Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2)

by C. K. Crigger

  “Did you kill my father?” He voiced his query in a firm, level way I might have thought indicative of apathy, if I hadn’t known better. “That’s one of the things they laughed about. They said you were a decent lay, but a dangerous woman to marry, as my father must have discovered. As did your second husband. And your third.”

  Beatrix’s eyes glittered in her stark, white face. “No one ever dared say such a thing aloud!”

  “No. They whispered their suspicions in my ear. And I believed them.” As he waited for her reply, August’s voice sounded quite expressionless, which was an illusion I saw through.

  That’s one thing about being an invisible spectator to a history already played out; the actors can’t hide the truth of their actions, their emotional anguish, or their fears from me. I can’t say I enjoyed the vicarious privilege at any time, and this was worse than most. Had it been possible, I’d have urged August to go from here, right this minute, and leave his mother to whatever rewards her vice brought. But my role was non-participating in this scene. I couldn’t speak to him. My sole purpose was to watch and to listen.

  “Did you?” he whispered. “Did you kill my father?”

  He walked right into that one. Beatrix was no fool—as a horridly bad example of a human being to begin with, she must have been the most execrable excuse for a mother I’ve ever heard of, in this time or any other. But not a fool. She heard the desperate need of denial in his strained voice. He gave her an out. Her choice meant she might as well have stabbed him to the heart.

  She smiled, a death’s head grimace, and said, “What if I did, August? What are you going to do about it? Are you going to tell the world, wash all our dirty linen before whatever friends you may have? Or perhaps cry pathetically in your precious uncle’s and cousin’s arms?” She puffed on the cigarette, then removed it from the holder and tossed the burning butt into her half-full coffee cup.

  “Oh, I quite forgot!” She shook her head in mock sympathy. “We are at war with the Americans. Too bad. They might not care about their German connection any longer.”

  “Then it’s true?” The force of August’s strangled shout must have triggered a modicum of caution inside her, for Beatrix turned away from him.

  August balled his fingers into fists, moaning low and deep enough in his throat that I doubt Beatrix heard. I heard, and I knew he had wondered this same thing himself, more than once.

  She went to a heavily carved table set against the wall, where she poured herself a brandy from a cut glass decanter. “I’ve said all I’m going to say. Why don’t you leave now? Go back to the war and shoot somebody.”

  August stood, planted to a spot in the middle of the room like a root-bound tree. He was thinking nothing had been resolved. That he had come back to speak with his mother about Eva, and they somehow had come to this. To the question of whether she had killed her husband, his father? Was she a murderess?

  In his heart, he knew the answer. And he knew as well he’d never betray her.

  She gulped brandy and unstoppered the decanter to pour more.

  But he might be able to jolt her. He might threaten her with retribution and let her have a few sleepless nights in which to suffer.

  “Major-General Bertholder spoke with me before I left hospital,” August said. “He asked me to give you a message.”

  She swilled the brandy in her glass, drank, then asked warily, “And the message is?”

  He waited until her eyes raised to his. “General Bertholder said to tell you, ‘Dennis died on the 2nd of March. He waited too long for treatment and was already past any hope of a cure. There was nothing I—meaning Bertholder—could do.’”

  With satisfaction he watched the blood drain from her face, leaving the skin alabaster pale. A crooked smile kinked his lips. “He said you’d best beware. He’ll send a list of the symptoms to watch for.”

  “You’re lying! You’re just trying to frighten me.

  He shook his head. “The gospel truth,” he said, an Americanism Frank or Will might have used.

  She gave a wordless cry and hurled the glass at him with fair accuracy for a woman who’d downed two good-sized shots of booze. Only his young, war-trained reflexes moved him in time to avoid being hit.

  August’s smile, faint as it had been, disappeared completely. “How disgusting, Mother. You’ve caught a venereal disease from Dennis Frieland.”

  I sensed no trace of sympathy in him, nor, evidently, did Beatrix. Quite the contrary. There was only an overwhelming disgust.

