by Julie Weston
A plethora of men, Nellie thought. Is that like a covey of quail? A gaggle of geese? Or a band of sheep? She thought of Gwynn Campbell. Having no father seemed not such a bad thing anymore. Were she and Lily alike? She removed her dress and slip, glad to be rid of them, and pulled on the trousers and shirt, then turned up the cuffs and sleeves so that she wasn’t wading in extra material. The belt from her dress pulled the pants tight around her waist.
Her hair frizzed in every direction, but re-fastening it in back would smooth it out. From her bag, she pulled a brush, and the envelope Mrs. Bock had handed her dropped out. Inside, Nellie found bills, twenty ones. Money from the Ah Kees, but why? For the photos? These must be payment—far too much. Still, she could order trousers from Sears, purchase more film and paper, save part of the money for an enlarger, and still have enough to buy an Ever-Ready flashlight for another venture out at night. She planned to return to the cabin one more time. Some clue was missing and she needed to find it. It might lead her to the murderer and to safety. More photographs at twilight were part of her plan, too.
The morning felt used up by the time she entered the darkroom with her negative pouch in hand, but it was still quite early. Just as she knocked on the door, heeding the Do Not Enter sign in case Jacob was in the middle of printing a photo, she heard voices inside.
“Where is she?” A woman’s voice.
“In the bathroom changing. Ah, there she is.” The door opened.
Inside, Jacob and his fiancée stood very close together and, judging by the deep flush that came to Emmaline’s face, Nellie was certain they had been in each other’s arms. So much for the plethora of men.
“You two met at the hospital, did you not?”
Nellie nodded. “It is nice to see you again.” she said. There was clearly no room for three people in the darkroom, so she stood in the doorway, not knowing what else to say or do.
“You look like a man,” Emmaline said. “How odd.”
“We have work to do, so you must leave us to it, Emmaline,” Jacob said. “I will see you for supper at your parents’ home. Thank you for coming by. It is always so sweet of you to be concerned about me.” He walked her to the front door, while Nellie closed the darkroom door, shutting them out. She did not want to watch them kissing goodbye. The feel of Jacob’s arm around her shoulders was still strong.
The moonshadow photos were her first order of business. Her paying business be damned. The portraits would keep. Enlarging the art photos required new test strips and the manipulation she had discussed with Jacob challenged her. Then she printed the negatives from her portrait sessions, including the photo of Ah Kee’s wound, and developed the film of the miners and the elk seen at Last Chance Ranch. While her own work dried, she turned to the exposed film from Jacob’s portrait sessions of the day before.
“Here are your prints and negatives, Jacob.” Nellie wanted to please him. “And I have my enlargements, too. Would you like to see them?”
“Already?” He checked his pocket watch. “Yes, let us look and then find some dinner. Do you think the innkeeper would begrudge me a noon meal?”
If she did, Nellie would pay her separately. “Why don’t I telephone and let her know we’re coming?”
On the large front desk, Nellie and Jacob studied the photos. The white smoke, if that’s what it was, still was not clearly coming from the chimney, but it hovered over the house. “Maybe it is a small cloud or a string of fog,” Jacob suggested. “There is an otherwordly feel to this photograph, Nell. The movement of the stars emphasizes the strangeness. It should become the first of your Idaho portfolio. And sending it to that group in San Francisco for their gallery is worth the effort and even the possible rejection. Now let us see the second one.”
In full daylight, the dark blob in the trees behind the wheat-grass took a definite form. It was no wild animal, and Nell knew instantly it was a man and who it was.
“I think the dark form is a man,” Jacob said. His well-kept index finger outlined the blob. “See? Here is a head wearing a hat, two arms, and two legs. They’re all akimbo it seems, but it’s a man. I wonder what he was doing out there?” He frowned. “I wonder if you were wise to explore in the wilderness by yourself at night.”
“I was safe, although I certainly didn’t know he—anyone—was in those trees.” She picked up the magnifying glass and peered again at the figure. Only one man walked as if he were a puppet on a string, and that was Rosy Kipling. Her heart sank. She’d suspected for some time that it was probably Rosy who moved the iceman. He was out there; it was his cabin. But she still could not believe Rosy had killed Three-Fingered Jack, then moved him, cut off his arm, and stripped him of his belt. Why would Rosy get a doctor to help him and then do him in? There must be another answer.
