Relentless (10 page)

    I didn’t have any big dreams myself. Just dreams of a cabin back in the Midwest where I’d been raised. I was one of those strange birds who actually enjoyed winter, so I actually suggested that a few times to Callie. Since she didn’t share my fondness for the cold months, I needed to do a lot more persuading before I’d find myself among the Swedes up north. But the railroad would give us a nice retirement. The farmers in our county needed a closer shipping point for their crops. Skylar was central to several communities and would be ideal. The investment sure seemed like a good one.

    I didn’t stay quite the full hour as I usually did. I was able to spend the first twenty minutes or so lost in the spectacle below. But gradually I realized I couldn’t keep the events of the last twenty-four hours away any longer. I started thinking about Stanton and who might have killed him. It would be easier for everyone but her two kids if we could prove that Sylvia Adams killed him. Easier for me and my wife anyway. I wasn’t thinking as a lawman. I was thinking as a husband.

    I was just turning my horse back toward town when I saw the tall, elderly man riding toward me. For someone his age and his health-he’d fought the cancer sometime back and had survived it-he rode with surprising ease and poise. I’d always thought that Edgar Bayard was the man Paul wanted to be, the kind of man who just quietly becomes the leader of any group he becomes a part of simply because he inspires trust.

    His virtue isn’t a handsome face. If anything, he’s ugly, the pocked skin of youth stretched tight over his jagged, gaunt features. The nose is a weapon, the mouth a thin line, the jaw shovel-shaped. But something in the somber eyes and the wise, resonant voice holds you. You listen and are impressed with what you hear.

    “I hope we’re both making a little money today, Marshal,” he said, nodding to the tableau below in the valley.

    “I’m making so much I decided to retire.”

    “So I heard. That’s why I rode out here, in fact.”

    He wore a white shirt, dark riding trousers, knee-length cordovan leather boots. His horse was midnight black. His white hair was long as a mountain man’s and the muscles in his narrow hands corded and fierce. He’d survived the Indian wars and the Civil War with admirable facility. He carried neither gun nor knife. The last time he was attacked by a man with a gun-this happened when he was a customer in a bank one day and two holdup men came in-he was shot in the shoulder but managed to stomp one of robbers so badly that the man was crippled for life. The other one he choked to death. He’d been in his late sixties then.

    “You did just what Paul wanted you to.”

    “I expect I did.”

    “I’m being selfish, Lane. I don’t want my grandkids to grow up in a town that belongs to Paul.”

    “It belongs to him now.”

    “Not all of it. You didn’t. Two members of the town council don’t. I want to get this Stanton thing cleared up and pin that badge back on you.”

    Edgar Bayard had been a partner of Paul’s for many years. They’d run silver mines together and had prospered. One of the mines was located on land belonging to the Ute Indians. It was widely known that Webley had initially wanted to start a fight with the Utes so that he would have a pretext to seize the land with the help of the Army. But Bayard had made the deal with the Utes, promising to give them a decent percentage of the mine’s profits, and he didn’t want to betray that trust. He had no special liking for Indians. But he did having a liking for his reputation. His word was his word. It took Paul seven years to achieve what he wanted. During the long year when the cancer took Bayard-and when most folks assumed he would soon die-Paul brought in some Pinkertons who forced some Indians into a gun battle, reporting it to the local Indian agent as an attack. Webley had one of the state senators appeal to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he was permitted to break his deal with the Utes. Bayard wasn’t strong enough physically to fight him. But when he heard what Webley had done, he insisted on being bought out. The two men had not spoken since.

    “Maybe it’s time for me to move on, Edgar.”

    “I meant what I said about my grandkids.”

    “You’ve got your own reasons for going up against Webley, Edgar.”

    “You should, too, Lane. He’s been after you since the day you were sworn in.”

    “There’s a Paul in every town, Edgar. When you’ve been a lawman as long as I’ve been, you get used to them.”