  In a blur of swift motion completely unlike her previous indolent posture, Beatrix picked up the heavy crystal decanter and lunged toward him. She swung the brandy-weighted decanter with all her strength. Had it connected with his head as she apparently wished, I’m sure he would have been killed instantly, but he threw up his arm, catching the blow on his thick muscle instead. The nerves, responding to the injury, spasmed, which caused his fingers to spring open.

  “Stop it,” he said, dodging another swing. “Think what you’re doing.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” she screamed through gritted teeth.

  She kept coming at him, again and again, as he ducked this way and that.

  “Why me? I didn’t give you the disease.” He danced aside from her flailing arms. Her eyes glared with unfocused rage. She followed his every move, her face twisted with a demented expression. Then finally, she slipped in spilled brandy, accidentally falling into him. He tried to push her away—I know he thrust at her shoulders, but she saw in this mishap a chance to best him. Her dark hair flying about them both like sticky spider webs, she went after him with bared teeth. Her actions were those of a human woman transformed into a snarling predator.

  They both panted, sweating with effort, raging with an explosion of anger. She attacked with tooth and nail; he found the best purchase to keep her at bay with his one good hand at her throat.

  The thing is, once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop the inexorable clenching of that one hand. His disproportionately large, strangler’s hand. Squeezing and squeezing on the fragile bones of her larynx until they crumbled. Her eyes ran blood red. She stopped moving, then stopped breathing. Her body sagged against him and he held her like a lover.

  I knew what she felt in her last moments of life: a combination of rage, pain, fear—and hate.

  I know what August felt, too, and they were the exact same things. Rage, fear and pain. Only when you got right down to it, the hate ran out of him in the moment of her final breath, to be replaced by regret.

  WE WERE BACK in the here and now, and I was hearing air gush in and out of August’s lungs with a noise like a bellows with a hole in it. The wheeze sounded painful.

  I nearly panicked, thinking he was having a heart attack. I jumped from my chair, feeling a little weak at the knees myself, and dashed for the tiny bathroom I saw through a half-open door. Saturating a cloth with cold water, I hurried to slap it against the old man’s forehead. I must confess I, too, was sweating.

  August shrank like a withered gnome into the depths of the leather chair. With his hands, large hands, once capable of squeezing the life out of a woman, he plucked and tore at the photograph that had precipitated us into the life of his memories.

  If I had thought he looked eighty when I walked in this morning, it seemed certain the pleasure of my company had done him no favors. Now he appeared closer to ninety and drained dry. Even his boots seemed too big for his feet.

  “Scare ya?” he asked when he was able to move his lips.

  “Yes.” Damn right, he’d scared me.

  He fell silent again.

  “I never knew why she hated my father so much,” he said finally. “Or why she carried that hate on down to me, her own son. There’s never been a day in my life, since then, I haven’t asked myself that question.”

  “I guess you’ll never know.”

  August smiled that cold smile of his. “Maybe I will. I’m gonna ask her, you see, when we meet
in hell,” he said. “Soon now.”

  DAMN! Why hadn’t I noticed the significance of Mueller’s things before when I’d been sniffing around? The faded pictures in tarnished silver frames. The clear, cut glass vase with a single pink rose. The precise placement of the table holding these items, so they lined up under the collage on his wall. There was symmetry here. The articles of war on the wall—the sacrifices to the war, to a misspent life, on the table below. It was an altar, of sorts. A composition illustrating a man’s sacrifices, reminding him every single day of his life of the price he’d paid to survive.

  I understood why he’d thrown the gun in the river and why he wanted to make good his final flight. I’d sensed great evil, but it wasn’t his evil. It was an evil forced upon a weak, young man by a vengeful trick of the cosmos.

  All very sad, of course, but not my concern. Damn the old bugger! He’d better not die on me before he pointed the way to Caleb.

