by Max McCoy
“Good idea, Ophie,” Doc said.
“Do you have a pencil and paper?”
As Doc reached into his Gladstone and pulled out a small pad and the stub of a pencil, it occurred to me that it might be useful to carry a small bag or satchel with me, a sort of detective’s kit that would hold some of the more common things I would need on a case.
I carefully drew the knot, which resembled the number 8 with the letter G beneath.
“Got it,” I said.
While Earp steadied the body, Doc pulled on the tail of the knot and the rope came free. The lawman caught the body and placed it on the floor as gently as one might tuck a sleeping child into bed.
“Search his pockets,” Doc suggested.
While Earp went through the dead man’s clothes, I walked slowly around the room. Where was the book that Molly had described? Either stolen by whomever hoisted poor Charlie up over the rafter, or still safely hidden in its secret place. Where would a man hide a book?
The Howart home was little more than a cabin, and sparsely furnished. It consisted of three rooms—the front room, a kitchen, and a bedroom—and I doubted that Howart could have succeeded in hiding the book in either of the latter, because that’s where Molly would have spent most of her time. In the front room, there wasn’t much between the raftered ceiling and the floor, which had a thin rug thrown over planks of uneven quality. The stove dominated the room, followed by a table with straight-backed chairs and a kerosene lantern on the table. But tucked in one corner was a triangular-shaped bookcase with a door beneath. I went to it and glanced over the few books on the shelves—Ayer’s American Almanac, some Walter Scott novels, and the family Bible. I opened the door beneath and discovered the cubby hole empty, save for a pile of Harper’s Monthly magazines. I reached in and felt for the hidden book, but with no luck.
Then I walked around the room, feeling and listening to the boards beneath my feet. None of them was loose or hollow sounding. I looked up at the raftered ceiling, and there seemed no likely spaces to hide a book of any size, at least not where it could be retrieved without the use of a ladder. No, I was looking for an easy, accessible spot.
I looked back at the stove. There was a small space between the bottom of the stove and the bricks it rested on, but when I knelt and peered beneath, it was clearly empty. The stove was cold, so I reached in; my hand felt the bricks to make sure they were all secure. There was firewood in the kitchen, but none beside the stove in the front room, because there had been no need of warmth in many months. There was still a kindling box, however, and it was nearly empty except for a few scrap pieces of wood. The box had been made out of an old peach box and still had the words GEORGIA PEACHES burned into the slats on the side. I tilted the box up and shook it, jostling the wood to make sure there was nothing hidden in the bottom, and that’s when I noticed an odd muffled sound from the bottom of the box.
I turned the box over and discovered a false bottom that slid away, revealing a space just deep enough to hide a flour sack that held a book-shaped object. I lifted the package and it was as if a jolt of blue flame traveled up my hands and through my arms to pierce my heart. The shock nearly took my breath away.
As I opened the drawstring on the cotton sack, my heart was pounding and my ears were ringing like the new bell on the steeple of the church up on Gospel Hill. I peeked inside and saw a book bound in red Morocco. I pulled the book free of the sack and read the gold lettering, much of which had been worn away, but I could easily read the title from the discolored places where the letters had been:
SYRINX of the SEVEN WORLDS
I turned the book to the spine and there was the name of the author, W. L. Gresham. I opened the book to the title page and the title was repeated, along with a note saying that it was a “metaphysical adventure” and had been published in 1858 in Boston.
“What’s a syrinx?” I asked Doc.
I had an image of a syrinx being impossibly old and possibly Egyptian presiding mysteriously over a desert landscape, like something out of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Doc and Earp were still hunched over the body of Charlie Howart.
“Spell it.”
I did.
“It’s the vocal organ in birds,” he said. “It’s also the pipes the Great God Pan played. It comes from the Greek, meaning ‘tube.’ Why?”
I told him.
“Well, there might be something inside.”
I opened the book, and a hundred images came to me at once. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to keep from uttering a cry. The images were of souls floating in water and souls floating in light and of a great ship that plied ice-strewn waters.
But strongest among the visions was one from the dream where I was in the wilderness in a wedding dress and wading through a trench of blood and bone and steel.
The book was thoroughly, disturbingly haunted.
I snapped the cover shut.
“Come up with anything?” Doc asked.
“I don’t think the book has anything to do with birds,” I said.
“Well, we found something interesting,” Doc said, holding out a railway ticket in my direction. “This was in his vest pocket. It’s a round-trip railway ticket to Canon City, Colorado.”
12
Wrapped safely in its flour sack, I carried Syrinx of the Seven Worlds to the agency. It didn’t seem prudent to leave the book at the Howart residence, considering not only was the book dangerously haunted, but whoever had strung poor Charlie up had probably been looking for it.
I took the book out of its sack and placed it carefully on my desk, drew the shade, and lit the lamp. Then I took a deep breath and opened the book. As before, my hand tingled with something other worldly. First, I went to the last page—it was 307, just as in my dream—then flipped back to the front matter.