    He fixed me with those Old Testament eyes of his and said, “I’m following up a rumor I heard. Don’t make any other decision until you hear from me.”

    “I don’t even get a hint?”

    “No.”

    “I assume it involves Paul.”

    The eyes were bitter now. His usual poise was gone for the moment. He was just one more pissed-off human being like the rest of us. He still had that fine speaker’s voice, though. “He’s got it coming, Lane. And maybe this time he’s going to get it.”

    “Some people think my wife may have killed Stanton.”

    “You know Callie better than that and so do I. She’s one of the finest women in this valley. She did something foolish when she was young. She took up with a scoundrel. But we’ve all done foolish things. You grow past them.”

    I smiled. “Hard to imagine you doing foolish things, Edgar.”

    He snorted. “Every night I lie in bed and think of all the stupid things I’ve done and said in my life. And I’m ashamed of myself and wonder why God ever let me draw a breath.”

    “You’re pretty tough on yourself for somebody most folks think is a paragon of virtue.”

    He laughed. “Some paragon I am.” The rancor was back in the blue gaze. “Remember, Lane. Don’t do anything till you hear from me. I need your word on this. You don’t leave town. All right?”

    “All right.”

    He almost never said hello or good-bye. He just appeared and disappeared. He disappeared now, leaving me to wonder just what he’d heard about Paul that I hadn’t.

    

    

    OVER COFFEE AT noontime Callie told me about her morning.

    At first, she’d decided against going to school. She just wasn’t up to facing the parents who would, inevitably, be at the school door to call her unfit and insist that she resign. Or be fired.

    But then she thought about the children. She owed them an explanation and perhaps an apology. She loved them and she knew that most of them loved her. In a very real sense, she saw them as reflections of herself, what she’d taught them these past years.

    A group of eight mothers met her at the door. There were no children present. As usual with mobs of any size-and eight is plenty for a mob-there were two outspoken ones. The rest lost a lot of their ire when they saw her. They suddenly felt sorry for her or realized that they, too, had done foolish things in their own past.

    Callie tried to get into the schoolhouse to write a note on the blackboard for the students, but the two women wouldn’t let her. Nor would they let her get her things out of her desk. Hiram Weaver, one of the two town councilmen who liked Callie and me, showed up and told everybody to calm down. He noted that Callie, whatever her past had been, was a fine teacher and that Skylar was lucky to have her. Callie was heartened by this, thinking that Hiram would at least let her write out her note of apology on the blackboard. But he ultimately sided with the two women and said that it would probably be better if she just went on home for a few days until this thing was all straightened out.

    By this time, half the women present were taking Callie’s side and arguing with their self-appointed leaders. Callie said that the arguments had gotten not only testy but pretty personal. The only way she could stop the women from having at each other was to slip away. Hiram walked with her to her horse. He was long on apology but short on advice. All he could come up with was: “Maybe you and Lane better stick pretty close to home until things settle down. Grice and Toomey are raising holy hell. Paul’s pretty quiet now. He got his way. He somehow managed to get the judge to come up with a sudden case of gout so that Trent couldn’t be tried.”

    She stopped by church and said some prayers. The old monsignor came out. He wore an eyepatch these days because of a detached retina. He emerged from the shadows of the sanctuary, looking pretty damned sinister for a cleric. She’d been almost afraid to speak to him, which was a good measure of how upset she was. He was one of the first people to befriend her when we’d moved here. And now she was afraid of him?

    But her misgivings were soon dispelled. He knew that her secret was out. She’d long ago told him in confession of her background, so he was well aware of what she was going through.

    “They think I killed him, Monsignor.”

    “Nobody who knows you thinks that for a minute, child.”

    “One of the women said that Lane resigned this morning. I’ve ruined his life along with mine.”

    “You have to have faith that this will be all right when it’s finished.”

    “But things aren’t always all right, Monsignor.”

