Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

That must have been where Lester Johnson had found the banker, Emory, before dragging him into the house.

  Louisa mounted the stoop, tapped on the door. No response.

  She tapped again, harder this time.

  Still, no response.

  Louisa turned the knob. The latching bolt clicked. She eased the door slowly open, the hinges creaking softly. She stopped when she saw a man lying just inside, the man’s feet shod in brown ankle boots maybe three feet from the door’s threshold.

  A light shone to Louisa’s left. Sidling through the quarter-open door, she peered toward where a lamp burned on a table.

  The room she was in was a kitchen—well appointed and neatly arranged, with a black cooking range abutting the back wall, to Louisa’s hard left. What caught the brunt of the Vengeance Queen’s attention was the woman sitting on the floor against the far wall, beyond the range and near a wet sink with a pump and several well-stocked shelves, pots and pans dangling from hooks in the bottom of a finely crafted wooden wall cabinet.

  She was a plump young woman, possibly in her midtwenties, with light brown hair pulled up in a bun, though the bun had come partly undone and had tumbled down the left side of her head. Her face was round and even-featured with a small nose and thin lips, scars from a bout of pimples when she was younger showing faintly on her forehead. She wore a plain cambric housedress, buttoned to the throat, and a white apron.

  She stared without expression toward the table, as though trying to make out something that lay on the floor beneath it. Atop the table, two loaves of freshly baked bread were cooling on a rack beside a bowl of red apples.

  The kitchen was smoky and rife with the smell of the stew that had been burning atop the stove until the fire in the stove’s firebox had burned down. Apparently, the young woman had been preparing supper when her husband, the man on the floor—the banker, Emory—had gone out for more wood. When he’d returned, it had been with the assistance of Lester Johnson, and Emory had been sporting the ax in his back.

  He still was.

  Johnson had been right. The ax resembled nothing so much as a half-lifted pump handle.

  Emory was a lean man of medium height, in his midthirties. There were a few strands of gray in his dark brown hair combed straight back from a severe widow’s peak. Wire spectacles dangled from his left ear. His eyes stared vacantly at the floor, glazed in death. He wore broadcloth trousers, a white shirt, and a fawn vest from which a pocket watch drooped to the floor, dangling by a gold chain.

  Emory hadn’t been robbed—that much was plain. The watch looked expensive.

  Louisa closed the door on the howling wind. She felt her belly tighten when she inspected the ax, the head of which was nearly entirely embedded in the banker’s back, revealing the grisly mess of his ruined spine and several ribs, the shards of which shone inside the bloody gash. There had been nothing tentative about the attack. Whoever had wielded the ax had been resolute in his endeavor to kill the banker, and he’d gotten the job done without question.

  He, if the ax-wielding killer had been Ramsay Willis, as Edgar Clayton was insisting. However, Louisa couldn’t help entertaining a vague suspicion concerning the redhead from Jiggs’s place. Could it be a mere coincidence that the banker had ended up dead—murdered—only a few minutes after turning away the young woman who’d come inquiring about a job with the longer-range hope of someday marrying the man?

  Louisa turned to Emory’s wife. The woman continued staring in a daze at the floor beneath the table. She had her knees drawn up toward her chest and angled slightly to one side, the skirt of her dress tenting over them. She had her hands on her knees. She was in shock. She didn’t even appear aware of Louisa’s presence. The only thing real to her was the horror inside her own head.

  Louisa knew all too well how she felt. She herself had been in shock for nearly three days after she’d watched her own family butchered in the yard of their farm in Nebraska.

  When she’d come out of it, she’d buried her family one by one, and then she’d strapped on her father’s old pistol and slid his old rifle into her saddle scabbard and set out after the men—the Handsome Dave Duvall gang—who had killed her parents and siblings, shooting her father and brother and raping her mother and sisters while Louisa had looked on in horror from the brush.

  No, not when she’d come out of it.

  Because she knew that she had never fully come out of the shock of such an experience, and she likely never would.

  She leaned her rifle against the wall by the door and walked slowly over to where the woman sat on the floor. Louisa removed her mittens and gloves and stuffed them into her coat pockets. Crouching beside the banker’s wife, she slowly waved a hand in front of the young woman’s face.

