Mercury's Rise (Silver Rush 04) (27 page)

Licking her lips, she tried to calm the sudden upwelling of fear. “We mustn’t panic,” she said. “After all, how many people have actually been stricken by taking medicine that originates from the Mountain Springs House and its clinic? Only Mr. Pace, that we know for certain.”

William had returned and grabbed a fistful of Harmony’s skirt. He was tugging her toward the picnic blanket, where Lily sat slicing yellow cheese to go with the bread.

“However, we must be circumspect,” Inez added. “I will talk further with Mrs. Pace, as soon as possible. Please, Harmony, don’t do or say anything that will draw attention to you in any way.”

They had no sooner finished their meal and were still lazing on the blanket when they heard the rattle of an approaching wagon and a cheery “halloo.” Susan waved from the passenger seat. The woman at the reins, however, was a stranger to Inez. Trotting along beside them on a magnificent roan was Robert Calder. The wagon clanked and rattled like a tinker’s caravan.

“I’m so glad we caught up with you before you left,” said Susan as they drew up and stopped by the horse and buggy. Inez rose and walked over to them. In the back of the wagon, Inez glimpsed stacked metal boxes, some of which she recognized as holding Susan’s photographic equipment and cases of photographic plates. “I wasn’t certain you’d still be here,” Susan continued, “and I wanted to introduce Mrs. Galbreaith.”

Calder slid out of the saddle and helped both women down from the wagon.

Mrs. Galbreaith turned out to be a pleasantly no-nonsense woman with a firm handshake. “Please, call me Anna,” she insisted.

“Anna and I have been roaming about the Garden since early morning,” said Susan. “Sunrise here is magnificent. The colors in the rock and the sky, you cannot imagine. If only one could capture those colors on the plates. Black and white is such a pale imitation of reality. Anna has photographed the entire Garden at one time or another, and has done a marvelous job of showing me around. As has Robert…Mr. Calder.”

“I was explaining to Miss Carothers how the Garden changes with weather and time of day,” said Calder. “Right after a rain, its hues are deeper, and it becomes so vividly red that if I were to paint it true to life, none would believe my vision real. In the soft light of evening, a sagy green suffuses the vegetation. At sunset, the last rays of the sun cause the enormous tablets of stone to flash out with surpassing grandeur.”

Inez glanced around at the strange rock shapes, silent as monuments to forgotten deities. “The Garden brings out the poet in you.”

He grinned. “I am more skilled with a brush than with words, so imagine how a writer feels, surrounded by such glory.” He added, “Seeing the Garden by moonlight should not be missed. I would be more than happy to be personal guide to you ladies one of these evenings.”

Susan clasped her hands together. “That would be lovely!”

Mrs. Galbreaith cleared her throat. “Thank you for the invitation. However, I have seen the Garden aplenty by moonlight and have a full house for the next few weeks, so must regretfully decline.”

Inez said, “I cannot speak for my sister, but I would certainly enjoy that.”

Calder smiled. “’Tis decided, then. We shall make a jolly outing of it.” The mare hitched to the buggy whickered, as if volunteering for the expedition. He turned to her, still smiling, and scratched her nose. She whuffled into his glove, ostensibly looking for a treat. “I know this one,” he remarked. “She’s full sibling to my own.”

Inez looked at both horses, and realized that they indeed shared the same coloring and conformation.

He continued, “Did Mr. Morrow warn you of her wretched eating habits? Both of them, they eat anything and everything. You must watch her on the trails and during your stops that she not get into the thistles and locoweed.”

“That’s right, he told us, and I forgot,” Inez felt guilty. The pretty little roan snuffled at the bare dirt as if she might seriously consider eating the few scattered red pebbles. “Mr. Morrow even gave us a nosebag, saying we should feed her when we stopped. Poor thing, she’s probably quite hungry.”

“No matter,” said Calder. “Mine had more than his fill of grass by a stream while I painted earlier.” He opened one of his saddlebags and pulled out a full nosebag. “Shall I?” He hefted the nosebag in the air with raised eyebrows.

