Giving Up the Ghost (2 page)

McCarty slipped a hand into his vest pocket. He emerged with a pale, cubelike stone in the fingers of his right hand, a stone about the size of a die used in a game of craps.

“Take it.”

I took the cube and weighed it in my gloved palm. It was roughly hewn, showing chisel marks on all sides but one. That side was strangely polished.

“It's a sort of good luck,” McCarty said. “Something I've carried for many years. It is Jerusalem limestone, cut from one of the paving stones from the Via Dolorosa. It is among the few things left today that we can be reasonably sure was touched by our Savior.”

“Does the bottom of His sandal count?”

McCarty did not laugh.

“He fell many times beneath the burden of the cross, and his hands and knees—and perhaps even his blood—may have contacted the stone. I brought it back with me from a tour of the Holy Land before the war. It has given me surprising comfort in times of need.”

“Doc, I thought you were a scientist.”

“Look at the face of stone,” he said. “It has been polished smooth by the passage of countless feet over the centuries. Even if Christ did not touch the stone—or even if His divinity were not greater than ours—it gives me comfort to know that so many have gone before us, and that each generation pushed us a little closer to the light of truth, both scientific and spiritual.”

“Doc, some of those generations shoved us back,” I said. “It was called the Dark Ages for a reason. And it wasn't so long ago that we were burning women who were suspected of witchcraft at the stake.”

I held out my hand for him to take it back, but he shook his head.

“You're the one who brought it back,” I said. “You have the sentimental attachment. It belongs to you.”

“Keep it,” Doc said. “For me, at least for a little while. Carry it on your person. And when you feel a need for comfort, close your hand around it, and if it doesn't please you to think of Christ, reflect at least upon the affection of the friend who gave it to you.”

I slipped the stone in my pocket and began again to cry.

Doc offered me his kerchief.

“You're right. Something did happen, between the end of the case and our return to Dodge City,” I said, hating the sound I made when trying to speak while crying. “Something that upended my understanding of what was real, yet in review I should have known all along. It has made me feel the biggest fool in the world. My life is built upon a lie.”

McCarty put his arm around my shoulders.

“What was it?” he asked.

“I cannot say,” I said, and again the tears came. “It mortifies me just to think upon it. If you were not holding me up, my knees would buckle and I would sink to the ground, and I do not think I could ever get up again.”

“Only love can lay one so low.”

I did not answer.

“What about Jack Calder?” he asked. “This is surely something you should speak to him about. As your partner in detection, if not affection.”

“Calder,” I said sharply. “Calder of the strong arms and the broad chest and that silly huge gun upon his hip. He has his own ghosts to deal with, and has grown as distant as the evening star. I can no longer speak with him.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, Ophie.”

“The only one I
can
talk to is Eddie.”

“And what is the quality of his advice?”

“You might be surprised,” I said. “Like you, he's fond of literature. But his tastes run more to Poe.”

“A dark one, that bird.”

“Takes after his mistress,” I said.

We walked on, but this time in silence. We found the end of Chestnut Street, and walked it into town. The road was frozen hard beneath our feet. Our steps echoed in the still winter air like the rattle and scuffle of the dominoes pushed by old men in the lonely saloons.

We continued to the corner of First Avenue and North Front Street, then crossed to the northeast corner building with the big front window, with the fresh gold lettering that said
CALDER & WYLDE, CONSULTING DETECTIVES.
This, imposed over a stylized Ace of Spades. Mitford, that jack-of-all-trades, had done a good job with the lettering, and none of the green paint on the frame had smudged any of the panes.

The interior of the agency was dark, as Calder was in the habit of spending his Sunday afternoons playing billiards at the Saratoga.

In the building just behind the agency, my neighbor, Mitford the undertaker, was at work. We could hear the bite and draw of a handsaw, and then the bark of a chisel, and I imagined wood chips clinging to Mitford's extravagant beard. In my mind, he was building a coffin, although he could have just as easily been working on an item meant for the living; most of his business was devoted to the selling of furniture. When Mitford wasn't building coffins or furniture, he was adding rooms to rent on the top floor of the establishment. A private staircase, protected from the elements by a roof, like a tiny covered bridge, descended from the second floor of the furniture shop to the detective agency. The stairs led from the back of the agency to my private bedroom above the furniture store, where a window overlooked my flat roof, Front Street beyond, and the Santa Fe tracks and depot.

I unlocked the door.

“Pardon me if I don't invite you to come in.”

“I'm sure you have much writing to do,” McCarty said, hands in his pockets. “The adventure waits to be distilled into thought. But if that work should prove insufficient to distract you from your cares, and if you believe that a bit of company would provide some relief—do not hesitate to call.”

“Of course,” I said.

I stepped inside the agency and softly closed the door behind me, then locked it. Eddie, who was perched on the plaster bust of Thomas Jefferson atop the high bookcase along the east wall, containing a complete set of Kansas statute books and assorted legal references, gave an impatient cry and stretched his wings.

“Hello, Eddie.”

The raven swiveled his head to fix me with a questioning gaze.

“No oranges today,” I said. “Tomorrow, perhaps, when the train comes. But none today.”

Oranges,
I thought.
If only my needs were as simple.

I sat down at my desk, opened the bottom drawer, and stirred the contents. I would say I hadn't organized the drawer in a good spell, but the truth is, I had never done so; consequently, it was filled with bottles of ink and pens and clotted nibs and a handful of pencils, some broken, and many old newspapers I was keeping for reasons that were mysteries to me now. I was looking for something placed there not so long ago, however, something heavy that would have fallen to the bottom of the drawer. Finally, my fingers brushed something hard and smooth.

