by Simon Toyne
“Well, here we are, Jimbo,” she whispered to the wind. “Alone at last.”
The last time they’d been up here together was for a photo op about two or three months previously. They had not been alone back then, there had been a handful of other people—press, photographers. She had stood here by his side, framed by the grave markers with the town spread out below them while he outlined his plans for its future, not realizing he wouldn’t be around to see it.
She walked over to a mound of dirt set to one side of the grave. She grabbed the edge of the stone-colored sheet of canvas covering it and started dragging it off, stumbling as her heels sank into the ground and her tailored dress restricted the movement of her legs. She had bought it for the investiture, a little black number designed to be classy but not too showy so it wouldn’t draw attention away from her handsome husband, the real star of the show. It was the only black dress she owned.
She stumbled again and nearly fell, the tight dress making it hard to keep her balance.
“SHIT!” she shouted into the silence. “SHIT FUCKING SHIT!”
She kicked her shoes off, sending her heels sailing away through the air. One skittered to a rest against the sword cluster of an agave plant, the other bounced off a painted board that marked the final resting place of one J. J. James, died of sweats, 1882.
She grabbed the hem of her dress on either side of the seam and wrenched it apart with a loud rip. She was never going to wear it again; no amount of dressing it up with a new scarf or belt was ever going to accessorize away this memory. She gave it another yank and it tore all the way up to her thigh. Then she planted her bare feet wide apart and felt the heat of the earth beneath them. It felt good to be free of the constricting dress and the heels. She felt more like herself. She grabbed the shovel and stabbed the blade into the pile of dirt, the muscles in her arms and shoulders straining against the weight of it as she heaved back and tipped it in the hole.
Dry earth whumped down on the wooden lid of her husband’s coffin.
Wood. Fifth anniversary is wood. Jim had told her that.
They had spent their first anniversary here in this town, a break from study so he could show her the place where he hoped to be sheriff one day. He had introduced her to everyone, taken her dancing at the band hall where everyone knew him, and taken her riding in the desert, where they’d made love on a blanket by a fire beneath the stars, like there was nothing else but him and her and they were the only two people on earth. She had bought him a tin star from one of the souvenir shops and given it to him as a present, a toy sheriff’s badge to keep him going until he got a real one.
First anniversary is paper—he had told her with a smile—tin is what you give on the tenth.
She had always loved it that he knew stuff like that, silly romantic stuff that was all the more sweet and surprising coming from the mouth of such a big guy’s guy like he was—like he had been.
He never got to pin the real badge on, and the gift of wood she ended up getting him for their fifth anniversary was this pine box lying at the bottom of a six-foot hole.
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and it came away wet.
Goddammit. She had promised herself she was not going to cry. At least there was no one around to see it. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. She didn’t want to give them a damned thing, not after they had taken so much already.
She remembered the last time she had seen Jim alive, sitting behind his desk in his office at home, looking as if he had been crying.
I need to fix this—was all he would tell her. The town needs fixing.
Then he had stuffed some papers in his case and driven off into the evening. But it had been Mayor Cassidy who had driven back, knocking on her door at three in the morning to deliver the news personally, his words full of meaning but empty at the same time.
Tragic accident . . . So sorry for your loss . . . Anything the town can do . . . Anything at all . . .
She hauled another shovel load into the grave, then another, numbing herself against her sorrow and anger through the real physical pain of burying her husband. And with every shovelful of earth she whispered a prayer, but not for her dead husband. The prayer she offered up, as tears smeared her face and the smell of smoke drifted up from the desert below, was that the wildfire was actually a judgment, sent by some higher power to sweep right through the town and burn the whole damned place to the ground.
Anything the town can do—Cassidy had said, his hat in his hands and his eyes cast down. Anything at all.
They could all die and burn in hell.
That was what they could do for her.
10
“HOW DID HE DIE?” SOLOMON KEPT HIS VOICE CALM BUT HE FELT LIKE howling and breaking something. His frustration was like a physical thing, a storm raging inside him, a stone weighing him down. Being confined in the tin can of the ambulance wasn’t helping.
“Car wreck,” Morgan said, his eyes still looking up and out of the side window, toward the slopes of the mountains. “He was driving late at night, fell asleep at the wheel or maybe swerved to avoid something and ended up in a ravine. Bashed his head and cracked his skull. He was dead by the time we found him.”
Dead by the time I found him too . . .
Solomon stared past Morgan and out of the window. The town was starting to rise from the desert in scraps of broken fence and crooked shacks with rusted tin roofs or no roofs at all. None of it seemed familiar. “Where are all the people?”
“Oh, those are the old miners’ houses,” Morgan said. “They keep it like this for atmosphere, I guess, a curtain-raiser for the tourists before they get to Main Street. Most people live around the center nowadays.”
A large sign whipped past—old-style lettering telling travelers they were now entering “The Historic Old Town of Redemption”—and the town came suddenly to life. Pastel houses were lined up in neat rows behind white-painted picket fences along well-paved roads. A Wells Fargo wagon stood beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree, the horses tethered by their reins to a wooden rail running along a trough filled with water from an old-fashioned pump. They were twitching their heads, spooked by the smoke blowing their way and anxious to run from it. Solomon knew how they felt. He wanted to run too, away from the fire, away from this town and this strange feeling of responsibility to a man who was already dead.
