Meanwhile, Back in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 6) (46 page)

“Should I do some more om-ing?” Natalie asked.

“Audience participation should remain at a minimum now.”

Cooper groaned, clearly having trouble believing this hokum.

Doc pointed at the detective. “If Violet leaves the room, follow her, but don’t stop her.”

Skeptic or not, Cooper nodded once.

“I advise strongly against waking her, as well,” Cornelius said. “Retrieving a channeler or medium from another plane of existence can be very dangerous … for everyone.”

“Where d’ya think she’s gonna amble off to?” Harvey asked.

Doc stared up at me. “Somewhere I can’t follow.”

“I’m not going to leave,” I told him.

“I’m just taking precautions.” He turned to Natalie. “If she leaves, you need to pull me out immediately.”

“But didn’t Cornelius just say that’s dangerous?”

“I don’t care.”

“But how do I even do that?”

“Pinching or biting works best, I’ve found,” I told her.

She laughed.

I didn’t.

“This is the real deal, isn’t it?” she said, sobering. When I nodded, her forehead wrinkled. “You have some explaining to do when this is over.”

“What about me?” Harvey asked. “What’s my job?”

“Your role is to speak to your grandfather,” Cornelius answered. “When I start, you’ll call to him, asking questions that will draw him out of the shadows.”

I glanced at the corner Doc had pointed to earlier. I had a feeling the old ghost was waiting for his cue.

“What sorta questions?”

“Those to which only he will know the answer. Once he’s here, you can ask other questions.”

“Like who committed the murder and why,” Cooper added.

Harvey harrumphed, muttering something about getting stuck with the lousy cook wagon duties.

Silence settled into the room. Something rattled up in the rafters. A piece of metal clanged somewhere outside of the barn. I could hear my heart beating, smell the straw and dust and dry-rotted wood all around me, feel the cool air trickling over my face.

Doc leaned his head back against my thigh, closing his eyes. “Stay close, Killer.” He spoke so quietly that I wasn’t sure if he’d actually said it or I made it up.

Cornelius began to chant his magical come hither song. He was using more guttural tones this time, reminding me of a pow-wow song I’d heard during a television special about the Lakota Sioux tribe.

Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes, too. I tried to clear my mind, as Cornelius had taught me, by thinking about the flame of a candle.

The flame flickered, shrinking and then growing several times, mesmerizing me.

A breeze made it ripple, the tip swaying back and forth before straightening out again.

It rounded, forming a perfect teardrop of fire.

Then something blew it out.

My heart thudded in the blackness, picking up speed.

In the darkness, I heard a crunching sound, like someone eating a handful of corn nuts.

I took a step toward the noise, but a hand caught mine.

“Whoa there, Killer,” said a voice that wasn’t Doc’s. The tone was a little higher, slightly twangy, but the use of Doc’s new nickname for me kept me from pulling free. “Don’t go sniffin’ in the direction of that deviltry. I got somethin’ to show ya.”

The hand tugged me along, pulling me into a silvery world lit by moonlight. We stood in what I thought was Harvey’s driveway, but his house looked different, smaller, missing the section where the master bedroom should be. I eyeballed the barn. It too was different. The neglected building was now obviously well-kept, shining brightly in the lunar lit world, freshly whitewashed.

“This ol’ place used to make me as proud as a peacock with two tails.” The old man standing next to me let go of my hand. He tugged a dark glass bottle from his coat pocket and yanked the cork out with his teeth. “But then,” he spoke around the cork, “my addle-headed son—worthless as owl shit he was—ran it into the ground. That boy never could get it into his thick skull that liquor was fer pleasure, not breakfast.”

Great Caesar’s ghost! Or rather Grandpappy’s ghost. Doc and Cornelius had done it. They’d managed to lure in Harvey’s grandfather. It sort of boggled my mind when I tried to wrestle with the time-space conundrum. I could use a few moments to wrap my brain around it all, but I had a feeling there was no time to sit and gather wool.

