She smiled apologetically. “I always knew he might go someday. That’s why I never left enough in these accounts to make it worth his while…”
She let her voice trail away.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so we shared silence for a few minutes until the relief of a light knock on the door. She opened it enough that I could see the teller’s anxious face from where I sat, but she did not invite him inside the office.
“No record of the loans,” I heard him say.
“Impossible.” Her voice was sharp.
“I checked the files. The bank vault for copies. Everywhere. No record.”
“The ledgers?”
“Three pages missing, Mrs. Girard.”
“Impossible.” But she didn’t say it like it was.
“I can look again.”
“No,” she said, “I’ll sort this later.”
Leslie Girard dismissed him and turned back to me. “Strange. You don’t suppose…”
Eagle concentration filled her face. I admired her toughness.
“Suppose?”
“I always knew he couldn’t be trusted,” she said. “That was part of his attraction to me. Everything else in my life was tame. You don’t suppose he drew up a loan to someone who didn’t exist…”
“Unlikely,” I said. “I’ve been to the Bar X Bar myself.”
“Why would he help out some rancher so far north?”
“Help?”
“Unless we can find records of the loan, there’s no proof. Without proof, we can’t expect repayment. Not unless the rancher volunteers his records.”
“Was it a substantial loan?”
“Without a doubt. David didn’t deal with loans under ten thousand.”
“And his ceiling?” I asked.
“Fifty thousand.”
“Fifty thousand dollars.” That would be enough to justify leaving his gilded cage.
“Find the money if you can,” Leslie Girard was saying. “But if you can, leave him be.”
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t hurt him.”
“He tried to murder me.”
“I know,” she said. “But I love him.”
Chapter 37
My return to Laramie was not a hero’s welcome. Not when the only person to greet me was Brother Lewis in his jail cell, still as ungrateful as ever for my efforts to spare him from future sins.
Jake Wilson was delivering a load of feed to a nearby ranch. Doc Harper was on a sick call in the opposite direction. And I had no hankering to discuss my Denver trip with Mayor Crawford, mainly because I barely knew more than what I had left Laramie with in the first place.
My first stop after dispensing with greetings to Brother Lewis had been the Red Rose saloon. Dehlia’s brothers sat playing poker, but were unwilling to share with me the whereabouts of Dehlia.
I’d then walked well clear of Benjamin Guthrie’s store, because all the sleep I’d absorbed on the train ride back from Denver was not near the amount I needed to put me in a mood that would make discussion with him any sort of tolerable.
With everyone out of town, all that remained for me to do was pay a visit out to the Rocking N.
Which is why I found myself a few hours later staring into the barrel of an old Sharps rifle.
***********************
“Have mercy,” I said from atop my horse.
Helen Nichols lowered the rifle. The bush behind her still shook from her recent exit. It was a big bush — she’d been completely hidden before stepping onto the trail.
“Recent habit?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said. “Being out here alone as I am. The boys told me they’d seen someone headed this way.”
I shook my head. I still hadn’t dismounted. “You had the rifle cocked. One shaky trigger finger from down there, it would taken out the bottom of my chin.”
“I know what I’m doing,” she said.
I wasn’t prepared to disagree with her.
I began to swing off my saddle. Stopped with my weight still on my good leg. What was bothering me?
“Marshal?”
I gave my head a shake and completed the dismount.
“Just distracted,” I said. “Got any bread and ham handy?”
Her broad face creased into a smile. “As much as you can pack into your belly.”
I led my horse and followed her around the bend in the trail to the soddie. What I really wanted to do was sit by myself and puzzle why I was so bothered. Something important had passed me by. I knew that with a gut-deep certainty. But what had it been?
Her three boys ran up, white grins in dirty faces.
I found a couple of coins and flipped them in their direction. “Think you boys are old enough to water a horse and brush him down?”
“Yes sir.” They’d each said it, but all together, and it sounded like one.
