The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  They left the old shack to decay in peace and headed back west, the way they’d come. After a few miles, they were in broken country, where arroyos twisted through the dry soil like empty veins.

  Buck Madigan gunned his powerful truck across a dry wash and up the other side. As they topped the hill, a small cemetery came into view, encircled by a crooked wrought-iron fence and a few scrubby cedar trees. Sagebrush thrived inside the tumbleweed-choked fence, which protected it from hungry cattle.

  The gate’s latch was rusted shut, so Buck found a softball-sized sandstone to loosen it. The hinges were so choked with rust they screamed like the angels of Hell as he horsed the gate open. The plaintive, persistent wind moaned all around them.

  “Don’t get up here much,” Buck said, lifting some trapped tumbleweeds over the fence and watching them roll away to the west. “My great-grandaddy’s original house was just down over there, but he moved it after the Twister of ‘Ought-two. Damn near two hundred head of cattle just disappeared. Put the fear of God in him, lemme tell you. He didn’t have a goddam clue what a tornado was, and it scared the bejeezus outta him.”

  Graeme Madigan’s grave, which he shared with his young wife, was marked by a pyramid-shaped block of granite topped with a sun. It was the most ostentatious of all the markers and sat in the center of the square plot, which was easily forty feet wide. Adhamh and Suzanne Madigan were buried together on the right side of his father. Jack and Marie Madigan, Buck’s parents, were buried under plain marble headstones on the other side. Jack died in 1969, leaving the place to his only son, unmarried, unrooted and unblessed with children of his own.

  How odd it was, Morgan thought, that this small empire was created by man who was prevented from claiming his family’s legacy. After Buck, there was no one left to claim it at all.

  “Here she is here,” Buck said.

  Aimee Little Spotted Horse’s final resting place was easily overlooked. The stone was a cube of granite, no bigger than a shoebox, nestled so deep in the weeds, it could not be seen.

  “I was near nine years old when she died, you know,” Buck said. “Her daddy come runnin’ over to our house to call the sheriff that night she disappeared. He was scared to death. I knew her a little, from the summer picnics for the hired hands and from school, but we didn’t mix much. She was Indian, you know, and them was different times. But I felt real sad for her. I didn’t know that little kids died and I couldn’t understand how somebody could just go away and never come back.”

  Morgan put his hand on the old cowboy’s shoulder. The muscles under his hand were rigid and hard.

  “Did you go to the funeral?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I come up here with my daddy for the buryin’. He helped her daddy lower that little pine-wood coffin into the hole, real slow and easy, so it didn’t bump on the bottom. It was like they didn’t want to disturb her no more. Her mama was in pretty bad shape. The preacher said some words, but I don’t recall what he said. I got to thinkin’ after you called this morning, and I still get a little choked to think about that little girl.”

  Claire yanked some weeds and kneeled on the ground beside Buck. Beneath the thick cover of ragweed and spurge, a few wildflowers clung to life close to the ground. They held fast to the soil, soaking up what little rain was left to them, but they survived.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Buck said.

  He reached into the thicket of sticky weeds. Morgan glimpsed a flash of silver as Buck handed something to Claire.

  It was a silver vase, tarnished by weather.

  It contained a half dozen dried up flowers whose wilted stalks were still slightly green. Their shriveled petals curled around the brown seed disk, still attached and undispersed.

  Claire studied the raised floral pattern on its side. She rubbed away some dried dust, and as she tipped it to look at the bottom, fetid brown water spilled out.

  The vase had been overturned, hidden in the tangle of weeds and buffalo grass that covered Aimee Little Spotted Horse’s grave. It had likely been in the cemetery for a long time, but the desiccated flowers were newer. They hadn’t been there more than a few weeks, Morgan guessed.

  And he recognized them.

  Tickseed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By Monday morning, Morgan was less certain about many things.

  The first payment on The Bullet was due, almost six thousand dollars, and he wasn’t sure where he’d find the money.

  The copy basket on his desk was empty. The reporters hadn’t worked all weekend. Morgan was furious, but he wasn’t sure he could put out the paper himself if he gave in to his seething anger and fired them on the spot.