Grandpappy pocketed the cork and tipped back the bottle. “Woo! That’ll put some hair on yer chest.” He held the bottle out to me. “Have a snort, purty lady.”

I reared back. “I’m hairy enough, thanks.”

He wiggled his bushy brows at me, reminding me of his grandson. “Don’t be flirtin’ with me now. It’s been a long time since I smelled someone as sweet as honeysuckle. Hell, my horns are so big, I can’t hardly get my hat on anymore.”

While I pondered if that meant what I thought it did, he took another drink.

Harvey looked a little like his grandfather, from the shape of his eyes to his open barn door ears and the slope of his forehead. Grandpappy’s beard was more scraggly, though. He was also taller and whip-cord thin, sort of a mixed version between his grandson and Cooper.

Shrugging, he corked the bottle. “Have it yer way, but yer gonna wish ya had some of this here bottled courage after ya hear the cross-grained shenanigans those whangdoodles have been up to.”

Whangdoodles. That was the name Harvey often used for the kooky folks who lived back in Slagton, a
nearly
ghost town located not far from this very ranch. Years back a mining accident had made the ground water undrinkable. It had thinned out the population except for a few stubborn oddballs who’d dug in their claws, refusing to abide by the EPA’s warnings and head for safer ground.

The crunching sound was growing louder. “Do you hear that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Never mind.” It must be something to do with the séance. Harvey was probably eating crackers again while I faced off with another paranormal being.

“I buried it all out behind the chicken coop in some ol’ tins.”

I frowned. “You what now?”

He held up the double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun I’d had on my lap at the start of the séance, but the wire around the triggers was missing. “That young whippersnapper five-fingered it before cuttin’ dirt out of the house.”

“What whippersnapper?”

He cocked his head to the side, stroking his beard like his grandson often did. “Well, from what I figure, he was fixin’ to play a little hide-n-seek. But that humbug got the budge on him. After that, he was a gone sucker.”

“What’s a humbug?”

“Ya mean the odd fish? Oh, his heart was all played out after their little fuss back in the bone yard.”

“Who? The what yard?” Criminy, I was starting to feel like we were operating on two completely different planes.

“The whippersnapper.” He handed me the shotgun stock first, which I took without thinking, noticing the same rectangular tin tag Cooper had shown to Harvey riveted to the wood. “That humbug done did run against a pill, but the rock salt made it techy as a teased snake. It ain’t like the others that been here before.”

“You mean the rock salt in the cartridges in this shotgun?” I held it up. As in the same rock salt Cooper had said was embedded in the barn wall? Was Grandpappy trying to tell me what had happened to the dead guy?

“Yes, ma’am.”

Then I honed in on one particular word. “What
others
do you mean?”

“You sure are as purty as a field of bluebonnets.” His focus drifted lower. “Nice breedin’ hips, too.”

Right, well breeding was one of my specialties. “Do you know who the man in the safe was? And what
others
do you mean? When had they been here?”

He held his finger to his lips, shushing me, and then cocked his head to the side again. “Well, some of them there hard cases are ugly as a mud fence. Masks make ‘em bearable.”

What in the world was he talking about? The masks in Harvey’s tool shed? Crikey, I needed a translator.

“Way back,” he continued, “long ‘fore we got the deed ta this place, t’others started usin’ it like some sorta stage stop, droppin’ ‘em off at odd times.”

“Dropping off what?”

He lowered his gaze to me. “The unwanted, purty lady. Although, this whippersnapper wasn’t s’posed ta be here. But ol’ milky eyes was on the hunt again. That humbug always did like ta play with his food ‘fore usin’ one of his pig stickers on it.”

I couldn’t follow the ghost’s one-sided conversation, and the crunching was growing louder and louder, making it hard for me to hear as well as focus. I looked around, searching for the source of the sound, wishing Harvey would come strolling out of the shadows with a boxful of crackers. I found nothing but dark skies and moonlight shadows. The crunching continued, mixed with a scratching sound every so often.

“You’re hearing that, right?” I said, still searching the shadows. “Surely you must hear that.”

