Moonshadows

by Julie Weston

  His heart tripping like a hammer, Rosy stepped over to the body. No friend, no enemy in there now. He managed to sling the dead weight—no lie there—up and over his shoulder. This time, the belt buckle cut into his neck and he had to shift the body, nearly falling over. Where was the dog? Maybe the girl hadn’t noticed the dead man.

  “Who is it?”

  The girl’s whispered question startled Rosy. He almost dropped his burden. Again he waited, afraid he’d burp or sneeze or breathe too loud. He closed his eyes. It didn’t matter; it was black inside his head and out. The bed rustled and all was quiet again.

  One slow step after another, Rosy crept back to the door. He groaned when he remembered his boots were waiting. What in hell was he going to do with the body? He gently pulled the door shut and dumped his burden in the snow. By the time he had his boots on, he had an idea. The dark of night held a different quality, not yet light, but anticipating it. He would have to hurry.

  CHAPTER 4

  Boots pounding on the porch and Rosy’s gravelly voice wakened Nell. Moonshine didn’t move a whisker until she threw off the blanket and sat up.

  “You in there, girl?” Light shone through the side window and filled the cabin when Rosy pushed the door.

  “Here I am.” She never thought she’d be glad to see the grumpy old miner, but his split face looked sweet to her. Her head ached, as if it had been pounded on during the night. She slipped the axe under the pillow.

  “If you ain’t a carcass of trouble.”

  Another man followed Rosy into the room. His tall silhouette filled the doorway, a cowboy hat shading his face, and he moved with long, springy strides. “We’re pleased you are all right. Goldie Bock worried, but when Rosy said you were at the Last Chance, I knew you would survive the night.” Each word was carefully enunciated, different from any of the accents she’d heard in Chicago. He glanced toward the fireplace. “You found matches. That’s good. The night turned cold. Rosy used a bottle of whiskey to unfreeze his joints.” He laughed, a pleasant, friendly sound.

  “Moonshine here provided most of the warmth—”

  She stopped, remembering the dead man, and turned to the fireplace and the couch. “What—?” She walked around the couch while the two men watched. The body was gone. Did she dream him? No, of course not. Moonshine tilted his head, looked at her, and looked at the men.

  “Lose something?” Rosy stomped over to the sink, pumped some water out, and touched the stovetop with a wet finger. “Any food left in here?” He poked through the cans on the shelf. “Liquor’s all gone.” He fondled the jars.

  Could someone have come in during the night and taken the body away? Was he not really dead and he’d walked out on his own? She knew he had been dead. No live person had an ice mask closing off his nose and eyes. When she had pulled and then propped him up, he’d been dead, dead, dead.

  The old miner’s activities gave Nellie a moment to push down her confusion. Rosy already thought she was stupid. The other man might think she dreamed everything. She hadn’t. But where was the body?

  “I’m Nellie Burns.” She held out her hand. He didn’t know what to do with it, then, belatedly, shook it with a warm, firm grip.

  “Rosy said this place was abandoned, but here’s this dog.”

  “This here is what we got for a sheriff in the county, Charlie Azgo. One of them Basques I was telling you about and nobody can’t say his last name. Goldie insisted he come with me.”

  The sheriff removed his hat to reveal dark eyes, olive skin, a Roman-type nose, long earlobes, and black hair down his back. With many small wrinkles, his face looked older than his robust frame, as if he’d spent his life looking into the sun. Nell wondered if he had been a sheepherder. An officer of the law laughing at someone drinking. Prohibition indeed was no problem in Idaho.

  “I didn’t get back to you, Rosy, because the strap on my snowshoe broke and the moon was going down. I decided to hike here instead, and found Moonshine—”

  “Alone?” the sheriff asked.

  “That’s what I can’t understand.” She sat on the couch. How much to tell? But this was the sheriff. “There was a tapping at the window—”

  “The ghost,” Rosy said, as if he knew one. He tromped to the fireplace. “Where’d it go? Up the chimney?” He cackled at his joke. “Musta dreamed it.”

  “I didn’t dream it. There was a man here.” Nell glanced toward the door she hadn’t opened. The sheriff followed her glance and crossed to open it. A stairway led to the second floor. He shouted, “Hey, up there!”

