by Max McCoy
“How is that different than the Comanche using buffalo meat for food and the hide for their lodges and the tails for fly swatters?”
“One is a matter of need,” I said. “The other is just an example of greed.”
“I have a coat with buttons made of buffalo bone,” Calder said. “Does that make me needy or greedy?”
Something stirred in my memory. “What?” I asked.
“I said, I have a coat—”
“Buttons,” I said. “The dead girl who spoke Russian was talking about a button she had torn from the shirt of the man who killed her. And when I saw her ghost, she was clutching something tight in her right hand.”
“A button?”
“It must be,” I said. “Do you know if Doc McCarty examined the girl before she was buried?”
“There was no reason to,” Calder said. “She was quite dead.”
“But did anybody open her hand?”
“She was stiff as a board. The undertaker didn’t want her, because there was no money in it, so we took up a collection for lumber and built a rough coffin and placed her in it. Nobody thought to force open her hand.”
I sat up in the tub.
“Jack,” I said. “We’ve got to dig her up.”
Calder protested that exhumation was a legal process and required a court order. He also rattled off some stuff from Blackstone saying that common law viewed the final resting place of a human being as sacred, and that disturbing those remains was a serious offense. Only a family member could petition for exhumation, he said, or the church, if the burial was in consecrated ground. He said he didn’t think there was anything consecrated about Boot Hill, though.
“You dug me up,” I said.
“You weren’t dead.”
“Who can order an exhumation, then?”
“Judge Grout, but I’m not sure he would grant the petition based on your visit to the other world,” Calder said. “Grout may be soft about his poor dead boy, but he would be pretty hardheaded about this. There would have to be compelling evidence, and we don’t have it. The only other person who can order it would be the coroner, in the course of a police investigation.”
“Who’s the coroner?”
“Doc Galland,” Calder said. “But that old Prussian is unlikely to be sympathetic to our request, unless we could deliver it in High German. But he’s not even in town this weekend—he took the train east to Kansas City to visit an old friend.”
“Who’s the assistant coroner?”
“Doc McCarty.”
26
We were back at Boot Hill at dawn, standing in the chill air with Doc McCarty and that walrus of a marshal, Larry Deger, who clasped a mug of coffee in his hands and seemed unwilling to share. We were watching as Diamond Jim Murdock and his two miscreant friends took shovelfuls of earth from the grave of the murdered girl and added it to a growing pile alongside. Calder had fetched the trio from the jail and forced them to help, as a fitting—if partial—punishment for what they had done to me the night before.
Murdock had a knot on his forehead the size of a baseball, from where Calder had clobbered him with the shovel handle, and his right eye was swollen shut.
None of the three would look at me while they dug.
My own clothes weren’t yet dry from the laundry, so Calder had borrowed some clothes from Tom the Jailer. He was skinny enough, but I had to roll up the sleeves of the flannel shirt and pin the cuffs of the Levi’s.
“Can we rest now?” Murdock asked, leaning on the shovel handle and looking up at us.
“Did I tell you to stop digging?” Calder asked.
“I’m really tired,” Murdock whined. “My head is throbbing from where you poleaxed me last night. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Your head would have throbbed from the whiskey anyway,” McCarty said.
“I don’t know why I drink,” Murdock said. “It makes me into somebody else and I do things I’m ashamed of.”
“You’ll have a lot of time in jail to think about what you did,” Calder said. “But right now, keep digging.”
Murdock made a face and scooped another shovelful of dirt.
“We had better find something in that hole, Calder,” Deger said, then slurped his coffee. “If you don’t, Doc Galland is going to have your testicles pickled and put in one of those specimen jars and make a present of them to Judge Grout.”
“Don’t double down yet, Larry,” Calder said.
Then a shovel swung by one of the miscreants struck wood.
“It am the coffin.”
“Okay, work toward the edges now.”
In a few minutes, the dirt had been cleared away from the edges of the coffin. The grave wasn’t the proverbial six feet, but it was a good four or five, and it took a few minutes of struggle for the inmates to work a pair of ropes beneath the coffin. Then they scrambled out of the grave, and each took an end of rope. Calder took the remaining end, and on his count, they began to haul the coffin to the surface.
Soon, the men had the wooden box out and placed beside the grave, and then they began to work on the lid with crowbars and claw hammers. The nails made a frightening screeching sound as they were drawn from the wood. Then the lid was loose, and Calder looked over at Doc.
“You might want to step away now,” McCarty suggested.
“No,” I said. “I want to see what I would have looked like if Calder hadn’t gotten to me in time.”
“Suit yourself,” McCarty said, and produced a jar of camphor from his pocket. He opened the bottle and allowed Calder and Deger to dip their kerchiefs in it. Then he tore his handkerchief in two, for us both to use.
“All right,” McCarty said. “Open her up.”
Calder swung the lid off.
We all held the cloths to our noses and mouths, but the stench of decay was overpowering, at once repellent and oddly sweet. All of the miscreants stumbled back many steps, and Murdock fell on his knees and began to retch.