  Malachi Pierce’s letter haunted him. Morgan’s instincts about the criminal mind were usually keen, but he couldn’t read Pierce, who was given more to allegory than actuality.

  Most of all, he was conflicted about Neeley Gilmartin’s guilt.

  The old man had called again that morning, twice. Morgan called back, and a disdainful motel clerk said she’d take a message rather than rouse him at his trailer, which had no phone. Morgan apologized for not calling sooner, and promised to visit Thursday, after the paper was out.

  “He’s not doin’ so good, you know,” the churlish clerk said. She turned her head away from the phone and hacked something glutinous from the pit of her lungs. Morgan winced and said goodbye. He feared he was just wasting his time — time he didn’t have — on Gilmartin.

  Morgan had plenty of questions, but they all betrayed his cynical suspicions. If Gilmartin didn’t do it, why can’t he explain where he was when Aimee disappeared? Why did he cop a plea if he wasn’t guilty? And how was it possible for a virtually penniless, lifelong convict to accrue more than seventy thousand dollars if he wasn’t guilty of something?

  Morgan wished it all added up to a rock-solid case against Gilmartin, but it didn’t. It wasn’t what he knew that bothered him. An old city editor’s warning echoed in his head: You don’t know what you don’t know.

  Like the flowers at Aimee’s grave. He brought the vase back from the cemetery, and left it among the papers on his desk, sealed in a plastic food bag. Even if he cajoled Sheriff Trey Kerrigan into dusting it for fingerprints, what would it prove? It wasn’t against the law to decorate a child’s grave.

  But the vase intrigued him because it meant somebody out there still felt an intimate connection to the girl.

  It had to be someone who knew the terrain, someone who felt compelled to trespass, and probably someone who was old enough to care about the death of a little Indian girl in 1948, at least fifty years old. And although the choice of a tickseed memorial might only be a coincidence, Morgan’s gut said it wasn’t.

  Who fit? Who still cared secretly about Aimee Little Spotted Horse, forty-eight years after her death?

  It probably wasn’t the unpretentious Buck Madigan. He was genuinely surprised by the discovery and readily admitted his continuing sadness over the girl’s death. If he’d placed the vase at her grave, he simply would have said so. End of story.

  Even if the ailing Gilmartin had the physical strength and wits to find his way to the remote cemetery, it wasn’t likely in his character to be so sentimental. Morgan made a mental note to ask him, but already knew the answer.

  Morgan checked his watch and rubbed his tired eyes. Ten-twenty. He’d let himself be distracted too long by this mouldering case, and he needed to get back to current events. He had a paper to make.

  “How many pages?” Cal Nussbaum was looming over Morgan’s desk, a sour expression as indelible as printer’s ink on his face.

  “Sorry,” Morgan said, as if he’d just been startled from an angry dream. “What?”

  “How many pages you want to print this week?” the overworked printer asked again brusquely.

  “How many ads do we have?”

  The volume of advertisements typically determined the size of the paper. A good one was roughly half ads, half news.

  “Four hun
dred and twenty inches,” Nussbaum muttered, then added sarcastically, “good enough for a humdinger of a seven-page paper.”

  Winchester was a town of declining fortunes. Business had been tough since Wyoming’s oil boom days went bust in 1986. When the oil went away, so did the easy money. The vagabond roughnecks and itinerant toolpushers were all gone now, and only the sons of native sons remained, plying their fathers’ gentler trades up and down the proud but deteriorating Main Street.

  Morgan did the math and it didn’t add up. Four hundred and twenty column inches might bring twenty-one hundred dollars, if everybody paid. Newsstand sales might bring in another three hundred, thanks to the grocery coupons. He needed twice that to break even.

  “Make it a ten-pager,” he said, already a little uneasy with the decision. “I think we can dig up enough news to make it look like we know what the hell is going on.”

  Cal Nussbaum’s long face rumpled in a morose smile.

  “I doubt it,” he mumbled, then slouched off toward the backshop.

