Destined to Die (2 page)

‘There, that’s better,’ she said with a bright smile. ‘Before, I was in no fit state to receive a gentleman caller.’

Gold showed a personable smile - an expression which, throughout his life, had given countless strangers pause for thought about their first impression of him. As it did on this occasion, while the girl was taking the things from a bureau to set two places at a table.

‘And that’s better, too. Why, when I first looked out at you, I had the fright of my life, Barnaby. Sitting there on that black horse, and you dressed all in black the way you are. And not smiling. You looked like . . . well, I don’t know what. But not friendly, that’s for sure.’

He rose from the chair and set his empty mug on the mantelshelf that was bare of ornaments.

‘Didn’t mean to scare you. Be okay if I water my horse?’

‘Certainly. There’s a trough in the barn. And leave him in there if you’ve a mind. In case it rains. Not too long now.’

He went out and unhitched the reins from the post. Overhead, the cloud cover was thinning and the orb of the sun could be seen, whitish, above the ridges of the Mohave Mountains. Gold led the gelding across the front of the house, along the side and on to the yard out back. Another horse in the barn snorted when he pushed open the door and led the gelding inside.

In fact, there were two horses in the barn. A grey and a chestnut. Both mares, occupying the only stalls. There was a trough at the rear, beside a stack of half a dozen hay bales and some sacks of oats. Gold allowed his mount to drink then hitched him to the offside front wheel of a cut-under wagon, neatly parked against a side wall.

Then, as he straightened up from slackening the saddle cinch, he did a double-take over the rump of the horse at something he had glimpsed from a more acute angle beneath the animal’s belly. And saw he was not mistaken. That, protruding from near the edge of an elongated patch of newly dug earth . . . there was a man’s finger.

CHAPTER TWO

SINCE, at the age of twelve, he had been apprenticed to his father’s undertaking business in New York City, Barnaby Gold experienced no sense of horror as - using a shovel taken from a rack of tools on the barn wall - he scraped aside some loose dirt from around the finger. To expose a work-gnarled hand. And enough of a shirt-sleeved arm so that he was able to get down on his haunches, take a double-handed grip on the dead flesh and haul the corpse partway out of the shallow grave.

Just one arm and shoulder, the head and upper right quarter of the torso.

‘Barnaby! I’m putting the food on the table now!’

She sounded like a mother summoning her reluctant offspring to leave a favourite game and come eat. Gold thought it likely that it was the hand of her own mother which was hooked over the shirt collar of the man partially dragged from the double grave. For he was certainly her father - despite the crumbs of dirt clinging to the dead flesh, the family resemblance between the thirty-some-year-old man and the girl was obvious.

‘You hear me, Barnaby?’

‘I hear you.’

He inched the man out of the dirt some more. Just enough to see the bullet hole, encircled by crusted blood, in his chest, left of centre.

The woman had a slighter build than the man and it was much easier to bring her far enough out of the ground to see that she had been killed in the same way. Her hair was the same colour as that of Joanne and her upper teeth also protruded slightly. In death, her eyes were closed. Her face was so contorted by agony or anguish, it was difficult to tell if she had been a pretty woman.
The man had died with his eyes open, expressing a shock less intense than the woman had left. His face was rough-hewn, not quite ugly.

Barnaby Gold straightened up and brushed his hands clean of dirt, rather than to free them of the touch of limp, cold, newly dead flesh. Then went out of the barn, blinking in the brightness of a sun which had punched a hole in the clouds. He re-entered the house through the rear door from which the young man in a hurry had emerged earlier.

It gave on to a kitchen hot with stove heat and redolent with the aromas of recently fried bacon and brewed coffee.

‘And about time, too. Ain’t nothing worse than bacon when the grease starts to cool.’

She was seated at one side of the table, already started on the breakfast of bacon, beans and grits. A plate with an equal amount of food was in front of the empty chair. Along with a mug of fresh coffee. The detached attitude of Barnaby Gold, which hardly ever altered - except when he smiled - gave Joanne Engel no premonition of his discovery.

