Legends Can Be Murder

by Shelton, Connie

  Or, if they were, someone had discovered them and taken the bodies away. Either way this wasn’t good news. The law could be hunting him for murder, or Connell and Thespen could be after him for their money.

  He hurried off in the opposite direction.

  A newsboy called out from outside the offices of the Skagway News. Joshua pulled the brim of his hat lower and approached, handing over the correct change for a copy of the morning edition. He tucked it under his arm and walked a few blocks before finding an empty bench in front of a hardware store to sit.

  The front page stories covered another lucrative find in the gold fields, which Joshua could easily imagine coming straight out of a typewriting machine in Liarsville, and an amusing piece about dance hall girls by a columnist calling himself The Stroller. Surely the discovery of two dead men would rate front-page coverage, and it was not there. He scanned the inside pages but saw nothing about the theft of a sizeable amount of money.

  He should have felt reassured but he didn’t. Eventually, Mick and Alistair would surely report the theft and the lawmen weren’t turning a blind eye anymore like they did in Soapy’s day. He felt a renewed urgency to get out of Skagway. He hurried toward the docks.

  A clerk with uncombed red hair and granules of sleep sand at the corners of his eyes looked up as Joshua approached the ticket counter.

  “The Portland docks tomorrow,” the young man said, after yawning hugely. “She’ll be in port five days before sailing again to Seattle then on to San Francisco. Takes that long to offload cargo and such.”

  “So there’s nothing leaving in the next day or two?”

  “Oh, sure. The ferry sails to Dyea this afternoon. Now I know that one will go, for a fact. The sheriff was just here and he’s wanting to get over there today. Tracking some criminal, he says.”

  A sheriff—no, the risk would be too great. And for what? To get fewer than five miles up the Taiya Inlet from here.

  “Thank you,” Joshua said. “I will have to think about it.”

  He walked away, hoping his reaction to the news about the sheriff on board the Dyea ferry had not been remarkable. With luck, the sleepy clerk would not remember him.

  A steady rain began to fall; within minutes it was dripping from the brim of his wide hat. He thought of his soft bed at Mrs. McIlhaney’s, the spare clothes and fire in front of which to dry himself. However, that would be the first place they would come looking for him—he dare not chance it.

  He walked the entire length of the town—nine blocks—mainly to keep awake and to force his limbs to move. Behind a house on Runnalls, he found a three-sided shed full of musty tarps and broken-handled tools. No signs of activity showed in the house, so he ducked into the shed and dropped to the bare ground in a corner, pulling one of the smelly tarps over himself. His thoughts grew blurred and his eyelids felt heavy. Soon, he slept.

  A sharp sound jolted him awake. The rain had stopped beating its staccato pattern on the tin roof and he could hear voices.

  “Toss ’em in there,” a man was saying.

  “Everything?” said a second male voice, younger.

  “Yep. All of it. One of these days I’ll get around to repairing this stuff. I can always sell it as long as these rubes keep coming along with their gold fever.”

  Joshua edged the tarp aside and caught a glimpse of a man in overalls talking to a teenaged boy, the two of them standing beside a small cart loaded with more of the same broken tools that already nearly filled the shed. The older man walked away and the young one picked up an axe with half a handle. He hefted it back, ready to toss it. Joshua flung the tarp back.

  “Wait! Don’t throw it yet.”

  The young man nearly dropped the deadly axe head on his own foot.

  “What in the devil—”

  “Look, I only needed some sleep. I shall go now, and I won’t come back. Please don’t tell your boss.”

  “He’s my father.”

  “Just please don’t tell him you found me here. I don’t want trouble.”

  The kid shrugged. “Fine.” He glanced toward the house. “Better get out before Ma starts supper. She’ll see you out that kitchen window.”

  Joshua leaped up and dashed out through the narrow doorway, realizing only after he’d traveled three blocks that he’d left his pack behind.