  Morgan slumped in his chair. The brass bell over the front door giggled at the pressman’s sardonic remark. He swiveled to see his mother in the foyer, fishing deep in her oversized handbag. Her pragmatic approach to life tended to fill her purse with items that, ironically, seemed highly impractical for any sixty-year-old woman to haul around.

  “‘Morning, mom,” he said, coming through the wooden gate that separated the newsroom from the small waiting area. “What brings you into town today?”

  “My glasses,” Rachel Morgan said.

  “Your glasses?”

  “I can’t find my glasses,” she insisted, rummaging through the collection of candies, Kleenex, odd scraps of paper, pencils, a year’s worth of grocery receipts, an unopened watermelon seed packet, keys and assorted other detritus in her bag. A yellow feather fell out of her purse and floated to the floor as she dug.

  “Good God, I’m starting to feel like some old woman,” Rachel said.

  Her silvery gray hair had a new style, cut close and permed with tiny curls. Silver bracelets with tiny Navajo symbols jangled around her wrists as she grubbed deeper in her bag. With her denim skirt, silver concho belt and tiny howling-coyote earrings, she looked every bit a Southwestern matron, maybe even a doyenne of Pueblo artisans. She had always dreamed of retiring to Santa Fe, Flagstaff, or maybe Sedona, where she knew she would see an original Georgia O’Keeffe painting and smell piñon smoke in the autumn. Maybe, when the winters grew too rigorous for her aging bones, she’d sell the place, she always said, and move “down south.”

  “Mom ...” Morgan said.

  It was no use. She wasn’t listening. In her mind, she was already retracing her steps through that clear, hot morning. Her eyes were closed, moving as they followed invisible footsteps through her memory.

  “I had them this morning when I was reading the paper at home. Then I had coffee with Claire, and she showed me some darling old photographs of Bridger. Then I was reading a magazine at the hairdresser’s, and I’m sure I put them ... in here ... somewhere,” she said, squinting back into the dark maw of her purse.

  “Mom, they’re hanging around your neck,” Morgan said. He tried not to sound as if he were making fun, for she prided herself on being organized.

  Rachel Morgan touched her hand to the front of her faded blue western blouse, the color of Arizona sky, then smiled gamely. A red tinge crept up her neck.

  “Getting old is no fun, Jeff,” she demurred.

  “You’re not old, mom. I think you’re just too organized. It does a body good to forget some things every once in a while,” he teased her.

  “Pshaw. I came to town to have my hair done and see Claire, and I decided to come in and renew my subscription. Is this how you treat all your customers, young man?”

  “Mom, that’s okay. I’ll take care of it,” he said. He tried to close her checkbook.

  “I insist, Jeff,” she said stiffly, pushing his hand aside. “Anyway, I think you are working far too much, son, and not paying enough attention to your wife. She’s such a good woman. You should go home earlier at night. It’s not good for you to stay up all night down in this ... this filthy place. And Claire needs your help now more than ever.”

  It was obvious, to Morgan at least, that Claire had told her the news about the baby.

  “So you know?”

  A look settled across Rachel Morgan’s face that every mother’s child recognizes when a secret is uncovered, a look of all-knowing grace that inspires equal parts of astonishment and guilt.

  “I wouldn’t know up from down if I waited for my own son to tell me. Mothers have their ways. I’m very happy for you, son, but I’m afraid you’re leaving Claire alone far too much at a time she needs you desperately. She’s frightened.”

  Rachel Morgan feared something else, too. Her husband, Ernest, long a victim of high blood pressure, died of a brain aneurysm when he was fifty-three years old. To Rachel, who’d worked twice as hard as any man raising a son and being a loyal wife to a workaholic hardware merchant, the workplace was a death chamber. And, of course, she sympathized less now with her son than with his worried, lonely wife. She saw in Jefferson the same hard-working, serious tendencies that killed her husband.

  And if she only knew how close her son was to busting a vein over his business now, she’d pinch his ear and march him straight home to save his life.

  “Mom, we’re just getting started in business here,” he explained. “It’s always tough at the beginning. Things will slow down when I get into the swing of it. Claire is a trouper. Don’t worry.”

