The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery) (16 page)

The walk to Oro City was pleasant, even though I had to thread my way through a maze of claims and mine workings. Not only were there the new operations to walk through or around, but the remains of the frenzy that had taken place sixteen or eighteen years before, including a rotting wooden aqueduct that had diverted the Arkansas River, miles away to the west, to fill the sluice boxes of California Gulch.

Even though it was the second of July, the weather was cool and pleasant. It felt good to walk, after having spent so much time in courtrooms and stage coaches and strange beds during the past week. It took me less than thirty minutes to reach Oro City, which was well on its way to becoming a ghost town. There were a handful of weather-beaten structures clustered at the base of a red-tinged slope called Iron Hill, and some of them had already been deserted. The grocery and the old hotel were still open for business, however. The hotel was an unpainted, two-story structure with a large porch, and on the porch there was a white-haired old man sitting in a ratty cane chair. The man was smoking a cigarette he’d rolled from a bag of fixing that hung from the pocket of his blue plaid shirt.

“How do you do,” I said.

“I get by,” he said. “Some days better than others.”

“Mind if I sit with you?”

“You’ll have to get your own chair.”

“I don’t need a chair.”

I scooted onto the porch deck, with my back against a post, facing the old man. He smoked and stared at me beneath bushy white eyebrows, and after a few minutes he finally spoke.

“We had a few women in the old days who dressed in men’s clothes,” he said. “Not fancy suit clothes like yours, but work clothes. They did the work, too, and most of them could best any man in camp. We didn’t have many of them, but we had a few. Are you like that?”

“I’m not much of a fighter.”

“You must be here sniffing around a claim.”

“Nope,” I said. “I’m looking for somebody, an old-timer like you. Ben Collins. I was told he was an original.”

“Who told you that?”

“Augusta Tabor.”

The old man laughed.

“Augusta,” he said. “That sounds like her. How’s she doing?”

“She and Horace are doing well,” I said. “Better than that, even. She told me he wants to build an opera house in Leadville.”

The old man shook his head.

“That’s crazy.”

“Are you the original Ben?”

“Maybe,” he said. “What do you want if I am?”

“I’m trying to solve a puzzle,” I said. “And to do it, I need some information about people who were here, and in Denver, going back eighteen years ago.”

“You’re talking about a lot of people.”

“Yes, but I have just seven names I’m interested in.”

I pulled the list from my pocket and offered it to him.

“I can’t read it, girl,” he said. “My close vision went years ago.”

“All right,” I said. “I can read it to you.”

I read the first three names—Ben Hollister, Samuel Drew, Butch Jones—and his face darkened so that I stopped.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

It took him a minute to answer.

“Read the other names.”

“Allen Gregory, Glen Lewin, Ethan Smith, and Cade Harland.”

The old man dropped the cigarette on the porch and ground it out beneath his heel. Then he leaned forward, his yellow eyes staring toward the peaks to the southwest.

“That’s Mount Elbert there,” he said, pointing at the tallest one. “It’s fourteen thousand and four hundred and some odd feet tall, the highest peak in all of the Rocky Mountains. Ain’t none higher, not any of the peaks of the whole damn range, from New Mexico Territory to British Columbia. That’s something, isn’t it?”

I stared at the mountain, which looked like a squat pyramid amid a row of other squat pyramids. Their summit was a squat gray pyramid marbled with snow.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“It’s so damned high that nobody reached the top, at least not until the Hayden Survey came four years ago. I wish to hell they hadn’t. We ruin everything we touch. Do you know who Mount Elbert is named for?”

I said I didn’t.

“Sam Elbert, the territorial governor, who made a treaty with the Utes that opened up three million acres of their reservation to mining and railroading. Three million acres. And look what we’ve done to it. We spoil every damned thing we touch.”

“Like I said, I’m not here about a claim.”

“I know why you’re here,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you, or somebody like you, for a long time. I’m tired, and I’m dying. Cancer is eating me up. It’s down deep in my guts. I was afraid that I’d die before somebody came and asked the question.”