  The sun dipped lower in the sky, making the point that the days were getting shorter. He patted his waist and pockets and felt the reassuring lumps of the cash and gold. Thank the lord he hadn’t put those into the pack. At least he had money. But what was he to do with it? He couldn’t think of a single hotelier or boarding house matron he could trust with his secret. Except perhaps Mrs. McIlhaney.

  Maybe if he pleaded, if he paid extra. All he needed was for her to let him stay out of sight. He could say there’d been some trouble, without actually admitting he’d broken the law. She would never condone that.

  Broadway Street was crowded now in the early evening. Joshua felt refreshed. He must have gotten six or seven hours of much-needed sleep. He pulled his mackinaw tighter against the chilly air and his hat brim low enough to obscure his eyes from casual view. His jaw was rimmed with stubble; perhaps this would be a good time to let his beard grow. Any scrap of disguise could help.

  He walked through the crowds on the board sidewalk, the opposite side of the street from the boarding house. Its neat white paint with blue trim showed brightly in comparison to the plain, unpainted wooden structures around it. His attic room window faced the street and while he watched, an unseen hand drew the curtain aside then let it drop into place again. Joshua froze.

  A momentary gap in the flow of pedestrians revealed the front door of the house. Alistair Connell stood on the front stoop, talking with Mrs. McIlhaney. Mick and the sheriff must be upstairs, searching his room. They’d come looking for him, telling the story from their own viewpoint, how Joshua had gotten them drunk and robbed them in an alleyway.

  His last place of refuge was lost to him.

  Connell’s head turned toward him, but Joshua had ducked into the doorway of an outfitter’s shop. He counted to five, then casually strolled to the corner of Bond Street and turned to face the mountain.

  Walking, with no particular destination, no goal other than to find a place where he could vanish until next Thursday, he saw a path. It followed a small stream, leading up the mountain and away from town. He took it.

  This wasn’t the same one the men took to access the White Pass Trail, so he should be able to remain out of sight. He’d heard of some small lakes out this way; perhaps camping out under the stars for a few nights would be a pleasant option. He would have to decide shortly, though. Night would come soon.

  Joshua had covered a half mile on the narrow path, pushing aside branches of bushes loaded with reddish berries, when he heard the sound. Steady footsteps that almost precisely matched his own. He stopped, they stopped. He resumed, quickening his pace. The other steps sped up and there was a mild oath as a branch whipped the pursuer with a whoosh. Joshua’s heart raced. Connell must have seen him, back there at the rooming house. One or both of them were surely behind him.

  He could barely see the trail now and his boot stubbed against a stone the size of his two fists. He picked it up and stepped off the trail to wait.

  Chapter 20

  I took a deep breath and went into the bathroom, hoping Drake’s sleep wouldn’t be completely ruined. I asked Mina to repeat what she’d just said. She choked at the description of the poor, deceased kitty; I told her I was more interested in the note.

  “Have you touched it?”

  “Yuk, no!”

  “I meant the note. The police may be able to get fingerprints from the paper.”

  “My doorbell rang, like twelve times, so I put on my robe and went to see. Through the peephole, I couldn’t see anyone so I opened the door just a crack. And there it was. I switched on my porch light to be sure ... then I just slammed the door.”

  “Call t
he police. They can take the cat, I’m sure, but be sure to tell the officers to give the note to Chief Branson.”

  Over the phone I could hear her blowing her nose.

  “You didn’t see anyone running away or driving off from your house?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I’m sorry. I’m not making a very good detective, am I?”

  “It’s okay. You were shaken up. Anyone would react the same.”

  “What if they come back?”

  I doubted they would. This was a first warning, and I suspected the note-writer would wait now to see if Mina had taken his threat seriously.

  “After the police leave, why don’t you go spend the rest of the night at your mom’s? You’ll feel safer there.”

  She agreed.