CHAPTER 21
Before she left Twin Falls, Nellie wanted to talk to the sheep rancher. His words continued to nag her. Maybe he could help her find out what happened. And she’d tell the sheriff, of course. It was early evening and Nellie and Jacob had called it a day, he because he was meeting his fiancée, and she because she had finished what she had wanted to, including another set of negatives of the moonshadows, which she left with Jacob. She could pack up to catch the connection for the train in the morning. One day a week, it left at eight a.m. Sharp.
Mrs. Olsen told Nellie that Gwynn Campbell lived near the falls. She offered up her husband as driver. “He’s not doing a thing. Just reading. Want to go now?”
Nellie and Franklin set off in the dark, dry evening along a paved road, he as quiet as usual. A light shone on the wide front veranda of a graceful mansion. Several windows were lit upstairs and down. Would he welcome her or try to bash her head in? “Do you want to wait, Franklin, or maybe you’d come in with me?” She had told neither Mrs. Olsen nor Franklin about the morning’s set-to.
He pulled out his flashlight and a book, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and smiled. “I’ll wait, Miss Burns, if you don’t mind. I’m at a good spot. If you need me, just holler or flash the lights or something.”
A Mexican maid answered the doorbell and said the old man was in bed, not feeling well, but nevertheless led Nellie across a marbled entry hall, up a sweeping staircase, along a carpeted hallway to a closed door. The maid tapped, went in, announced “Señorita Burns” in a soft, sweet voice, then left Nellie to manage by herself.
Even without his sheepskin coat and cowboy hat, Gwynn Campbell hardly seemed diminished, sitting against three pillows in a large canopied bed in a room with a row of windows black with night. His skin no longer looked leathered, just wrinkled and worn out above a couple days’ growth of salt and pepper beard.
“Won’t say I’m sorry if that’s what you’re here for, Lassie.” He coughed and covered his mouth with a white handkerchief with lace embroidery, such a non-cowboy, non-farmer scrap of material that Nellie wondered where a Mrs. Campbell was. No one ever mentioned her.
Nellie took the chair beside the old Scot’s head. She ached all over. “What did you mean when you said Ah Kee was already dead? Did you see him?”
A stubborn expression and a slight tinge of color improved Gwynn’s face. “None of your business. You and your damned pictures.”
“It is my business. I found a dead man in the cabin and I found a dead man in the snow. The second one was Ah Kee. I’ve photographed both. I want to know what happened. If I’m wrong about your killing the Chinese doctor, I’m sorry.” Accusing this weakened old man of murder didn’t faze Nellie. He’d attacked her. “You led me to believe you might have.”
“How’d I do that?”
“After Jacob was hurt. You swore at all Chinese and said one killed your daughter. Maybe you wanted to get even.” When he still looked mulish, she added in a low tone, “And maybe you were entitled to.”
Grief replaced truculence. “Entitled I was. I went out to that hellhole because I knew he kept his drugs upstairs . . . in her bedroom.” Tears slid from the outer corners of eac
h eye. “Saw him dose her myself. Figured he’d want his opium some time. I got word he was going out to the ranch. I followed. Dead already. Some damn fool cheated me.” His voice strengthened and the sag in his cheeks lifted. Then he laid back and wiped his eyes.
“Dead how? Where?”
“Conked on his head in the snow and dead as a squashed bug.” He mumbled a few more words, ending with “. . . damned sheepherder.” He pulled the sheet up to his neck, his strength wilting in front of her. Nellie’s remembered image of Ah Kee was of a gentle-faced Buddha, swathed in brilliant silk clothes, lying like a statue. Who else was he referring to?
“Didn’t seem so evil then,” Gwynn said. “Red blood just like the rest of us.” He seemed to plead with Nellie. “Couldn’t do a thing, could I? I puked up my lunch in the snow there—back of his head was bashed in—and left.”
