by Erik Carter
I put my hand on my Colt.
There was a creaking from across the room. I turned. Macintosh had taken a couple steps toward the mystery man.
“Who are you?” he said, surprisingly nervous.
The mystery man raised a gun and shot Macintosh in the chest. As soon as the shot had fired, the mystery man ran toward Macintosh.
It all happened in a moment. Macintosh collapsed, knocking over the lantern. Lilly screamed. The mystery man charged Macintosh. I bolted up, ran toward them. The lantern crashed to the floor. Utter darkness. Lilly screamed again. Footsteps, footsteps. I lunged forward at the noise. Gotta catch this bastard. I smashed into something hard—not a man, the damn desk. Ow. More footsteps, going in the opposite direction. He was headed back toward the hallway. Lantern, lantern? There it was. I picked it up, lit it. The room was alight again, but the mystery man was gone.
I ran over to the doorway and listened. I could hear no more footsteps. But then I heard noise coming from outside.
I ran past Lilly—who was standing in the doorway, eyes wide—to the window. I looked out. The mystery man was on his pinto, galloping away from the mansion at full speed.
“Who was it?” Lilly said, walking up behind me.
“I’m not entirely sure.”
I turned to her. She was rattled as hell. She was doing her damndest to be tough, though. Not a tear on her cheeks. Gotta admit, I was impressed.
I hugged her. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
We walked across the room. Macintosh lay on the desk. Dead as a doornail. He’d been shot straight in the heart. Blood dripped onto the floor.
Lilly squealed.
“He’s a lot holier than I remember,” I said.
The bookshelf-wall behind him was half open. Lilly walked into the small room beyond.
“Barnaby …” she called from the room.
I tipped my hat to Macintosh and stepped in behind her. The room was cool and moist. Smelled like a cellar.
“Look,” she said. “He took it.”
It was gone. The kettle was gone. Where once the little globe of metal had sat, almost glowing, there was nothing.
Lilly turned away.
Normally this would have been a big moment, one of those events in a case where the tables turned. But so much had gone wrong already that it had no impact on me. Even if we had gotten the kettle, there was no way in Hell we would have made it all the way to Dry Rock Basin by midnight. Lilly had been foolish to come out here.
She cried gently. She had a hand to her face, and the other arm was wrapped around her stomach. I walked over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She stopped crying and wiped her cheeks.
“I suppose that’s it now,” she said. “Daddy’s as good as dead.”
She was right. But what do you say to that? I squeezed her shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
“What about …” She motioned toward Macintosh’s body, being careful to not look at it.
“Just come on.”
The best thing to do was leave the body. Sure he lived alone, and in theory no one would find him, but he was an important man. He’d be missed first thing the next morning. Someone would come looking for him soon enough. Besides, how would Lilly and I ever explain what we were doing there?
Hopefully his puppy wouldn’t eat him.
We left in silence. Lilly wasn’t much in the mood for talking. We headed back the way we came, past the dog and through the window. The dog was snoring loudly, a big shit-eating grin on its face.
We descended the lasso then walked over to the horses, who were hidden in the scraggly trees at the end of Macintosh’s drive. We mounted up.
Lilly’s face was flat, wiped clean like a chalkboard. She glanced back toward the mansion. I turned too, and for a split second I thought I saw the mystery man watching us from the back porch—until I realized I’d seen him leave in the opposite direction just minutes prior with the kettle. This whole thing was beginning to make me jumpy.
“Midnight. That’s when they kill him,” Lilly said.
“I know.” I thought of the two scenarios I’d come up with earlier in the day. If the kidnapping had been a ruse, her dad could very well be dead already. For a moment I considered telling her this, as though this might be a sort of consolation. I didn’t, of course.
Lilly was still looking at the mansion. She turned back to me. “Don’t suppose we could make it back there.”
“To Dry Rock Basin?” I said and took out my watch. It was going on eight o’clock. “No. Trains aren’t runnin’. It’d be four hours plus from here back to Desecho, another forty-five minutes to Dry Rock. And it’s dark. No, babe, we’ll never make it.”
She nodded slowly. Then a look of realization came to her. “But maybe they’ll wait. You know?”
“What do you mean?”
“They won’t kill him at midnight on the dot,” she said, her voice rising with excitement. “They want the kettle! They’ll give it some time.”
She did have a point. I’d seen this sort of thing go down before. If there were indeed real kidnappers, they very well might wait a while before killing Cosgrove.
Lilly pulled at the reins. Her horse stirred. “I’m going. I might even make it there before midnight.”
“And what would you do then, not having the kettle and all?” I said.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. But I have to do something! I’m not asking you to come, Barnaby, but it would be wonderful if you did.”
“Hey, look at me,” I said. “Does it look like I got anything better to do?”
So it was that I found myself racing across the desert in the middle of the night with Lilly Cosgrove. It was cold. Oh, it was cold. My nose was solid ice. I pulled my duster around me tighter.
The moon was white. The sky was black. The ground was blue. All I could hear was the thundering of the horses’ hoof beats. Bob was exhausted, I could tell. Poor guy. He wasn’t used to all this.
