by Max McCoy
“You seem to know a lot about politics.”
“I only have to act dumb,” she said.
“Does Miles have enemies that would do him bodily harm?”
“All rich and ambitious men have enemies.”
“From his early days,” I said.
“He had a partner at California Gulch,” she said.
“What happened to him?”
“Miles said there was some kind of disagreement, and then the partner disappeared, so he guessed he just walked out. Found things too tough. It was pretty wooly in the early days, and still is, I guess.”
“Do you remember this partner’s name?”
“No,” she said. “Something common, I think.”
“I’m not buying another cigar.”
“You don’t need to because I really don’t remember.”
“Earlier you mentioned something about an elephant pen?”
“The Elephant Corral,” she said. “It was famous during the gold boom. It stretched from Blake to Wazee streets, near the Cherry Creek Bridge, and it was a huge canvas-roofed hotel with a dirt floor. Sheets separated the rooms. It was a notorious spot for gamblers and thieves, and Miles has said it was the most exciting place he could imagine. He was twenty-one and had come from a small town in Ohio and fell in with a bad lot, and was forced to hurt a lot of people but never killed anyone. From there, he set out to make his fortune at California Gulch.”
“A real Ragged Dick,” I said.
“Pardon?
“Horatio Alger,” I said. “Ragged Dick is one of the characters in his novels. You know, hard work pays off? I was making a joke.”
“Oh,” the cigar girl said. “I just read the newspapers.”
“Anybody around the Elephant Corral now that might remember Miles?”
“It burned down in 1863,” she said. “And most people were just passing through, anyway, on their way to the gold fields.”
“That’s unfortunate,” I said. “Did he say anything to you about the spirit photograph case?”
She shook her head.
“I read about it, but he didn’t discuss it with me.”
“Thanks for your time,” I said.
I picked up the Brothers Upmann cigar and stuck it in my breast pocket.
“Don’t you want to know about the library?”
I had completely forgotten why I had stopped in the first place.
“Yes, of course.”
“Over on the opposite corner, 405 Larimer. Second floor, above the hardware store.”
“I don’t know how I missed it.”
“They took down the sign,” she said, “because they are closing down.”
“What on earth for?”
“Guess cigars are more popular in Denver than books.”
22
There was a narrow flight of stairs beside the hardware store. At the top, the stairs opened onto a spacious landing with several offices with frosted glass doors. There was an assayer and an attorney, a dentist and an engineer, and at the end of the hall, in ghost letters where the name had been removed from the window with turpentine, the Denver Library Association.
I knocked, and the unlatched door swung open a crack.
“Hello?” I called.
“The reading room is closed,” a man called. “For good.”
“Then I’ve arrived none too soon,” I said, opening the door a bit more.
A man came marching toward the door, looking as if he intended on slamming it shut. He was in his shirtsleeves, with his suspenders hanging from his waist, and with a blue marking crayon over his right ear.
“Could I have a moment of your time?”
“I told you, we’re closing down,” he said. “I’m crating up all of these books and trying to mark what’s in each of them so the crates don’t get mixed up. They’re all going to the Board of Education, for the benefit of the students. There are six hundred volumes here, and I’d like to get this done by the end of the day.”
“That’s an ambitious plan,” I said. “Why did this task fall upon you?”
“Because I’m the treasurer, or was the treasurer, of this failed civic experiment,” he said. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to introduce himself. “I’m sorry, my name is Charles B. Patterson. I’m an agent for a bank down the street, but today I’m just a combination stock and delivery boy.”
“Miss Ophelia Wylde,” I said. “Here on business, I’m afraid.”
“Charmed, Miss Wylde.”
He opened the door and I stepped into what was once a very comfortable reading room. He indicated a pair of leather chairs, and I took the one closest to the window. It has become my habit not to sit facing the light because it makes it difficult to read expressions.
“What kind of business?” he asked.
“Detective business,” I said. “My agency is in Dodge City, and I’m working on a case that involves what appears to be a suicide but may prove to be murder instead.”
“That sounds quite serious. What led you here?”
“This book,” I said, removing Syrinx of the Seven Worlds from my bag. “It seemed quite important to the owner, the victim in the case, and there is a stamp on the title page indicating that it was the property of the library association of Denver City and Auraria. It is quite overdue, by some eighteen years.”
He took the book, looked at the stamp, and smiled.
“This is not our association,” he said.
I cursed in French—to myself.
“But we did inherit the records of that association.”
I had sworn too soon.
“Would it be possible for me to take a look?”
“Of course,” he said. “If only I can find the right box. I’ve tried to label everything properly, but there is the press of time, and the enormity of the task.”
He walked to the back of the room and began moving crates of books around, searching.
“Did you know any of the principals of this earlier library association?”
