly to it if you released him. She seems to have a holy fear of him.”
Harley said, “We should ask Shortridge for a photograph of her. That way you can at least get a mental image of the gal who’s quite nutty on you.”
Neil frowned. “Pshaw.”
“Don’t scoff at it!” said Harley. “You seem to be the only one she’ll talk to. And she did agree that her murderer wore a derby as well.”
“Well, listen here,” said Neil. “Minerva said all would be revealed after the fire tonight. So we should go back to the Elks Club. Act natural-like. Pretend we dropped a watch there earlier or something and are just looking for it.”
Ivy said, “I’ll pretend I dropped something feminine. That always stops men real short. They’ll just tell me to get on with looking for it because they don’t want to hear about it.”
“Some lip rouge,” suggested Harley.
“No, it should be something that will embarrass them to high heaven,” said Ivy. “Perhaps a feminine sponge, for the purposes of preventing pregnancy. Yes, that should mortify them sure as shooting.”
“If you’re going to tell them that,” Neil interjected, “then Harley and I should steer clear of you. Wouldn’t do to be seen together, looking for a sexual aid.”
“Nonsense!” declared Ivy. “In this town? Correct me if I’m wrong. But Harley, wouldn’t you say the customs and morals of Laramie City are much—well, let’s just say it—lower than the cities of the East?”
Harley didn’t have to think hard. “Your observation is correct. The ramshackle shanty towns of the Far West have a much looser code. With so few women available, it’s natural that men would fight over—and share—the few belles who made it that far west.”
Harley was glad that this made Neil smile and regard Ivy fondly. Neil had been acting much more generous and inclined to share the woman he considered “his.” The idea that their unconventional arrangement might actually work out, though, gave Harley an uneasy feeling. He wasn’t used to loving anyone. His affairs had always been temporary situations where he could easily walk away with no regrets. However, if he was forced to leave right now—if he was even sent to the end of the line at Dale Creek Bridge for a couple of nights!—his mind would be so preoccupied with this tantalizing couple he would get no work done at all.
The idea that he might love Ivy and Neil terrified him.
Still, it was good that Neil wasn’t currently viciously tackling him in a jealous rage, so Harley said congenially, “Let’s get back to the Elks Club to look for your feminine sponge.”
On the way out of the Bucket of Blood, Harley saw an odd thing that stuck in the back of his mind. Behind the bar, a wooden crutch leaned against a booze keg. Who was lame around here? Whose crutch was it? In the excitement of the moment, the crutch was forgotten.
At the fraternal lodge quarters, flames still blackened the rafters. The trio went down the line of the bucket brigade, men passing each other sloshing buckets of water from the Laramie River half a mile away. They each grabbed a bucket from a fellow and jogged with them into the building, spilling about half the water before running into Ezekiel Vipham.
Zeke was chattering eagerly, his arm slung across the shoulders of a chap Harley knew as Henry Zuckerkorn, a scribbler for the Frontier Index. The Index was the rag that printed a column on “Last Night’s Shootings,” and a fire was probably more unusual than the latest cold-blooded murder. Zuckerkorn was a very good journalist, from all reports.
“How’d the fire start, Zuckerkorn?” Neil asked.
Zuckerkorn’s eyes shone with almost religious zeal. “It’s the strangest thing, Tempest! Far as I can figure, ol’ Franklin Reeves was unpacking some boxes in the attic when a whale oil lamp overturned.”
Zeke interrupted. “But that’s not the strange part, Neil! No, sirree.” He spread his hands like a magician, squiggling his fingers as though he scattered fairy dust. “When the flames were extinguished in the attic, what was revealed but the burned, charred carcass of…” With bugged eyes, Zeke looked over both shoulders to ensure no local gossiping hens were getting an earful of his big talk.
“Well?” shouted Neil, rattling Zeke by the shoulder. “Out with it, man! Charred carcass of what?”