    “That’s a difficult thing to know sometimes. Even when they go wrong, you see God’s terrible wisdom years later. You find out what He really had in mind for you. You see why He made you suffer.”

    “ But Lane ’s suffering, too.” Callie frowned. “ ‘Terrible wisdom.’ That’s a strange way to say it, Monsignor.”

    “Sometimes His wisdom does seem terrible. At least until we come to understand it.” He took her slender white hand into his own huge, age-mottled one. “All you can do for now is pray and know that someday, in some way you don’t expect, you and Lane will be vindicated.”

    As she had told Lane many times, the younger priests always had bright little homilies to offer you in times of trouble. It was their way of keeping you and your problems at arm’s length-because they didn’t have any answers, either practical or theological. They were just human beings.

    This was why she appreciated the monsignor’s candor. He never offered easy answers. He sometimes implied that righting a wrong might take years, and even then it might not be righted. But somehow the realism of his words was more comforting than the homilies of the younger clerics.

    “You have to stand by your husband because he’s innocent,” the old monsignor had concluded, “and he has to stand by you because you’re innocent. That’s the strength you have to rely on, Callie. That no matter what they say about you or try to do with you, you’re innocent. You know the real truth. That’s the only weapon you have. And it’ll help you survive this. You’ll see.”

    

    

    She went for a long ride afterward. She pretended that she would be teaching again soon. She rode along the river, making note of the various trees and undergrowth and how it had all changed over the course of this lingering Indian summer. She would take her class on a trip. Yes, a morning trip, when the light and the air were at their freshest, and she would identify various botanical splendors for them-

    But the fantasy was short-lived. It all came crowding in on her again. She relived her time in the Irish ghetto in Chicago where she’d been raised. Her parents had been loving but frail. She’d watched two of her brothers and one of her sisters die of influenza. Early on she realized that life was a fragile business. She worked in a sweatshop crowded with other immigrant girls, chiefly Jewish. She sewed garments. Though Jews and Catholics didn’t especially get along, she made good friends with several of the Jewish girls. For all their seeming differences, both ethnic experiences had been pretty much alike.

    On Saturday afternoons, they went to plays together. These tended to be musicales aimed at working girls. They invariably dealt with poor girls being swept away by poor boys who were secretly royalty in disguise-dashing young men who just wanted to see if the girls loved them for themselves and not for their money or status.

    The girls, certainly not Callie, never tired of this particular plot. A prince would come into her life someday. She was sure of it. She just hoped it was before she turned eighteen. That was the age when decline began to set in among the girls at the sweatshops. They came in at eleven or twelve, fresh and pretty as morning-cut flowers. But five, six, seven years of working for a dime an hour, sometimes seven days a week, sometimes twelve hours a day… well, after a few years of that, who could look fresh and pretty?

    So she was all primed to meet somebody like David Stanton that sunny Sunday afternoon when she was strolling in the park with her friend Dorothy Steiner. Dorothy was every bit as pretty as Callie, but she’d fallen in love with a young soldier a few weeks earlier and was waiting for him to get back to Chicago following a brief bivouac for new recruits.

    And that’s how it happened. Stanton took her to plays, baseball games, operettas in the park. He brought her flowers, candy, even wrote her sweet, corny little poems. He took her to places where she had her first real glimpse of urban society. She didn’t know if his friends were really as important as they tried to pretend-but they were certainly more important, and interesting and entertaining, than anybody she’d ever met in the ghetto.

    He was wise enough not to even try and seduce her for some time. She was a good Catholic. Her virginity was a very basic part of her entire personality.

    But he was sly and he was stealthy and so, two weeks after he’d convinced her to give up her job at the sweatshop, two weeks after he’d convinced her that through his various business enterprises he could support them both, he took her one rainy midnight to his apartment. She’d felt curiously tired and worn that night, sorry that she couldn’t be more sensitive and alive to what was going on. Months later, she would realize that he’d drugged her.