  Mrs. Emory didn’t react. She didn’t even move her eyes.

  Gently, Louisa said, “Can you tell me your name?”

  Nothing.

  Louisa dropped her butt to the floor, beside the stricken young woman. Louisa leaned back against the wall. She studied the woman’s profile, the expressionless face with lips slightly parted, the unblinking, staring eyes.

  Gradually, a cold darkness crept into Louisa’s bones. Into her very soul. It was like poison. Snake venom. She was well acquainted with this darkness. She’d gotten fairly good over the past couple of years at holding it at bay. She must have let her guard down too low, however, because suddenly it grabbed her like a giant fist, squeezing, making her heart race, oozing cold sweat from her pores, and she was right back in that brush at the edge of her family’s farm in Nebraska.

  She heard her mother pleading with her tormentors, begging them to take her and to leave her daughters alone.

  “Please . . . please don’t you savage my girls!” she screamed.

  Two gunshots. A man yelled. That was Louisa’s father.

  “Oh God, no!” he bellowed as Louisa’s brother flew back off his heels with a bullet in his chest. “Noooo—not my boyyyyyy!”

  Handsome Dave and the other gang members were whooping and yelling and passing bottles, two members wrestling Louisa’s mother into the brush behind the springhouse. Two others had Louisa’s sisters. Her sisters were screaming at the top of their lungs, one being dragged by one ankle as she fought to free herself, grabbing at the brush with her flailing hands. Her captor held her ankle with one hand, and he took pulls from a bottle with his other hand.

  There was another gunshot.

  Louisa leaped nearly a foot up off the floor of the dead banker’s house in Dakota Territory and slammed her head back against the wall. In the brush at the border of the Nebraska farm, she watched her father drop to his knees. He knelt there for a moment then looked down at the bloody wound in his chest. He fell forward without breaking his fall and lay facedown in the weeds, quivering.

  Meanwhile, Louisa’s mother screamed, “Not my baby girls! ”

  She screamed . . . and screamed . . .

  Louisa rolled onto her belly, lay flat against the floor, writhing with the screaming in her head and the daggers of grief and terror in her heart, grinding the heels of her hands against her temples as though to knead away the sights and the sounds that were more real than the cold wooden floor she lay upon.

  A hand closed over her shoulder. A man said, “Louisa?”

  She thought she recognized the voice. Louisa rolled over. She placed both her hands on the man’s arm, squeezing, half sitting up and yelling hopefully, “Lou?”

  It was Captain Yardley staring down at her with concern, on one knee beside her. Lou’s absence was nearly as palpable as that of Louisa’s family. Suddenly, she wanted to scream the bounty hunter’s name, to call to him across the cold miles between them, for it was only he who could comfort her, settle her down when the black claws of terror engulfed her.

  But he wasn’t here.

  It was the handsome, cobalt-eyed Captain Yardley. She felt tears slither into her eyes, felt her lips tremble with longing. Her disappointment must have been plain on her f
ace.

  Yardley gave a regretful smile, his brows forming a V above his nose. “Sorry. Just me.” His eyes probed hers. “Are you all right, Louisa?”

  Quickly, she brushed her hands across her cheeks, rubbing away the tears that had started to dribble down from her overfilled eyes. She sniffed, nodded, her face warming with chagrin. “Did you find Clayton?”

  Yardley shook his head. “Dark back there. I lost his tracks. I think he headed for some woods north of town but I couldn’t be sure. I thought I’d come back and check on you . . .” He glanced at the banker’s wife to Louisa’s left. “And Mrs. Emory.”

  “She’s been sitting like that since I came in,” Louisa said.

  “Poor woman.”

  “Does she have family around here?”

  Again, Yardley shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. I only pass through here from time to time.”

  Still flushed with embarrassment over her unseemly emotional display, Louisa rose with a grunt. What horrified her almost as much as the memories of her family’s murder was Yardley having witnessed her breakdown. If only she could go into the captain’s brain and clear his memory of the past few minutes. Only Lou had ever seen her like that. Only the big ex-rebel knew how to comfort her.