“Then you’ll help me, Mister Collins?”

“I’m not Collins,” he said.

I told him I didn’t understand.

“I’m not Ben Collins,” he repeated. “My real name is Ben Hollister, the first name you read on your list. And I’m going to help you to keep Jackson Miles from becoming another one of these sons of bitches who gets their names put on mountains.”

Over the next two hours, Ben Hollister told me how he’d been part of the horse and cattle theft gang in Denver City. There was no vast syndicate, he said, just an odd group of characters who had met at the Elephant Corral and decided to take systematic advantage of the amount of traffic passing through Denver to get to the Kansas Territory gold fields. Hollister said he was nearing forty at the time and was the oldest member of the gang, but had the most experience as a horse thief, having learned the trade in the Indian Nations on the other side of the river from Fort Smith, Arkansas.

A. C. Ford was an attorney who specialized in representing the lower elements of Denver society, and as the only educated member of the gang and, handily, secretary of the library association, it had been his idea to use the membership as a cover. Orders were conveyed by means of a book cipher. Messages consisted of a long list of numbers that would mean nothing unless the reader knew that the numbers stood for words in a book (24,10 would mean the tenth word of the twenty-fourth page, for example) and, more importantly, knew which book was used to encode the message. Because the names of the gang members were unlikely to all appear in any text, they were referred to by their prime numbers from the library ledger. A. C. Ford had a personal copy of the book used for encoding messages, and the library association had the other—W. L. Gresham’s
Syrinx of the Seven Worlds
.

But things fell apart when Samuel Blalock was nabbed by the local vigilance committee in possession of stolen horses and, in bargaining for his life, named Ford as the leader of the gang and Shear as lieutenant. If the committee had been more patient, they might have unraveled the mystery of the other gang members, but their buckshot and rope put an end to further inquiry.

The surviving gang members fled Denver.

Young Jackson Miles and Angus Wright wound up at California Gulch, as did Ben Hollister, while the others were scattered from Idaho Springs to Buckskin Joe.

“Are you prepared to testify to all of this?”

“If I live long enough,” he said.

“You’ve seen a doctor.”

He waved his hand.

“I saw a doctor. He didn’t tell my anything I didn’t know already.”

“We’ll get a notary here tomorrow,” I said. “Just in case . . .”

He nodded.

“There’s more I want to tell,” he said. “What happened in Denver—it wasn’t just stealing. There was worse, hired murders even, all ordered through those slips with those damn rows of numbers. I’ll swear to it.”

“Didn’t happen to keep any of those secret orders, did you?”

“Burned them,” he said. “All of them. Except for one. Kept it to remind myself of my wickedness.”

“Where is it?”

A shaking hand went to the pocket where the muslin Durham sack hung. His brought out a folded paper yellow with age and brown with sweat, and handed it to me.

“I told you, I’ve been waiting for you to come. I’ve been ready.”

I unfolded the paper.

It contained several rows of two- and three-digit numbers, joined by commas, all written in ink in a careful hand. There were two numbers in the rows not joined by commas, the primes 5 and 23.

“That’s an order for Jackson Miles and me to steal the cayuses of some pilgrims just arrived in Auraria City,” he said. “Look the numbers up in the red book and that’s what it will tell you. That Andrew Jackson Miles is a horse thief.”

“Let me keep this, won’t you?”

I folded the paper and slipped it into my jacket pocket.

“Tell me what happened between Angus Wright and Jackson Miles.”

Hollister shrugged.

“Wright just disappeared one day,” he said. “Jackson said he had come to him the night before and said he’d had enough, that the work was too hard and he was ready to move on. Jackson said he agreed to buy his claim—”

“They weren’t partners?”

“No,” Hollister said. “They each had their own operation. A couple of days after Jackson took possession of the mine—The Great Divide—he struck one of the richest gold quartz veins in the district.”

“Convenient,” I said. “Who had the red book last?”