I looked over at Lilly. She was stone-faced. Her horse was flying, but she held tight, stayed right there with it. She squeezed the reins hard with her little hands. The cold air was making her eyes water, but still there were no tears. This gal’s heart was set. There was no time for something like tears.
It was one of those surreal moments when time makes no sense. That night seemed to stretch out forever, but by the time we were getting close, it felt like we’d only been traveling a few minutes. The bluffs and crevices of Dry Rock Basin appeared, and my senses returned. We were almost there.
I took my watch out. It was eleven fifty-four. We’d made excellent time, but Dry Rock was still another fifteen minutes or so away. There was no way we were going to make it there by midnight. Lilly was probably right, though. There was no way they’d kill him right at midnight. I might not quite have understood why, but everyone sure wanted to get a hold of that kettle. The kidnappers would give it a little extra time.
Lilly took her watch out too. She looked at it and gave her horse a kick. We sped up.
Wind raced past my frozen ears. We inched slowly toward Dry Rock.
I looked at my watch again. Eleven fifty-seven.
Lilly gritted her teeth. My hat flew off my head. The leather strap around my neck stopped if from blowing away.
Eleven fifty-eight.
We were never going to make it. There was no need in riding the horses so hard.
“Lilly!” I yelled. “We’re not gonna make it in time. Slow down!”
She didn’t hear me.
Eleven fifty-nine. The minute hand progressed. Midnight.
It wasn’t ten seconds later that we heard it.
Crack!
A gunshot ripped across the empty land.
Lilly pulled back on the reins, and her horse reared back. Bob and I swerved to the side to miss her.
Lilly sat in her saddle panting and staring at the bluffs ahead. She looked at me then back to the bluffs. She jumped off her horse and r
an a few feet toward the bluffs before collapsing to her knees.
There had been real kidnappers after all.
I hopped off Bob and walked over to her. Her watch was in her hand. She was weeping.
“They didn’t wait!” she screamed and squeezed her watch tight. “They didn’t even wait at all!”
She threw the watch. It hit the dirt with a thump.
I crouched down beside her. “Maybe it was a hunter or—”
“You know no one lives out here!” she shrieked. She bit her lip. “He’s dead.” The words came out in a whisper.
I put my arm around her. She laid her head on my shoulder and wept.
Chapter Sixteen
I snapped a small twig off a tumbleweed and scraped its prickly edge along the top of my new boot. It left a line of scratches in the fresh leather. Back east, folks think tumbleweeds are soft and fluffy, like little clouds bouncing along the ground. But they’re not. They’re stiff and course, and they’ll cut your hand if you’re not wearing gloves.
I tossed the twig into the fire. It sizzled and popped.
It was five in the morning. The sky was black, stars were dim. I was sitting on a rock on one side of the fire. Lilly sat across from me, her legs folded beneath her. She stared solemnly into the flames. Occasionally she’d wipe a stray tear that would roll down one of her cheeks.
We’d searched the caverns for Cosgrove’s remains. I knew it was fruitless. There were infinite caves and little holes out there where the body could be. But how are you gonna tell a woman that somewhere out there her daddy’s corpse was seeping blood into the ground—and that she wasn’t gonna find it?
She’d calmed down with surprising dignity after a couple hours, and we set up camp to catch a little sleep before heading back home. I would have expected her to either ramble on for hours about her dad or to cry all night long. She had done neither. I’d dozed off several times, and each time I woke, I found her also awake. Just staring into that fire. I don’t think she slept at all.
Now I was awake for good, staring into the fire myself and watching over her. She opened her mouth to speak, and I thought she’d finally say a few words about her father. Again she surprised me.
“What’s your story, Barnaby?”
“My story? I don’t have one.”
“Everybody’s got a story.”
I broke another twig from the tumbleweed and began cleaning the dirt from my fingernails. “Tonight’s not about me,” I said. “What’s your story?”
“There’s not much to tell, really. And what there is you already know. My mom died when I was young. I was homeschooled. By Pattison, mostly. Daddy’s all I’ve ever known—all he’s allowed me to know.”
“You’ve got a brother.”
Lilly scoffed. “Yeah. I sure do. I’ve only seen the guy a handful of times in my entire life. They say Samuel wanted to get away from Daddy more than anything in the world.” She paused. “Can’t say that I blame him, though.”
“Come on, kid. Is this what you want be sayin’ right now?”
She picked up a stone. “I suppose not.” She threw the stone into the fire. “Daddy owns the lake. Well, owned the lake, I suppose. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“When I was little he’d wake me up sometimes before he left for his office. He’d take me out to the lake. This was about four in the morning. He was an early riser. I’m sure that’s not surprising. It was the only time of the day when there wasn’t any hooting and hollering from town echoing over the water. The only time is was perfectly silent. We’d sit out there for ten, maybe twenty minutes sometimes.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It was. But it didn’t last,” she said. “Tell me about yourself, Barnaby.
“I told ya, I don’t have a story.”
“You know that night we spent together?” she said.
I groaned inwardly. Here it comes. I knew that was gonna come back to bite me. She was going to try to trap me.