“That would be wonderful,” said Inez.

“Did you see Balanced Rock?” Susan asked. “We are going to stop there on the way back, and Mrs. Galbreaith has promised to take my picture while I stand by it. I shall have to send a cabinet card home to my parents. They shall be most impressed!”

Calder’s horse, already burdened down with two canvases, a small easel, and a paintbox snorted as if in agreement. After checking that both the wagon’s horse and his own mount were properly tied off, Calder took the grain-filled bag to the buggy’s mare and slipped the strap over her ears. Inez went to introduce herself to the huge roan, who after a suspicious sniff, accepted her touch. In the process of admiring the horse, which was, she decided, a truly magnificent animal, she glimpsed in the open saddlebag an odd-shaped bundle wrapped in a green, blue, and black tartan with a thin red thread running through. A partially collapsed bladder, covered with the same pattern, bulged alongside the wrapped objects.

Calder returned to his horse, and strapped the saddlebag closed. “Shall we join the others?” he suggested.

Susan had already joined Harmony, Lily, and William on the blanket. As the three of them—Inez, Calder, and Mrs. Galbreaith—moved to the picnic blanket, Inez ventured, “Were you, by chance, playing bagpipes a while ago atop a ridge?”

“Indeed I was.”

“It was quite haunting. Lovely music. But bagpipes?”

He sobered. “’Twas in honor of my brother, who came to Manitou to find health but found death instead. He was eldest and has left me head of the family. Part of my responsibilities, as I saw it, was to come here and determine what brought him down.”

Mrs. Galbreaith said, “I am so sorry to hear of your loss. I will say, however, that so many people come here, hoping to find a cure or at least treatment for their illness. Some do recover, but many do not.”

Inez pondered the almost complete lack of accent and the ease with which Calder fit into the general high-class milieu of Manitou, before asking, “Have you spent much time abroad?”

He paused, removed his hat, and, with a forearm, pushed back a tangle of black curls. Mrs. Galbreaith moved on to the party on blanket, and Inez lingered behind, curious as to his answer.

“Schooling in England, then more time in New York. As younger brother, I was encouraged to create my own future. I had hoped to be a painter. I was making some small name for myself in New York circles when I learned of Alec’s death.” He sighed. “If I’m required to return to the ‘auld hame’ and give up the life I’ve planned, I want answers as to what happened to my brother first.”

He glanced toward Susan, who was playing peek-a-boo with a delighted William. He started to move toward her. Inez stepped to block him and lowered her voice to say, “Mrs. Pace said I should talk to you. I have my concerns about the Mountain Springs House and she said you did as well. Can you tell me, what happened to your brother?”

“Mrs. Pace, is it?” He stared hard at her, then, seemed to come to a decision. He took her arm and steered her away from the blanket, saying in a louder voice, “One of the formations you must observe is Cathedral Spires, Mrs. Stannert. Do you see? Over there?” He pointed to a grouping of sharp, sheer formations. Standing so close, his hand clasped on her elbow, Inez was aware of the pleasant smell of horse, paint, and sweat that emanated from him.

“Very much like spires of churches,” Calder added, “but much grander than any made by the mere hand of man.” He then lowered his voice. “Alec arrived late last summer, drawn to this cursed place by word of Dr. Prochazka’s successes with victims of consumption and the wasting disease. My parents were all for him going to Spain for his health, some place closer to home and warm year-round, but he’d not hear of it. Still, after he arrived in Manitou and all through winter and into the spring, we heard good reports. In fact, he began talking of the place as a business opportunity.” He paused, staring out at the spires, which to Inez looked for all the world like red rock knives threatening the cloudless sky.

“I assume this all changed at some point?” Inez asked.

“His symptoms suddenly took a turn for the worse,” said Calder. “Gone were the hopeful missives. He began to write that Prochazka was a sham. That his cures were no better than the charms hawked from gypsy carts. All talk of a possible business connection vanished.” He shook his head. “I believe he put too much faith in an imperfect science. But what happened next shocked us all.”

“What was that?”

