The Empire of Shadows

by Richard E. Crabbe

  A check of the barn yielded nobody but a stableboy, who professed not to know “a damn thing about any damn crates,” and suggested Jim go, “’quire by the front desk fer the man-ger.” Tupper ambled off, but instead of cutting through the hotel he decided to walk around to the front.

  He’d rarely seen its equal, although he’d heard that down south in Lake George, and of course in Saratoga, there were grand hotels that were every bit as big. He’d seen the hotels of New York. They were in another league altogether. Still, the Prospect House, perched as it was on the edge of Blue, with nothing but forest for half a day’s ride in any direction was a very impressive sight.

  Tupper strolled around it, finding he had to step back from the place to keep it from overflowing his vision. As he turned the corner near the piazza on the east wing of the hotel he heard

  “Well, goddamn! If it ain’t Jim Tupper!”

  Tupper froze and became instantly aware of the knife at his waist. He wished he had the bayonet and wondered how in hell he could have been so foolish as to lose it.

  “Jim. It’s you, ain’t it?”

  Tupper looked about but couldn’t see who was calling to him, though the voice was familiar. He flexed his knees and came up on the balls of his feet. His eyes darted and his hands knotted.

  “Up here, ye darned fool!” the voice called again. Perched on the railing of the piazza was Exeter Owens.

  “Hey, Ex!” Tupper called with a wave of his hand that he hoped looked genuine. Inside his gut was a seething icy knot of worms, tumbling and twisting. The last time he’d seen Ex was in New York.

  It had been in Madison Square Park. Jim had gone there to eat his lunch away from the construction site. The park was the only place nearby where a man could get some grass under his feet. He’d get away from the steel and stone and dirt of the building site and for a little while imagine he was up north. The noise from the street, the clatter of hooves and wheels on cobbles, the rumble of streetcars, the clanging of their bells, the twittering of cop’s whistles and the constant surf of voices beat against its leafy boundaries.

  He’d been sitting in the park, head back against a big oak, a tree that had probably been there a hundred years or more, gazing up at the dirty blue sky, trying to imagine he was somewhere else. Ex had been standing in front of him and he hadn’t even noticed. A kick at his foot brought Jim back to earth. Ex greeted him like a long-lost relative, which they sort of were. They were displaced Adirondackers swimming the darkened, downstate waters.

  They’d had a long talk, mostly about home and the winters they’d spent logging around Tupper and Saranac lakes. They’d met later that night. He and Ex drank watered ale at a cheap saloon on Tenth Avenue, a place that catered to pimps, sneak thieves, confidence men, and a smattering of the dock trade. It stank. The beer was bad. The smoke was thick and clinging.

  But they got drunk and had a fine old time, somehow managing not to get their heads bashed in, a common fate of drunks in that part of town. They had planned to meet two nights later in a place not far from the construction site where Jim worked, but that was the night Jim’s troubles started.

  “Almost didn’t recognize ya ’out yer hair. Get yerself scalped?”

  Tupper tried to laugh. “Somethin like that, honióo. A fella in the mirror did it. Told me I had to get shed of my old ways. Start fresh as a new man,” Tupper said with a straight face. He had to know, Jim thought. He couldn’t have been in New York and not have known. For all he knew, Ex might have shown up just as the cops chased after him.

  “Stay there. Be right down,” Ex called. “Gotta see ya with no hair.”

  Tupper waited, wondering what to do. The story of the escape had to have been in all the papers. But Ex never had been a big reader, Jim remembered. Maybe he really hadn’t heard about the arrest and escape. Tupper waited, his palms damp with worry.

  Exeter Owens ambled up with a broad grin.

  “Damn! You look a sight changed, Jim-boy. Almost pass for a white man,” he said with a joking slap on Tupper’s shoulder. “Or at least a Mexican, anyways.”

  “Hmph. What the hell you know about Mexicans, you ignorant Honióo? You’ve never been south of New York City,” Tupper said, giving Owens’s hand a good natured shake. “Speaking of that, where the hell were you last week. Waited for you at the site but you never showed up. Had to drink alone.”

