A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose)

by Charlaine Harris

  Felix shrugged, and we walked two blocks to another place.

  I was going to visit every restaurant in Sally, at this rate. They all seemed to be of the home-cooked variety, so they all seemed to offer the same things. I was pleased to see pecan pie on the menu at Aunt Lillybeth’s. I’d never had that. Travel was going to broaden me if I didn’t walk more.

  The ice water was better than the pecan pie. Aunt Lillybeth had had a heavy hand on the crust this morning.

  “Why are you here?” Eli said, when the waitress had delivered our orders and left to clean the counter.

  Felix leaned back, like a man about to have his favorite drink. “Your patron sent me to check on you,” he said.

  “My patron?” Eli looked blank. “You mean Gilbert?”

  “Yes, Gilbert.” Felix, who did look a lot like a cat, practically had feathers sticking out of his mouth.

  “Gilbert is my immediate superior in the Air Guild,” Eli explained to me. I nodded. Paulina had told me the wizards had assorted special talents: earth, air, fire, water, death, and healing. But hadn’t Eli mentioned someone else in Mexico? His mentor?

  “What happened to Dmitri?” I said.

  “Dmitri was executed,” Felix said, his face empty of expression. See, I hadn’t known that. Eli and I needed to have a much longer talk. Maybe we needed to spend more time talking in chairs, and less time in the bed.

  “Excellent,” Eli said. “I need some help, Felix. This place is treacherous.” He might as well have hit Felix over the head with a shovel.

  “What has happened?” Felix seemed to have the malice knocked out of him.

  “Someone prepared for the train wreck and caused it,” Eli said. “It was no accident. We don’t know whether it was caused so the chest could be stolen, or if someone simply took quick advantage of the chaos.”

  “If the train didn’t derail so the thieves could take the crate, what reason could there have been?” Felix said, his forehead wrinkling.

  “It could have been a guerilla strike.” Eli looked thoughtful.

  “Guerillas? There are guerillas here in Dixie?”

  It was lucky I was looking down. I thought he meant “gorillas” for a minute, and I was having a picture in my head that was crazy wonderful. Then my brain translated.

  “I’m not sure of the size and scope of the movement,” Eli said. “The people involved know they will be killed if they’re found out.”

  I thought about Galilee’s parents in the back room of the shoe shop. I thought of the man who worked behind the counter there, and James Edward. You didn’t get afraid like that overnight. It was in the air your whole life.

  “You all talk,” I said, and stood. “I got to go run an errand.”

  Both the men stood, which was real polite but not needed. Eli gave me a questioning look, but I just nodded to him, told Felix good-bye, and got out of there. I went to the Western Union office, found that the reply to Eli’s telegram had been delivered to the hotel, and walked to the Pleasant Stay. Nellie Mercer was still on the desk. She tried to give me a face with no expression, but she couldn’t carry it off.

  “I understand a telegram for my husband has arrived,” I said.

  Nellie reached back to our little mailbox and plucked a thin sheet from it, which she gave to me by laying it on the desk and sliding it over the wood with one finger. It might as well have been a dead mouse.

  I gave Nellie a real direct look. And had the pleasure of seeing her look as scared as she should.

  A white-haired lady with a back as straight as a poker had approached the desk from the stairs, unheard by Nellie. After I’d turned away with my telegram, I heard her say, “I certainly hope you treat the elderly with more courtesy than the young, Miss Mercer.”

  I smiled to myself.

  I sat on one of the dining chairs on the porch to open the envelope.

  The yellow sheet read: No connection Iron H here. Felix en route. Anxious. Tell no one. G

  Felix had sure made good time. I didn’t know if it was Felix who was anxious, or “G.” I guessed that was Gilbert, Eli’s new “patron.”

  Tell no one, my ass. I had to know what I was looking for. This was ridiculous. I loved Eli’s sense of honor, but I also loved common sense.