“Go farther down the hill for that,” Calder called.
The girl was on her back, her hands crossed over her chest, and her hair spread over her shoulders. Her eyes were closed but sunken. Her skin was a greenish gray. Her black lips had drawn back to reveal her white teeth, which gave the impression that she was smiling without mirth.
The slit beneath her chin still gaped, and it was black with crusted blood.
“Andrei!” I heard. “Is that you? Where are you?”
Calder knelt down and reached for her left hand.
“The other one,” I said.
He stopped.
“You want me to do that, Jack?” McCarty asked. “I’m the acting coroner.”
“I can do it, Doc,” he said.
But his face showed some doubt.
He reached over again and picked up the girl’s right wrist. Having long since passed rigor mortis, her hand unclenched as he lifted it. A bit of something fell from the dead fingers. Calder retrieved the object from the coffin and held it up.
It was a mother-of-pearl button sewn to a ragged patch of black cloth.
“I’ll be damned,” Deger said.
“I’d say that looks like a button from Andrew Vanderslice’s favorite shirt,” Calder said. “What do you think, Doc?”
“I think you need a warrant,” McCarty said.
“I already have a warrant for Vanderslice,” Calder said. “A federal writ for selling whiskey to the Comanches, and I aim to serve it.”
“Shouldn’t you wait until Judge Grout can issue one tomorrow morning?”
“That’s going to give Vanderslice another twenty-four hours ahead of me,” Calder said. “The murder charge can be filed after I drag him back.”
Calder handed the button and cloth to McCarty for safekeeping.
“Marshal, you might want to contact the Russian Mennonite community, up near Newton, and see if any of their girls are missing. I expect them to say yes.”
“What makes you think that?” Deger ask
ed.
“Call it a hunch,” Calder said as he rested the lid back on the coffin.
“Like the button?”
“I told you, Doc had a confidential witness for that, somebody who wouldn’t come forward if his name was used,” Calder said. Then he stood and used the camphor handkerchief on his hands. “All right, boys. Seal her up and get her back into the ground.”
“Wait,” I said.
“For what?” Calder asked.
“We should say something.”
“She’s right,” McCarty said.
“Go ahead,” Calder said to me.
“I’m no preacher.”
“You’re the closest thing we’ve got,” McCarty said.
“All right.”
I told the men to doff their hats, although Calder wasn’t wearing a hat, as usual. Then I cleared my throat and bowed my head.
“I wish you could hear me,” I said. “Because if you could, I’d tell you that you aren’t forgotten, that even if we don’t know your name, there are good people here who care about what happened to you. We’re going to try to help you find some rest.”
27
“I’m going with you,” I said.
“You can’t. You’ve got the hearing in front of Judge Grout tomorrow,” Calder said, taking some kind of rifle down from an antelope-horned rack on the wall. We were in his quarters, behind the law offices of Frazier and Hunnicutt, across from the courthouse. The entire living space was one room, really just a shack added to the back of the law office. It was filled with the usual kinds of trash that bachelors tend to accumulate: papers, dirty clothes, dishes that needed washing. There was a potbelly stove in one corner and a rope bed opposite.
“If you don’t show up,” Calder said, “Grout is going to issue a warrant for your arrest and somebody like me is going to track you down and send you to Labette County to stand trial as Kate Bender.”
“Potete can fix that.”
“You don’t understand,” Calder said. “I might be gone for two or three weeks, and Potete can’t fix anything if you’re not there.”
I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. There wasn’t room to sit, because every flat surface was piled with something—legal documents, law books, dirty plates. Even the chairs had bundles of the Times and other newspapers on them.
“How do you live like this?”
“Sorry, I didn’t know I was going to have guests.”
“Where are your books?”
“The law books are in the corner.”
“No, I mean literature.”
“I read newspapers.”
“But not Twain or Dickens.”
“I only read factual material.”
“There’s more fiction in just one edition of the Kansas City Times than in all of Thackeray,” I said, aiming at sounding droll but grazing boorish, instead. “Look at this mess! You can hardly walk from room to room.”
“I know where everything is.”
“Every man says that,” I said. “You’re going to burn this place down, come winter, when you light that stove. A single spark could set the whole mess on fire.”
“Worry about your own problems, Professor Wylde.”
“I am, and that’s why I demand to come with you.”
“You’re not in a position to demand anything.”
He began gathering cartridge boxes.
“Look, Jack,” I said. “There’s something I have to get back from the creature Vanderslice works for, this Malleus. He stole it from me, and if I don’t get it back, then none of these other things matter.”
“Your aura,” Calder said. “You already told me that at the drugstore.”
“Then why don’t you believe me?”
“It sounds crazy.”
I made an incredulous sound in my throat. “How much more proof do you need that this stuff is real?” I asked. “What about the button? I couldn’t have just made that up.”
“That’s different,” Calder said. “That came to you in a vision or something. But this thing about your aura . . . I’ve never heard anything like that before. If everybody has an aura, then why have I never seen one?”