“Of course,” I said.
Lilly didn’t try to trap me, though. “You had a nightmare in the middle of night. You woke me up. You kept saying ‘Dodson.’”
Torn faces. Severed limbs. Blood. Frozen blood.
I didn’t remember having the dream again. I guess it had come back for another visit.
“Who’s Dodson?” she said.
I finished with my fingernails and tossed the twig into the fire. It squealed and curled on the embers. I looked at her. “I was a soldier at one time. In the war. I was an NCO.”
“An NCO?”
“A sergeant.”
“Sounds important.” She gave me a smile.
I shrugged. “It was.”
“It’s hard for me to picture you like that, polished and squared away.”
“Well, I was. Time’ll change a man. Or a woman. You’ll see. I was a damn good soldier.”
“Did something happen?”
I nodded, looked from her to the fire. “I was a First Sergeant. Tons of clout for an enlisted man. The officers in my company wanted me to do something. Somethin’ bad. The Rebs had been dug in our region for weeks. We’d been hit hard. Real hard.
“There was this farm a few miles east of us. Big field. It was vital ground, and we needed it. Problem was, we didn’t know if the Rebs held the buildings—the house and the barns that sat up on a hill. Valuable high ground. If the Rebs hadn’t taken the buildings, then we could control the whole field. If they had, we’d have a bloodbath. So the officers wanted to send a platoon out there to test the waters, see if they were around.”
“Wouldn’t they be killed?” Lilly said.
“Yup. That was the point. They were gonna be bait.”
Lilly gasped.
“We’d just gotten a new platoon. A colored platoon. Negroes. Their company had been decimated, and somehow they ended up with us. The officers weren’t happy. They wanted the platoon sent to another colored company. But it never happened. And when the time came to send a platoon out as bait, you can guess which one they wanted to send.”
“Yes, I can,” she said.
“It was my job to give the orders. Bastards wouldn’t even do it themselves. I tried to refuse. See, there were other platoons with a lot more soldiers, platoons that could have survived the assault. There were so few remaining soldiers in the colored platoon … they had no chance at all. But the officers didn’t care. It was their chance to be rid of them.
“I tried to send one of the other platoons. I went all the way to the colonel. But he told me if I didn’t send the colored platoon, he’d hammer the rest of my units while I was still in command. He said, ‘Somebody’s gotta do the dyin’.’”
“So you sent the black men,” Lilly said.
“Yes.”
“And did they—”
“We found the bodies the next morning. Rebs destroyed ’em. And then they fled, knowing their company was smaller than ours. We got our damn high ground in the end after all.”
“I’m sorry, Barnaby,” Lilly said. “Who’s Dodson?”
“It got real cold that night. It was the beginning of winter. The bodies were … frozen.”
“Who’s Dodson, Barnaby?” She leaned forward, looked into my eyes.
It was nothing she needed to know. And, besides, it didn’t matter. “He was a soldier.” I stood up. “Sun’ll be up soon. I’m not gonna be sleeping anymore. You?”
She shook her head.
I walked over to Bob and saddled up. “Then let’s go.”
Chapter Seventeen
They say that the dawn is always brighter, that things will be better the next day. It wasn’t at all like that this day.
At some point the sun had risen. But you wouldn’t know it. The sky was gray and drizzling. There was a bitter chill in the breeze. I sat on Bob with my duster buttoned up tight. We were on the gravel drive next to the Cosgrove mansion. Lilly stood near us, on the steps leading to the front door of the home.
We�
�d ridden in silence back to Desecho. Hadn’t exchanged a single word. Now, as I looked down upon her from my saddle, she stared off to the horizon with the same vacant look she’d worn all night.
“I’d like you to stay on the case, Barnaby.”
That was a surprising request, given the case was closed. No way to save a dead man.
“What do you mean?”
“The man who stole the kettle and Daddy’s killers—I want you to find them.”
Okay, now it made better sense. For a moment there I was thinking she was going to ask me to find Cosgrove’s body. The thought of searching through all those caves had been disheartening. It was better to just let the coyotes find him.
“Sure, Lilly,” I said. “But this really is something you should get the law involved in.”
“You have a badge. And besides, I trust you.” She tried to smile.
“If that’s what you want.”
“And I’m just as interested in finding the kettle as I am in finding the murderers.”
“Why?”
She turned from the horizon and looked directly at me. “It’s the cause of all this. It’s caused people to—”
“Lilly,” I said, trying to be as gentle as possible. “There’s no such thing as curses.”
“I know that, Barnaby,” she said. “But it’s still the reason all this happened. People believed in the kettle, they wanted it, and now people are dead. I’m going to destroy it. After you find it, I’ll have it melted down.”
“Very well.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was pointless. It had been impossible to track the kettle when I knew it was somewhere near Desecho. Now that the mystery man had it, he could have taken it anywhere in the world.
She was staring off away from me again.
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” I said.
“I’ll be fine. Let me know what you find out.”
“I gotta tell ya, it could be quite some time before I find out anything.”
“I understand. Take care.”
I leaned down and touched her chin. “Hey. We’ll talk soon. Okay?”
“Sure.”