They took the horse’s reins, serious determination showing in the rigidness of their small bodies.
“By the way, boys, when you get the saddle off, take a good look in the saddlebag. I believe you’ll find some licorice sticks. Can’t eat them myself. Doc Harper says I’m too old.”
They whooped delight that continued until they’d reached a far shed.
Helen was already in the soddie.
I eased myself in the shade on the same stool I’d used on my earlier visit.
She returned with water and strips of clean white meat on thick bread. “Chicken this time, Marshal,” she said. “Cooked yesterday, and with the cooler weather, it keeps plenty good.”
She was right. I swallowed it down with cold water.
I grinned.
“Anyone else here but me,” she said, “I’d swear you was in a courting mood.”
“I do have good news,” I said. “Been looking forward to delivering it.”
She had not yet sat. She placed her massive fists on her massive hips and looked down on me.
“Pray tell.”
“You’re a wealthy woman.”
“Marshal, you have no call to jest.”
I gulped more water. “No jest. A lawyer named Brian Scott, back in Denver, looked into the mining papers you believed were worthless. Turns out out you own a regular producing vein of silver. Mr. Scott there figures it won’t bottom out for a couple of years.”
I reached inside my vest pocket and handed her the envelope that Brian Scott had hand delivered to me in my Denver hotel. By then, of course, I’d had a hot bath, shaved, rested some and was in shape to understand most of what the lawyer had explained about his tradeoff with Leakey. All documents immediately transferred to Helen Nichols. No further inquiries into his crime.
Helen Nichols did not open the envelope that assured her that she never need approach another bank for a loan.
“Marshal,” she finally said with the first trace of helplessness I’d seen upon her, “I cain’t read.”
I gritted my teeth at my stupidity. To assume she been schooled…
“Durn, me neither,” I lied. “I was hoping you‘d be able to tell me what it said.”
I snapped my fingers. “Ask Doc next time you’re in town.” I added a grin. “And I’d get to town soon. What I did hear was the first lawyer looked for a way to steal it from you, and the second lawyer got it all straightened for you. From the way the fella in Denver was talking, you might just be able to buy the next bank you see.”
She studied my face and when she decided I was not playing a cruel joke, she clutched the envelope to her massive bossom.
“My boys,” she whispered. “I can move them from here and all the bad talk about their pa.”
Her eyes began to redden, and she began to sniffle.
“If it ain’t asking too much, I could use another bite or two.” I held up my empty plate. A person don’t mind helping out, and this hadn’t take much anyway, but she was ready to bust into tears or give me a big hug. Both prospects promised sentiment, and in general, I found it pays to duck that kind
of difficulty.
She returned with another chunk of bread and sliced chicken that I had to force down, and because I was eating more slowly, she filled the silence.
“Didn’t mean to give your heart a jump with that rifle,” Helen said. “Just that I did hear about you getting shot, and how Clay Barnes died, and what with all the dying in these parts, I figured it don’t hurt to be safe.”
I nodded, and swallowed hard. At least she wasn’t sniffling.
“Old Emma, too,” she said. “You heard?”
I nearly choked. “Emma Springer? Dead? How?”
She nodded. “In her sleep. At least that’s what I heard. Peaceful like.”
“She was strong like a mule,” I said.
Helen shrugged.
That bothered me. Greatly. Two deaths — Emma Springer and Clayton Barnes — out at the Bar X Bar. Two deaths in Laramie — both somehow tied to David Girard in Denver. And David Girard in Denver tied to the Bar X Bar through the cattle loan.
I opened my jaw to take another bite.
Jaw…
It sprung loose, the distraction that had been worrying at me like a bur under my saddle ever since Helen had stepped out suddenly with that rifle. If she’d shot upward, her bullet would have taken out my jaw.