  With her spectacles now on her nose, Rachel Morgan was making out a check for her subscription, like the proud and dutiful mother of a newspaperman she was. She stripped off the check, then dropped the pen and checkbook back into hiding in her cluttered handbag.

  “Well, just remember that it makes no sense to have a heart attack over something that sells for a quarter,” she warned him. “Just make sure I get my paper. It’s been late the last few weeks. I can’t do anything on a Thursday ‘til I get my paper. See what you can do, son. And don’t be a stranger. Come visit your lonesome mother once in a while.”

  Rachel Morgan handed him her check and left, sweeping out the front door and up Main Street in her denim skirt.

  No matter how imperiled the business got, Jefferson Morgan didn’t think a mother should pay for a subscription to her own son’s newspaper. He started to tear up her check, but stopped when he looked closer.

  The check was for ten thousand dollars.

  The paper devoured time voraciously, like a hungry animal.

  For three days, Jefferson Morgan did nothing else but produce the latest edition of the Winchester Bullet as if it were the last. He was determined not to miss deadline for the fifth consecutive week. He postponed every task that wasn’t part of making a newspaper, except one: He called his mother and thanked her for the generous loan, promising to pay it back within the year. Her money bought him more than she knew: Time. Maybe a month.

  Other than that, Morgan worked feverishly, unaware of the time for hours at a stretch. He wrote a dozen stories, answered phones, “souped” film and printed photos, sketched out dummies for a few pages, and rode herd on the reporters and ad saleswoman. He looked up once from his terminal and they were all gone. He cursed, then realized it was after seven, long past quitting time.

  He came home at dawn on Tuesday, slept a few hours, then went back to the newsroom, where he fell asleep at his desk sometime after midnight. He awoke just before dawn Wednesday.

  Morgan’s mouth was pasty and rancid. His head ached, and his hands were thick and clumsy. After two cups of coffee, he felt human again, but hollow. He sniffed under the arms of his wrinkled shirt and decided he could safely go down to The Griddle, a favorite breakfast spot for truckers, ranchers and other working men who carried their musk with virile pride. He didn’t have a choice anyway, since it was the only place in town open befor
e sunrise.

  The morning sky was like dark suede, reflecting the coming light. Winchester’s only traffic light slowly blinked yellow, lending a cautious rhythm to the silent dark.

  Warm light spilled through The Griddle’s front window. Tiny bells tinkled as Morgan came through the front door and he took a seat at the long counter cluttered with ketchup bottles, sugar dispensers, little plastic creamers and menus crammed between stainless steel napkin holders. Too tired to look through the menu, he scanned The Griddle’s Wednesday special, scrawled, misspellings and all, in yellow chalk on a blackboard over the coffee machine: Two eggs (any style) hashbrowns, sausauge or bacon, toast or short stack, coffe $3.95. No subsistitutions.

  The waitress, Suzie, was a petite woman in her late twenties. She was pretty, but wore too much eye makeup, giving her a raccoon-like appearance under the fluorescent lights. Her bleached blond hair was short and looked as if it was still wet when she arrived at work that morning. Her fingernails were trimmed working-woman close and painted cherry red, to match her lipstick.

  She had that far-off look he’d seen in people who never went anywhere. Still, she was pretty enough to catch some cowboy’s eye long before last call on a Saturday night.

  Morgan ordered the breakfast special, over medium with bacon.

  “Regular or unleaded?” she asked, snatching a fat glass pot of coffee from a warmer behind the counter. Comforting curls of steam rose from the opaque liquid inside.

  “Better give me the hard stuff,” he said.

  The coffee was hot and thick, a liquid alarm clock.

  Suzie leaned forward and looked down the counter. A couple of ranch hands were shoveling mashed eggs into their mouths in heaping forkfuls, washing it down with coffee. One of them, a rough-looking guy with long hair, wore a cellular phone on his wide leather belt. As she bent near Morgan, she smelled like peach soap, an unexpected scent among the odors of cooking fat, fresh black coffee and male sweat.