The Shotgun Arcana (9 page)

Auggie crossed the distance to her and scooped her up in his arms, lifting her off the floor, no easy feat given Gillian was a good half a foot taller than the grocer. He wished he had time to clean up and change clothes. It felt profane to hold her in the same clothing he had … He struggled to push the unpleasant thoughts out of his mind, and focus on Gillian.

“
Ja, ja.
I am fine,” he said, holding her tight. “I’m sorry I worried you,
mein Schatz
.”

“Where were you?” Gillian asked.

“I had to deal with some things at the store,” Auggie said, stroking her hair as he held her. “It took longer than I expected.”

Gillian froze in his arms. She pushed herself away from him gently.

“You weren’t at the store,” she said. “I checked there, several times.”

Auggie looked down at the floor and rubbed his face. “We … we must have … missed each other.”

“Auggie,” Gillian said, “please tell me what’s going on. You’ve been so tired, you look like you haven’t been sleeping and you are a terrible liar. I want to help you, my love. Please…” She paused and touched her cheek where it had been resting against his coat and examined her hand, rubbing the fingers together. “Is … is this blood … and makeup?”

Auggie stepped toward her. “Gillian, I can’t explain to you right now, but please…”

“Will used to say the exact same thing to me when he was out all night gambling,” Gillian said, summoning the memory of her late husband. Auggie had never cared much for Will Proctor and his irresponsible treatment of Gillian. “Those words are poison to me, Augustus.”

Gillian pushed her glasses up on her nose. She walked toward the door and took her simple cotton shawl from one of the pegs beside it.

“Augustus, I think we have both showed each other how much we love and trust one another over the years.” She turned to address him as she slipped her shawl over her shoulders.

“We’ve been through so much together. I lost Will, you lost Gerta. We had to get past those losses and learn to live again on our own before we could try to live together. We went through that awful mess last year, but it brought us together.”

The “awful mess” was Auggie’s greatest shame. He had slowly confided the tale to Gillian over the past year of how his grief over his wife’s passing had been so great, so all-consuming, he had taken part in horror and madness. Auggie had agreed to allow his best friend, Clay Turlough, to reanimate Gerta’s head and keep it alive in a jar using a type of scientific alchemy that Auggie still didn’t fully comprehend. Auggie had lived a twilight existence alongside his dead wife until Gillian, and her love, had brought him back to the world of the living. Gerta had finally known peace and been freed from her hellish undead existence, perishing in the fire that destroyed his store last year.

Auggie had feared that when Gillian knew the whole, terrible truth, she would shun him. But she had listened and she had understood and the truth had made them stronger. Now, he was falling into an even deeper hole of macabre secrets and he feared that it was too much for even this remarkable woman to forgive or forget. Auggie feared the truth this time would shatter them.

“I think we’ve paid our dues for a little happiness, don’t you?” Gillian said. “We’re to be married in a few weeks. That makes me very happy. You are who I want to grow old with, my love.”

Auggie wanted to go to her, to hold her and kiss her, explain, ask forgiveness, if there was such a thing for what he was doing. He stood his ground. He knew what was coming next, could feel it in the tone of her voice. There was steel behind the quavering, the near tears.

“Something has changed, Augustus,” she said. “Something has changed in you in the last few months and you won’t talk to me about it, won’t let me help you. Tell me, and please be honest, do you still want to be with me?”

“
Ja,
yes. With all my heart. Yes,” Auggie said. “I can’t imagine a life without you, Gillian. You remember how happy I was when you said you would be my wife?”

Gillian smiled; it hurt Auggie to see the pain in that smile. “You danced a little jig, as I recall,” she said. “Please, Augustus, tell me what’s happening? Whatever it is, darling, we can get through it together.”

She was an amazing woman, far better than he deserved. He opened his mouth to tell her, looked down, shut his eyes. He was still and he said nothing.

“Is it the trouble with the store, with Bick?” she said. “I know how much stress he’s put on you. Horrible man, already richer than Croesus and it’s still not enough for him. Is that it?”

