by Ed Gorman
“I didn’t aid and abet anybody, Grice,” I said. “She was gone when I came home. I didn’t know she was going to leave. And she’s not a felon. She hasn’t been charged with anything yet.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Toomey said. “She will be as soon as we get back to town.”
They really were interchangeable: stout, loud, preening.
“You could make it easier on both of you,” Grice said. “You could cooperate.”
“I am cooperating,” I said. “I didn’t try blocking Horace or Tom from entering, did I?”
“I never did like that sense of humor of yours,” Toomey said. “You always make yourself try and sound so superior.”
I decided not to respond. Shooting ducks in a barrel is the cliche, I believe.
“There’ll be a reward for her,” Grice said.
“And that means lawmen and bounty hunters will be looking for her,” Toomey said.
“She can take care of herself.”
“I can’t believe you don’t care that your wife ran off,” Grice said.
“I do care that my wife ran off. But what the hell can I do about it? I don’t know where she went.”
Tom and Horace came back.
“She didn’t leave a note?” Horace said.
“No.”
“Did she mention the possibility she might take off like this?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“And you didn’t encourage her in any way to take off?”
“I didn’t, Horace. Until yesterday I was a peace officer. I’d never advise anybody to run away in the face of criminal charges. I think you know that.”
“This is different, Lane,” he said quietly. “She’s your wife.”
“All the more reason not to advise her to run. Grice and Toomey here just pointed out that a lot of people will be gunning for her, wanting the reward.”
“What reward?” Tom said.
“We’re putting up thirty-five hundred dollars between us,” Grice said.
“We’re going to announce it when we’re on the platform with the lieutenant governor this afternoon,” said Toomey.
Horace said, “You two are shameless, you know that? Tom and I are trying to conduct a serious investigation here. And you two keep turning it into a circus.”
“She’s a wanted felon, isn’t she?” Grice said.
“Not yet, she isn’t,” Horace said. “And even if she was, isn’t that a pretty steep reward for what’ll probably be second-degree murder? At most. It could easily be manslaughter. Or possibly-since we haven’t heard her side of yet it-even self-defense. Stanton was no angel.”
Hard to tell which had the most impact on me. The fact that Horace had obviously hardened in his opinion that Callie had killed Stanton. Or that he was open to the possibility that it was self-defense.
“You throwing in with Ryan here, are you?” Grice said. “I’m throwing in with what’s called the law,” Horace snapped. “Maybe you should read up on it sometime. It’s a fascinating subject.”
He turned to me. “I’m going to ask you two questions. And I’m going to trust you to answer them honestly.”
I just hoped he’d ask me two questions that I could answer honestly.
“All right, Horace.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t urge her to run away?”
“No.”
“And I suppose you’re going to believe him,” Toomey said.
“I’ll believe him till you can show me that he’s lying, Toomey. Can you show me that?”
“He’s got all the reason in the world to lie, Horace,” Toomey said.
“That isn’t what I asked you, Toomey. I asked you if you could show me he’s lying. You obviously can’t, so I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your damn-fool mouth shut.”
“I’m counting on your word here,” Horace said to me. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Tom said, “Then there’s no reason to arrest him.”
Both Toomey and Grice seemed eager to respond to him, but kept quiet. Horace’s scorn was not anything people wanted to go up against if they didn’t have to. He could be as withering out of court as in.
“Let’s go back to town,” Horace said.
Toomey and Grice shook their heads, but followed him back to the horses. Tom lingered, about to say something to me, thought better of it, and followed Horace, too.
I spent an hour getting ready to head to town myself. But first I was hoping I might be able to break into Ken Adams’s place.
SEVENTEEN
WHEN I GOT there, I saw the oldest girl, Sandra, closing the front door and heading to her horse, which was ground-tied a few feet away. I would’ve found a place to hide, but as soon as she turned from the door, she saw me. I had to ride up to her.
She was fourteen or so and on her way to becoming as pretty as her mother had been. She wore denims and a blue cotton blouse and her sun-bleached blond hair was in pigtails. “Hi, Marshal.” She carried an armload of folded clothes, shirts and clean denims and drawers.
I dismounted. “Hi, Sandra. Is your dad around?”
“He just went on into town. To the mortuary. Mom’s gonna be buried tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry about what happened.”
She paused thoughtfully a moment. “It’s a sin to kill yourself. You can’t go to heaven when you do that. But the priest, he told us that sometimes God’ll let you go to purgatory. You know what purgatory is, Marshal?”
“Yes, I do, honey.”
“I bet that’s what happened to my mom. Where she went, I mean. Purgatory. I don’t think she went to hell. Do you?”
“No, I don’t. She was a good woman.”
“She shouldn’t ought to have done what she did with those men. But she always felt real sorry afterward. I felt sorry for her, the way she’d get, the way she was afterwards.”
There was no particular emotion in her words. She sounded as if she might still be having some trouble accepting the fact that her mother was gone.
“Dad says you think he killed that Stanton fella.”
