by D. J. Butler
Michael opened the screen a crack and then pulled it the rest of the way open with the shotgun’s nose.
He didn’t rush in. No, in detective novels, you had to slowly work your way into a room, especially a crime scene. The movies might not have the details on the supernatural right, but he trusted his detective novels: Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth, or Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers, wouldn’t steer him wrong.
Michael didn’t call out, though he wanted to. He slowly walked into the cabin, ready for anything.
He could imagine some specter, maybe the ghost of Lloyd Preece, with blood dribbling down his lips, begging for help. No shade rose to harass Michael. No creature of darkness leapt for him. Once inside, he pushed his back against the rough logs of the low-ceilinged structure.
His flashlight threw a circle against the rocks of the fireplace, the logs, glued together with mud plaster, and the rough thicket of the ceiling. A deer pelt on the wall, something else that looked like a wolf belt. An antlered head.
He couldn’t think too much of the widow Artemis. He had to get to work, and he had to keep his focus intact. Michael set the flashlight on the windowsill on his right. He aimed the light across to the far wall, to illuminate the front room of the cabin, and send light into the bedroom and the study as well.
Michael felt the sweat drip off his nose. Inside the cabin, it was stifling.
Did Diana sweat with Preece? Did he sweat on her?
“Dammit!” Michael cursed his traitor mind. Then he regretted the profanity. “Lord Divine, help a young man in his hour of need. Take from me these impure thoughts.”
That seemed to help.
Michael left the shotgun tilted against the wall beside the window. “There’s a fortune to be had in a man’s good opinion of himself.” It wasn’t much of a clue.
It probably wasn’t a clue at all.
Michael would have to use craft to find the money.
Michael took out his pocketknife, took the Y-shaped branch, and carefully peeled off all the bark. Then he cut three crosses into the green wood. He then carved the name Lloyd Preece into the wood and the word “fortune” followed by three more crosses. He didn’t want to find Preece, nor his corpse or his ghost, but only his riches. Depending on the denomination of the bearer bonds, they might only be a few pieces of paper. Or one. Could you have a million-dollar bearer bond? Michael thought it was possible. In any case, you didn’t need a big space to hide paper. A loose floorboard? A chunk of adobe? Maybe a rock in the fireplace?
Or Preece might have hidden it somewhere out in the desert, and if so, finding it might take all night.
Michael took the forks of the rod in his hands. “Lord Divine, which prayer should I use? Go easy on me. I’m not a great biblical scholar like my pap.”
No verses came to him, but he did think of a hymn. It felt right that he should say some sort of godly words, so he went ahead and sang.
God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.
He wasn’t sure there was an obvious connection between the song and his need to find Lloyd Preece’s hidden treasure. However, in the incantations he’d heard his father recite, the words often seemed to have only an indirect connection with the effect desired.
He only remembered the one verse. Singing it, he liked it, and thought he should learn the other verses and maybe the chords on a guitar. But his more urgent task at hand was to test the divining rod. “Did Germany win the Great War?”
The rod was motionless in his hand. He kept a light hold on it, not clutching it, but letting it nearly dangle, so he could feel any movement. He’d done this with Pap, so doing it without Pap should work just as well.
And this would be his…what, fourth?…act of magic in the last two days. Michael Yazzie Woolley was becoming a regular magician.
“Did Lloyd Preece keep his money in this room?”
Nothing.
This room, that bed, that was where he and Diana did it, the evil act, and with how…hot it was, yes, there had been sweat. A lot of it.
Michael felt his eyes burn from his own perspiration. He remembered Diana lifting her leg to show him her painted toes. And that robe, which hardly covered her, and that black lace on her pale skin. Her smoky green eyes. The tumble of her long dark hair. And boy, when she’d unchained that French, it had really been something.
“God, this is not helping me. You created the entire universe, if the Bible has anything to say about it, and took only seven days to do it. Surely, you can help me with my lust.”
Michael blew out a breath, sang his verse again, and asked a different question: “Did Lloyd Preece keep his bearer bonds in this room?”