  I edged my way back to the bedroom and managed to smack my toe on the corner of the nightstand, which clattered as the lamp tipped over. I gave out a little pain-curse and grabbed for the lamp, and naturally with all this Drake woke up. So much for my attempts at consideration. He pulled me on top of him and one thing led to another ... and by the time he was contentedly snoring away once more, I was really wide awake.

  I wrapped up in my robe and went to the kitchen, thinking in terms of hot cocoa. Across the way, I could see lights on at Berta’s and two indistinct shapes moving about in her kitchen. Clearly, they weren’t getting any sleep either. I turned off the kettle and made my way across the grassy expanse of the two back yards.

  When I tapped at Berta’s back door I heard a tiny shriek, so I called out. Berta pulled back the curtain and I waved.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. I saw the lights.”

  Two cups of tea sat on the laminate kitchen table, one of them untouched, which I guessed was because Mina would not sit still. She paced the width of the small room three times before I got inside.

  “Poor little Georgie Girl,” she said. Her eyelids were puffy and red.

  “When the police came, Mina recognized the cat,” Berta said. “It was a stray that she’d begun feeding. She’d planned to adopt it.”

  “I never was sure whether it was male or female, so the name went from George to Georgie Girl,” Mina said with a sniffle.

  “I’m so sorry.” I thought of our year-old pup and how Drake had taken her in because she was about to be abandoned.

  “There’s the note,” she said. “I know, I didn’t follow instructions but when I went to cut the string off Georgie’s neck I guess I got so upset ... I tossed the note out of the way and then the officer came and he just seemed eager to get the job over with. He barely took the details. He offered to take the kitty away but I told him she—he—should be buried nearby. So he got busy digging a hole near my garden and we both forgot about the note.” She picked up a baggie. “I did remember to put it in plastic.”

  I took the little parcel and looked at both sides. As she’d told me, someone had gone to the trouble of cutting out magazine and newspaper letters to form the short sentence: Leave this business alone! They were glued to a piece of cardstock with a round hole punched in one corner. Through the hole the perpetrator had threaded a double strand of rough twine. There were a few dark cat hairs stuck in the twine, attesting to the fact that it had been tied pretty tightly.

  A big-city crime lab could probably run analysis of the glue and the card and the letters and the string and come up with a profile and sources for the materials. But a veiled threat and a dead cat probably wouldn’t warrant the use of those sorts of resources. Still, we would give Chief Branson the note and the story and insist that he keep it as evidence until we knew exactly what it was about.

  “Just to be sure,” I said to Mina, “are there any other stories you’ve worked on recently that might bring someone to do this?”

  “You know what the ‘police beat’ around here consists of. Sure, I suppose some guy could take exception to my coverage of the grand opening at the new auto parts store, but seriously? There’s the little Police Blotter column that lists traffic citations and drunk-and-disorderly calls, but no one is mentioned by name. This has to refer to the cave-guy story.”

  She was right, of course.

  “So, all that’s been printed in the paper so far was a plea for anyone knowing about the disappearance of an unknown man ... yada, yada ...”

  She nodded.

  “His name and the visit by his sister ...?”

  “Not yet. I was planning to run a follow-up this week, saying that a relative had been located and that the investigation continues.”

  “But very few people know about Katherine yet, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, so it has to be someone who knows there’s been new information to follow up on. And that’s a limited list.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s think about this.” I asked Berta for a pen and something to write on. “Who knows anything at all about it?”

  “Well, everyone in the police department,” Mina began. “Probably some other city officials. I mean, all the offices are pretty well connected.”

  I jotted down the chief’s name and the other officers who’d been present when Katherine came in. Mayor, fire chief, head of street sweeping ... but none of those seemed like serious candidates.

  “What about anyone who might have overheard us talking?” I asked.

  “Well, we took Katherine to lunch, so I suppose the owner of the tea house and the girl who waited on us.”

  “Hardly seems likely that one of them would go so far as to kill—to do this. Unless they have a grudge against you anyway?”