Apparently Zuckerkorn was of the same dramatic nature, for he leaned in and whispered theatrically, “Carcass of whom, you should be asking!”
“Carcass of whom?” Neil shrieked.
“J. Walter Weatherman,” Zeke intoned, as though the name alone was enough to rouse the dead.
This information evidently stunned Neil so thoroughly he was unable to speak, so Harley demanded to know, “Who is J. Walter Weatherman?”
Zuckerkorn replied enthusiastically, “Only the biggest landowner in Dakota Territory!”
“Another landowner,” Ivy breathed thoughtfully.
“Wait a minute,” said Harley. “Minerva said all would be revealed in this fire. Let’s take a look at the burned, charred body. Ivy, you stay here with Mr. Zuckerkorn.”
“I’m coming, too,” said Ivy, handing her nearly-empty bucket to a passerby.
“So am I,” said Zuckerkorn. “And how did Minerva Shortridge know about this fire? She died three months ago.”
The question was thankfully lost in the bustle of darting firemen dashing to and fro. Apparently the attic fire had been quenched before it had moved on to other rafters, so they were free to clamber up the ladder.
Harley held Ivy back from the still-smoking Mr. Weatherman. The less sensitive Neil and Zeke went to examine the body.
“I presume,” said Ivy, “that Minerva meant to tell us the same person who killed her and Whit Gentry also killed this landowner.”
“That’s what I’m guessing at,” Harley agreed. “Stay here.”
Zuckerkorn had brought a lantern up, which he now hung from a scorched and broken beam. The only thing that made Weatherman stand out from the other mummified, burned people Harley had seen before was his rather shiny ring. The ring gleamed like a lighthouse from a hand that had been reaching for something in midair when he was knocked flat on his back and consumed by fire. There was also a six-shooter in his left hand, but something looked wrong to Harley. The fingers didn’t g
rip it convincingly, as though it had been placed there after death.
Harley and Neil squatted near the body, and Harley asked, “Where’s this Weatherman own land?”
Neil held the cotton of his neckerchief over his nose and mouth. “He owns two thousand acres…some of them adjoining my ranch.”
Their eyes met briefly, flashing with significance.
Harley looked down at the blackened arm. “This ring.” He had to bend closer to view the ring, an entirely distasteful chore. Neil also leaned over, their heads almost touching, and both men simultaneously gasped and jumped back in shock.
“The Cow Palace!” Neil whispered.
Harley stretched his hand toward the ring, flinching to discover the metal was still hot.
Neil was right. The ring had been forged into the CP brand of the Cow Palace ranch, the home of Minerva and Rodney.
Harley asked, “Did Weatherman have anything to do with the Cow Palace?”
“Not at all,” said Neil. “Why would he? He owns a much bigger spread.”
Ivy said, “Then whoever placed it on his finger is trying to make us think he’s the one who murdered Gentry.”
Neil’s cornflower-blue eyes glimmered with understanding and an emotion Harley pinpointed as sorrow.
“I’d best get out to my own ranch posthaste,” he nearly whispered.
Harley wanted to comfort the poor cowboy when he realized what the sorrow was. It was sorrow that he had to leave his friends in Laramie City, even for one day.
Chapter Sixteen
Ivy was getting the creeps with Minerva Shortridge staring right at her.
Especially while she was on her knees unbuttoning Neil’s pants, facing his enormous erection that packed his crotch admirably.
“Um, Neil?” she queried in a small voice.
“Yes, my dove,” he murmured, caressing the back of her skull. His mind was clearly not on the photograph of Minerva Shortridge sitting on the mantel. Minerva glared down at Ivy with steely anger, her hands folded primly in front of her white apron. She had probably been a good-looking woman, “handsome” as it was often called, hair parted severely down the center, her jaw clenched tightly as though she chewed on acorns. They had brought the photograph here to Neil’s Serendipity Ranch thinking it might enhance their investigation, but it was only scaring Ivy half to death.
Training Ivy [How The West Was Done 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 13