When I released the book, I found that the haunting sensations stopped. While touching the book was disturbing, reading it was not. In fact, the reading of the book seemed absolutely neutral. I noted the fact, and returned my attention to the title page.
In addition to the information about the date and place of publication, there was a faded stamp across the bottom of the page: Property of The Denver City and Auraria Reading Room and Library Association. A handwritten note on a slip of paper nestled beside the title page indicated the book was due back April 22, 1860.
The book was overdue by more than 18 years.
I turned the page and scanned the Table of Contents, which listed the titles of the book’s seven parts, in this manner:
Chapter the First: Darkness. Being a meditation on the void between worlds; the appearance of our adventurer and his passage on a comet; his arrival on antique shores; his confusion regarding this mortal coil; and his eventual discovery of the hidden and narrow passages between worlds.
I will summarize the other chapters.
Chapter Two: Water (ancient Mars).
Chapter Three: Light (the sphere of love).
Chapter Four: Life (the chains of Earth).
Chapter Five: Death (the domain of Saturn).
Chapter Six: Dreams (the Mountains of the Moon).
Chapter Seven: Rebirth (the symphony of Venus).
Each chapter was long, and tracked the progress of this unnamed pilgrim from world to world. It was the kind of story I would normally find intriguing, but the writing was baroque, cryptic, and old-fashioned; it was about as enjoyable as reading a multiplication table but made much less sense. I skipped to the chapter on dreams, thinking I might find some clue to my own sleeping drama, but it was more of the same impenetrable prose. The author, Gresham, was either a genius who was speaking on a plane that was far beyond my comprehension, or he was a lunatic.
Why would this book figure so heavily in my dreams, when I had no obvious connection to the story? The book must be important, to figure so in my dreams, to be kept hidden by Charlie Howart, and to be as haunted as it was.
My only recourse was to
ask W. L. Gresham himself.
I paged back to the front, looking for the address of the publisher.
OLD STATEHOUSE PUBLISHING CO.,
924 CONSTITUTION AVE.,
BOSTON, MASS.
I got out a fresh sheet of paper, loaded my pen from the inkwell, and composed a letter to Gresham, in care of the publisher.
13
Molly Howart sat in the chair she’d sat in only two days before. She was clutching Western Mutual Life Assurance Company Policy No. 784 in her lap, pleading with eyes that were even more sorrowful than before.
“They are denying the claim,” she said. “Mister Hill says that Charlie’s death was a suicide. Do you believe he took his own life, Miss Wylde?”
“I don’t know, Molly,” I said.
“Not for a minute do I think he committed suicide,” she declared. “Not Charlie. I don’t understand what secret he was guarding, but I know he wouldn’t have chosen that way out.”
“May I get you some tea?” I asked. I’d read somewhere that when confronted with someone in distress, the thing to do was to offer tea.
“It’s bad enough that Charlie is dead,” she said. “But now I am faced with a penniless widowhood.”
“I think a cup of tea might be the thing.”
“There is no one I can turn to,” she said. “My family in Missouri is dead, all of them, and without Charlie I am a woman alone. I will be able to survive well enough for the rest of the summer, but winter will come. Then what will I do, with all of the food gone and no money?”
“No tea, then.”
“What did you determine from the book?”
“Very little, I’m afraid,” I said. “The book is quite haunted, but remains a mystery. Whatever connection it may have to the case remains unclear.”
“Did you find nothing that might exonerate my Charlie?”
I told her how the rope showed signs of having borne weight after it was thrown over the rafter, but I said that the detail in itself was probably insufficient to challenge the insurance company.
“Doctor McCarty is delaying any official determination of the cause of death,” I said. “As county coroner, he needs more evidence to make a ruling. But I’m afraid he’s about exhausted his sources of inquiry.”
Molly looked at her hands, flightless birds in her lap.
My heart slid toward my stomach.
There would be no money from this case, even if I could prove that Charlie Howart did not commit self-slaughter, for how could I take even a dime of a poor widow’s insurance money? Even if she had the means to pay my twenty dollars a week plus expenses—and it might take many days indeed—there was no guarantee I could bring her satisfaction.
There were expenses of my own I had to pay, of course. My half of the rent on the agency here on North Front Street, and my weekly bill for my room at the Dodge House, and my meals and Eddy’s seed, and the chair I sat in, and the paper I had written the publishing company on. Being a consulting detective wasn’t a hobby, as Calder kept reminding me, but a trade. You wouldn’t go to Zimmerman’s hardware down the street and expect him to give you a new Martini and Henry buffalo rifle just because he likes dealing in guns, would you? (Actually, I had no idea if Zimmerman dealt in such rifles, or if the Martini and Henry company made buffalo rifles, but being ignorant of firearms, it was the only type and make of gun I could summon from memory to use as an example.) My point—and here I had to admit I was arguing with myself—was that I deserved to be paid. Why, Doc McCarty wouldn’t treat anyone without asking for—
And that’s where my argument crumbled, because I knew Doc treated everyone, whether they could pay or not. Oh, he would take their money if they could afford it (and he supplemented his income with the drug store next door), but if they couldn’t, he treated them anyway and didn’t make them feel as if they were somehow inferior human beings. What Doc looked at first was need, and in an emergency, there was no time to be pulling out the ledger books.