Another thought struck him. He’d been alone with Diana, in her room, that very night. Just the two of them. She’d let him in, had him sit, and she’d sat, drinking her wine which would have lowered her inhibitions.
Nothing from the rod.
Michael squeezed his eyes shut. “Come on, head. I know I’m a mess of hormones, and I’m young, and my urges are strong. But come on, Pap’s life is involved.”
Again, he reset himself, said the psalm, and was determined to be filled with the pure grace of God. God’s saving grace. He didn’t ask about silver, that was just town gossip. And it wasn’t exactly money. No, it was bearer bonds, and yet the dowsing hadn’t worked. He’d try it again. “Did Lloyd Preece keep the fortune meant for his daughter in this room?”
A fortune. Money. If Michael had money, Diana would’ve done things with him. He’d been a simple paying customer after all. And he knew she liked him. At least a part of her did. She was an outcast, and so he was he, a Navajo with a Mormon father, not your normal joe.
The witch hazel remained still.
Michael was failing when he needed this magic stuff to work. “Well, this is terribly inconvenient. I’m making a poor instrument.” He lifted the rod. “Or are you the problem, witch hazel? Is it Witch? Or Miss Hazel?”
Michael walked across to the middle of the room, holding the rod. He waved the rod around with a flourish. “Abracadabra!”
It wasn’t just a vaudeville word. According to pap, that word had power, and you could draw a chart using the letters, which could do all sorts of things if you had a chaste and sober mind.
Michael was going to have to give up on that.
“God helps those who help themselves.” He tapped the rod against this thigh. “I’ve done pretty well so far with the magic stuff, but then, I wasn’t in an extreme situation, and I wasn’t dealing with a beautiful prostitute. I wonder if Mary Magdalene was ginchy like that.”
He frowned at himself. “Come on, Michael, enough jokes. This is not a laughing matter.”
He’d have to give up and go by himself, his grand plan undone by his untamed mind, and the seductive powers of Diana Artemis. She’d searched the cabin and hadn’t found anything. Maybe the money simply wasn’t here.
He thought of the clue and said it out loud. “There’s a fortune to be had in a man’s good opinion of himself.” His mind raced, as he tried to think of what it might mean. And wasn’t there where his real power lay? His intellect was a marvelous thing, it helped him remember, it was a tool he could use to deduce the truth, and to solve problems. Someday, and maybe soon, human intellect would launch human bodies off the planet and into the stars.
Already, the human mind was exploring the nature of reality itself, the atomic nature of what seemed so solid. In his musings, he turned.
The witch hazel rod jumped out of his hand and clattered to the floor.
A shiver tickled up the back of Michael’s hair.
He stooped and picked up the rod. Rather than asking it questions, should he be dowsing for the money? As he and his father had dowsed for water? Holding the rod loose in his palms again, he turned.
And the rod dipped.
He swung it back the other way—and it dipped in the same place.
It was indicating the study. Michael following the rod, walking into the shadowed study, turning to face each dip as it happened—
and bumped against a wall.
Looking up, he saw a monster and jumped.
But the monster was him, in the study’s tall mirror. He saw himself, but where his head should be, he saw the head of a beast, a monster with three faces. Stepping slightly to one side, he realized that a crack in the mirror had caused the effect; by standing in exactly the right spot, he could see his body, with his head replaced by the stone statue on Lloyd Preece’s shelf.
He turned and look at the statue for a moment. Three faces, there it was, in front of them from the start. The three decans of any sign of the zodiac, embodied in a sly bit of art on the rancher’s shelf.
His pap had mentioned a diary. There had been dates that were circled but had nothing marked on them. Michael quickly found the diary and flipped it open. October 11, 1934, was circled—that was the night on which Jupiter had entered Scorpio. There would have been a Tithe, and that would have been the night Jimmy Udall died.
Michael felt ill. He should test one more date. What date fell halfway between October 11 and today, June 30? That should be the day when Jupiter entered Scorpio’s second face and should also be the day of a hunt.
Michael did some quick math: February 19.
He checked the diary: circled.
Which might have been the date when, according to Davison Rock, the prospector had nearly been run over by a herd of deer on the Monument.
Lloyd Preece had noted the days of the hunt in his calendar. He must have known about Jimmy Udall’s death. He might have watched it.
Suddenly, Michael felt a lot less sympathy for the dead rancher, however much the man had wanted to get out.
He needed to get his pap out now, though. The money.
Michael turned and looked at the mirror to which the dowsing rod had led him.
“A man’s good opinion of himself.” The grin on his face turned into a full-blown smile. Then a memory came to him, standing with Preece, Gudmundson, and Clem, dowsing Rex Whittle’s well. Preece had been joking, and he’d said, You’d be surprised how much time a man like me spends looking into the mirror.
Michael stuck the hazel rod in his back pocket and retrieved the shotgun. This was probably some kind of crime. What was it Pap said he did, again?
“Dear God,” he said out loud, “if I’m barking up the wrong tree, please make the mirror resist my shotgun.”
He smashed that mirror into bits with a single blow of the shotgun butt. Inside, tucked between the frame and the backing, was a long, thin leather wallet.
He plucked the wallet out, then hurried back to the flashlight, unlashing the leather thong tying it shut. This was a cowboy’s wallet, fifty years old at least. Within the cracked leather sheath were bearer bonds, each worth five hundred dollars. Michael did a quick count: sixty slips of paper, each worth five hundred dollars in cash. Thirty thousand dollars in bearer bonds. Lloyd Preece’s fortune.
Michael didn’t pause. He tried to put the wallet in his back pocket. It was too thick. He held it pressed up against the shotgun as he snatched up the flashlight and jogged to the Double-A, not even bothering closing the door to Preece’s cabin. Michael tossed the hazel rod into the back of the truck before getting into the driver’s seat.
Back on the road, Michael took in a deep breath. “Now, I would like to say, for the record, I figured out where the money was. The clue’s pretty obvious in hindsight. But yes, God, you get some of the credit. Let’s say, twenty percent. Okay, I can go as a high as thirty, but what can you do for me?”
He laughed at that. If God didn’t appreciate his sense of humor, Michael was sunk. He patted the wallet on the front seat.
Should he keep some of the money? Set it aside, maybe pay down the mortgage on the farm with it, or buy a second car? Michael was worldly enough to ask himself the question, but he had enough Hiram Woolley in him to know immediately that he couldn’t keep any of the cash.
The harder question was: could he spend the money rescuing his father? Didn’t the bearer bonds really belong to Addy Tunstall? Michael immediately saw options for rationalization: the money had an occult origin, and came from the death of innocent people, so it was fair game; Hiram and Michael had saved Addy’s life by getting her out of town before the deer-men got to her, so she was only returning the favor.
But to hell with that. He was going to rescue his pap, and figure out what he owed Addy Tunstall later.
Michael drove on.
He didn’t have to worry about the local police pulling him over for driving too fast. The local police were currently up in the hills, trying to murder his father. He raced at nearly sixty miles per hour through town, which was quiet.
He turned hard and skidded onto the lawn of Edna Whatever’s house. God might want Michael to have a chaste and sober mind, but Pap had never said anything about his magic depending on good driving habits.
The sky overhead was clear; a moist wind tried to wrap itself around his neck as Michael hurried up to Diana’s bungalow, wallet gripped tightly in both hands. He knocked on the door and called out in a loud voice, “Diana, it’s important.”
The lights went on in Edna’s house, in an upper room, and the window was thrown open. “What is it? What’s the meaning of this?”
Diana came to the door, scowling.
“You want money,” Michael said, “and I have it.” He lowered his voice and raised Lloyd Preece’s wallet, but kept it close to his body so Edna couldn’t see it. “I will pay you thirty thousand dollars for your help, but you do what I say, when I say it, and you get the pay day when we’re done.” The words made him feel magnificent and powerful.
Her scowl turned into a skeptical half-smile. “You know I’ll need proof.”
Michael took a step back, opened the wallet, and then flicked through the bonds. “I’m not going to let you count it yet. We don’t have time. Get in the truck.”
“What is it, Diana?” Edna wailed. “What is the meaning of this?”
Diana answered her. “The stars are in an uproar tonight, Edna. Jupiter is expanding all of our horizons.” Then to Michael. “Give me five minutes.”
“Two minutes. Then I start docking your pay.”
Michael walked back to the truck. The crisp night air stung his nose and ears. He got his jacket out from behind the seat, put it on, and slipped the wallet into his inside pocket. He’d imagined thirty thousand dollars would weigh more.
He had the truck backed up and parked neatly on the street when Diana hurried out. She got in and they drove off. She looked as if she were going to ride in the Kentucky Derby; she wore canvas pants, high leather boots, and a tight coat with a vest, which seemed to make her bosom both rise and expand. He wondered how she could breathe.
And he found, to his relief, that he didn’t wonder anything else. She sat beside him in the truck, as alluring as ever, and Michael’s mind was entirely on the rescue operation.
He smelled a hint of wine beneath the wafting perfume. “How sober are you?” he asked.
“Sober enough to drive. What’s your plan?”
He told her.
“Where did you find Preece’s money?”
“In the mirror.” He cast her a glance. “It seems pretty obvious, in hindsight. A man’s good opinion of himself begins in the mirror.”
“Damn,” she said. “I considered breaking open the mirror, but couldn’t really do it with Adelaide there.”
“Uh huh,” Michael said. “You are the smart one. You know all the things.” He passed the turn to Lloyd Preece’s cabin and Frenchie’s Canyon, then drove over the bridge spanning the Colorado River. “No wonder you outwit all the men.” The entrance to the Monument lay on Michael’s right, and he took it.
“Not all of them,” she said.
“I must admit, I’m not sure what to make of you,” Michael said. “You know, I had this idea of, uh, fa
llen women, and you’re not exactly it. You’re more…uh, complicated. Don’t take this the wrong way, but more interesting.”
“Jesus liked to spend time with fallen women.” Diana Artemis laughed. “There must be something interesting about us.”
Michael took the roads fast, sliding across the dirt, bouncing over ridges, and then careening down the other side. When he got to the Turnbow Cabin, he didn’t stop, but drove up a rough cattle path.
Diana braced herself against the dashboard. “I heard from Lloyd that they used to call this the Wolfe Ranch, before the Turnbow family took it over. I always took Wolfe for a family name, but after the revelations of tonight, I’m beginning to think…maybe not.”
No point telling her that Gudmundson had already denied that exact connection. Michael kept shifting back and forth between first gear and second as the truck rattled up and down low ridges. “Do you at all feel good about going to rescue my father? I mean, even though it took a big cash reward, do you have some feeling of virtue?”
“Feelings of virtue, like feelings of remorse, are dangerous before the fact,” Diana said. “I indulge in both, but I do it afterward, when the men have paid and left. That way, the feelings don’t interfere with wise decision-making.”
Michael ground his teeth. He’d made a similar calculation about Lloyd Preece’s money. “There’s some truth in that. But also, I think kindness is what makes us human.”
An expanse of slickrock appeared out of the sand, the incline too sharp for the Double-A. Michael stopped the truck.
“I do not know a single mother who would not steal, or prostitute herself, or even kill, if that was the only way to keep her children alive,” Diana said. “Kindness is for the rich, Michael Woolley. If you rely on people’s greed in this world, you’ll get farther.”
“Which is what I am doing tonight,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like life, mon enfant. You only have to get through it.” She exited the truck.
He directed her to a stone, which they lifted, though she had trouble with her false leg in the sand. She had to go slowly, working her legs in such a way she didn’t fall over. They stacked the rocks until they’d fashioned a rough ramp onto the slickrock.