  Moonshine ran to the door and up the stairs, barking. He put up the kind of racket Nell would have expected when she fell into the room, or, later, if someone had come and taken the body away. Then she remembered her dreams. Both men followed the dog, making enough noise to scare anyone up there. No one could have crossed the front porch without making the same kind of noise as when Rosy and Charlie came in, waking her and the dog. Their boots pounded back and forth, causing dust to sift down from the ceiling. Nell walked to the stairway and looked up. She stepped back to the kitchen area and saw a door to the outside.

  Boots clomped down the stairs. “Nothing up there,” Rosy proclaimed. The dog padded after them and raced out the front door.

  “No one there now,” Sheriff Azgo said, “but someone has been, smoking cigarettes.”

  The implications of what he said made Nell’s skin crawl. A dead man in the living room. A live one upstairs, waiting. And all the while, she had been below, taking a photo, watering and feeding the dog, sleeping in the bed. Why hadn’t Moonshine made a ruckus?

  “There was a man here, Sheriff. But he’s gone now. I don’t understand.” To cover her confusion, she picked up her jacket and took out her own cigarettes. The sheriff watched while she lit one, his forehead creasing.

  Rosy snorted. “You can’t understand ghosts, now can you?”

  “Those were your cigarettes, Miss Burns?” the sheriff asked.

  “Mine?” She realized what she had done and snuffed the cigarette out on the rocks near the fireplace. “No. I didn’t even look for stairs. I forgot this place had two stories. I was too tired to explore anything last night. Sheriff—” she said, and then Moonshine came back into the cabin carrying a sock. He brought it to her and dropped it at her foot with a clunk. She picked it up and realized there was a rock almost the size of a baseball tied in the toe. A dog toy. “No, Moonie, I can’t play now.” She turned back to the sheriff. “I came to the house because I thought I saw someone tapping on the window. It turned out to be this dog. But there was a man on the floor. Frozen to death.”

  Rosy and the sheriff looked at each other. She half expected them to make the crazy sign.

  “You don’t believe me.” She walked over to her camera. “I have a photograph.”

  “If there was a man, where did he go?” The sheriff didn’t ask rudely, but disbelief colored his words and the corner of his mouth twitched.

  Rosy laughed. “Let’s get outta here,” he said. “I gotta get back to town. There’s another storm comin’ in. I can smell it. Where’s that snowshoe? I’ll fix it good enough to get you to the road.” He headed out to her sled, mumbling about women smoking, seeing ghosts, and the world coming to an end.

  “I’ll need to pack up my gear,” Nell said. More than one man had laughed at her in the past few years. Besides, she did have a photograph to prove it. A man who froze, then thawed and walked out, but only after smoking cigarettes in the upstairs of an abandoned house. Or maybe he smoked the cigarettes first and then froze to death.

  The sheriff picked up her tripod and pack after Nell filled it with her camera and film case. “Be very careful,” she warned. “That’s my livelihood in there.” He used two hands to convey the pack to the sled and watched while she secured it. By then, Rosy had attached a new strap to the snowshoe and waited to help her into it. The sheriff’s manners were rubbing off on him.

  “C’mon, c’mon.” No, not m
anners. Rosy was in a hurry.

  So was she, but she decided she wanted to check the house again. Moonshine stood in the doorway. “Wait. I’ll be right back. I left . . . my cigarettes.” The sheriff gave her an indecipherable look.

  Inside, Nell glanced around. There was still no body. She walked to the door between the beds and opened it. The hinges worked without a sound. The rumpled bed reminded her of how neat it had been when she arrived, so she smoothed out the blanket, felt the axe under the pillow, but left it there. The dog picked up the toy and brought it over. “Not now.” She grabbed at it and he pranced backwards and dropped it, waiting for her to throw it. She stuffed it in her jacket pocket, then realized she had crushed her cigarettes. Maybe that was why the sheriff looked at her so strangely. He probably saw her replace the pack. Damn.

  “Get a move on!”