“Because you haven’t looked,” I said. “It takes some practice.”
“What color is mine, then?”
“Green,” I said.
“That’s not my favorite color.”
“I know—your favorite color is blue.”
He gave me an odd look.
“I guessed that, because of your shirts. You’re always wearing a blue shirt under that vest. But auras don’t work like that. It’s not based on your favorite color. It has to do with your mood and personality.”
“Even if that’s true,” he said, “there’s no reason you should go with me. It’s too dangerous. And with you along—well, I’d always be looking out for you and not concentrating on bringing in Vanderslice.”
“I can take care of myself. I have, for a long time.”
“Not like this,” he said. “Below the Arkansas is no man’s land. There’s nobody to ask for help when you get in trouble, and the only thing you can count on is trouble.”
“All the more reason for me to go with you.”
He picked up the rifle and offered it, butt-first.
“Tell me whether this is loaded or not,” he said.
“I don’t like guns.”
“Take it,” he said, and shoved it in my hands.
I hated the feel of it.
“Gun help is the only kind of help I need,” he said. “And you can’t even tell me if it’s loaded or not, much less how to use the damned thing.”
He took the rifle from me.
“I can be useful in other ways,” I suggested.
“Like what?”
“I’m smart,” I said. “And I knew the girl had that button in her hand. There could be other things that would come to me from the dead. And the dead always tell the truth, Jack.”
He began shoving cartridges into the bottom of the rifle.
“I know you don’t understand about the aura,” I said. “But if I don’t get it back, I’m never going to be myself.”
“You seem fine to me.”
“I won’t be for long,” I said. “Without my aura, I’ll turn into somebody else. It’ll happen so gradual that nobody will notice the change, at least not at first. But it’s already started. Remember the mezcal binge? When you met me, I was at McCarty’s seeking a cure for a hangover. That’s not me, Jack. And when I channeled Katie Bender? I don’t know if that was her or not, but it was something evil. These things won’t stop until I have my aura back.”
He stopped loading the gun. “What happens if you die without it?”
“I don’t know, Jack. I’m scared.”
He sighed and then muttered beneath his breath.
“Can you ride?”
28
I had grown up with Tennessee walking horses, the kind of mount that plantation owners would survey their acres from. Such horses were known for their gentle ways and easy ride. What I needed was something fast and tough. So, at Bell Livery on Third, south of the deadline, I chose an Arabian mare named Fatima and a Texas saddle—although Bell first tried to sell me a sidesaddle. I said to have both horse and tack ready in half an hour, and then I went to the Dodge House. There I packed what little I owned into the valise, including the take from the performances at the opera house—just over five hundred dollars and change. It would be just enough to settle up at the Dodge House, buy the horse and saddle, and a few incidentals. I had picked up my regular clothes at the laundry, and I left the flannel and denim borrowed from Tom the Jailer on the bed.
There was only one thing left to do.
I opened the window over Front Street.
The problem with ravens and other corvids is that once they imprint on a person, it’s for life. If given to another owner, they become deeply melancholic and often will themselves dead. I had raised Eddie since he was just a baby. If I left hi
m for someone else to take care of, even somebody as kind as Doc McCarty, odds were that Eddie would soon become miserable and would eventually die. So there was only one thing to do.
I opened the cage and reached my hand in. Eddie rubbed his beak against my fingers, the membrane over his eyes half closing in contentment. Then I took him out of the cage and held him for a moment on my forearm, stroking his gleaming blue-black feathers.
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” I said. “My hand is played out and I’m about to jump off the edge of the world for God knows where. I don’t expect to come back, considering the amount of weaponry Calder was preparing, and from the tone of his voice. But if I don’t go, I’m never going to get my aura back. It’s better to die trying than to just sit and waste away into somebody else, don’t you think?”
He cocked his head.
“I know. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
I started to cry.
“At least this way, you’ll have a chance,” I said. “Ravens are smart, and you’re the smartest of them all. Why, if you could learn the things I taught you, you will do just fine on your own. But you’ll have to look out for hawks and eagles, and probably hang around town so you can eat scraps the restaurants throw out their back doors. I recommend Tin Pot Alley, since there always seems to be fresh slop there.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my free hand.
“And who knows?” I told him. “Maybe I will come back, and you’ll still be here in Dodge, and you’ll find me and we’ll be like we always were—inseparable. What do you think, baby? We’ll meet again, right?”
“‘Nevermore.’”
Now I was truly bawling.
I carried him to the open window.
“Go on,” I said.
He didn’t budge.
“Take off,” I said. “You’re free.”
He swiveled his head to look at me with first one eye, and then the other.
“Fly, damn it!”
I shoved my arm out the window and shook it, and Eddie squawked and snarled and dug his claws into my arm, trying to hang on. Then I shook harder, and Eddie flew off. He swung out low over North Front, flapped over the train depot, and then turned sharply, coming back to the hotel.