In a flash, I saw clearly her husband’s body in the bank vault. Shirt and vest and dusty jeans. Hat off and crushed beneath his head. Gray and black beard matted with blood, blood that had pooled from a hole torn in his throat, the exit wound at the back of his skull hidden by his hat and hair.
And hadn’t I told Doc that the bullet that killed Bob Nichol’s was going upward, a fact that proved Calhoun hadn’t killed him?
Now, if my guess was right, it was the path of a bullet fired in the same manner as Helen might have fired at me. From a man on the ground shooting a man sitting on a horse.
Helen tried to say something.
I put up my hand for silence. I wanted to think this through.
Yet it was ridiculous to think that Nichols had been on a horse in the bank vault.
I closed my eyes again, pictured what I’d seen in the bank vault.
Then I smiled.
“Helen, when your husband left the ranch —”
“You mean that last time?”
“Yes,” I said gentle, and reminded myself that this was not a puzzle to her, but the death of someone she would grieve for years. “Did he take a coat? I mean, it is fall and nights get cold.”
She thought some. “Why…why yes, I believe he did.”
Of course he did. I had my own coat rolled back of my horse’s saddle for when the sun set.
“That may be enough to clear his name,” I told Helen. “If not legal-like, at least cleared in folks’ minds. Your boys might not have to hear much bad about their pa.”
“How’s that?” She was hesitant, but hope shone from her eyes.
“Helen, he didn’t have his coat with him at the bank. Nor was it found on his horse. I think I can make a case that he was…”
I couldn’t say it to her.
“Murdered,” she said. “You don’t have to go easy on me.”
“I think I can make a case it happened somewhere else. That his body was then taken to the vault.”
I wasn’t going to detail my theory about the bullet that took his life coming from a man on the ground while he sat on his horse. Not with her grave eyes fixed on me.
“But the landlady,” Helen protested. “She says she saw Bob visit Lorne Calhoun. Everyone says Bob forced Calhoun back with him to the bank.”
I disagreed with her. “By the time I got around to asking the landlady, she’d already heard about the two men who were found in the vault. Easy mistake at that point, for her to assume it was Bob. Dark hallway, low voices, I’ll bet if the landlady thinks it through, she’d never be able to swear on a Bible that it was Bob.”
Especially, I thought, if Bob had already been shot somewhere else, then brought into Laramie late at night by the person who then knocked on Calhoun’s door. If Bob had been shot just after leaving the Rocking N, that would explain his three-day absence before appearing dead in the bank vault.
Except for one thing.
Blood.
The blood around both bodies in the bank vault had been sticky. Fresh. Not four days old.
“Marshal?”
I realized I’d been quiet too long.
“Helen, it’s…”
I’d been about to say that it’s impossible to explain the fresh blood. Doc’s voice echoed in my mind and cut me short. When I cleaned the entry wound, I was low to the ground, and I found something in the blood between the two bodies. Bits of feather stuck in the blood. Like feathers from a pillow.
“Helen, first time I visited, you’d just finished butchering chickens. I saw the claws and feathers on the ground near your chopping block. Tell me, how hard would it be to lop off a chicken’s neck and hold it by the legs so that it’s blood drains into a bucket.”
I knew the answer already, but I wanted to hear it from her.
Her square face shifted in puzzlement. “Not hard t’all, Marshal. Why ask? What’s this got to do with —”
“Last question,” I interrupted. I couldn’t force myself to involve her in my guessing game. Not about her husband. I had a good idea of how he’d been murdered. All I had to figure out was who, and I had my ideas on that too. I asked the question which on my first visit I forgotten. Back then, the question had little importance when I’d believed four days had passed between Bob’s departure and his murder. “Helen, which direction was Bob headed when he left that last morning?”
I swept my hand vaguely in all directions. “He could have gone north along the river, or south. He could have cut across the river or taken the trail back toward Laramie. Did you happen to notice?”
“Certainly.” She blinked back the sadness of her memories. “I always see him off. It’s just how we were.”