“That crazy fool tried to pull foot, but once ol’ milky eyes gets yer scent, there’s no shakin’ him. He figured the safe would hide him well enough, but he was dead wrong.”

“Who’s ol’ milky eyes?”

“I reckon he shouldn’t have lit from the whangdoodles. They may be ravin’ distracted, but they don’t mess around with their prey, they just kill it. Ol’ milky eyes, though, he’s downright ringy, always playin’ with his food first. That runner’s heart gave out before ol’ milky eyes even poked his head in that safe, lucky for him. Otherwise, he’d been screamin’ for mercy when the humbug cut the skin off his face.”

I stood there stunned for several seconds as my brain translated and filled in what blanks it could. “So, milky eyes is one and the same as the humbug? And he’s the one who cut the skin off the guy’s face? And the guy was dead when it happened?”

Was I getting this …
crunch, scratch, crunch, crunch.

“Ol’ milky eyes came back later to play s‘more. Boy howdy, ya shoulda heard that humbug roar when it found that safe empty.”

Crunch, crunch, scratch, CRUNCH.

“How can you not hear that?” I asked, glaring over at the barn. It seemed to be coming from around back, loud and clear in the moonlit night.

“I never have seen anyone escape those pig stickers, human or the others.”

“What
others
?” Was he talking about Aunt Zoe’s Others?

“The mead?” he asked.

I scratched my head, wondering if I’d somehow missed the segue to the topic of mead.

“Oh, ya mean in my chicken coop? They were left by the grave digger. He got into neck trouble before he could send the message back to Slagton to come fer it.”

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

I winced, the noise grating on my nerves as much as the sound of my kids fighting.

That was it. I needed to find Harvey and make him stop. This conversation was confusing enough without his chewing. “I’ll be right back,” I told Grandpappy.

“That shotgun don’t work no more.”

“I need to wire the triggers back, I know. Your grandson filled me in.”

He crossed his arms. “Yer all balled up. That there is some bad medicine.”

Being balled up is bad medicine? I waved off his confusing babble. “I’ll be right back. I need to go tell your grandson to chew with his lips closed.”

I rounded the barn, searching the moonlit world, but found nothing. Leading with the shotgun, I followed the crunching sound further back, around the chicken coop and into the shadows beyond.

The crunching stopped.

Then I realized what I was doing and fear stopped my feet cold.

What in the hell was wrong with me? I’d left Doc back with Grandpappy.

“Time to go, Killer,” I whispered and turned around.

But the barn was gone.

The chicken coop and tool shed were missing, too.

In their place was a graveyard, tombstones all around, some straight and regal, others slanted or broken into pieces. They stretched up a knoll and over into the trees.

My heart ratcheted up. This wasn’t the Harvey family graveyard. It was bigger with many more tombstones. The trees and hills were in the wrong places. I was still in the Black Hills but not on Harvey’s property.

A cold wind blew across my face, making my shivers crawl even deeper under my skin.

I heard scratching right behind me, like fingernails on wood.

What was that?

Too afraid to look, I stood there telling myself over and over again:
There’s nothing there
.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

Drawing a shaking breath of courage, I looked over my shoulder.

What I saw made that shaky breath whoosh out like I’d been gut punched.

Not ten tombstones away in a partially dug up grave squatted a creature outlined in shadows. Every muscle in my body went into lockdown. My heart even paused to assess just how screwed I was.

A distant soundtrack from my memory replayed, Harvey’s voice echoing from a day months ago in Bighorn Billy’s diner …
spiked teeth, claws like scythes, and a coat made up of its victims scalps
.

The description fit. I was too far away to confirm the scalps, though. From where I stood, it looked more like patches of white fur.

The White Grizzly was what Cooper had called it, mentioning something about a legend that had been passed down from the Lakota Sioux tribe. That must mean this thing had been around since before the miners and ranchers had come to the Black Hills. Was it here before the Sioux, too? Or was there more than one?

I watched in silence as it scratched at and tore into the top of a coffin, pulled out a skull and bit into it, chewing like it was an apple.