“Ethan Smith went to the library and got it before he quit town,” Hollister said. “Don’t know what became of Ford’s copy of the book, but we didn’t care, because if they found it—so what? Nobody could link that book to us with the ledger with the key to the names. Don’t know what happened to Smith after that. Changed his name, probably.”

“To Charlie Howart,” I said. “Ended up in Kansas.”

“How is he?”

“Hanged,” I said. “Last week.”

“Not surprised,” Hollister said. “I reckon Jackson Miles couldn’t let anybody live who knew any part of the real story.”

“Any idea who killed him?” I asked.

“I haven’t been off this porch in a month,” he said.

“What happened to my other names on the list?”

“Drew and Jones quit Colorado and were killed holding up a bank in Utah,” he said. “Gregory died of fever, the first winter in the camp. Glen Lewin blew his brains out over a woman.”

“That just leaves Cade Harland,” I said.

“Harland,” he said. “That kid was the worst of the lot.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“I’m tired,” Hollister said. “And thirsty.”

“I’ll get you some water.”

“The hell with that. Whiskey.”

I went into the hotel and asked if there were a notary in Oro City. The sad woman behind the desk said no, but that Leadville was crawling with them. She asked me if I wanted a room, and I said no, but that I needed a glass of water and a shot of whisky for the old man on the porch.

“Old man Collins?” she asked. “Sure, I keep a bottle for him.”

“Does he have any family that you know of?”

“Nobody ever comes to visit him,” she said. “No letters, either. He’s sick, you know. The cancer.”

“I know.”

“He used to go into Leadville and drink at The Great Divide, but it’s been months since he could make the trip,” she said. “Poor thing.”

I paid and took the whiskey and the water to the porch.

The old man was slumped over in the cane chair.

“No,” I said. “Oh, no.”

I put the glasses down and knelt beside him. The front of his shirt and the bag of cigarette makings were covered with his blood, and it puddled beneath the ratty cane chair. Confused, I gently tugged his head upright—and discovered that somebody had slit the old man’s throat.

Whoever had killed the old man couldn’t be far away. I looked up and down the street, but nobody stood out as suspicious—there was nobody running, or glancing over their shoulder, or with blood on their clothes. It was just business as usual, from the man loading a wagon with bits of discarded lumber to the woman who carried her laundry on one hip and a crying baby on the other.

Then I thought—the killer was probably watching me right now.

I went back inside the hotel and asked the sad woman to summon the sheriff and the undertaker. She asked who would pay for the funeral, but she didn’t ask how the old man had died.

I gave her a twenty-dollar note, then left by the back door.

The killer was probably watching the front of the hotel, waiting for me to leave so he could follow. Or, he was waiting somewhere along the road back to Leadville, his knife at the ready.

I didn’t wait in the hotel because it might take a half an hour for either the law or the undertaker to arrive, and I didn’t want to be waiting alone with the sad woman. It would be nothing for the killer to slip in and kill both of us in a matter of moments. No, I wanted to get away unseen.

From the back of the hotel, I ran in the direction of Mount Elbert, generally southwest, not really knowing where I was going, but intent on turning back north to Leadville and the safety of Tabor’s store.

Driven by fear, I positively flew through the old mining district. I didn’t slow down until I reached a steep hillside studded with pine trees. My shoes slid in the loose rock and my legs went out from under me and I fell, then rolled and came hard up against a cedar stump. I wasn’t hurt badly, just bruised, but the horror of the old man’s murder—and the loss of my key witness—crashed down on me.

I cursed, in English, and then I cried.

What was I going to do now, I asked myself. I was 500 miles from home, in the roughest mining camp in America, having made a mortal enemy of the man destined to be the next governor of Colorado, and was on the run from a killer—and I was alone.

I felt sorry for myself for perhaps five minutes.

Then I picked myself up, brushed the dirt from my clothes, and made my way down the hillside. I tried to go north, but an impossibly steep ridge prevented it, so I continued down. I continued hopelessly lost for the next hour or so, until finally I could hear the rush of water—and I knew if I followed the river upstream it would lead me back toward Leadville.