My hand emerged with an awkwardly shaped brass object mounted on a wooden base. It was a telegraph key, the kind that code practitioners refer to as a “camelback,” because the long brass lever has a pronounced hump. Carefully, I placed the device on the desk. I gently touched a fingertip to the walnut button on the end of the lever, and the key began to chatter. As it clacked out a string of dits and dahs, a heatless blue flame danced over the instrument. But no electricity ran through it; it was connected to no wires, nor did it have a battery or other source of power.

When I removed my finger, the clicks and clacks continued. It was a peculiar sound, like a musical phrase, that repeated over and over.

I cannot understand Morse code, but the message was one that had been deciphered for me months before, and I had learned to recognize its rhythm. It was the only message that came from the key, and it repeated itself endlessly if the device wasn't stowed in some fashion to keep the lever depressed and immobile.

The message was from the book of Job 38: 35.

“Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, ‘Here we ar
e?'”

I reached out and clamped my right hand over the key, silencing it. The blue flame leapt up, jittered for a moment across my knuckles, and then winked out.

I tucked the spirit telegraph back into the drawer, lever down, and slid the drawer closed. Then I placed my hands palms down on the desk and attempted to quiet the damned voice in my head.

“Shut up, shut up!” I shouted at myself, rising to my feet. “I can't stand the sound of you—of myself—any longer.”

“No,” I said.

A chill shook my frame.

I walked back to the stove, swung open the fire door with the poker, and tossed a few cottonwood logs into the embers from the box beside the stove. Then I slammed the door and adjusted the damper, and watched through the mica glass as the fire bloomed.

“But that would kill Eddie, too.”

Then I clapped my hands to my mouth, shocked that I was now negotiating with the voice in my head.

I found the pint bottle of whiskey Calder kept hidden on the shelf, behind a copy of Lew Wallace's
The Fair God,
a book he had never read but which he displayed as a prize because the territorial governor of New Mexico had given the book to him personally, as thanks for some kind of law enforcement work. There was also some Civil War history with Wallace that I did not understand, nor did I care to, because I had had my fill of the way men worshiped the memory of a mass slaughter of a generation. Glory was cheap when you were an old soldier recalling, from the comfort of an easy chair, the horrific events of thirteen years before.

The bottle had no label, but I remembered Calder called it “Taos Lightning.” He said he kept it for emergencies, and I reckoned at that moment I myself was enough of an emergency. I had sworn off the hard stuff more than a year ago, shortly after I came to Dodge City and found myself adrift and soul-less; not only didn't I like the taste of whiskey, but I hated the mental dullness it induced.

At this moment, however, I needed some dullness.

I uncorked the bottle and took a long pull of the amber liquid. It smelled like varnish and tasted worse, and it burned its way down my throat to smolder in the pit of my stomach.

By the time I stoppered the bottle and returned it to the care of General Wallace, the contents were a third gone. I still hated the taste of the stuff, but at least the voice in the back of my head was, for the moment, silenced—even if the room did seem a bit off center now.

I went back to the desk, leaned against it, and took from my pocket the cube of paving stone McCarty had given me. I clasped it tightly in my hand as I stared out the window at the empty street, awash in hard winter sunlight.

The glass returned my reflection.

I stared back at myself, a slight figure dressed in black, save for a white shirt, and with a tangle of red hair falling to the shoulders. The face was just a shadow, as if I had already crossed over.

In days not long past, a familiar green face might appear in the glass, leering and telling bad jokes. But my ghostly companion from childhood had disappeared, perhaps for good, and only my reflection stared back from the depth of the glass, making me even more lonesome than before.

As I pondered my reflection, my thoughts ran to my life before Dodge City. What would have become of me had I continued the life of a confidence woman, a trance medium, a charlatan and a fraud? I had stolen fortunes, considerable and otherwise, from a string of men who were convinced of my otherworldly powers—and of my affection. To make others believe is the easiest thing in the world, and easier still if the thing presented is outrageous in desperate desire. The foolish frogs cannot help but pursue the golden ball.

The men I cheated, I told myself, were cheats themselves, and worse, and deserved the grim harvest of avarice and lust. I felt I was justified in this behavior. Thwarted by love at a tender age, robbed of happiness by death, corrupted by grief, and seduced by the dark side of prayer, I had a thousand reasons why the satisfied deserved to suffer.

None of that made it right, of course, and my reckless ways left many an unhappy heart behind. My own unhappy heart I carried with me. Try as I might, I could never leave it behind, not in Chicago or St. Louis or Cincinnati. Then I fled west, and—as I have recounted before the tale—I was given a second chance, and began my life anew.

I thought I had finally left my heavy heart behind, but I had only placed the burden down for a moment. All of the old wounds still bled, along with a few fresh ones as well. As I stood looking at my image in the window, it seemed as if my heart would pull me down through the very floorboards of the agency to the dirt below.

The same earthly reward awaited both the righteous and the wicked.

I turned from the window and tossed the paving stone on the desk, where it skipped and spun across the walnut top as well as any die thrown in the Saratoga or the Long Branch. The stone came to rest just shy of the edge, its rough face revealing nothing of my future.

“We could return to the life,” I suggested to Eddie. “It would be like the old days. Just me and you and a carpet bag of our necessary things and a copy of the blue book to tell us everything we need to know about the new town. And there is some thrill in being wicked.”

Eddie craned his neck and stretched his wings, the tips of his feathers brushing down over the president's worried brow.