  “Got myself de-layed on account of a woman,” Ex said with a wink. “Time I got there you musta been long gone.”

  Tupper played the opportunity as if he was landing a ten-pounder on a five pound line. “Wasn’t about to cool my heels overlong for the likes of you,” he said with a smile. “Decided to head back home the next day. Had to pack my gear an’ get accounts settled, that sort o’ thing.”

  Ex nodded. “Damned if I don’t know just what you mean. Took off myself a couple days after. Had my fill o’ the city. Don’t think I’ll ever go back neither. A man can’t think nor breathe down there. No place for the likes of us, eh, Jim?”

  Tupper agreed and asked Owens if he was working and what his plans were.

  “Thought I’d do a bit o’ guidin’ till fall. Then it’s back to the woods for me, I guess.”

  Tupper shook his head. “Not a hell of a lot else to do in winter, ’cept starve. I was lucky. Got a job over ta Pine Knot, working for Durant. Pay’s good. Don’t know what the prospects are come winter though,” he admitted.

  They talked like that for some time, never dwelling on the city nor any troubles left behind. They had such a pleasant chat that Tupper found himself forgetting the city altogether. He told Ex about the job and about Durant and Pine Knot. Twenty minutes passed in that fashion when Jim looked up at the sun and said, “Better get going. Got some things I’m picking up, supplies for the Durants.”

  “Can’t keep the big man waiting,” Owens said with a sour tone, like he’d just had a bad piece of salt pork. Tupper, suddenly remembering Owens’s old land problems, asked, “You got things settled with Durant, right? Seems I recall it working out.”

  “Oh yeah,” Owens said with a dismissive shrug. “Sure. That was years gone.”

  From what Tupper knew of Owens and what he’d heard from others, he was not in the habit of forgiving a wrong. He treated grudges like children, feeding them and keeping them warm. Owens was not a man you wanted to cross.

  Owens had been a popular man at the logging camps, where hard work and close quarters could make some men edgy. He was a good logger and had done just about every kind of logging job from road monkey to river driver. He was tall and strong and he could hold his liquor like he had no bottom. His long, sandy hair and muttonchop sideburns framed a lean, hard face with deep-set eyes under overhanging brows. The eyes could be piercing, but mostly there was a cold kind of fun in them. A wry grin seemed to always flirt with the corners of his mouth, and he could be generous with those who knew him best.

  Still, there were rumors about Ex, things said with little to back them up. There had been speculation about a gambling debt and a logging accident. But accidents happened all the time in lumbering. Blame got cast in directions that sometimes it shouldn’t. Tupper knew about that, understood it all too well.

  “Guess I’ll see you around then, Ex?”

  “Yup. Waltz some sports around for a month or so, then into the woods for winter.”

  They shook and wished each other well, promising to get a beer if the opportunity presented itself, and talking vaguely about lumbering together once the flatlanders had gone back home. Tupper walked up the stairs to the piazza and in the main doors, not giving another thought to New York City. It was nearly three hundred miles away, after all.

  It was close to two by the time Jim clucked to his horse and got started back towards Pine Knot. He’d found someone who knew about the freight for Pine Knot, and got lunch at the kitchen. A cook threw together a sandwich, giving him a reasonably cold beer as well. All he’d had to say was that he worked for Mister Durant. No oth
er explanation was necessary. He couldn’t make it before five-thirty he figured. He had no schedule to keep, but he didn’t want to give that foreman any excuses to fire him.

  Exeter Owens leaned against the corner of the Prospect House’s two-story outhouse, chewing on a long piece off grass and swatting flies. Though the adjoining bathhouse had hot and cold running water, the outhouse had no water at all. The flies seemed to approve. He watched Tupper drive off.

  The road was hot and dusty. Tupper was grateful he remembered to stow his bowler under the seat. The Adirondack sun burned like a match head, unfiltered by the soot of the city. Though it was not nearly as oppressive as the city sun, it seemed hotter on the skin. A trickle of sweat leaked down from under the band of his hat. He reached up to wipe it away when he saw someone cross the road.