“No,” he said. “It was all before my time, back in the days when Denver City was untamed. The association didn’t last long, as I recall. Only a year or so, and there wasn’t another library until ours was formed in 1873.”
“Well, you lasted five years. That’s something.”
“Here it is,” he said, bringing out a ledger. He blew the dust from the cover and opened it to the first page. “Your association seems to have been formed in the winter of 1859 and 1860, to create a circulating library for subscribers. The first recorded meeting is of February 10, 1860, and it lists the mission of the association.”
He handed me the ledger.
Whereas, the want of a place of resort where
citizens of our towns can meet during their
leisure hours for the purpose of gaining
information, improving their minds and
engaging in social conversation and enjoyment,
has long been and still is felt in our midst; and,
Whereas, experience has proven by the
establishment of reading rooms in other cities,
that they tend to both mental and moral
cultivation—Therefore, we the undersigned,
resolve to form ourselves into an Association,
and swear a prime understanding of the penalty
for infidelity.
On the following pages were the names of the subscribers, who paid dues of fifty cents per month to belong. There were ninety-nine names in the ledger, numbered according to a system that I guessed corresponded to their date of joining.
I ran my finger down the list of names and found:
13. Angus Wright.
“How strange,” I said.
A little farther down, there was:
23. Jackson Miles.
“Is it proving a help or a hindrance?”
“Two mysteries become one,” I said. “And more complex.”
And on the next page, this:
29. John Shear. Lynched and hung for horse stealing.
“Why would the library association note the lynching of one of its members?” I asked.
“Oh, the Shear entry,” he said. “It was quite a scandal. Even I’ve heard about that. After a secret tribunal condemning a horse-stealing ring, Shear was hauled from his bed in Auraria City by vigilantes, taken to the bank of the Platte River below the Larimer Street crossing, and hanged from a cottonwood tree. A note was found pinned to his chest that read, ‘This man was hung. It was proved he was a horse thief.’ ”
This was similar to the note that Molly Howart said was pinned to the ghost hanging in her front room.
“Who were members of this grim tribunal?”
“Nobody knows,” he said. “Or at least, nobody’s talking.”
“I still find it remarkable that it was necessary to note his end in the association’s ledger.”
I ran down the remaining pages of names, but none of them looked familiar. Also, there was something peculiar about the list of names. Although there were only ninety-nine names listed, the number entries went to 125; there were seventeen blank spaces, including, for example, the numbers 43 and 59. Why, if the names were written in the order members had joined, were numbers skipped?
I asked Patterson and he said he didn’t know.
“Does the name Angus Wright mean anything to you?”
“No, sorry,” he said. “The only names on the list I’m familiar with are Shear, because of the hanging story, and Jackson Miles, obviously.”
“Obviously. What about this language in the preamble, about the ‘prime penalty for infidelity.’ That seems a bit out of place in this kind of document, don’t you think?”
He shrugged.
“Books were even more valuable in camp than they are now.”
Even though two, or perhaps three, of the names on the list were immediately significant, I knew there might be more. It would be necessary to have the list.
“May I borrow the ledger?”
Patterson scratched the back of his neck.
“It is a historic document going back to the founding of the city,” he said. “I’m not sure I should let it go back to—where did you say you were from?—Kansas.”
“Perhaps I could make a copy, under your supervision.”
“Yes, I suppose that would be all right,” he said. “But I think you should return that book you have.”
“The Gresham book?”
“It technically belongs to the school district now, just as our association inherited all of the assets of the former library,” Patterson said. “It appears to have been quite an expensive book, and the Board of Education no doubt could use it.”
Men. Why did they turn everything into a horse trade?
I considered for a moment. Although Syrinx of the Seven Worlds appeared to be connected to the ledger entry of the hanged man—and the ghost no doubt was the unlucky John Shear—I desperately needed the full list of names. In addition, the book was written by a lunatic, the content did not seem key to the case, and the volume was exceedingly haunted. If one could help a restless ghost cross over by taking care of unfinished business, couldn’t you bring peace to an overdue and very haunted library book by returning it, as closely as possible, to its source?
“All right,” I said, handing over the book. “You have a deal.”
“Done,” Patterson said. He took the book and threw it into a crate near the back of the room, then marked the crate with the blue crayon. I hoped no poor student of the Denver Board of Education perusing the school library one night would be confronted with the hanged ghost of John Shear.
Still, I was curiously sad to part with the strange book.
Patterson continued to work, stacking crates on top of the one that contained Syrinx.
Because of the matter of cost, I still had not assembled a detective kit with the necessary aids, so I could not yet begin my copying.
“May I borrow a sheet of paper and a pencil?”
I sat in the leather chair with the good light behind me and as quickly and accurately as I could made my copy of the preamble and the list of names, including the unfilled numbered lines. While I worked, Patterson continued to crate books, and I suppose a good hour had passed when the shadow of a man darkened the frosted glass of the reading room door.