“Which direction?” Now I was impatient.
“He took the trail,” she said. And pointed in the direction of the Bar X Bar.
Chapter 38
I rode. And thought.
There was what I’d just considered. Two deaths had taken place at the Bar X Bar. Two other deaths — Lorne Calhoun and Bob Nichols — were related to the Bar X Bar through David Girard and Denver. Bob Nichol’s last ride had been in the direction of the Bar X Bar.
The easy conclusion was that someone at the Bar X Bar was behind all of this.
But was it David Girard? How could he be in Denver and Laramie?
Eleanor Ford. She was also a common tie to Lorne Calhoun and Bob Nichols. Jake Wilson had told me Bob Nichols on his return from Denver mumbled a comment about stopping by the Bar X Bar to see Eleanor Ford. Lorne Calhoun had his letter of instruction from her.
Eleanor Ford owned the Bar X Bar. And Eleanor Ford had access to the bank vault at the First National in Laramie.
Was it her, the murderer, the person who had shot Nichols as he sat trusting on his horse looking downward at the person about to take his life?
I told myself it could not be. Eleanor Ford was not big enough to handle the inert weight of dragging the dead Bob Nichols into the First National bank vault. Eleanor Ford would not have been mistaken for a man by the landlady who had seen Lorne Calhoun’s late night caller.
The frustration was killing me. I felt as if all the pieces were there, maybe even assembled, but somehow I was failing to recognize the completed puzzle.
Alright, I asked myself, what did David Girard and Eleanor Ford have in common?
Banking.
She owned a bank. He’d worked in a bank.
She owned a bank. He’d married someone who owned a bank.
Anything else?
The Bar X Bar. She owned it. He’d loaned to it.
I gnawed on that for a while.
Nothing.
I was maybe a half hour away from the Bar X Bar. My horse flushed the occasional jackrabbit
. More often a sage hen. The bowl of the afternoon sky was a pale blue, painted with the wisp of high, white trailing clouds. Usually I enjoyed the ride, but now, not even the serene freedom of horse travel through the great grassland basin of the Laramie Plains gave me any sense of peace as I rode.
I realized all of my thoughts had been focused on the murderer — logical, but with no results.
I decided to try it from another approach. Why not wonder about the victims? I’d include myself as murdered — after all, David Girard had left Denver so quickly he would have no idea I was still alive.
Bob Nichols, Lorne Calhoun, Clayton Barnes, Emma Springer, Samuel Keaton. Take Emma off the list; maybe she had indeed died a natural death. Take Clayton Barnes off the list; he might have died as an innocent bystander, or been killed simply because of his involvement with the dead man’s horse and the missing ten thousand in bank notes.
That left Bob Nichols, Lorne Calhoun and Samuel Keaton. All three of us had seen David Girard in Denver. All three of us were from Laramie. All three of us had been to the Bar X Bar.
Impossible as it seemed, if it was Girard, what could he be trying to hide through our deaths?
Bob Nichols and Lorne Calhoun might have known. I didn’t.
What then could Nichols and Collins have in common that I had missed and Girard hadn’t? What had they seen that I hadn’t?
I gnawed at that, too. Found nothing.
It jolted me when I finally realized David Girard has asked me essentially the same question. How much do you know? That was his question at the mining shack. How much do you know? My wife tell you anything?
Why would he be so concerned what I might have learned from Lesley Girard? Unless he feared that I had passed along that knowledge, and before I died needed to be certain I hadn’t.
My wife tell you anything?
Girard had accused me of being on his trail like a dog on partridge. From the beginning, he’d said. Before my arrival in Denver? But how could that be?
My wife tell you anything?
Girard had admitted to shooting me and Clayton Barnes. How’d he know the Bar X Bar country so well? Why could he ride through it and not fear that somebody might comment on him being a stranger? Both suggested, of course, that he was no stranger in these parts.
Silver Moon Page 23