  If only he were here. If only they could get along, stay together . . .

  She suppressed the trembling in her hands and knees and looked down at the banker’s wife. “We’d best get her over to the saloon. We can’t leave her here. Not with a killer on the loose. Can you carry her?”

  “Sure.” Yardley glanced at Emory. “What about him?”

  “Leave him here,” Louisa said, walking over to the door and picking up her rifle. “Let the town deal with him once the storm breaks.”

  Quickly, feeling the walls of the banker’s house closing in on her, Louisa glanced once more at the dead Emory still lying with the ax embedded in his back, then swung around and went out.

  Chapter 25

  Tipping her hat brim low against the storm, Louisa headed back in the direction of the saloon, the cold engulfing her, the wind sucking the breath from her lungs. She was maybe halfway there, lost in thought, her own horrors slow to retreat, when she stopped and turned back to stare toward the Emory house.

  More chagrin assaulted her.

  She should have helped the captain with Mrs. Emory. She started walking back toward the house but then a figure materialized out of the darkness and the blowing snow. She’d started to raise her rifle when she recognized the tall captain in his dark coat and hat. He was carrying the banker’s wife. Obviously, without Louisa’s assistance, he’d found a quilt to wrap Mrs. Emory in.

  Not one for apologies—to accept or to offer them—Louisa swung back around and continued heading back toward the hotel. Yardley was just behind her as she mounted the stoop and pushed through the heavy winter door, causing all faces in the room to snap toward her, apprehensive looks in the men’s eyes. In the eyes of one woman, as well. Toni was working behind the bar.

  Louisa held the door open while Yardley passed through it then she closed it and said, “Take her over to the fire. We’ll get her warm before we take her upstairs.”

  The barman, Tutwiler, sat at a table near the bar, a bottle and a steaming coffee mug before him.

  “Is there a doctor in Sundown?” Louisa asked.

  The blond hardcase, Vink, was playing cards with his rough-looking pards, Mose and Nasty Ralph, at a table near the barman. Vink chuckled wryly and threw down a card.

  “A doctor?” Tutwiler said. “Sure, we got a doctor.” He tossed his head to indicate the little, wizened oldster asleep at the table on the opposite side of the bar, near where Louisa had shot Quarrels and DuPree through the ceiling. “For all the good he does.”

  The doctor was snoring softly, his head buried in his arms.

  Louisa inwardly cursed and went over to where an old, faded brocade armchair sat against the far wall, under a cracked leather harness, a ragged duster, and a moldering gun belt housing a rusty pistol—paraphernalia that customers had likely left on the premises long ago. There was even a badly faded dodger for a traveling Shakespearean theatrical troupe from Memphis.

  Louisa brushed it all onto the floor then dragged the chair over to her own table, positioning it between the table and the crackling, sighing woodstove, the orange flames inside showing through the slight gaps around the brass-handled door.

  Yardley eased the addled woman into the chair. Mrs. Emory sat with an expression very similar to the one she’d had in the house—staring into space as though she were trying to remember something that stubbornly evaded her. It was as though her mind, unable to comprehend the horror she’d witnessed—the ax embedded in her husband’s back—had simply shut down.

  Louisa understood only too well the condition.

  She removed her mittens and gloves and shrugged out of her coat then made her way to the bar. All eyes in the room slid between her and the banker’s wife.

  “What happened to her?” Vink asked as Louisa strode past his table. He was staring at Mrs. Emory.

  “Shut up.”

  Nasty Ralph and Mose shared a smirk and chuckled. Vink curled his nose at the Vengeance Queen. “I was just askin’,” he said.

  Louisa walked up to the bar, where Toni stood unpacking bottles from a box and stacking them on back bar shelves. When she turned to Louisa, Louisa said, “You found a job.”

  Toni shrugged. “Didn’t much care to stay upstairs. Not after all the shooting and hollering.” She gave Louisa a vaguely ironic look. “So I came down and asked Mr. Tutwiler to put me to work.”