  And as I sat there mulling this over—Iron Hand, Felix, the crate, the Society of the Lamb, the terrible wreck and its death toll (which a newspaper headline told had grown by fifteen)—I could not make any sense of it. While I pondered it all, a man came by with a dog on a leash, a sight so odd that I stared at him. Pet dogs are pretty rare in Texoma; dogs roam the plains in packs, and to encounter a pack is to encounter painful injuries or death.

  I caught the man’s eye as he spit out some tobacco juice. “Little missy, you ain’t never seen a bloodhound?” he said.

  “No, sir, I have not.”

  “Then let me introduce you to Clete, the best sniffer in Dixie,” the man said, with a lot of pride. He walked over to the porch with Clete, who sniffed at my shoe with a lot of enthusiasm. Clete looked up at me with doleful eyes.

  “He hopes you’ll give him a pat on the head,” Clete’s owner said.

  Real carefully I reached down to give the dog a little pat, and when that went over well, I scratched him behind the ears. To this he responded with a kind of happy moan, so I did it again. The dog sat and looked up at me.

  “What do bloodhounds do?” I looked from the dog’s big brown eyes up to the narrow blue eyes of the man. I’d never known a dog who did anything but attack or bark.

  “He’s a tracker, ma’am. He can track anything you give him the scent of. A missing person, a deer, and so on.”

  I hadn’t had any idea dogs could do that.

  “Thank you for letting me meet him,” I said, not having much idea how to end this encounter.

  “You’re real welcome. Clete likes to make new friends.”

  I looked at the baggy jowls and the drool and I figured it might be a little hard for Clete to do that. Smart he might be, but he was not lovely or appealing, at least to this Texoman. The dog and the man resumed their walk, and I congratulated myself on avoiding the drool.

  When I looked up from checking my shoes, Eli was there. He was alone, I was glad to see.

  “My telegram came,” he said, spotting the yellow paper.

  I came down the hotel steps to meet him. “Sure did. Telling you Felix was coming, and telling you to share everything with your gunnie.”

  Eli looked away with a smile. “I’m sure it said that.”

  “It did. Doesn’t make any sense to keep things from the one who’s protecting you.”

  “Say anything about Iron Hand?” He was still thinking.

  “That G doesn’t know anything about Iron Hand.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Lot of that going around.”

  “Like Felix’s arrival,” Eli said. He was frowning as hard as I’d ever seen him frown. “The guild either trusts me or it doesn’t. Why send help when I hadn’t given any sign of distress? When I hadn’t been wounded, and the enemy hadn’t even appeared to confront me?”

  I nodded, but he was thinking too hard to notice. We were ambling along now, because he seemed to like to move while he worried at things.

  I was looking around us, because that was my job. I saw a pickup truck creeping up the street after us. There were two men in the cab. Though he was wearing a hat pulled down and a kerchief over his lower face, I was sure the one in the passenger seat was Friend. There was another man in the truck bed. Intended—What was his name? Harvey?—Nellie Mercer’s fiancé.

  “Eli, they’re coming for us,” I said, and his head jerked around. “We don’t want to talk to the sheriff.”

  Eli didn’t waste time asking me if I was sure, and he didn’t ask any questions. He blew out the two tires on our side with a gesture, and the truck suddenly sagged to the left. There was a lot of yelling, and Harvey leaned out as far as he could with a pistol
in his hand. Eli blew a cloud on them, and while they couldn’t see we took off walking as fast as we could. We took the first right, an alley, to get out of sight. When we emerged onto the street where the shoe repair shop was, I got my bearings, and steered us toward the back way to the hotel. Though it was now enemy territory, it was all we had. I figured neither Mercer, nor Nellie, nor her Intended and his buddies, would attack us in the Mercer place of business, which was also their home. Probably.

  We scooted up the stairs to our room at a more unremarkable pace.

  Closed the door. Locked it. Stood and stared at each other.

  “I’m going to tell you everything,” Eli said. “If I get killed, I want you to know why.”

  I didn’t remark that I was just as likely to get killed as him. I just pulled off the damn shoes and scooted up against the headboard, while Eli collapsed into the armchair.