23
The door swung open without the customary knock, revealing a man whose likeness I had only seen before in the spirit photo at the courthouse—Andrew Jackson Miles.
Miles was standing with his feet planted, but his head down and his hat in one hand. The other held a cigar, and its smoke uncoiled from his fist like a snake. He was perhaps forty years old, and his most remarkable feature was his thick black hair, as straight and as coarse as the mane of a thoroughbred.
He gave a sly smile.
“Miss Wylde,” he said.
“Councilman Miles,” I said. “Or should I call you ‘Jacks’?”
The ledger hid my right hand as I stuffed my copied list of names into my bag.
“Only my friends call me that.”
“I’ve heard as much, from the cigar girl on the street corner,” I replied. “She must have alerted you, because nobody else knew of my presence here in this about-to-be-shuttered reading room. Sad, isn’t it?”
“What is sad?” he asked.
“The closing of a library for the public,” I said. “What else?”
“Councilman Miles,” Patterson said, rushing forward with his hand outstretched. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”
Instead of shaking Patterson’s hand, Miles placed his hat in his hand.
“Find a place for that, will you? And this.”
He handed over a cane, a wicked black thing topped by a bright silver knob with his initials, AJM. He must have been holding the cane in the same hand as his hat, because I didn’t notice it until he handed it to Patterson.
The cane went into a basket near the door, and the hat atop the cane.
“I’m sorry,” Patterson said. “We’re short on creature comforts, considering.”
“What’s your name?” Miles asked.
Patterson told him.
“I never forget a name,” Miles said. “And you will never remember I was here. Now, go.”
“Sir? I have work to do.”
“It’s time for you to take a break from whatever you were doing,” Miles said. “A long break. Don’t come back until tomorrow.”
“But—” Patterson stammered a bit. “But I don’t think I should leave the room unattended, or to leave you—I beg your pardon, sir—or to leave you alone with Miss Wylde, considering your odd demeanor.”
Miles turned slowly to look at Patterson.
“We will attend to the room. And Miss Wylde will be quite safe.”
The way he said safe made my breath catch in my chest.
“Yes,” I forced myself to say. “Don’t worry, Mister Patterson. Everything will be well looked after. And I thank you for your help.”
Patterson hesitated.
“Go on,” I said. “Truly, I’m fine.”
He nodded, then stepped toward the door.
“Close it,” Miles said.
Patterson did, and the closing of the reading room door seemed terribly ominous, even more threatening than when the jury room was locked from the outside. Miles stood looking at me for many seconds while dust motes drifted between us in the shaft of sunlight that poured over my right shoulder.
“Why is your intention to ruin me?” he asked.
“It is my experience,” I said, “that people are quite capable of ruining themselves with no help from me.”
“Clever,” he said.
He walked over, dragged the other leather chair away from the shaft of sunlight, and placed it nearly arm to arm with mine, in a manner so we faced one another.
“You are something more than I expected,” he said.
“What did you expect?”
&nbs
p; “Not you,” he said. “Some well-meaning but inconsequential woman who believes in humbug and speaks nonsense, most likely. Or a Spiritualist who babbles about the everlasting sunshine of Summerland and how happy are the dead there, but has nothing to say about the hard material things, the real things, before her. But certainly not you.”
“I am pleased to disappoint.”
“Decker is an idiot,” he continued, then took a malodorous draw on the cigar. “He assured me that your coming to Denver could be turned to our advantage, that your expert testimony would be laughable and contribute to the impression that poor chicken-eating Eureka Smith was a fool or a charlatan or both. Even by chance, he said, there was only a one-in-five chance of you picking the Smith photograph. Those are good odds. I took them—why not? Those are house odds. But not only did you beat the house, you busted it.”
“I do not play games of chance, Councilman.”
“All the worse,” he said. “You played with a marked deck, and the risk was mine.”
“There was trickery. And any harm was incidental to my task before the court.”
“I find it difficult to believe that this wasn’t engineered by a third party,” he said. “Fred Pitkin, no doubt. Damn that old Connecticut Yankee; he came to Colorado for his health and is ruining mine. Whatever he’s paying, I can beat it.”
“Nobody’s paying me.”
“You’re working for someone.”
“I work for my clients. At present, sir, I have only one—a widow in Dodge City to whom I must report shortly.”
He stared at me, holding the cigar loosely in his right hand. The ash was growing long and I was afraid it would drop on the arm of the chair and burn the leather.
“You could be charged with perjury,” he said.
He tapped the ash to the floor and brought the cigar to his lips.
“I don’t see how,” I said.
“A simple matter,” he said. “A word to my friend, United States District Attorney Decker. If not perjury, then obstruction of justice. Or tampering with evidence. Any felony will do.”
“How quickly you resort to threat.”