  CHAPTER 14

  Caleb checked himself out of hospital along toward evening on the day after the sniper’s attack. Not that the hole in his leg didn’t still hurt like hell. The torn muscles and ruptured blood vessels protested vigorously as he forced himself to walk the aisles of the ward tent, trying desperately not to limp. Showing off, that’s what he was doing. Trying to act as if taking a bullet was an everyday occurrence where he came from.

  In truth, he was afraid to stay any longer. He had a number of reasons for his fear, the foremost being that he distrusted the doctors here. He knew at the first whiff of infection, they’d have his leg off. He’d seen it happen more than once since the doctors had made their morning rounds. He’d begun to think they were amputating for the pure hell of it. It wasn’t like they needed the practice.

  Talk about suffering through like experiences in every incarnation of life. Was it to be his everlasting fate to sustain a leg wound at every point in history? Afghanistan, in his own life. Again, on the battlefields of Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. That happened last winter, during his first out-of-time experience. It was hard, living a soldier’s life in 1918, to comprehend those other times as being real.

  As he sat on the edge of his cot, waiting for the surgeon’s release papers, he pushed that errant thought aside. He blocked out the next one, too: the one that said maybe he’d actually be better off if he did make an all-out effort to forget. If he learned to live in this moment and to not let his extended stay make him bitter. He didn’t really believe he’d been abandoned. Did he? Boothenay must have done everything— been doing everything—she could to bring him home. He could rely on her. He did. But what in the name of God had gone wrong?

  He sighed and went on reminding himself of why he needed to leave the hospital.

  The second most important reason on his list was that he knew his own level of expertise in the medical field to be significantly greater than any doctor—sawbones—he’d observed so far. He was bound to be forever frustrated by knowing what to do for the wounded men, but lacking the right tools. Still, limited though he might be, he couldn’t do any worse than the doctors, and probably a whole lot better. It was only a matter of time before he opened his mouth with a criticism, and then who knows what can of worms would be opened.

  And finally, he reminded himself, he had to get back to his post so there was someone to take care of the dogs.

  Oh, yeah. Quit lying to yourself, Deane. The final, final reason he left the hospital before official discharge lay in the growing awareness that in the space of twenty-four hours, he’d gotten a little more interested in Mrs. Irene Prafke than seemed wise.

  Most of the time he kept pretty well oriented on what was going on in the here and now. Caleb Deane—time traveler—gone astray. For the moment only, he hastened to assure himself.

  But sometimes Ned Smith lost sight of Caleb Deane, and when he did, Irene’s lovely, tired face filled his mind. At these moments, Caleb would wonder why he was still fighting the inevitable. His other life grew more distant, hour by hour, and he couldn’t stop thinking that this might be his future. Irene seemed a saving grace.

  He remembered awakening from a crazy, morphine-driven dream, one of many during that long, long night, and finding her at his bedside, mopping sweat from his face with a cool, wet cloth.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said. “The drug will wear off soon. There’s no need to sit with me, Nurse Prafke. Go get some sleep while you can.”

  “I don’t sleep,” she confessed. Her hazel eyes filled with tears, and she ducked her head and turned away. “I . . . I can’t bear this place sometimes. I want to do good, help people who are sick and hurting, and I know I should rest if I want to carry out my duties. But the moment I close my eyes⏤” She swallowed the rest of whatever she’d meant to say.

  A forced smile trembled on her full lips. “Sitting with you does me good, Sergeant Smith. I know you’re going to be fine, and I’ll soon be watching you leave, hale and hearty. Then I’ll know that sometimes we win. Not everything we do is an exercise in futility.”

  Caleb understood her feeling perfectly well. And so did Ned Smith, no matter that his equation factored in horses instead of people. A patient is a patient, and no doctor, nurse, or veterinarian wants to lose one

  So he said, “I’m happy to be of service, Mrs. Prafke.” He deliberately omitted “Nurse” from his address, aware as he did so that, in this moment, they had gotten on a different footing. “Well then, feel free to stay as long as you like.”

  They talked during the long night. About the war—how could they not?—about horses and soldiers and where they came from, and, of all things, about aeroplanes.