  “You’re not religious, so you may not know this,” he said. “But our church, the church of Holy Russia, is Orthodox.”

  I nodded, to show I was listening.

  “We don’t believe everything the Catholics believe, and we worship differently from the Protestant churches, too.”

  I already knew that, thanks to my mother. I waited for him to go on.

  “But we are a Christian church, and we have our own saints. One of our early saints is African.”

  I didn’t care one way or another where his saints came from. I made a beckoning gesture to tell him to keep going.

  “Saint Moses the Black—some people call him Saint Moses the Ethiopian—was a big man, a violent man, a runaway slave. He was a fugitive when he got to Wadi al-Natrun.”

  I had no idea where or what that was. Not going to ask, either, not now.

  “Though Moses was a robber and a killer, he converted to Christianity when given shelter at a monastery. There are all kinds of stories about him resisting temptation to return to his violent ways, though he wasn’t always successful. When he was old, his monastery was attacked by bandits, and he chose to be martyred.”

  “So in the chest … ?”

  “His bones. The remains of Saint Moses the Black.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  So the Lucky Crew’s first and only job had been protecting a dead man.

  “How long ago did he die?”

  “Fifteen hundred years ago.”

  “And there are still remains?”

  “Yes. If the British can find tombs of ancient Egyptian kings, and see their preserved bodies, the bones of a saint can certainly survive.” Eli sounded very certain.

  I didn’t know about any Egyptian tombs, and I didn’t care. I was concerned with the here and now. “So the thinking of the Holy Russian Empire was that … ?”

  “Our priests have been in contact with the Negro people here for a couple of years, very secretly, spreading the story. Moses the Black has become the most beloved saint of poor people here in Dixie.”

  That sounded like a secret religion to me, and kind of creepy. But I kept my mouth shut.

  “It’s no surprise that the Catholic church—the priests who know about this—has become incensed.”

  “So why are you doing this, exactly?” I didn’t disapprove, not at all, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a government would do if it wanted to stay stable.

  “Tsar Alexei loved his first wife. You may remember she was a Ballard, from Dixie—in fact, from here in Sally. Her name was Amanda.”

  A lot clicked together in my head when Eli said that. I remembered the newspaper coverage of the wedding, even in Texoma. An American tsarina.

  “Amanda grew up on the largest Ballard-owned plantation, just outside of town. On her deathbed, the first tsarina asked Alexei if he could try to make things better for the downtrodden people here. She often told the story of the woman who was her nurse when she was little. The woman was whipped for some minor error, and died of infection from that. It was the tsarina’s last wish, that the black people here be helped. She told Alexei he was the only person she’d ever met who was powerful enough to change things.”

  “It sounds like you were there.” It also sounded like, though she was dying, the former Miss Ballard had appealed to Alexei’s pride and vanity.

  “I was there,” Eli said. He looked sad. “It was a terrible day. The tsar loved her, truly.”

  “He’s got another wife now, and an heir.” I was just saying.

  “Tsars have to have heirs. Otherwise, we have people like his uncle and my father plotting to overthrow him.”

  “So does his current wife know about any of this?” Not that it made a difference, I guess.

  “Tsar Alexei set all this in motion soon after Amanda died. The tsar sent one of our priests to Africa. After much searching, he returned to San Diego with Moses’s bones. My superiors thought our priests, or even our grigoris, would be too easy to spot if they accompanied the crate to Dixie. So gunnies were hired all along the way, and it was switched from one crew to another, to muddle the trail. I thought that the decision was made to hire Iron Hand to further make sure the bones arrived where they were supposed to go. But maybe not. Their presence is a mystery to me.”

  “So the Lucky Crew had the crate on its final leg.” I had pictured a lot of things that might be in that chest, but not human remains.

  “Yes. Until the train wreck, which I believe—now—was caused by these Lamb people. They took advantage of the train wreck to kill your crew leader and steal the chest, having tried to get it away from other crews several times before. I don’t know how they found out. There are sympathizers with their way of thinking in places I would never imagine.”

