Trumpet of the Dead (Raven Trilogy Book 2)

by Kurt B. Dowdle

  Kamp, who’d been lost in a forlorn reverie, looked up to see his daughter’s face and looked into her luminous eyes, one brown, one blue. Her joy at seeing him put a lump in his throat. He scooped her up in his arms and held her high as she giggled.

  In a very earnest voice she said, “Where were you?”

  For the first time that day, Kamp smiled and said, “At church.”

  He set her down, and Shaw took her turn, putting her arms around Kamp. He pulled her to him, and she laid her head against his chest. Shaw inhaled deeply and caught a variety of scents, including dirt, sweat and gunpowder.

  “You don’t smell like church,” she said.

  As they ate the stew Shaw prepared, Kamp told her the story of the failed exorcism.

  AFTER THE MEAL, Kamp made a fire and played with Autumn until she grew tired. By the light of the fire, he read her a story as she fell asleep in a nest of blankets on the floor. Kamp felt a powerful relaxation overtaking him as well. He unlaced his boots, took them off and stretched out on the floor next to his daughter.

  He said, “Shaw, tell me a story.”

  From the kitchen, she said, “What story?”

  “Tell me what happened to that missionary. The Shakespeare one.”

  Kamp felt the dream machine starting, throwing pictures onto the back of his eyelids. He blinked his eyes hard and opened them to stay awake as Shaw walked back into the room and sat down next to him cross-legged. She twirled a forelock of his hair.

  “You don’t look long for this world.”

  “I saw their gravestones.”

  “Whose?”

  “Jonas and Rachel Bauer.”

  “Oh, my love.” She stroked his forehead with the back of her hand.

  He looked up at her. “Tell me what happened to the missionary.”

  “I think you already know what happened.”

  “The details,” he said. “I need to hear the details.”

  She cradled his head and rubbed the star-shaped scar at his left temple. “Now cracks a noble heart.”

  Kamp fought sleep. “Do you want to know what it said? Jonas Bauer’s stone?”

  “Of course.”

  It said, “Wer bis zum Ende ausharrt, wird gerettet werden.”

  “What does that mean?”

  His eyes were closed now. “He that shall endure unto the end will be saved. Shaw?”

  “Yes, love?”

  “Is that true?”

  The words trailed off as he said them, and Kamp became quiet. She watched the heavy, even rise and fall of his chest.

  “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” she said.

  HE WOKE UP ALONE on the floor. Red and orange embers in the fireplace warmed his feet, and the blanket Shaw had placed on him before going to bed warmed the rest of him. He lay on the floor for a few minutes, tensing various parts of his body to see where it hurt most.

  He began with his left arm, the one that had taken a bullet the year before, flexing the bicep and then the tricep. No pain there. Kamp then bent his right elbow, which had been broken in a leap from a moving train. The elbow was stiff and sore but not as sore as Kamp’s right hip, a casualty of the same unfortunate fall. The old injuries, Kamp knew, had been aggravated when he’d tackled the man with the rifle and landed on his right side. He exercised his muscles gently, feeling life come back into them.

  He reflected on the dream he’d been having just before he awoke. He’d been an observer in what he took to be the Garden of Eden, the moment of expulsion. In the dream Adam was Raymond Hinsdale and Eve the shame-faced Margaret. A snake with a million geometrical patterns and a multitude of colors on its skin slithered around their ankles. He couldn’t see its face.

  Kamp rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, banished the dream and stood up when he heard the familiar cries of the young bear outside. He laced up his boots and went out to find the animal pacing back and forth by the bulkhead doors. Even in the pre-dawn black, he could tell the bear had grown considerably since he’d seen her last and figured she must be approaching seventy or eighty pounds. He swung one of the doors open as quietly as the hinge would allow.

  He said, “Good morning, girl,” as the bear vanished down the stairs. Kamp knew he had hours until his family woke up and even longer until he could find anyone he needed to talk to in town. Kamp went to the back room of the house, where the mother bear’s hide remained salted and stretched between the two saw horses. By the light of a lantern, he removed the last bits of flesh and moved onto preparing the solution for pickling the hide. He drew water from the well behind the house into a barrel and added the chemicals in the correct amounts before placing the hide in the barrel to soak.