He wanted to say yes and leave it at that. It was true, in part. To rebuild the store, buy this land on Rose Hill and raise a new house had taken all of Auggie’s savings and more.

With the bank temporarily closed after the troubles last year, Malachi Bick, the wealthiest man in town, had stepped in to offer loans and financial stability until the Golgotha Bank and Trust was back on its feet. Bick’s First Bank of Golgotha had given Auggie loans to rebuild his general store after the fires of last year and to help him secure his dream home for Gillian. While at first it had seemed like a true act of Christian kindness, as the months wore on, many, Auggie included, had begun to see Bick’s act as a way to gain control of the few things in Golgotha he didn’t already own. But by then it was too late.

“It is … it is not that easy, Gillian,” Auggie said. “Bick is part of it,
ja
.”

“But not all of it,” Gillian said. “And you’re not going to tell me. Not going to tell me why you are not sleeping, why you are coming home a hair before the rooster crows, covered in someone’s blood and ladies’ paint. No, Augustus, it doesn’t sound easy at all. It sounds like trouble.”

Auggie struggled to find a way to even begin to explain the nightmare his life had become these last few months; how she was the only light, the only hope he saw now.

Auggie looked at the woman he loved, her hand on the door to leave, the pain, confusion and distrust like a ghost in the room between them. Auggie’s blue eyes locked with Gillian’s. She had never seen him look so grim. It was almost like looking into the eyes of a stranger and it frightened her. The timid shopkeeper departed. This grim man spoke now.

“
Ja.
Yes. Very bad trouble, Gillian. Very bad. Evil. But I will fix it. I will. For you, because of you. Because I love you. Because I want to start my life again with you and I’ll do whatever I have to to make this all right.”

“Don’t start with lies then, Augustus,” Gillian said, opening the door. “Nothing really good comes of them; nothing is ever truly fixed with a lie. Good night. I love you. You know where to find me if you want to talk.”

“Gillian, please, let me walk you home, it is still very dark.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s almost dawn. The boarders will be up soon and I need to have breakfast ready for them. I’ll see you at the shop later today, if you’d like that.”

“
Ja
, very much. Please.” He walked to her, she to him. The kiss was gentle, almost timid. He didn’t want to hurt her and she didn’t want to be hurt.

“Good night,” Gillian said, stepping away. “I love you.” She closed the door behind her.

Auggie stood and looked at the door for a long time. He felt the air catch in his lungs. He felt something begin to crack inside him. He felt the anger swell.

“Gott verdammter Narr!”
he said, wanting desperately to break something, to do something, to fix all this. All Auggie could do was clench his fists and try to let the rage pass. Life had taught him long ago that anger was a storm that left far too much wreckage in its wake.

He sat in his chair by the dying fire. Her scent lingered there, taunting him with happiness. He was so weary but he knew sleep would evade him. Once he closed his eyes, they were there. Waiting, staring, accusing, like they were every night when he tried to sleep, like they had been for months when this waking nightmare had begun.

Auggie had anticipated that the boom from the Argent Mine being reopened would grow Golgotha as it had before. The lure of silver would attract new people; new families looking to settle down, miners, prospectors and adventurers would arrive as well and that would mean more customers and more prosperity. It should have worked that way. Malachi Bick, however, opened his own store up on Argent Mountain, near what had been the squatters’ camp, but was now becoming a thriving miners’ settlement, almost a town within a town. The Argent Company Store sold all the things Shultz’s General Store did, and they extended credit to the miners on the Argent Company payroll as well. Add to that that Auggie’s business had been pretty much out of commission for months while he rebuilt and restocked. Many of his best customers had headed up the mountain to buy from Bick.

When he reopened, most of his regulars came back, preferring the calm of Main Street to the raucous tumble of the miners’ camp. But not all, and few of the new customers came with them. So in less than a year, Auggie Shultz had lost business to the man he owed a large sum of money.

To add insult to injury, when Auggie began to fall behind in his payments, Bick’s men would come to Auggie’s store and take parts of Auggie’s inventory to restock the company store, as “interest” on the late payments for the loans. So when Auggie didn’t have the items his customers needed due to the depletion of his wares, it drove more and more people up the mountain to the company store.