“He was turned out of the Mountain Springs House, without so much as a by-your-leave. Not the hospitality he’d been greeted with initially, I assure you.”

Inez was shocked as well. “Why?”

“I do nae know.” Distress slipped through into his speech. He heard it himself, gave her an apologetic smile, and shook his head. “After careful observation and thought, I’ve decided that the Mountain Springs House is eager to only have successes and no failures. Someone dying while ‘on the plan’ brings down the cure rate, you see? No longer can they boast without reservation, ‘Carried in on a mattress, walked out on his own!’ That’s one of their claims they make to those who are ill. With Alec, it was the opposite. He walked in on his own, and was then carried out in the dead of night.”

“Why didn’t he say something? Surely he must have protested. If it happened to him and others, well, I would imagine the reputation of the House would be a shambles.”

“He’d found another savior,” said Calder. He pivoted about to eye the happily chatting company on the picnic blanket. “In his last letters, he told us he was comfortably settled in Colorado Springs, at the Colorado Springs Hotel. A different physician was attending him, one who promised the impossible yet again. A total cure.” Calder’s mouth twisted bitterly. “
Another
total cure, based on a different regimen. He was content to let sleeping dogs lie.”

“A different physician? Who?”

“Ah, he was cagey about that. But something turned up that I can explain more thoroughly later. I’ll tell you this now, however. From some things he wrote, I believe that introductions must have been brokered from someone at the Mountain Springs House,” his eyes narrowed. “That is the person I am seeking. For whoever it was led him down the road to his death. He should have come home, where he could have been treated by the family physician. Where he could, at least, have died surrounded by family who loved him.”

“He died in Colorado Springs? How can you blame someone in Manitou for that?”

“I believe my brother was silenced to keep him from revealing that the treatments were a sham. Silenced, to keep from discussing whatever business plans and overtures were made.”

“You think he was killed?”

“Easy enough,” Calder said with a shrug. “He was weak and racked with the fevers and pains of the wasting disease. Alone, far from home, would nae take much, a gentle push, too much of this and that in a bottle of ‘restorative’ or a medicinal inhalant to topple him into the grave, him and whatever he knew.”

Inez took a step back, aghast, then recovered.
Really, how different is it from those who kill to secure a mining claim in the mountains or a handful of gold in the alleys?

“So, you think someone at the Mountain Springs House put your brother in touch with this other physician, who killed him either purposely or through medical ineptness?”

“I’ve no doubt of it.”

“Who?”

“I suspect Lewis. Prochazka would nae do so, and my brother would nae trust him, after all that. Prochazka aside, Lewis stands to lose the most and would have been happy to ease my brother out of the hotel. He has an oily way about him, of ingratiating himself into people’s good will. Plus he seems to have some medical knowledge and has the pulse of the medical community.”

“There’s also Mr. Epperley,” she said.

Now it was his turn to be surprised. “The hotel’s manager?”

“Also part owner, and apparently heavily invested in the hotel. You didn’t know?”

“Nae, I didn’t. This puts a different light on things.” He sounded grim. “I thought I’d figured it out, but now…”

“Mr. Calder.” Susan’s voice wafted from the picnic blanket. She was smiling at them. “Are you giving Mrs. Stannert the entire geological history of the Garden?”

He waved and called back, “Not at all, Miss Carothers. I’m saving that lecture for our moonlight adventure.”

Gazing at Susan’s beaming face, shadowed by the flapping straw brim of her summer hat, he said softly, almost to himself, “Ah, Miss Carothers. The bright star in this whole dark and sorry business of mine. Who would have guessed I would meet such an enchanting creature here, so far from, well, nearly everywhere. If it were up to me, I’d conduct the family business from Colorado. Who knows? I may yet find a way. We have many connections in New York and Boston. Colorado is not that distant, by train and telegraph.”

“Miss Carothers is my dearest friend. I would not take kindly to anyone trifling with her affections.” Inez bit her lower lip, sorry for having spoken so bluntly to one who was, by all appearances, kind and open. “Forgive me, I was out of turn.”