  By this time the dawn chorus was going full-throat, and he saw the first glow of morning. He put on a clean shirt and then his canvas work jacket, headed out the backdoor and up the mountain trail behind his house. He passed the clearing where he’d heard the rifle’s crack just before Shaw’s father held the baby aloft and spoke her true name for the first time. Kamp continued on to the oak tree close to the top, where he and his brothers played war, where he’d run when the word came that his oldest brother was dead.

  He knew that this was the tree the kid said he’d lived in for two years after he was killed. The kid said he’d seen the Reverend’s trysts here. How many people had met here and for what secret purposes, Kamp would never know. He tilted his head back, gazed up into the branches and back down at the ground. Nothing grew on the ground at the base of the tree. No flowers, no grass. He thought about the kid again. Why would anyone, even a ghost, live in a tree for two years?

  The shriek of the Black Diamond Unlimited pulled him from his reflections. His muscles and joints felt warm and probably as good as they’d feel all day. By the sound of the train whistle, he calculated he had ten minutes to get to the tracks and catch out. And it would take him just about that long to get there. So Kamp broke into a run.

  THE ROOSTER STOOD ON THE FENCE beside the henhouse, arched his neck and let fly with the first cock-a-doodle-do of the morning. Angus was already awake. In truth he’d barely slept since the girl trudged to his front door, clutching the rifle with her blue fingers. He’d fallen asleep easily enough but didn’t dream and soon awoke. Angus had gotten out of bed, lit the lantern, and with great care disassembled the gun Nyx brought with her.

  Angus could tell the gun had seen a great deal of use and had been expertly maintained. The Henry only needed a cleaning and some oil, and it was already up to Angus’s high standards. His hands moved quickly, no motion wasted, and the gun was back together by sunup.

  Nyx had brought no bullets, though. Angus would fix that soon, but not now. The rooster, meanwhile, had reached the height of his crowing. Angus figured the bird had to have woken up Nyx, but when he checked in on her, she wasn’t moving, save for the easy rise and fall of her ribcage. Angus peeled back the blankets where they covered her feet. Nyx’s toes appeared even blacker than the night before. He went to the kitchen, cooked oatmeal and biscuits and set them on a tray next to Nyx’s bed. He doused the cooking fire, closed the heavy wooden shutters on every window and locked them.

  Angus wriggled into the girdle he wore whenever he left his cabin. It covered his torso, flattening his breasts entirely. Over that, he put on a heavy flannel shirt. From a canister on the windowsill, Angus took a handful of bear fat and rubbed it in his hair. He combed it straight back, except the long forelock, which he combed upward. Angus laced up his heavy boots and put on his winter coat. He wrote a note and set it on the table next to Nyx’s breakfast. It read, “Back later.”

  He picked up the rifle he always kept by the front door and left, locking the front door behind him. Angus went to the fence where the rooster continued to crow.

  Angus said, “Kumm mitt mich, Charles,” and picked up the bird under his arm. He put the greatly discomfited rooster into the henhouse and locked that door, too. Angus studied his cabin’s chimney for a long mom
ent to see if any smoke still issued from it. None there.

  AS SOON AS THE TRAIN PULLED INTO THE SOUTH SIDE STATION, Kamp jumped down out of the boxcar and went searching for answers to the growing pile of questions. He went to Grigg’s office first to retrieve the files that the prosecutor said he’d provide. But the man wasn’t there, and his office door was locked. Through the office window, Kamp saw a stack of files and assumed they were the ones he wanted. He wrapped his jacket around his fist and cocked it back, preparing to smash the window.

  “Oh, don’t go to all that trouble.” Grigg called to him from the end of the hall. “I have the key.”

  Once inside the office, Grigg spread the files across the top of the otherwise empty desk. “What you asked for. They’re all here. Every scrap of paper related to each murder committed by one or more of the upstanding human beings in this fine city.”