  A stinging bead of sweat blurred the vision in one eye, but he was sure of what he’d seen. It had been a man and a woman. The woman was dressed as a maid. They’d been perhaps two hundred yards away, but there was no mistaking what he’d seen. The pair crossed the road in a hurry as if they wanted to avoid being seen. The only reason he’d seen them at all was because he’d just rounded a bend at the crest of a small hill.

  Aside from Tupper’s wagon there was nothing moving on the road. Jim was curious and marked where the couple had crossed, not far from a gnarled, old maple that stretched a sagging, bony limb out toward the sun. In a couple of minutes he came to the spot and stopped. He peered back over his shoulder and again down the road in front. He stood to get a better view. The road was empty.

  “Strange,” he mumbled to himself. It was about a mile back to the hotel. “No maids out this way changing sheets,” Tupper said to the horse nibbling at the grass in the center of the road. “A curious hand sometimes loses a finger,” his grandfather used to say. Tupper grinned as he recalled the old man wagging a finger at him, an image that seemed to come to him at just the right moments, as if his spirit watched over him to appear when needed. The old man had power still, almost as much as he had in life. Still, Tupper’s curiosity got the better of him.

  Pulling the wagon over, he hitched his horse to a tree. There was the trace of a path leading off the road. It looked to be a deer run. Deer were a lot like humans that way. They had their habitual highways through the forest, trails where hooves had carved a delicate passage. Tupper followed the trail and was rewarded with a footprint no more than ten feet from the road. He stood still, listening for any sound not of the forest. He crouched low to probe the undergrowth with his eyes. He heard nothing, but saw the way they’d gone.

  They’d followed the deer run. A leaf, snapped off and laying with its light green belly showing, was as clear a sign as he needed. Tupper followed, moving in silence. He figured if he was cautious perhaps he’d see something. It seemed clear they didn’t want to be seen. To see them without being seen would be reward enough, a trophy of sorts. Tupper took care with every step.

  The toes went first, planted slowly, feeling for twigs that might snap like firecrackers in the silence of the woods. For all his caution he moved fast enough, going hundreds of feet into the forest in a few minutes. Every few steps he’d stop and listen, hearing nothing but his own breathing.

  Eagle Lake lay on this side of the road. He wasn’t sure how far it was, but judging from the blue gaps that peeked through the trees it couldn’t be much farther. In a few minutes more he was near the shore. The lake shimmered between the trees, sunlight dancing on the restless surface. He knew better than to show himself at the shoreline. His grandfather had taught him that on his first hunt.

  “See but do not be seen, Jim. That is the way of the hunter,” he’d told him. Tupper stood back, concealed by the trees but able to see much of the lake. A noise caught his ear. He couldn’t identify it but moved in its direction, somewhere off to his left. A little peninsula jutted into the lake perhaps a hundred yards that way. It was a pretty spot, crowded with towering white pines. It would be shady and cool there, Tupper thought, a perfect spot for lovers to catch a breeze coming off the lake. A broken branch on a beech seedling confirmed where they had gone. Tupper tracked them like a hound on the scent.

  He froze at a flash of movement. Something among the trees caught his eye and he focused on it with a hunter’s intensity. Something flashed again. He couldn’t make it out, just a blur of color through the underbrush. When it didn’t change location, he ventured forward, from tree to tree, making no more noise than the breeze in the pines. Keeping a small stand of young aspen between him and the movement he’d seen, he got quite close. He was about sixty feet away before he stopped.

  Tupper crouched like a mountain lion, hands on the ground, legs coiled behind. He could see them through a leafy, green window. It had been her head he’d seen, Tupper realized. Her mane of honey-blonde hair rose and fell, rose and fell in slow motion. He could see the young man’s hand, her hair cascading through his fingers like a brassy waterfall. He could almost hear them.

  The head moved suddenly, the body shifted. There was a brief glimpse of glistening shaft, then a leg, smothered in a maid’s uniform, blocked the view. He could see her back arch and her rounded hips descend. Jim Tupper turned away and crept back the way he’d come, his grandfather’s voice stern in his head.