“Blood? I didn’t see any blood.” Thank heavens for that. Would the snow have wiped off the blood?
“Snowed since then. Good thing about snow is it covers all sorts of sins.”
What other sins was the old man thinking of? Maybe not murder, but could she truly believe him? She knew so little about Mr. Campbell, except his own nattering about revenge and his attack on her. The sheriff would have to put it all together.
“Who killed Three-Fingered Jack?”
Gwynn either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore her. “That Chinaman was as dead as my Lily.” Some of the anger returned to his eyes. “Hope he hurt as much as she did.”
“I suspect his wife and son hurt as much as you do.”
“What do you mean?” But he knew, she saw. “Jack Smith, that three-fingered jackanapes, was a good for nothing, lying, cheating, son-of-a-whore. Killed my sheep and that’s same as stealing money. Left a band in a corral up in the Boulders with no water and no food. Stole god knows what-all from the mine up at Triumph. Then smoked it all up.” His lip curled. “Deserved whatever he got.”
“You didn’t kill him?”
“Got murder on your mind, don’t you?” He closed his eyes. The ordeal earlier in the day had weakened him, and her anger seeped away.
Nellie pushed herself out of her chair and to the door, then turned back because he was mumbling again or perhaps he was dreaming and talking to the shades. “Maybe I did cause the whole sorry shebang.”
Back in the automobile, Nellie turned to Franklin. “What happened to Lily, Mr. Campbell’s daughter?”
For the space of a mile, he said nothing. Then he pulled the auto to the side of the road and faced Nellie. “Which time?”
“There was more than one ‘time’?”
“Lily loved everybody and everybody loved Lily. Got lots of people in trouble, including her. Like the time she ran away with Gwynn’s sheepherder, Charlie Asteguigoiri. Gwynn caught up with them inYellowstone Park where they were camping out. Mad, I’ve never seen anybody so mad as—”
“Sheriff Azgo? He worked for the Campbells? She ran away with him?” It was hard to believe that taciturn man would have done something so adventurous. And yet, she, too, had been drawn to him. “No wonder Gwynn was angry.”
“Not Gwynn. Lily. She swore she’d get her revenge on her father, and in a way, she did. Married a dirt-poor, twice-her-age miner and wouldn’t talk to her father again. Not even when she nearly died having that first boy of theirs.” Franklin’s voice was soft in the darkness, almost as if he, too, had loved Lily.
Mr. Campbell’s mumblings came back to her. Did he think the sheriff killed Ah Kee? If he thought her photos would prove the sheriff’s guilt, that would explain why Mr. Campbell might have been anxious to get into the darkroom.
“That’s the irony. The sheepherder rose in the community. Lily’s husband, Ross something-or-other, worked the mines, became a drinker, although I understand for a while he did all right.” Franklin shifted back around to face the steering wheel. “That cancer ate him up as surely as it ate up Lily. He’s just been doing it slower, I hear—pickling himself.”
The night wrapped itself around the auto. Nellie wanted it to protect her and Rosy, but she guessed it was too late for that. “Why does Gwynn insist that the Chinese killed Lily? I don’t understand.”
Franklin uttered a huge sigh. “When Lily nearly died the first time, that old Celestial, Ah Kee, was called in and he dosed her up with laudanum and some other Chinese remedy is what we heard. Gwynn thought she was being poisoned. Then when she got sick again, she wouldn’t let anyone see her, except her children, her husband, the Celestial, and Goldie Bock. Goldie never told anybody either, until after Lily died. According to her, Ah Kee kept Lily alive as long as he could, kept her from going mad with pain, until he finally eased her out of her agony. Who’s to know?” He started the motor going, shifted gears, and pulled back into the street.
The auto rumbled along and Nellie felt tears gather. She hadn’t known Lily, but she did know Rosy and Goldie.
“Where was the sheriff when all this was happening?”
“Doing his job, I suppose. Goldie told Mabel that he cracked once. Said his God would wreak vengeance in His own good time. That he didn’t have to. We didn’t know who he thought should be revenged upon. Rosy, maybe? Gwynn? The Chinese doctor? You know, those Catholics have some strange ideas sometimes.”