  “For the past twelve years.”

  Grigg nodded slowly. “For the past twelve years. May I inquire as to the purpose of your researches?”

  Kamp ignored the question and began leafing through the first few files.

  Grigg said, “There’s none named Truax. I already checked.”

  “What about Tucks?”

  “Who?”

  “Onesimus Tucks.”

  “Not that I recall.”

  Kamp looked at Grigg for the first time. “Do you know anything about a murder of a runaway slave?”

  “I’m new in town. And slavery’s illegal, remember? If such a crime had been committed, it would have to have been a long time ago.”

  “I realize that.”

  “And if it were the killing of a runaway slave, it likely wouldn’t have even been considered a crime. Alas.”

  Grigg noticed the tension in his Kamp’s jaw, the dirt on his elbows, the furrow in his brow. “You’re frantic, disheveled. You’re hunting ghosts. They don’t exist.”

  Kamp rubbed his left temple with the first two fingers of his left hand. “What do you want, Grigg?” He continued riffling through the files.

  “What do I want?”

  “Yes, as payment.”

  Grigg closed the office door. “Information.”

  “Like what?”

  Grigg let the question hang until Kamp looked up to face him. “Where’s Nyx Bauer?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “You told me you wanted to expose the Order of the Raven. Dismantle it.”

  “That’s right, Black Feather as well,” Grigg said.

  “What does Nyx have to do with that?”

  “Two things. First, they think she’s plotting revenge against them for ordering the killing of her parents. And second, they believe she has more, or has access to more, information that could harm them.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “In any case I’ve learned that they’ve sent a hunter to find her. A professional.”

  “Who?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me.”

  13

  THE CROWING OF THE ROOSTER didn’t wake up Nyx, and neither did the sound of Angus cooking breakfast or locking the door or saddling up and riding away. All these sounds she expected and allowed to soothe her while she slept. But in the way that someone can listen to the outside world even while sleeping and never entirely rest, she remained vigilant.

  The sound that woke her was a soft prying sound, more of a request to enter than a demand. Nyx heard it at a window in the front room, the sound of a quiet visitor gently pulling on the shutter to see if it was unlocked. As soon as she located the source of the sound, Nyx’s heart began to thud. Someone was trying to get in, to break in. That the person was working so quietly troubled Nyx even more. Precise and persistent, she could tell.

  Nyx heard heels knocking on the porch as the person shifted from window to window. Her eyes went to the doorway of the bedroom and to the back of the cabin’s main room where a rack of gleaming rifles stood ready. Without making a sound, Nyx pulled back the blankets and swung her feet over the side of the bed. And without thinking, she tried to stand up. When her ruined feet hit the floor, Nyx had to bite down hard on her bottom lip to stifle the scream. Tears streamed down her face as she waited for the wave of pain to pass. Very slowly she lowered herself to the floor and began crawling on hands and knees. She heard nothing outside now but a raven’s slow croak. She focused on the gun rack, sizing up each weapon. She preferred rifles but assumed they were all unloaded, and she didn’t see any cartridges. She zeroed in on a 12-gauge shotgun, action open, on Angus’s work counter. Beside it lay two shells.

  Nyx heard a noise at the back door and saw the brass doorknob jiggling. If the lock gave way or if the person simply forced open the door, she knew she’d be a goner. She considered lunging for the shotgun and taking her chances in a firefight. She felt certain that the noise of making a move would give her away, though. And she didn’t trust her frostbitten fingers to do what she wanted. She decided to wait. The knob stopped moving. Nyx counted a breath, then another. If the person were coming, she thought, they were coming now. She tensed to spring, but the moment never arrived. She heard quiet boot heels on the porch outside once more, then again, then nothing.

  Nyx crawled to the window in the front room. Rising to her knees, she unlatched the shutter and pulled it slightly open. She saw a lone figure crossing the clearing, moving toward the creek. The figure wore a grey hunting cloak, hood up, and a rifle on a shoulder strap with brass fittings that reflected sunlight. She could see that a scope sat atop the rifle. Even though Nyx hadn’t made a sound and even though the shutter was barely open, at the moment she looked outside, the figure turned to look back at the cabin. Due to the hood, Nyx couldn’t see a face, and after a moment, the figure disappeared into the woods.