  “I know the restaurant owner by name, barely, and I think the girl working there is new. I’ve never seen her before. That wouldn’t be unusual during the summer months.”

  “When you first learned about Katherine, where were you?”

  “At the news office. So, there’s Wilbur and Betty who answers phones, and Gilda who does advertising layouts. Only Wilbur was there when I talked to Katherine, but I suppose he could have mentioned it to anyone.”

  “And we were at the airport when you came to tell me about it, so that includes Drake and Kerby and Chuey. Have you talked about this case much with Chuey? Just asking ... about everyone.” I didn’t want to cast aspersions on her new boyfriend.

  She shook her head. “He knew I was excited about my original piece getting picked up by the wire services, but I really haven’t seen him much in the last week or so.”

  The wire services. That pretty much opened up the list of who knew Mina’s connection with the cave-guy to the rest of the world. I felt a little overwhelmed as I wrote R-O-W on the list. I scratched it off. We had to be reasonable about this.

  If there was one certainty about any of this, it was that the person who wanted to threaten Mina away from the case was someone who could easily find out where she lived and who knew that killing her cat would come as a blow to her. They wanted the threat to stick, and most likely they wanted to be around to see if she backed off the investigation. It was someone local.

  “We have to look at motive,” I said. It’s what my brother and his homicide detective buddy always do. “If ‘this business’ refers to solving the murder of Michael Ratcliff, who wants you to stop? It has to be the killer.”

  That was a little sobering, the knowledge that someone who committed a murder forty years ago was still around, perhaps just watching and waiting.

  With that unsettling thought I left the two of them and returned home where I tried to sleep, with no success at all. By six o’clock I estimated that I’d probably dozed for a whole thirty minutes so I gave up and went into the kitchen to make the biggest breakfast I could think of: scrambled eggs with green chile and cheese, plus toast. Drake, being the real cook in our family, could have done much better but he was still in the land of post-coital slumber. He finally came out of the bedroom when the scent of roasted green chile could not be ignored.

  “Mm, hey,” he said, flashing me a sexy smile. “You read my min
d.”

  I had a feeling I’d read more than one thing on his mind. I set plates on the table and offered the quick explanation of why my slippers were sitting by the back door, soggy with dew and covered with grass stains.

  “Let me know if I can help,” he said, slathering his toast with a good half-inch of strawberry jam.

  “For now I think I’ll try to dig up some leads online. Mina’s going to hold her follow-up story, if Wilbur is agreeable. Poor thing, she was pretty upset about the cat.”

  He ate quickly and went to shower, saying that Kerby had scheduled his first flight for nine o’clock. I estimated that it was not an unreasonable hour to call my brother in Albuquerque, so I dialed the office.

  Sally Bertrand, our part-time receptionist, sounded chipper, considering that I could hear her six-month-old son fussing in the background. She filled me in on such interesting facts as little Ross’s morning intake of oatmeal before switching me over to Ron.

  “I don’t know what to suggest,” he said, after congratulating me on our discovery of the dead man’s identity and location of a relative. “You’ll have to go pretty far back in time and there weren’t computer databases then. The police consider a case cold a few weeks after the fact.”

  “I can’t remember that we’ve ever been brought into a case as old as this one.”

  “The basics should be the same. Find out who knew him and who had reason to kill him.”

  He made it sound so simple. But who in Skagway knew a man who’d somehow ended up here from Seattle, when even his own sister hadn’t a clue why he’d come. On a wild hope, I passed along Michael’s full name and work history in case Ron had any spare time to help search. I hung up, knowing how rare his free time was these days, deciding I needed to proceed full-speed ahead on my own.

  I spent the morning puttering around in websites that Ron had told me about before, hoping that I might stumble upon something, but by noon I still had absolutely zero. Those boxes Katherine had mentioned that once belonged to Michael were probably our only hope. Since the lady was now homeward bound on a plane, I couldn’t very well start pressuring her for at least a day or two. I drummed my fingers on the table, wondering what to try next.