“Did James Coronado have family?” he asked.
“Holly,” Gloria said, fixing a dressing over the burn mark on his arm. “His wife.”
“Holly Coronado,” Solomon repeated. “Maybe I should talk to her.”
Morgan shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“She just buried her husband. She’ll want to be left alone, I should imagine.”
“She might know who I am.”
Morgan shifted in his seat like it had suddenly become uncomfortable. “She should be left alone, time like this.”
Solomon cocked his head to one side. “It’s an odd custom, don’t you think, to abandon people when they are at their loneliest? If her husband knew me, then she might know me too. And she might be glad to see an old friend.”
“I can run a check on your name, if you want,” Morgan said, fishing his phone from his pocket, “see if anything comes up.”
Solomon wondered why Morgan seemed reluctant to let him talk to this woman. It only made him want to talk to her even more. He watched as he dialed a number, then fixed him with a level stare as he waited for someone to answer.
“Hey, Rollins, it’s Morgan. Run a name for me, would ya—Solomon Creed.” He glanced down at the book, used the inscription to spell out the name, then looked back up. “He’s about six feet tall, mid to late twenties, Caucasian—and by that I mean white: white skin, white hair.” He nodded. “Yeah, like an al-bino.” He split the word up and stretched it out, in the same way that he might say neee-gro. “No, I’ll wait. Run it through NCIC, se
e if you get anything.”
Solomon felt the ball of anxiety expand in his stomach a little. The NCIC was the National Crime Information Center. Morgan was checking to see if he had a criminal record or was wanted on any outstanding warrants. And the fact that Solomon knew what NCIC stood for suggested to him that he might.
Solomon looked down at himself, his white skin glowing under the bright lights, no pigment, no marks at all except for the I branded on his arm, now hidden beneath a dressing. A blank page of a man. He crossed his arms in front of himself, feeling vulnerable and exposed with his shirt off.
The ambulance turned off the main road and a huge white building filled the ambulance with reflected light. Solomon narrowed his eyes and peered through the rear windows at the church, far too large for such a small town, its copper-clad spire needling its way up into the desert sky. He felt it tug at him, as if he recognized it, though he couldn’t say for sure. Morgan had said the cross he wore around his neck was a replica of the one on the altar, and he felt a strong urge to slip out of the straps that held his legs and break out of the ambulance so he could run to it and see it for himself.
“Yeah, I’m here.” Morgan nodded and listened. “Okay, thanks.” He hung up. “Well, Mr. Creed,” he said, tucking the book back into the folded jacket pocket. “You’ll be pleased to learn that you are not in the criminal database.”
He sounded vaguely disappointed and Solomon was too, a little. At least if he had been in it he would have more of an idea of who he was.
The ambulance slowed, turned off the road, and pulled up in front of a large stone building. Gloria handed Solomon his shirt and moved with practiced speed, pushing past Morgan to the rear doors to throw them open in an explosion of sunlight and heat. She turned back and released the lock holding the gurney in place and the other medic appeared beside her, ready to pull Solomon out of the ambulance.
“I can walk,” Solomon said, slipping his arms into the shirt.
“You can’t,” Gloria said. “It’s hospital policy. Sit back.”
The driver tugged hard and the gurney slid out of the ambulance with Solomon still lying on it. The steel legs rattled as they unfolded and the sunlight made him screw his eyes shut. “I’m not hurt,” he said, squinting up at copper letters spelling out King Community Hospital across the facade of the building.
“Sir, you are injured and you have amnesia.”
“How was my PERLA test?” Solomon said, covering his eyes with his arm.
“It was . . . How did—have you had medical training?”
“Possibly. My pupils are both equal and reactive to light?” They were certainly reacting to the light now.
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t need to go to the hospital.” He reached forward to undo the straps holding his legs in place, swung his legs free and down to the ground. The moment his bare feet touched the ground he felt calmer.
The driver moved forward and Solomon pulled the gurney between them and stepped out of reach. He wanted to run and get away from these people but he couldn’t. Not yet. Morgan climbed down from the ambulance, the jacket dangling from his hand, the book sticking out from the pocket. “Why don’t you just go with these people and let them run their tests,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”
Safe. Interesting word. Safe from who? Safe from what?
“My jacket,” Solomon said, holding his hand out.
Morgan held it up. “You want this? Go with these people and you can—”
Solomon darted forward, shoving the gurney at Morgan in a loud clatter that made him flinch. He instinctively reached out and the jacket swung close enough for Solomon to snatch it. He had moved away again before Morgan even realized what was happening.
“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” Solomon repeated, slipping his arms into the jacket and backing away from the gurney, and the people, and whatever they wanted to do to him. “I need to go to the church.”
11
MAYOR CASSIDY CLOSED THE DOOR OF HIS STUDY, SHRUGGED OFF HIS jacket, and let it fall to the floor. He stood in the downdraft of the ceiling fan, pulling his string tie loose and undoing the top button of his shirt. His collar was soaked with sweat.