The sky was lightening through the leaded glass windows that overlooked the Hepplewhite table. Auggie knew he needed to get up soon, wash up, change and head off to open the store. He sighed and rubbed his sore eyes.

He briefly considered taking down the green glass jug of ale he had brewed a few months ago and draining it, to chase off the awful feelings inside him, to maybe dull his memory enough to let him sleep. What was the point of going to the store today? A handful of customers, a few more creditors coming by to remind him he was behind. Standing behind that counter with a false smile and kind words, when all you wanted to do was scream and bash their patronizing, selfish faces in. If he were gone tomorrow, gone today, they would just walk up the hill and not even look back.

He suddenly wished Gerta was still here. Still floating in her jar, so easy to talk to about everything, so much easier … better?

No. It was
easier
to talk to his dead wife than his living bride. That didn’t make it better. It made him weak. Gerta had been dead for a long time and he and Clay had forced her to remain in this world in a frightening twilight of life in death, in hell, all so Auggie could take her out and cry to her when he felt alone and overwhelmed. He had been selfish and cruel to do that to her. Gerta was free now, dead in the fire, and that was best. He also remembered what drink had done to his papa when he was a boy. His father screaming, raging against his mother, his sister. Papa never struck any of them but often his words were so painful, Auggie would have preferred to be beaten.

No, none of that was the way to go. He stood, already growing sore and stiff from the night’s exertions. He needed to get cleaned up and get to the store. It was Tuesday, and Mrs. Dockery would be in for her medicines and the Widow Stapleton would be by to collect her packages that had arrived from back east. People needed the store, people needed him. They were good people too. He was just tired and worried and feeling very guilty about what he was doing, what he was part of.

It had to stop. The sickness, the evil, it had to stop. He had to stop it, no matter how difficult it would be.

Auggie Shultz trudged to his bedroom, weary but determined to begin battle with another day and terrified at what the night would bring to him.

The Queen of Cups

The morning stage groaned to a halt at the Golgotha station a quarter till noon. The Wells Fargo Station, a new edition to the town in the last eight months, was a narrow little building on the corner of Prosperity and Main Street. It housed the coach clerk, a privy with water basin for the passengers and driver, and a table with as much food and drink as the budget allowed. The crowd waiting to board the stage clustered on the station’s narrow porch for shade in the unseasonably baking temperatures of November in the desert. Many of them were talking about the murder of one of the public girls from the Dove’s Roof that had occurred the night before. Others tried to pull the conversation to less grisly fare, instead discussing the upcoming mayor’s race or plans for the approaching Thanksgiving holiday.

The crowd let up a cry when they saw the battered Concord coach rumble down the street and creak to a stop in a cloud of dust.

“Look at that, will ya,” a man in a sweat-soaked tweed suit said. “Ol’ shakeguts is fifteen minutes early, I tell you what! Modern conveniences! Don’t they just beat the Dutch! I can’t wait to ride on that there transcontinental rail they just finished. It’s in all the papers—quite the do, I hear. A mechanical miracle. New station just a spit away down by Hazen too. Hell, Golgotha could get her own dogleg if the town keeps a-growing!”

“Won’t catch me on one of those infernal engines,” another man, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, said. “Too fast, too dangerous! Hear the damn things blow up! Give me a good horse or a carriage any day, yessir!”

Several of the passengers picked up their bags and began to crowd the stairs in front of the station. Their enthusiasm was curtailed by the sight of the first passenger disembarking as soon as the stepping block was set down by the driver. The man, quite green in complexion, stumbled out, fell to his knees and began retching profusely in the manure-covered street.

“Welcome to Golgotha Station,” the grim-looking driver said. He had a fringe of graying blond hair and a drooping handlebar mustache. He called out to the heaving man and the other passengers that climbed down after him.

“Listen up! You got an hour for vittles, pissing and to stretch yer legs. It’s first come, first serve for seats and just cause yer ass was in one up till this point don’t mean you put yer damned brand on it!”