‘You want to tell me about your folks?’

He bypassed the table to go to the fireplace, tossed the stub of the cheroot into the empty grate.

‘Virgil and Mary-Ann?’ she responded conversationally. ‘Them and me, we come from the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. Like a lot of the folks hereabouts. Moved out to this neck of the woods . . .’

She allowed the sentence to hang in the hot air, bright with sunlight streaming in through the east-facing window. And turned on her chair to look at him - standing before the fireplace. Her head was cocked to one side and there seemed to be genuine puzzlement in her soft brown eyes.

‘You found them?’

‘Right.’

She began to cry. Abruptly, tears filled her big eyes and spilled down her freckled cheeks. For long moments there was no sound from her. Then she dropped her fork to the floor, covered her face with her hands and vented a wail.

‘Shut up.’

She curtailed the sound but kept her face covered. ‘What?’

‘It’s as fake as your grown-up act.’

She let her hands fall into her lap. ‘Shit, they were my parents!’

‘Been dead for most of the night. You’d be through weeping about that, if you felt bad about it. Don’t even think you’re sorry you killed them. You or the guy I saw riding out on the trail awhile back.’

She used the backs of her hands to rub the salty moisture from her eyes. And stood up violently, so that her chair fell over backwards.

‘Jesse! Jesse Gershel. You saw him leave here, Barnaby?’

‘If that’s who he was.’

‘I’m not going to protect him! Why should I? He’s nothing to me! Just a hillbilly rube! He took me in just because he was the only man around here to show any interest in me! What a fool I’ve been!’

She took two steps toward Gold, but the lack of emotion in his green eyes extended no invitation to come closer. Then he moved. Swinging to go around her to the table. Where he sat down and began to eat the breakfast she had prepared.

‘You just going to leave it there?’ she asked hoarsely: and her surprise was definitely genuine.

‘How old are you, Joanne?’

‘I’m...’ She was going to lie, but decided against it ‘Shit, I’m twelve, going on near thirteen.’

He swallowed some beans and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

‘Just that? Tell me why?’ A fresh spell of weeping was in the offing. Not the histrionic variety.

Gold nodded. ‘Right. You’re just a kid, older in mind than body. There was a chance you were in a state of shock after whatever happened that got your parents killed. But that’s not the way it is. So I’ll just eat and be on my way. None of this is any of my business. And kid you may be, but I figure you’re in control of the situation.’

‘I’m not, I’m not! I need help! I was gonna tell you everything that happened! But I just couldn’t think how to do it! So I just put on that act of being calm and all,
while I was thinking!’

‘You did it real well.’

She set her chair upright and dropped on to it as violently as she had left the table. And stared intently across at him.

‘Please, Barnaby! Jesse came by last night. While my folks was over at a neighbour’s place. He sweet-talked me into going with him.’ She shook her head, the pony-tails swinging. ‘Shit, I ain’t saying I wasn’t ready to be sweet-talked that way. I ain’t saying I tried to fight him off or nothing. And I ain’t saying I didn’t enjoy it and all.’

Gold looked up from his plate and was certain there was a tacit suggestion in her eyes that she was willing to demonstrate her brand of enjoyment between the sheets.

‘You’re not exciting me, Joanne,’ he lied.

She scowled, but not for long. ‘We fell asleep, Barnaby. Didn’t hear Virgil and Mary-Ann drive back to the house. They found us together in my bed. Naked as when we were born. Virgil, he went crazy. And I’m sure as sure he would’ve killed Jesse if Jesse hadn’t got his gun first. Mary-Ann, she just kept on screaming and screaming. No different after Virgil was dead than when she’d first seen me and Jesse in the bed. Jesse, he just told her to stop. And when she wouldn’t, he shot her, too. I never touched no gun, Barnaby. I swear it.’