The funeral had turned into a disaster, his big unifying gesture undone at a stroke by the whiff of wildfire. Everyone had drifted away before the ceremony had ended, a few at first, then a stampede as soon as the sounds of sirens had reached them and they’d seen how fast the smoke was rising and which way it was headed. They all had homes and businesses to worry about, so he couldn’t blame them, but it wasn’t exactly the gesture of community support he had hoped for. There was also the little matter of what might have started the fire, and he didn’t even want to think about that.
His phone buzzed in his pocket and his heart clenched in his chest like a hand had taken hold of it and begun to squeeze. He looked down at the crumpled jacket, the black material shivering where the phone vibrated inside it like some large insect had crawled in there and was now trying to get out. There was a small hole in the fabric and the sight of it made him burn with anger. Damn moths, the house was plagued with them. There had been a Cassidy living in this house ever since Jack Cassidy had built it and now it was all being eaten away, pulled apart fiber by fiber, everything unraveling. He felt embarrassed knowing that he had stood in front of the assembled town with a hole in his jacket—their shabby, moth-eaten mayor.
The phone stopped ringing and silence surged back into his study. It could have been anybody calling. There was a wildfire burning on the edge of town, all kinds of people would be trying to get hold of him, wanting him to lead, wanting him to reassure them, wanting—something. Everyone wanted something, but there was no one there for him. Not anymore.
He glanced over at the photograph on his desk of Stella in the garden, standing under one of the jacaranda trees, Stella with the sun glowing in her long hair, taken about a year before the cancer wore her away to nothing and took her hair along with everything else. He still missed her, six years after he had stood over her grave, and never more than in these last few months when he had badly needed someone to talk to and share the burden of all he’d had to bear, someone to tell him that it was okay to do a bad thing for a good enough reason, and that God would understand.
The phone buzzed again at his feet, like the last effort of a dying insect, then fell silent again.
He tipped his head back and let the cool air wash over him. He felt done in. Defeated. He wanted to lie down on the floor next to his crumpled jacket and go to sleep, close his eyes on his crumbling, moth-eaten world and slide away into blissful oblivion. He half-wished he was a drinking man so he could grab a bottle and disappear into it. But he was a Cassidy and his name was written across half the buildings in town. And Cassidys did not drink, nor did they lie down on floors and close their eyes to their responsibilities. And this was his responsibility, all of it—the town, the people, the widow he’d left standing alone by her husband’s grave, the fire out in the desert—everything. He was trapped here, bound by blood, and by the name he carried, and by the generations of bones lying buried in the ground.
He looked up at the portrait hanging above the great stone fireplace, Jack Cassidy’s eyes staring sternly back at him across a hundred years of history, as if to say, I didn’t build this town from nothing only for you to run away and let it die.
“I’ve got this,” Cassidy whispered to his ancestor. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The desk phone rang, sharply and suddenly, its old brass bell cutting right through the silence. It echoed off the oak paneling and leather-bound books lining the walls. Cassidy plucked his jacket from the floor, slipped his arms into the sleeves, and stepped out from beneath the cool flow of air. It made him feel more official, wearing the jacket, and he felt he would need authority for whatever conversation he was about to have. He took a deep breath, as if he was about to dive into one of the cold-water lakes up in the mountains, and snatched the p
hone from its cradle.
“Cassidy.” His voice sounded as though it was coming from a long way off.
“It’s Morgan.”
Cassidy collapsed into his chair with relief at the police chief’s voice. “How bad is it?”
“Bad. It’s the plane.”
Cassidy closed his eyes. Nodded. The moment he’d seen the smoke rising he’d feared this. “Listen,” he said, naturally easing into command. “I’ll call our associate, tell him what happened here. We’ll work something out, some sort of compensation. Accidents happen. Planes crash. I’m sure he’ll understand. I’m sure he’ll—”
“No,” Morgan said. “He won’t. Money won’t work here.”
Cassidy blinked, not used to being contradicted. “He’s a businessman. Things go wrong in business all the time and when that happens there has to be some form of restitution. That’s all I’m talking about here. Restitution.”
“You don’t understand,” Morgan said. “Nothing can make up for what happened here. There is no amount of money that can fix this, trust me. We need to come up with another plan. I’m not going to talk about this on the phone. I need to head back out to the fire, but I’ll swing by your office first. Don’t move and don’t call anyone, okay—not until we’ve talked.”
12
MULCAHY EASED OFF THE HIGHWAY ONTO THE UP RAMP OF THE BEST WESTERN.
They were driving through Globe, a mining town that had seen better days and was clinging on in hope that it might see them again.
Javier kissed his teeth with his oversize lips and shook his head at the gray concrete-and-brick motel complex. “This it? This the best you could manage?”
Mulcahy drove slowly around the one-way system then swung into a parking bay outside a room he had checked into the previous night under an assumed name. He had avoided all the independents and franchises because he didn’t want some overattentive owner-manager giving him that extra bit of service you didn’t get from the chains. He didn’t want good service and he didn’t want the personal touch, he wanted the impersonal touch and some bored desk clerk on minimum wage who would hand over the room key without glancing up from their phone when he checked in.