  I could believe that easily. There were so many people who tried to find a reason for all the bad things that had happened in America, bad things that had destroyed the United States as a country. Blaming it on black people was the easiest solution to a big question.

  “They killed a lot of people to get the chest,” I said, thinking of the row of bodies on the hillside. The two funeral homes. How Jake had looked.

  “Maybe more than they’d counted on.”

  “And what will they do with the chest?”

  “I’m afraid they will destroy the bones unless we find them very quickly.”

  “It’s been days already.” If I’d been a Society member, I’d have powdered the bones beneath my boot and burned the powder.

  I didn’t want to start this venture unless there was a real chance of success. No point in risking death for nothing.

  “Then we have to move fast,” Eli said. He was nothing but determined.

  “I would move fast if I knew where to move.” I had not a single idea.

  But we had a miracle. There was a knock at the room door, and I pulled my gun. I stood to one side while Eli, spell in hand, answered.

  James Edward stood there, his arms full of folded linen, and he looked from side to side and stepped in without being asked. “Shut the door, sir,” he said. He set down his stack of sheets.

  Eli did, and I lowered my gun.

  “Listen to me,” James Edward said. “Juanita Poe saw the chest where she works, at the Ballards’ house, out on the road to Bergen. Young Mr. Ballard brought it in two days ago after the train wreck and hid it in his attic. Juanita waited till they was gone and went up there. Way she described it, that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “Did you leave the note here about the meeting?” I said.

  “I did, but I wanted to tell you … the man who gave it to me is someone I don’t trust. Elijah likes money more than he’s loyal to other black people. He’s been keeping an eye on me to make sure I delivered it. He’d know if I hadn’t. He has a friend who works here.”

  “So you don’t know who will be at this meeting.”

  “I’ve asked around, to see if any of my friends know anything about it. It’s not with any of them, that’s for damn sure.”

  That was bad news.

  “Sally is a complicated place,” I sa
id. Everyone I’d met had seemed like other people, some nice, some not so nice, but regular. But there was this whole secret underlying it all, this thing we were all supposed to assume.

  “Yes, ma’am,” James Edward said, and I didn’t tell him to call me Lizbeth. He would not be able to.

  James Edward left within a minute, because his absence would be noticed. He’d picked his time carefully. He asked Eli to look out in the hall to make sure no one was observing before he picked up his armful of folded sheets and carried them on to the big linen closet at the end of the hall. After that he went down the back stairs, which I figured ended in the kitchen area.

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  “That sums it up.” Eli threw himself on the bed. He lay his head back against his laced fingers. “We should have asked where the Ballard house is.”

  “Phone book,” I said, looking in the shallow drawer of the bedside table. It was only a few pages long. Though Ballard was a common name for businesses and public buildings, I found only two private individuals with that name: one senior and one junior, same phone number. Looked to me, from the map, that if we hadn’t turned onto Bergen Road we would have gone past the place.

  There was no way we could drop in on these people. We were strangers, and Eli was clearly what he was. I couldn’t think of a single story that sounded believable. Even if we could talk our way into the house, there wasn’t any reason on earth we could give to ask if we could see what was in their attic.

  “I’ll tell you about the Ballard family,” Eli said.

  I loved it when he volunteered information. “I’ve seen the name on a lot of buildings here,” I said, to grease the conversational wheel. “I’ve read about them in the papers, I’m sure. But it’s been a long time.”

  “The Ballard family owns huge amounts of farmland in this area, and several businesses, too,” Eli said. “They also have a sugarcane plantation in Cuba. They control part of an import firm in New Orleans. But they’re based here. Tsar Nicholas was impressed with their wealth when he met the previous head of the family at a reception in Cuba.”

  “So he was open to the marriage of Amanda Ballard to Alexei. Pretty ambitious marriage on the part of the Ballards,” I said. “Considering Alexei is real royalty.”