Gold rattled his fork down on his empty plate. And finished the last of the fresh mug of coffee.

‘I believe you,’ he said as he stood up and pushed his chair back.

She shook her head again. ‘And I never helped him to bury the bodies out to the barn, neither. Jesse, he said it had to be done. That afterwards he’d ride home and say he’d been out drinking in Bacall. I was to wait until this morning. Then go see Will and Martha - his parents. Say how worried I was that my folks hadn’t got back yet from visiting the Wolfes up at Bent River Crossing.’

Gold had taken a cheroot from the tin box he carried in an inside pocket of his frock coat. Now he struck a match on the butt of the Peacemaker in the holster and lit the tobacco. He let the dead match fall on to the greasy plate.

She stood up, hands gripping the edge of the table, her immature breasts heaving with powerful emotion.

‘I don’t want to go along with all that, Barnaby! Last night, when he told it to me, I agreed. But I don’t now. Even before you found Virgil and Mary-Ann. I knew folks wouldn’t go along with the idea that they was taken by Injuns or fell into the river and got swept away.’

Gold clicked his tongue and nodded. ‘That’s right, Joanne. Especially since the wagon and team are safe in the barn.’

Gold clicked his tongue and nodded. ‘That’s right, Joanne. Especially since the wagon and team are sale in the barn.’

‘Aw, shit!’

He turned from the table. ‘Bye-bye, kid.’

‘I told you I didn’t like that kid stuff and little lady crap!’ she shrieked, suddenly a child with a temper tantrum because she had not been given what she wanted.

‘I was wrong first off,’ he said from the doorway that gave on to the kitchen. ‘With a mouth like you have, you’re not any kind of lady.’

‘But I’m a woman!’ she hurled back. ‘Last night Jesse made me one of those!’

She whirled and ran into a bedroom. Not her own. She left the door open and Gold heard a ripping of fabric. A gasp. Then the unmistakable metallic sounds of a gun being cocked.

He started across the parlour.

She came out of her parents’ bedroom, her dress torn from the neckline to the start of her shallow cleavage. Her right hand fisted around the butt of a big Army Model Starr .44 revolver.

She pulled up short as he came toward her. And squeezed the trigger. The crack of the gun sounded very loud in the confines of the parlour. The gun bucked in her hand and the exploded bullet buried itself in the wall.

A gasp of shock vented from her mouth and she struggled to thumb back the hammer again.

Gold snatched the smoking gun from her hand and hurled it into the grate of the fireplace. Gripped her shoulder with his left hand and made to bring back his right to slap her across the face.

She cowered away from him, her features showing an expression of childish terror.

He squeezed his eyes tight shut, then pushed her away from him., She slammed to a halt against the wall.

‘Go on, mark me up some more.’

When he opened his eyes, her mouthline was set in a sinister smile.

‘He made me a woman! And I’m not yet thirteen, mister!’ She rasped the words through her bared teeth. There was a challenge implicit in her stance,

‘Finish it, Joanne.’

‘It’s well known hereabouts that me and Jesse have been walking out. But him being twenty years old and me being what I am, well folks just wouldn’t easily believe what happened. But if I was to tell them some passing stranger dressed all in black and wearing two guns on his belt came by and had his way with me - killed my folks and all like that . . . Well, Barnaby, I reckon they’d believe that easy enough. And even if I haven’t killed you, you wouldn’t get out of this neighbourhood alive.’

‘Just what is my breakfast going to cost me, Joanne?’

The challenge, the anger and the slyness drained out of her face and attitude. And she became the pathetic, apologetic young girl as she modestly clutched the two sides of the torn dress together.

‘I’m sorry I tried to kill you, Barnaby. Take me over to the Gershel place. With you there, to tell how you found the bodies and all, I’ll be able to say what really happened. Honest I will. The whole truth, just like I told it to you. And it won’t matter that Jesse’ll be there with his folks not ready to believe he’d do such a terrible thing.’

Her big brown eyes implored his agreement.