  She glanced at Tutwiler, who sat sipping his coffee and smoking a loosely rolled quirley, looking as apprehensive as all the other men in the room. The consternation was understandable, given that a killer was apparently running loose in Sundown.

  “He figures it’s going to be a long night and needed a hand,” Toni continued. “If I work out, he might keep me on.” Again, she hiked a shoulder. “No promises. But, then, I’m not accustomed to promises, anyway. What can I get you, Miss Bonaventure?”

  “Two cups of tea.” She glanced at the bottles lining a shelf behind Toni then added as an afterthought, “And a bottle of whiskey. Something that’s not going to burn the skin off my tonsils.”

  “I knew you’d come around, Miss Bonaventure,” Tutwiler said with a knowing smile, raising his own coffee laced with whiskey in salute. “It’s that kind of night, ain’t it?”

  “It’s looking that way.”

  “Is . . . is he really dead?” Toni asked Louisa, frowning in befuddlement.

  “He’s really dead.”

  Louisa stared at her. Toni stared back at Louisa, the dawn of recognition growing in her eyes. Indignation grew there, as well. “You don’t think I had anything to do with it.”

  “I don’t know,” Louisa said.

  Toni glanced around. Several men, including Tutwiler, were staring toward her and Louisa. Toni leaned over the bar and said in a rasping voice barely audible above the wind outside, “You think I would kill the man merely because he didn’t offer me a job?”

  “We both know you were over there for more than a job,” Louisa said, keeping her own voice down but also keeping her previous frankness in it. “But, then, I guess if you wanted one of them dead, it would most likely be the woman he married.” She glanced toward Mrs. Emory, staring down at the floor near her feet, then turned back to Toni. “And I don’t suppose you would have had the strength to hammer that ax as far into his back as someone did.”

  Toni gave a caustic snort. With open contempt, she studied Louisa across the bar. Louisa stared blandly back at her.

  Tightly, Toni said, “You can sit down. I’ll bring your tea and your whiskey. And I’ll add them to your bill.”

  “Two cups.”

  “Two cups.”

  “Obliged.”

  “On the house,” Tutwiler said, again raising his coffee to Louisa. “Under the circumstances, I
for one am glad to have you here, Miss Bonaventure. If anyone can run that crazy man down, it’s you.”

  He shivered as he rose from his chair. “Damn, it’s a cold night. Gotta keep the stove a-roarin’!” He shambled heavily toward the back of the room.

  Louisa turned away from the bar and started back to her table.

  Ahead of her, Vink sat staring darkly over his shoulder at Mrs. Emory. “She’s a purty woman,” he said, as though mostly to himself. “Right fine-looking woman, the banker’s wife.”

  Louisa stopped by the tall, lanky blond, who was slowly closing a quirley as he stared toward where Mrs. Emory sat in the brocade armchair, near the stove and Captain Yardley, who had taken a seat at the table now, as well.

  As Vink turned his head to face Louisa, his eyes shone, bright as newly minted pennies, with drink. His nose was bright red. He seemed to have a mood on, as though after a few more drinks he’d considered Louisa’s treatment of him earlier, and he was stewing about it.

  Stewing himself raw.

  He had set a pistol on the table, up close to his right hand.

  He glanced over his shoulder again then turned back to Louisa and said over the quirley he was rolling up near his chin, “Look at her sittin’ over there . . . all nice an’ quiet. The banker’s wife. Very quiet an’ polite. The kind I like. I hear she came all the way from Council Bluffs. Mail-order bride. Poor woman’s without a man now, though, ain’t she? That’s an awful shame. It purely is.”

  He glanced at his partners sitting to his right. “Ain’t that right, boys?”

  Mose and Nasty Ralph smiled up at Louisa.

  Also grinning at Louisa, Vink fired a match to life one-handed. “Maybe she needs me to step in an’ take care of her.”

  Louisa took one step toward him, hardening her jaws and flaring a nostril. “I liked you better when you were smart enough to keep your mouth shut.”

  Vink gave a crooked, faintly jeering half smile. “I’m just sayin’ I could—”

  Louisa’s hand whipped forward. It cracked against the blond’s left cheek so sharply and loudly that one of the three drummers leaped in his own chair with a start.