  Nell rolled her eyes and left the cabin. With her snowshoes fastened, she followed behind Rosy and the sheriff, the latter with the sled tied to his waist. Her awkward bowlegged walk of the night before had improved, although she still couldn’t move as rapidly as the two men. The dog brought up the rear.

  A second night of photographing was out of the question. Rosy certainly wasn’t in the mood for another evening’s foray, and Nell felt as weary as she’d ever been. Flakes drifted down as they snowshoed back toward the road in the trampled path. Gray clouds painted the scene in gloom, nothing like the magical black and brilliant white of the night.

  While she walked, the mechanics of developing negatives in a makeshift darkroom took over her thoughts. The bathroom at the boarding house should be dark enough. She hoped the water came from a well and not the hot springs piped into town from the source at Warm Springs where a spa stood. The minerals in the water might be medicinal and good for ailments, but it wouldn’t be good for photography. The thought of a good long soak in hot springs appealed to her. Muscles she never knew existed ached along her legs and in her buttocks, although pulling the sled hadn’t seemed so difficult the night before.

  Moonshine ran back and forth between the two men and Nell, an ever-widening space. The weight of the rock-sock in her pocket reminded her it was there. She threw it for Moonie to retrieve. He barked and grinned at her, galumphed through the snow, retrieved the toy, and brought it to her to throw again. “Good boy!” She tried to pull it from his mouth. He pulled back. “Drop it!” This he promptly did. Who had trained him so well? This time, as she picked up the toy, she noticed a smear of black and brown on the end, then tried to look in the dog’s mouth to see if the rock had scraped the animal.

  “Goddamn it, will you move along, girl?”

  “Coming.” Nell stuck the toy in her pocket again. Snow was falling thicker and faster. The two men ahead of her looked hazier and hazier. The wind picked up. She turned for a silent goodbye. Indeed, Last Chance Ranch was an abandoned place, and behind the curtain of snow, it looked more and more like a ghostly image floating in the distance.

  With her next visit, she would come with food, a lantern, matches. She wished she could circle the house and see what tracks there were in the back. A brave thought after her dismaying night. With another snowfall, any trace of activity might be gone. But something would be there. Ghosts did not exist. Somehow that body was taken away, even if neither she nor the dog had seen what did it. Who, she meant. Seen who did it.

  When Nellie reached her room, she took the sock out of her pocket and placed it on her dresser. Then she carefully unpacked her camera, film case, and the three wrapped film holders. These were precious. Two of the sheets of film might hold her future, and the third—it could affect her future too. Art and money.

  In the kitchen, she approached Mrs. Bock. “Will it be all right to develop my film in the bathroom?” Goldie was her first name, Nell remembered. She wondered where the name had come from as there was nothing gold about her landlady. It sounded more like a dance hall name. Surely, Mrs. Bock had never been one of those women. She was too motherly.

  And, as usual, she was baking. She slapped dough back and forth in her hands and then pounded it on the countertop. “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll be setting up some trays with chemicals in them and I’ll need complete darkness, so I’ll have to close off the door.” When Mrs. Bock didn’t answer, she hurried on. “I thought of my room, but I need water and the windows are too difficult to make light-tight.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind if you use the bathroom, but the men didn’t work today, so you can’t close it off now. And old Henry drinks ’bout a gallon of coffee ever’ afternoon. He’ll be needing the facilities.” Slap, punch. “Can you wait ’til ever’body’s in bed?”

  Nellie’s shoulders sagged. “That will be fine. Thank you.”

  “Miss Burns, maybe you could do an errand for me while you’re awaiting?” She didn’t wait for Nell’s answer. “Run over to the store and pick up a haunch of mutton? I’m stewing it for dinner tonight, and I didn’t get away before I had to begin the rosemary and garlic bread here.” After another slap, Mrs. Bock looked up. “You had me worried, Miss Burns. An easterner like you oughtn’t to be out in snow at night. Suppose you froze to death!”

  The market smelled of blood and fat and Nellie wasn’t sure how long she’d last before she threw up her lunch. She tried breathing through her mouth and holding her handkerchief to her nose. “I’m here to pick up the mutton for Mrs. Bock,” she told an aproned man behind the high counter. Dark spatters on his soiled apron reminded her of the sock on her dresser.