  Thirteen

  The burned buildings were situated not more than thirty feet from the hotel, in which there were between 200 and 300 people. But for the heavy rain which was falling at the time the hotel would also have been consumed. The guests were very much frightened, and turned out of the house in their night-clothes.

  —NEW YORK AND LAKE GEORGE RIPPLE

  Chowder decided to concentrate on finding out whatever he could about Tupper before looking into the case of the floater with the bayonet hole in his head. Though the two were undoubtedly related, at least in Chowder’s mind, Tupper had to take priority. A couple of hours spent interviewing the arresting officers, including the one the prisoners had overpowered, hadn’t yielded much, except the fact that he was called Jim Tupper.

  Most of the time he’d spent in police custody, he’d been either unconscious or in transit, so nothing of any detail was known about him. His wallet and a large, well-sharpened hunting knife were all the police had found. The wallet contained no clues other than his address in New York.

  The cops tossed his room soon after he’d escaped, but again had found little of use. Chowder had canvassed the men he’d worked with at the construction site too. About all he had to show for it was a name, a general description, and the fact that he came from somewhere north, near some lake they’d never heard of.

  “I expect he’d be going back there, if you were to ask me,” one of the construction workers said. “He didn’t talk much, but when he did it was mostly about the woods, hunting, logging, that sort of thing. You want to find him, you’d be wise to look there.”

  Chowder had spent the rest of that day and most of the morning talking to stevedores, captains, clerks, oystermen, stokers, oilers, and deck crews. He’d spoken with the roundsmen who patrolled the dock area. Not one could recall seeing a man with Indian features and black hair, either long or short. The patrolmen hadn’t been any more help than the rest, though they’d been alerted to keep a sharp eye for the wild Indian escapee whose picture had been in all the papers.

  It had seemed fruitless. Thousands of men worked along the waterfront. Many of those were transients, in port for a day or two, then gone. At any point in time, thousands more might be temporarily ashore. Sailors of every description were commonplace, and unusual looks or dress drew hardly a passing glance. A man who would stand out on Broadway might attract no more attention than a fly at a butcher’s shop on West Street.

  Compounding the problem was the lack of any identification on the floater. Chowder knew how hard it was too find a man based on just a general description. In his hours working the docks Chowder had turned up five men who’d gone missing. Three of them matched the approximate height and weigh
t of the victim. All of those were sailors. Chowder had little hope that any were his man.

  Knowing sailors, those five were probably off on a binge, rollicking with whores, beaten unconscious in some alley, or in jail. Most likely it was some combination of all of that. Still, he had to check them all. He enlisted the help of each of the roundsmen he contacted, asking them to keep a lookout for both the Indian and any one of the missing men who happened to turn up alive and breathing. He hadn’t entertained much hope until he got to the office of the Hudson River Night Line.

  “Barry Davis,” the clerk said. “Barry Davis. Missing from the Albany night boat two nights ago. Captain reported him missing some time after they docked in Albany. Have the telegram right here.” The clerk handed it over to Chowder for him to read. Chowder repeated the dead man’s description, but it wasn’t any help.

  “Don’t know the man myself, detective. What I do know is that he was a steward on the boat. Been with us since, ah, let’s see…” The clerk adjusted his glasses and flipped pages in his record books.

  “September of ’eighty-one,” he said with a note of satisfaction.

  “This Barry Davis, he ever disappear before, you know, go off on a spree for a few days or something?”

  The clerk looked indignant, adjusting his glasses so he could peer over them at Chowder. “Detective, this is the Hudson River Line, not some oyster barge. If one of our employees misses days without cause, let me assure you he is summarily dismissed. In fact, I processed his termination just this morning.”

  Chowder grunted in grim amusement. “Looks like somebody terminated him already. He’s on a slab in the morgue.”

  The clerk paled above his starched collar and became quite helpful, quickly arranging for the chief steward of the boat to identify the body. He also looked up Davis’s address for Chowder.