“Merde,” I exclaimed.
There had to be a better way to make a living at being a consulting detective, but thinking like that was pulling the ledger book out first. I could figure that out after I helped my client.
“I beg your pardon?” Molly asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking out loud.”
“Did you have an idea?”
“Perhaps,” I said.
I retrieved the ticket that Doc had taken from Charlie Howart’s body and slid it across to her.
“What do you make of this?”
“The railway ticket? I told Doctor McCarty I had no idea why Charlie would have a ticket for Canon City. He never had any business there, as far as I know of.”
“Might I make use of it?”
“Use it how?”
“To go to Canon City and make some inquiries,” I said. “It’s a round-trip ticket, on the Santa Fe with a transfer to the Denver & Rio Grande, and it has some cash value to you. But it might be worth more to pay my passage to Canon City and back. It’s the location of the state prison—which was the territorial prison until just two years ago—and perhaps Charlie’s business had something to do with someone incarcerated there.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
“I can’t promise results,” I said. “But I can promise I will do my best.”
“Do you want my twenty dollars now?”
“No, Mrs. Howart. Keep your money.”
Molly started to cry.
“Please, don’t.”
She pulled a kerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes.
“I can’t help it,” she said.
“Doesn’t some tea sound good right now?”
She shook her head.
There was a knock at the agency door. Through the window, I could see Wyatt Earp slouching in the door frame, a cigarette smoldering beneath his mustache.
I asked Molly to excuse me.
“I’m sorry, Marshal Earp,” I said, after opening the door a crack. “As you might notice, I am quite occupied with a client. Perhaps you could come back at a more convenient time.”
“Sorry, Ophie.”
“Only my closest friends are allowed to call me Ophie,” I said. “We may never reach that level of familiarity, so I suggest you not become too fond of using the diminutive of my name.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“Just call me Miss Wylde.”
Earp nodded, and removed his hat.
“Miss Wylde,” he said. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I have paper for you.”
“Paper? I don’t understand.”
“Paper,” he said. “An official document.”
“A warrant?”
“Something like that.”
“For my arrest?”
“Actually a subpoena,” he said. “You are hereby compelled to appear at Federal District Court at Denver in the matter of the people versus Eureka Smith.”
He handed me a tri-folded sheet of paper with my name on the outside.
“The spirit photographer case?”
“Don’t know anything about it,” Earp said. “My job is just to serve the paper.”
“When?” I asked.
“It’s right there,” he said, pointing to the paper. “Ten in the morning, Thursday, June 27.”
“That’s two days away. What if I can’t make it?”
“That’s a subpoena,” Earp said. “It’s a command from the court to appear.”
“But that’s Colorado,” I protested. “Surely a court in Colorado can’t force me to appear.”
“It’s a federal court,” Earp said. “State lines don’t matter.”
“What if I can’t afford the travel?”
“You’ll have to take that up with the court—in person.”
“This is outrageous.”
“Outrageous or not, you must appear.”
“What if I don’t?”
“You would be held in contempt of court. You cou
ld be fined, or they could send somebody like me to arrest you.”
“Fils de salope,” I muttered.
“It is enough to make one cuss,” Earp said. “Good day, Miss Wylde.”
14
“I have a ticket,” I say.
Death reached across the desk and took the pass from my hand. He gave it a quick examination with his expressionless black eyes and promptly returned it.
“How unfortunate for you,” Death says. “This is a ticket to Colorado, something you’ve carried over from your waking life.”
“All I can read are numbers,” I say. “The letters are a jumble to me.”
“It is of no use to you here,” he says. “Our line doesn’t make the run to Canon City, at least not yet.”
I frown.
“That was a joke,” he says.
“Death isn’t funny.”
“So I’ve been told,” he says.
“What can you tell me about a book by a lunatic named Gresham,” I say.
“More questions. Truly?”
He would have raised his eyebrows if he’d had any.
“The book is titled . . .”
“I know the title of the book,” Death says. “But this is not a question that I am allowed to answer.”
“So there is some connection.”
“It would violate home office rules for me to tell you whether there was a connection or not,” Death says. “This is something that you must work out for yourself, for only you can decide if there is a connection.”
“So, if I asked you what the meaning of life is . . .”
“The answer would be the same. You must work it out for yourself, while entertaining the possibility that there is no meaning at all.”
“That would suggest that the only real meaning is in the rigor you bring to the question. Many people would be tempted to say that life is what you make it, or that you make your own meaning, but that’s too easy. You could come up with something silly like saying puppies and sunsets are the meaning of life.”