  KAMP SAT HUNCHED over his stack of files in the library of the college where he’d studied when he returned from the war. At the time, he’d needed to find silence and solitude to let the slow healing commence. He’d always gone up to the desk by way of a spiral staircase at the back corner on the building’s third floor, a spot walled in by ancient tomes and with a view all the way to the stacks of Native Iron and beyond that, the river. Often times, he’d sit back in his chair and let the conflicts of men play before his mind’s eye, those he’d taken part in, those he’d observed and those he couldn’t stop imagining.

  He fought now to focus on the task at hand, though he thought of what Grigg said, the part about how he was chasing ghosts of Abel Truax; of Nyx Bauer, the girl who’d died the moment a madman invaded her sleep; and of himself, the boy he was before men in blue wool uniforms appeared to deliver the news, the boy who’d buried his red hat. Sitting, staring at the shelves of books, Kamp tumbled backward in his memory, through years of empty searches, lost causes, fresh graves.

  But at this desk he’d begun to try to live a life in the present, and here, apparently, he was trying to do it again. Each file before him was written up in the same way, more or less. Name, cause of death, and a few brief comments. Kamp had asked for twelve years’ worth of murder files, and Grigg had said he’d given him all of them. He counted them now and found there were nine files. Kamp knew that he himself had killed several men and knew of at least eight more killings, including the murders of Jonas and Rachel Bauer. Yet none of the homicides Kamp had committed or knew about appeared in the official records. Nothing about Roy Kunkle or the others blown to pieces in the coal mine. Nothing about the shotgun murder of the district attorney Philander Crow or the assassination of the coal boss Silas Ownby. All invisible to the public, all officially lost.

  From what he could tell, all the files in front of him, the cases officially ruled as homicides, could easily have been suicides. There were three deaths by hanging, five single gunshot wounds and a drowning. None of the cases had been solved, no arrests made. Kamp reflected on his year as Bethlehem’s first-ever police detective. He recalled that whenever he’d attempted to investigate an incident as murder,
he was quickly and persistently dissuaded from doing so.

  Nevertheless, he was certain that none of the cases before him could have been a West Virginian named Abel Truax or a freed slave named Onesimus Tucks, because all of the murder victims in the official files were women.

  Kamp knew the police files could offer him nothing, fragmented and misleading as they were. But he knew of another source of information, a much more detailed, comprehensive accounting of the dead. He stuffed the murder files into his haversack and departed his sanctuary. As he left the library, he reflected once more on the topic of chasing ghosts, wondering if, since he returned from war, he’d been capable of doing anything else. He hurried down South Mountain to the mayhem of Fourth Street at midday and angled across town to the building that housed the morgue.

  In his time as detective, he’d learned that there was no process, no event more dependable than death, and no official more consistent or efficient in cataloguing death than the coroner, A.J. Oehler. Kamp relied on the cool quiet of Oehler’s morgue, and the sound of the coroner’s pencil scratching out the corporeal details but never noting the dreams of the dead.

  He saw Oehler there now, inspecting a body, taking notes. Oehler had a wispy fringe of grey hair around an otherwise hairless, pink head, giving him an appearance not unlike a Teutonic vulture.

  Kamp cleared his throat.

  Without looking up, Oehler said, “Oh, I know it’s you. I’m just not paying attention.”

  “Nice to see you, too.”

  “What do you want?”

  “How long you been in this job, A.J.?”

  “I’m busy, Kamp.”

  “Were you already on the job back in, say, sixty-one?”

  “Your point, please.” The coroner covered one body and moved to the next, pulling back the sheet to reveal an old man with a caved-in skull. Oehler resumed the note-taking.

  “I have to find someone who died, probably eleven years ago, a man in his thirties. Died from a blow to the back of his head, or the back of his neck. Let me look at your files.”