  Irene laughed over something he said, softly, so the sound did not carry beyond his curtained-off space. “You’re too easy to talk to, Sergeant Smith. Do you know this is the first time I’ve laughed in a month?” She sounded almost accusing, as if there might be some blame attached to this.

  Sergeant Smith thought it had been more than a month for him. Time worked oddly under these conditions, but he had the strange conviction that laughing with her and relaxing in her company wasn’t the wisest thing for him to do. So he didn’t speak of time travel or Caleb Deane or the next millennium. And Mrs. Prafke didn’t say a word about Mr. Prafke.

  AUGUST SUDDENLY FUMBLED at the snapped-down flap of his shirt pocket with hands made clumsy by stress. I dropped Beatrix von Fassnacht’s battered photo—a useless and used-up object now—onto the table and, recognizing the telltale shape of a pill bottle through his pocket, leaned over to help.

  “Nitro?”

  He grunted, his head wobbling on an unsteady neck. I shook out one of the tiny pills and poked it under his tongue. This was a drill I’d been through with Dad when he was having problems, and I could see August had been through it before, too. He sat back while the pill dissolved, eyes closed, resting. I re-wet the cloth, continuing to hold it to his forehead.

  Soon his breathing slowed. The vein in his temple that had pulsed rapidly, hard enough for me to feel through the washcloth, ceased pounding. The muscles in his rigid neck relaxed. After a bit some of the white, pinched look eased and his breathing steadied.

  “Better?” I asked. And indeed, like a miracle before my eyes, the deep creases around his eyes and nose cleared away, he drew a solid breath and sat up straight. I could swear I saw his shoulders broaden and strengthen. He wasn’t quite as he’d been when I first met him, but he was some different than two minutes ago.

  Damn! Nitro might be a wonder drug, but I’d certainly never seen my dad profit from its effect like this.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, his voice sounding young and strong again. “Musta been the disappointment brought on an attack. I’d thought it was going to work that time, sis. I thought I was going back.”

  “I beg your pardon? Going where?”

  He waved a gnarled hand and I shied away from it. I have to confess, I didn’t want him getting too close when I’d just watched him murder his own mother.


  “Back where I belong. You know what I want, sis. I told you that already.”

  “We made a deal, Mr. von Fassnacht. Not until I’ve found my friend.”

  “Your deal maybe,” he said. “If you find your friend, that’s fine. But I’m ready to go now. Don’t count on me holding back if I’m able. There might not be many more chances. Damn, girl! I’m tired of living this half-life. I want it to end.”

  He was taking to this time-travel business like a pro. Better than I might have wished. The first time we were cast into the timestream, the simple fact it was possible had frightened him. Now events frightened him, but not the travel. I hoped I didn’t lose my advantage over him. Not too soon.

  If I’d ever felt sorry for him, his assertion got me over it. He was back to his usual obnoxious self. I suppose I should be glad he’d strangled his mother rather than stabbed her, or shot her or something equally bloody. All the bloodshed I’d encountered so far had been a few dribbles here and there. Nothing too substantial or the old fart might have pulled it off, gone and left me here, what with my unwitting assistance.

  “Fine,” I said. “End it then. The quicker we find Caleb, the quicker you can be on your way. But I am not going to let you go until you at least show me where to look.”

  He took the wet cloth from me, turning around to look me in the eye. “Caleb, eh? Might have known it would be a fella. My guess is, sis, you’d drop me like a hot rock if you didn’t need me.”

  I looked him in the eye right back. “Well, sir, I’d say you’re a hundred percent right about that. You make me real nervous. Fortunately, nobody said we had to love each other in order to get through this.”

  Amazingly, he laughed his approval. “So then, it’s a race to see who gets there first.”

  “This isn’t a competition, for crying out loud. I’d like to see us both get what we want. We need each other, Mr. von Fassnacht. Can’t we try to co-operate?” Easy, I cautioned my loosely held temper. Gentle persuasion. That’ s the key.