Now there was a statement for you. A young girl in all this pain-and I was adding to it by saying that I thought her father was a suspect. “You have to consider everybody who had trouble with Stanton, honey. And that’s a number of people, not just your dad.”
She squinted into the sun. She had a mustache of sweat beads on her upper lip. Another scorching day. “Then how come you’re here?”
“I just thought I’d see how your dad was.”
The bright blue eyes grew hard. In this moment at least, she was a lot more woman than girl. “I don’t think I believe you, Marshal. I think you think my dad still did it and you come over here to see if you could get something on him.” She glanced back at her horse. That was when I noticed the Winchester in the rifle scabbard.
“I’m not even marshal anymore, Sandra.”
This was obviously news to her. She became a girl again, a curious one. “How come?”
“Because some important people in town think my wife Callie killed Stanton. So I had to quit.”
“Those important people be Grice and Toomey?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“My dad hates them almost as much as he hates Paul.”
She raised her head and looked at the sun. Apparently she could tell by its position just about what time it was. “I better get back to where us kids’re staying. I just come over here to get some clean clothes.”
“Well, if he isn’t here, I guess I might as well head back.” She eyed me steadily. “He didn’t kill Stanton.”
I paused and said, “It’s good to see you again, Sandra. And I’m sorry about your mother.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself if you hadn’t come out here.”
It was funny, and it didn’t say much for the instincts I prided myself on, but she was so soft-spoken that I hadn�
��t realized till just then that she hated me. Genuinely and truly hated me. Not only did I suspect her father in Stanton’s murder. But I just might have pushed her mother into suicide.
“I’ve wondered about that myself, Sandra.”
“My dad, he thinks you as much as killed her yourself.”
“I don’t think that’s true. Not in the daylight I don’t. But I guess late at night when I think about things-I sure hope I didn’t push her into it. I tried to get in to stop her, but I couldn’t. She wouldn’t let me in.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t ought to have been out here in the first place.” She hefted her clothes and walked away.
I wanted to say more, exonerate myself in her eyes-maybe, more importantly, exonerate myself in my own eyes-but all I could do was let her walk away.
***
I turned my horse toward the road leading to town and headed off. I wanted her to see me go. I didn’t want her to suspect what I had in mind.
I rode maybe a quarter mile, then guided my horse into some shallow timberland, keeping in the shadows of aspen and pin oak so that nobody could see me if they were glancing down the road.
When I got near the Adams place, I tied my animal to a tree limb and went the rest of the way on foot, pausing before I walked out into the clearing around the cabin. I wanted to make sure she was gone.
No sign of her or her horse.
The cabin was unlocked. The inside was orderly but poor. The best feature was the plank floor. There were two narrow mattresses piled on each other. I assumed these belonged to the girls. They slept on the floor at night.
The one big room smelled of coffee and whiskey. Adams had done as much drinking last night as I had.
What I was hoping to find was a diary or letters of some kind. A lot of women kept diaries to record what life was like out here. They also wrote a lot of letters back home. And received a lot of letters. Maybe Adams’s wife had exchanged intimate letters with Stanton-I knew I was desperate, but I didn’t have much choice at this point.
I was just opening the bureau when I heard the cabin door squawk open behind me and a familiar voice say, “I could shoot you right here and right now and tell everybody I thought you was a robber. Seeing’s how you ain’t marshal no more.”
She’d seen through me pretty damn well, Sandra had.
I turned and faced her. Her Winchester led the way into the cabin. “You going to shoot me?”
“You think this is funny?”
“Not at all. I’m nervous, you pointing that repeater at me.
“You should be nervous. You ain’t got no right to be in here.”
“How about if I just leave?”
“What were you lookin’ for?”
“Nothing in particular.”
“You think he killed Stanton?”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
“What if I said I killed him?”
“I wouldn’t believe you.”
“Maybe I was so sick of seein’ my ma cheat on him that I killed Stanton myself. You should’ve seen what it did to him. He’d vomit all the time. And cry. Me ’n my little brother’d just hold him, try to help him. But there wasn’t no help for him, he loved her so much.” She paused. “I wanted to kill her. One night I even took a shot at her.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“So maybe I killed Stanton.”
“Maybe you think your dad killed Stanton. Maybe that’s why you’re telling me all this.”
“He didn’t.”
“He ever hit your mother?”
“Just once. And I honestly think it hurt him more ’n hurt her. Afterward, he got drunk and went out to that oak tree to the west and kept hittin’ till he broke his hand.”
“That was the only time?”
“The only time.”
There was still no real emotion in her voice. Flat, just relating facts. You had to read all the misery and terror and conflict into her words yourself. You could hear the kids crying and screaming, and the two adults arguing, both of them trying to understand why she did what she did, cursed somehow in a way neither of them could fathom or do anything about.
“I loved her and I hated her. Sometimes at the same time. And I feel guilty about that now. I shoulda just loved her. She was my mom.”
“People can confuse you sometimes.”