Nellie knew nothing about organized religion. She thought most religions had some strange ideas, but she wasn’t going to pursue it with Franklin. “And the boys?”
“Lily’s husband took them East and came back without them. Goldie knows where they are. She gets letters.” He slowed the auto as they approached the Clarion Inn.
“Thank you for taking me to see Mr. Campbell. I wished I’d known all of this before I went into the house.” Maybe it was better she hadn’t known. She might not have been as blunt as she had been. The stories whirled in her head during the night and she rose in the morning low in spirits and feeling unwell. Heavy clouds and rain mixed with snow didn’t help.
Satisfied with her work in the darkroom and armed with prints of her new customers, as well as prints of the daylight photos at Last Chance Ranch and the miners, Nellie caught the train in the morning. Jacob Levine had been more than helpful, even to the point of suggesting another way to sell photos: make contact prints on postcard stock, a fairly quick and easy process. Then her customers could send their photographs to relatives and friends outside the area. She once again studied the photo of the wheatgrass, the aspens, and the dark shadow of Rosy in the trees. He seemed such a simple man, and it was hard to think of him skulking along through the trees in the dark while she was working away. Still, the moon had been so bright, any number of activities could have been carried on in its light.
She remembered something the day when she had talked Henry into taking her back to Last Chance Ranch. As she met him after her misadventures, she’d seen a figure among the trees to the north. A crouched figure.
Another image: Mrs. Smith crouching low and scuttling along the hallway of the boarding house, imitating the man who stole her negatives. Always, she had associated Sammy with that theft, and if it were he, then he might have been the person in the trees. What a leap, she thought, from Mrs. Smith imitating someone to making that thief the person north of town. Empty landscapes no longer were what they seemed. Was that also true of all the people she’d met? The sheriff. Rosy. Gwynn Campbell. Three-Fingered Jack Smith. Was Mrs. Smith related? Everyone seemed to have a secret.
Who had been at the cabin in the day or two before Nellie went? Sheriff Azgo, Gwynn Campbell, Ah Kee, Three-Fingered Jack, Rosy Kipling. It sounded like a convention. How did they manage not to bump into each other? Or, more to the point, which man was a murderer? Two of those names were dead. Of the other three, Gwynn said he was not. She could hardly believe the sheriff would murder someone. And Rosy—it didn’t fit. Her head ached with true and false names and shadows.
Photography held no secrets one couldn’t learn. It showed a world and people in black and white. And yet, there could
be secrets. Her photo of the moon over the ranch was a double exposure. The light color of the river rock stones came from manipulating the enlarged image. Timing, too, had an impact on what the viewer would see in the photos: more or less light, blurred or crisp lines. She would need to know much better all the people involved in this mystery to gain insight into their secrets, to shed light where some might not want it shed.
The train slowed on its entry into Hailey. Why not deliver the photos to the Ah Kees now? Nell separated them, her enlargements, and her negative sleeves from the rest of her prints. Before she could change her mind, she arranged with the porter to off-load her supplies in Ketchum and then disembarked onto the snowy pavement with no idea how she would get herself from Hailey to Ketchum by nightfall. She looped the strap of her camera pack over her shoulder, and walked the three blocks to Main Street, a longer trek than she had expected.
Hailey’s main thoroughfare, the highway that headed north to Ketchum and south to Shoshone and Twin Falls, was wide enough for a horse and buggy to make a U-turn. Now that few horses and buggies populated any town, the street width diminished the size of the automobiles that motored along it. The clink of tire grippers and the exhaust smell of oil and gasoline sharpened her impression of busy commerce. A pang of regret rose and fell over her decision to stay in Ketchum. Never mind, she could always change her mind. A move ten miles south would be considerably easier to contemplate than the move from Chicago to Idaho, although going through a process of finding a place to live, meeting more new people, perhaps finding, too, greater resistance to setting herself up in business, loomed as obstacles.
But first she had to find the Ah Kees. Hailey during a dazzling sunny day looked nothing like Hailey on a dark and stormy night.
At the Clarion Inn in Twin Falls, Nellie had handwritten several medium-sized cards announcing: