Wild to the Bone

by Peter Brandvold

  She went out, locked her door, and headed down the stairs and into the lobby. She passed the door to the right of Mrs. Waddell’s mahogany desk, and while the curtain was drawn aside, she did not peer through it. She didn’t want to make eye contact with Mrs. Waddell, for she’d hoped to make it out of the hotel without being pawed up as she had been yesterday. But halfway to the front door, the woman’s voice called loudly, trillingly, “Good Lord, dear, you’re not thinking about facing the day on an empty stomach, are you?”

  Raven stopped. She winced.

  She drew a breath and walked back to the door opposite the desk and looked into a small dining room that housed half a dozen tables covered in wash-worn and lye-yellowed linen. A large stuffed bear stood in the middle of the room on its hind feet, ready to pounce, near a cold potbelly stove, and to the left of the bear, Loretta sat at a table strewn with manila folders and papers.

  She was dressed every bit as gaudily as she had been the day before. A steaming cup and saucer sat on the table before her, along with a small porcelain sugar bowl with little pine trees painted on its side.

  “Come hither!” Loretta trilled, holding up her arms and beckoning with her beringed, long-fingered hands. “Sit down here, and I’ll have—” She stopped and cupped her hands around her mouth as she yelled through another curtained doorway beyond the bear, “Dudley, we have a customer! Bring coffee!”

  Raven shook her head. “That’s not neces—”

  But Loretta wouldn’t let her finish. “Nonsense, my dear! Dudley and I serve the best breakfast in town”—she glanced morosely around the empty room—“though I reckon you couldn’t tell it. Sit down, sit down. Dudley will whip you up some pancakes and eggs.”

  Dudley came through the curtained doorway to the right of the bear, balancing a steaming china coffee cup in a saucer. The stocky man was decked out in a chef’s hat and an apron, and he had an unctuous grin on his fleshy, craggy face as he gazed at the pretty customer standing in the doorway.

  “Why not?” Raven said, remembering that she needed to speak to the woman—preferably with her clothes on. Besides, the steaming coffee in Dudley’s fleshy hand looked enticing despite the lusty glitter in the man’s eyes.

  “Dudley, tear your eyes from the poor girl and cook her up some pancakes and eggs!”

  “Right, Loretta, right,” Dudley said, nodding to Raven and then reluctantly trudging back through the door beyond the bear.

  To Raven, crossing the room to the woman’s table, Loretta said, “Sleep well, dear?”

  As she sat down before the coffee cup, Raven glanced at Loretta smiling at her in that half-jeering, half-admiring manner of hers. For a second, she wondered if Loretta had heard Raven’s groans as she’d pleasured herself to images of her brawny colleague. But no. Loretta couldn’t have heard anything, unless, of course, she was listening right outside Raven’s door.

  Which, after all the fawning of yesterday, wasn’t all that impossible.

  “Indeed, I did, Loretta,” Raven said, pouring cream into her coffee. “You?”

  “I never sleep all that well. Dudley probably snores louder than that bear of a man you told me about.” Loretta sipped her coffee and frowned over the rim of the steaming cup. “Say, where is he, anyway? He didn’t come in last night.” She leaned forward, smiling broadly. “You didn’t just imagine this big bear of a man, now, did you, dear?”

  Loretta slapped the table loudly and laughed.

  Raven flushed. “He found himself otherwise disposed,” she said, growing weary of explaining the man. She sipped her own hot brew, set the cup down on its saucer, and glanced around. “Is business usually this slow?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “Unfortunately, this is customary, at least for weekday mornings,” Loretta said, turning her mouth corners down behind the coffee cup she was holding up near her chin with both hands. “The country’s drying up, I’m afraid. Folks have been leaving the rangeland for years, and because of that, more and more businesses are closing in Spotted Horse. We managed to hang on after the drought started because word was going around that a spur railroad line was going to push through into the gold camps up in the Big Horns. That hasn’t come to pass, which was good for Duke Shirley, but now, unfortunately, because of the stage holdups, he’s also fallen on hard times.”

  “How does that affect you?”

  “His mercantile brings folks in from the countryside—what few there are left, that is. There’s always a few prospectors and drummers and card sharps pushing through now and then. Some on horseback, some in wagons, some on the stage. By the time they get here, they’re usually tired, and they usually need supplies. So they shop at Shirley’s place, maybe drink some whiskey over at the saloon, and then come here to sleep and get up and eat breakfast here in the morning.”

  Loretta sipped her coffee, smacked her lips, and shook her head. “So, you see, Duke Shirley’s sort of the hub of the wheel in Spotted Horse. We’re the spokes. Every wheel needs a hub, or it stops goin’ around—see?”

  Raven nodded. “Wouldn’t need the spokes without the hub,” she said as Dudley Waddell hauled a smoking platter through the kitchen door, holding the large porcelain plate with an oven mitt.

  “Hot off the skillet!” the man said above the sizzling of the five strips of bacon separating the two eggs from the two large flapjacks swimming in butter and maple syrup. “Hope you’re hungry, miss!”

  When the man had set the plate down in front of Raven and headed back into the kitchen, Raven wasted no time digging into her food. She hadn’t realized she was hungry until she’d smelled the bacon, but now her stomach was fairly dancing at the prospect of the meal.

  Loretta laughed at Raven’s unabashed delight.

  To the horror of her well-brought-up mother, Raven had never been a dainty eater. So she didn’t slow down much as she leveled a pointed look at the middle-aged woman gazing back at her fondly. “Loretta, yesterday, when you were leaving my room, you said something that I’m sure you realize begs elaboration.”

  Loretta pooched out her overly painted lips and turned her head slightly. “I did?”

  Raven picked up a strip of bacon, bit off a chunk, and chewed while she cut into one of the sunny-side-up eggs. “You said that the stage robberies are merely one symptom of the sinister forces at work here in Spotted Horse.”

  Loretta stretched her lips, wincing, looking uneasy. “I did, did I?”

  “Yes, you did. Now, you know I’m here to investigate those robberies, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you to explain what you meant by sinister forces.”

  Loretta winced again, as though the phrase were a hand slapping her face. “Me and my big mouth,” she said, glancing toward the door behind which Dudley was banging pots and pans around and opening and closing a squeaky stove door.

  Raven continued to eat hungrily, sipping her coffee between bites and watching Loretta curiously. “Might as well spill the beans,” Raven said. “I’d bet if I threw that phrase around town long enough, someone would give me an explanation for it.”

  “No, no, no—you don’t want to do that, dear! This town is right protective of its secrets, don’t ya know!”

  “Then spill it, Loretta.” Raven smiled shrewdly as she chewed.

  Loretta glanced at the door to the kitchen and then at the door to the lobby, obviously afraid she might be overheard. Leaning forward, she placed one hand flat on the table, atop her scattered business papers, and kept her voice low as she said, “Only if you promise not to tell anyone I told you about this. Do you promise, Raven?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me,” Raven said, setting a forkful of food back down on her plate and resting her forearms on the table, holding her coffee up in her right hand. She’d lift her head out of the feed bag for a time, not wanting to miss a word of what might turn out to be an important bit of information.

&
nbsp; Loretta took another sip of her coffee, set the cup down carefully, staring at it, and then lifted her troubled eyes to Raven. “There was a girl who worked for me about a year ago. A pretty half-breed from the Wind River reservation. Apparently, she’d run into some trouble up there, trouble involving an Indian agent. So Vera—her name was Vera Walking Thunder—ran away from the agency and showed up here. Dudley found her one morning sleeping out in the keeper shed. She was tired and hungry, and she needed a place to stay.

  “Business was better then, as another mine had just opened up south of here, though it’s since gone under, but at the time, I could afford a girl to clean rooms, do the laundry, split wood, and help in the kitchen. That sort of thing.”

  Loretta paused. Color rose in her painted cheeks as she stared down at her coffee cup. Her eyes gained a faraway cast, and then she drew a breath, swallowed, and returned her gaze to her rapt audience of one.

  “Vera was a pretty girl. Beautiful. She looked very much like you, all that black hair, fine bones, beautiful . . .” She let her voice trail off, then cleared her throat again, sheepishly. “Anyway, one morning, she didn’t come down from her room. It was getting late, so I called and called from the bottom of the stairs. No reply. She was a hard worker, Vera, and she never slept past five o’clock. In fact, she often woke me and Dudley up with all her early commotion.”

  Loretta stared at Raven, but her eyes were opaque and darting around in their sockets, as though she were seeing not Raven but that morning again in her head.

  “Go on,” Raven quietly urged.

  Loretta cleared her throat again. She glanced once more at the kitchen door.

  There was a thickness in her voice as she continued. “I went up and opened her door with a skeleton key. She wasn’t in her room. Me and Dudley looked around the place, and I finally found her just out the back door. The poor child had been fetching wood before dawn, for the breakfast fire, when someone hit her with the splitting maul. Split her head right down the middle!”

  Loretta’s eyes had glazed with tears. Obviously, she’d had feelings for Vera Walking Thunder.

  “I’m sorry, Loretta,” Raven said, patting her hand. “Do you know who killed her?”

  Loretta shook her head. “Not for certain sure, no.”

  “Any idea who killed her?”

  Again, Loretta glanced at the kitchen door. “Oh, I’ve got my theories, but I think I’ll keep them to myself for now.” She added in a whisper, “Dudley doesn’t like me goin’ on about it. Such talk is right bad for Spotted Horse.”

  Raven took a bite of food, chewed for a time, and then asked, “What makes you think there’s a connection between Vera’s murder and the stagecoach robberies, Loretta?”

  Loretta was resting her chin in her hand, staring thoughtfully down at the table. She nervously tapped the fingers of her other hand on the table. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’ve spoke out of turn. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  “Come on, Loretta,” Raven urged, frowning. “This could be important.”

  As she’d been speaking, she’d heard the hotel’s front door open. Boots thumped and scuffed in the lobby. Loretta stretched her gaze to the lobby and smiled brightly as she rose from her chair. “Gentlemen, welcome,” she intoned, beckoning. “Come in, please, have a seat anywhere you please. I’ll be right back with the coffee pot!”

  Raven glanced behind her to see three men in shabby trail gear walk into the dining room, doffing their hats and looking around sheepishly. They walked past Raven and sat down at a near table, and then Loretta got busy, serving the men coffee and taking their breakfast orders.

  Raven doubted that the woman was too busy with only three customers to continue their discussion, but Loretta made herself scarce after that.

  So Raven finished her breakfast, ignoring the lusty glances of the three men, who had the hangdog, hungry look of grub-line riders or out-of-work cowboys, and then finished her coffee, tossing some coins onto the table.

  She headed outside as the sun climbed, spreading its buttery light across the town. Heading toward the settlement’s heart, Raven considered the murdered Indian girl and wondered how many more secrets she could kick up if she put her mind to it.

  And she wondered if such secrets would be more symptoms of the sinister forces at work here in Spotted Horse.

  23

  The wind had picked up just after Haskell and Dulcy Stoveville started up the trail from the canyon in which Dulcy had tried to perforate Bear’s hide with lead.

  It hadn’t picked up enough that it was moaning and blowing thick waves of eye-stinging dust, but there was enough dust in the air that from forty yards away, the Stoveville ranch looked like an insignificant gray-brown blotch nestled in a broad bowl ringed with low stark brown hills. It appeared little larger than a horseshoe swallowed up by a vast, parched, dun-colored range that in turn was dwarfed by the sky.

  As Haskell drew the wagon up to the log portal straddling the trail, at the edge of the ranch yard, he had to squint to make out the faded letters that had been burned into the gray-weathered crossbar: “STOVEVILLE CIRCLE-T.”

  To each side of the words, a circle with a T in it was barely visible. The portal listed precariously to the left, as the base of the upright on that side had rotted, and the whole affair squawked and chirped in the wind. It would fall soon, and Bear hoped no one was under it when it did.

  The black horse pulling the livery wagon shared the sentiment. The horse balked at going under the crossbar, but finally, shaking the reins against the frightened beast’s back, Bear managed to urge the horse through, behind Dulcy’s steeldust mare.

  The cabin was a story-and-a-half, shake-roofed affair with a narrow front stoop. An iron triangle clanged lightly, sporadically, beneath the stoop’s sagging roof. A washtub hung from the front wall, to the left of the Z-frame door.

  The Stoveville brand had been burned into a board hanging beneath the porch roof, a sad remnant of the obviously once-high hopes for the forlorn-looking place. To the left of the cabin was a chicken coop with a large pen enclosed in chicken wire, with a ramp leading up into the stable-sized shed. Five or six chickens—Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds—pecked among the feeding troughs and watering tins, the wind rippling their feathers.

  A log barn with an adobe-brick side shed and a corral faced the cabin on its right. Three horses milled inside the corral, trotting friskily over to the front gate when they saw Dulcy and the steeldust enter the yard. The mare whinnied a greeting at the three in the corral, and a tricolor paint responded in kind, shaking its head and stomping its front hooves, its brown mane blowing in the wind.

  The wind kicked up dust and the smell of horse and chicken shit and swirled it along with several tumbleweeds and bits of paper trash and a few rusty tins blown off a trash heap. The wind didn’t appear to bother Dulcy overmuch. She hipped around in her saddle and, holding her hat down on her head, yelled, “Drive around back! Pop and Mama are buried behind the privy. That’s where we’ll plant Danny. I’ll fetch some shovels!”

  With that, she turned forward as the mare approached the thin trapezoid of shade leaning out from the barn.

  Haskell had stopped the wagon in the middle of the yard, near the windmill that was the centerpiece of the dusty, worn-out place, its blades spinning. He looked around cautiously, trying to make sure that no one was bearing down on him with a rifle. His suspicions about the possibility of Miss Stoveville being part of the gang robbing the stagecoaches hadn’t been assuaged by seeing how well she worked a Winchester carbine.

  He could see no obvious signs of a bushwhack. They appeared to be alone here. Just the same, he’d keep his eyes and ears skinned, and he wouldn’t let the pretty, tough, rifle-handy Miss Stoveville out of his sight.

  He whipped the black around behind the cabin and the privy next to it. On the other side of a dry wash sheathed in thin willows
and cottonwoods that were being thrashed by the wind, a shelf of barren land rose. Haskell spied two wooden crosses sprouting amid the rocks and prickly pear of the rise. It was a sad, barren stretch of ground, but then, none of eastern Wyoming looked any better.

  It was as good a place as any to plant young Danny.

  Bear put the black on across the wash and up a ragged two-track trail to the top of the shelf. As he did, he saw two large, dark shapes sitting in a lightning-topped and blackened pine tree about fifty yards off to the right, at the east edge of the shelf. Another bird—a buzzard, it appeared—winged up from below to sit on another spindly branch and stare toward Haskell and his grisly cargo.

  “What the hell?” Bear grumbled as he stopped the wagon to the right of the graves, scowling toward the carrion eaters. “What do you fellas do, just sit over there waitin’ to be fed?”

  Hoof thuds rose behind him. He jerked with a start and reached for the Winchester that he’d laid across the seat beside him. He glanced over his shoulder.

  Dulcy was riding up the side of the shelf. For a moment, Haskell thought she was wielding a rifle, but then, as she approached, frowning at him skeptically, he saw she was holding two shovels tucked under her left arm.

  Sheepishly, Haskell set the rifle back on the seat and jumped down from the wagon.

  “Kinda jumpy, aren’t ya?” Dulcy said, tossing both shovels down at his feet and then leaping off the mare’s back.

  She ground-reined her horse and picked up one of the shovels, giving him another skeptical glance. Ignoring the look, Haskell retrieved the second shovel. The girl looked around and then heeled the blade of her spade into the ground near the two other mounds, saying, “I reckon this is as good a place as another.”

  Haskell heeled his own shovel into the ground and began prying up the flinty, gray soil and tossing it to his left, where the girl had tossed her own first shovelful. As they worked, the wind blowing their hair and nibbling their hat brims, blowing the mare’s tail up under its belly from behind, Haskell glanced curiously at Dulcy, and then he said, trying to sound casual, “I sure am sorry about shootin’ your brother, Miss Dulcy. I sure wish I hadn’t had to do that.”