  “You’re that girl staying there,” the man said. “Picture-taker, I heard. What kind of pictures do you take?”

  “I take portraits, mostly, but here, I’m taking scenic photos.” In her own ears, she sounded self-conscious and amateur.

  “Do you now?” He took a huge piece of meat out of the case and began wrapping it in white paper. “The wife’s been after me to get a picture took. Says we need something for pros-teri—the kids to have. No time to waste driving down to Twin Falls. Could you do it here?”

  The request surprised Nellie. Portraits were part of the past she’d left. On the other hand, maybe she could make some money to replenish her nest egg. “I might be able to.”

  The man hefted the wrapped haunch and Nell nearly dropped it, it was so much heavier than she expected. “I’d need the proper film and lights,” she said, trying to balance the package and at the same time think how she might accommodate the butcher, “and a place and more customers so I could cover the cost—.” This potential customer certainly wouldn’t want to hear her business uncertainties.

  “The train comes here three times a week, Miss. You could call down to Twin and see that what you need gets put on the train. And I bet I could rustle up some more pictures for you.”

  “Thank you.” She meant it. This opened up new avenues. “I’m Nell Burns from Chicago.” She balanced the meat with one hand against her hip and stretched out the other, then realized his were covered with blood. He wiped them on his apron and enclosed her hand in two slabs of flesh.

  “I’m just Bert the Butcher. You come ’round again about your order and I’ll tell the station agent to put it with mine for delivery here.” The warmth of his paws and his words made Nellie feel good all the way back to the boarding house. “Here’s your haunch, Mrs. Bock. My heavens, it’s heavy.” The kitchen smelled of baking bread. She could sit there and sniff until dinnertime.

  “The sheriff was here,” Mrs. Bock said. “He wants to talk to you?” The question in her statement bespoke her curiosity. “Wanted to see your room, so I sent him up to wait, but he left not more’n two shakes ago. And the dog’s been howling outside. You’ll have to do something about that. Can’t be disturbing my roomers.”

  Nell was appalled that Mrs. Bock would let anyone in her room. Then, Moonshine howled and snuffled at the door. “I’ll take Moonie to my room. He’ll be quiet there.”

  “I’m not having that animal traipsing through here with his dirty feet.”


  The floor was marked with as many footprints as usual, from the men’s boots, from everyone traipsing in and out. “If I wipe them off, would that be all right? He won’t wake anyone up if he has a place to be. I’m sure of it.”

  Mrs. Bock grumped a bit. “I’ll think about it.”

  Before the landlady could grump anymore, Nell took a rag to the back porch, wiped Moonshine’s paws clean, and he followed her upstairs. In the room, she folded the rug up in a corner by the bed, so the dog would have a place to sleep. He padded around, his toenails clicking, put his feet up on the dresser and sniffed, dropped down, turned in three circles on the rug, and then lay down on the bare floor.

  “Here, Moonie. I have your toy for you.” Nell went back to the dresser. Her film case was there. The rock-sock was gone. First a body and now a dog toy. Was that why the sheriff left in a hurry?

  CHAPTER 5

  Nellie locked herself in the boarding house bathroom after everyone else had gone to bed. A single electric bulb over the mirror provided light for her tasks. Her first order of business was to develop negatives. The bathroom was sizable with claw-footed tub, pedestal sink, toilet, and space for a huge old bureau with drawers marked by room numbers, one for each of the eight bedrooms in the house. Her number was five. The top of the bureau was large enough to hold her trays, and she used a step stool to comfortably reach it.

  The rag rug plugged the gap under the door. Her black cloth served as a curtain over the door frame so that no light leaked in at the edges. The bathroom had no windows. The film itself was flammable and its smoke poisonous. The usual procedure during developing was to have a bucket of sand ready in case of fire to douse any flames, which of course, would ruin the film, too. She intended to be careful. As she pounded small nails into the door frame to hold up the cloth, she was startled by a voice on the other side.

  “What are you doing, Miss Burns?” A woman’s voice was low and intense. It couldn’t be Mrs. Bock.