“You ever loved and hated the same person?”
“Sure.”
“It’s hell, isn’t it?”
And just then, in a way that was both adult and childlike at the same time, her voice quavered and conveyed her confusion and sorrow. And I went over to her and took the rifle and set it down on a table and let her come into my arms. She still didn’t cry. She just wanted to be held, and I just wanted to be held, and so we stood like that for just a few minutes, strangers, but comfortable with each other for a tiny clock-strike of time, and then she moved away from me and said, “He didn’t kill her, Marshal. I just keep thinkin’ of my kid brother. If the law took my dad away to prison-or hanged him-”
There was nothing I could say except: “I don’t think he did it, Sandra.”
“You mean that really?”
“Yeah. I do.” I handed her her rifle. “C’mon, I’ll walk you outside. You need to take those clean clothes over, and I need to get to town.”
“What’s in town?”
“The lieutenant governor,” I said.
“My dad says he’s a crook.”
I laughed. “Your dad is a wise man.”
EIGHTEEN
I HAD TO hand it to Grice and Toomey. They had managed to work up so much enthusiasm for Lieutenant Governor Bryce Fuller’s visit that at least half the town turned out that sweaty afternoon at the railroad depot. Abe Lincoln couldn’t have done much better by returning from the grave.
Miners, merchants, gentry ladies, farm wives, ex-convicts, preachers, noisy children, deaf old men-everybody mobbed the depot platform and the ground parallel to the tracks as the train came churning in.
In the lot adjacent to the depot you saw a similar spectrum of vehicles-fancy surreys, a hansom or two, dusty buckboards, and all forms of bicycles. Even a honey wagon on which adamant black flies the size of knuckles were having their own celebration.
The brass band started playing patriotic songs, and many in the crowd began to sing along. A peacock disguised as a human male conducted the band with a flawlessly florid style that impressed some and made others giggle. I couldn’t watch him. It was embarrassing.
One other thing was embarrassing, too. The way people watched me. Another spectrum-this one ranging from the hatred of those I’d in some way offended during my tenure as town marshal to pity from those I’d done right by. Nods, fingers pointing in my direction, whispers. The wearer of a scarlet letter couldn’t have been any less prominent than I was in that crowd.
But then the train pulled into the station, deep in so that the caboose came even with the depot doors. The handiwork of Grice and Toomey could even be seen here. The caboose was all decked out in red, white, and blue bunting. It looked like a refugee train car from a political convention back East where the candidates liked to combine politics with aspects of circus.
Even small towns like Skylar attracted nationally known celebrities and speakers as they swept through the West promoting their books or elixirs or controversial beliefs. They were, for the most part, slick, literate, and effective speakers. And they helped banish the old style of Western politician, the sincere immigrant who had simple but sound ideas for local or territorial government and stated those ideas without fuss or subterfuge.
No longer. If you wanted to run for any kind of important office, even a big city local office, you had to be at least half as slick and literate and effective a speaker as the nationally known folks who had been by within recent memory. And the same for your appearance. You had to be all suited up and tidy. And you had to be wily with your gestures and your posturing. You didn’t want too much in y
our speech or your mannerisms; otherwise you’d look like the band conductor. On the other hand, you didn’t want to stand up there and mutter and mumble and look cowed. One of the state newspapers had even said that a few of the major state politicians had hired the services of drama teachers to help them perform better on the stump.
Whatever else he was-a man of empty words, a man with an open palm for anybody who wanted to lay greenbacks on it, a man who had proved useful to just about every sinister vested interest in the state-Bryce Fuller was a talented performer. He had the looks for it, that rocking-chair-on-the-porch white-haired amiability of grandfathers everywhere; the frank, blue-eyed gaze of a man you could trust; and teeth so damned white they could blind you if he chose to smile into direct sunlight. He was big but not fat; handsome but not pretty; well-dressed but not dandified. The women loved him, but their husbands didn’t have to worry about him trying to get into the knickers of either wives or daughters.
Within two seconds of the caboose coming to a stop- the locomotive all scorching steam and hot oil and searing steel-Grice stood on one side of Fuller and Toomey on the other.
The band was ear-numbing in its fervor now; so was the crowd. It applauded, whistled, stomped. It sang, it screeched, it screamed. An arthritic old man, perhaps insane, broke out into some kind of jig. A matronly woman, dazzled by the sight of Fuller, touched her bosom in a most suggestive way. And a man blinded in that long-ago blue-gray war of ours had tears streaming down his cheeks. I could not tell you why.
Frenzy. That was the only word for it. And Grice and Toomey were swollen with the moment even more than Fuller, who had probably had so many moments like this that they’d become routine, maybe even a little dull.
It took Fuller several moments-looking humble, his entire body saying, Please, please, I don’t deserve all this; wonderful and special and godlike as I am, I am just like you, just another human being, well, maybe just a wee bit more wonderful and special and godlike than you, I guess, I have to humbly admit-it took him several minutes before he finally calmed the crowd and spoke.