The river was twenty or thirty feet across, with gravel banks and strewn with boulders. The going along the riverbank was just as hard as making my way through the pine forest. I was panting from exertion, and my clothes had become damp with sweat, so I stopped and peeled off my coat.

I folded it and placed it on a flat rock.

The rock overlooked a short section of curling and hissing rapids. It was comforting, and somewhat hypnotic, to stare at the rushing green water. This, I thought, is what the Arkansas River must have looked like before—well, before we got to it. I sat down on the rock, resting.

But the rapids made so much noise that I didn’t hear the Sky Pilot approaching me from upstream—and I didn’t even know he was behind me until he shouted, nearly in my ear.

“Sister!”

I sprang from the rock.

“Stay away from me,” I said.

He stepped forward, his right hand outstretched.

“I know who you are,” I said, backing away. “Your name is Cade Harland, and you killed the old man and I told everybody in Oro City that you did it, so it’s no good killing me, because your secret is out.”

“We’re all sinners,” he said, still advancing.

I turned to make a run for it but tripped on one of the millions of blasted rocks that lined the river bank.

The Sky Pilot was on me in a moment, and his right hand closed around my wrist like a band of stone. Then he began dragging me across a gravel bar to an eddy, a pool of still water above the rapids. He had only one hand around me—the other held the Bible aloft—and I was fighting and kicking with all three of my free limbs, but it was no good. He was just too strong.

“Rock of Ages, cleft for thee,” he sang. “Let me hide myself in thee.”

He waded out into the swift water, pulling me with him.

I pleaded with him.

“Please,” I said. “I won’t say anything. I’ll do anything you want. . . .”

“Don’t fight it, sister,” he said.

We were thigh-deep in the water now, and it was cold, and I could feel the pressure of the current piling against my legs. He released my wrist, just for a moment, just long enough to get a grip on the front of my vest.

“Do you believe, sister?”

We were face-to-face, the Sky Pilot standing over me.

“Oh, God!” I cried.

“I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!”

He pushed me down into the water.

I saw the sky and the mountains and trees disappear and be replaced with a cloud of my own red hair in the swirling bluish green water. The water against my face was cold, shockingly cold, like nothing I had ever felt before. I could hear the hollow rush of the water and the clink of stones as they moved along the bottom. And there was something else—the soft murmur of voices.

I fought with both hands against his wrist, but I had even poorer leverage now than I did on the bank.

The sound of the voices was stronger now, and they were all the voices of all of those who had died in the river since the beginning of time, an untold number of drownings and killings and suicides, all the way down to the confluence of the Mississippi.

The bluish green light above me began to wink and go dim.

The voices were stronger, gasping and struggling and pleading.

“No!” the chorus screamed.

I could feel my heels skitter along the bed of the river; feel my shirttail loose and billowing in the current; feel the icy embrace of the river as it coursed down my back and along my sides and between my legs.

“No! No! No!”

And then I realized it was me who was screaming the word, the sound made weird by the water, the meaning rendered useless by the intent of the hulking figure holding me under.

I had used the last of my air to shout, over and over, a cry of protest.

Then bloody raindrops began to sprinkle the water. They fell and bloomed and streaked downstream. For a moment I thought I was dreaming again, until the burning in my lungs convinced me otherwise.

I wanted to breathe, but I forced myself not to.

The river went dark and soon even the sound of the water began to grow faint. Then everything went dark, except for a single point of light that floated just above me. It was a tiny ball of white light, hard and brilliant.

My body screamed for me to take a breath.

I fixed my attention on the light. There was the light, and nothing else.

Then I was jerked up and out of the water and back into the world.

I took great gulps of air.

The Sky Pilot held me yet, grinning madly, the Bible still in one hand. But the water around us was crimson with blood. At first I thought it was my blood, but then I saw the wound to the side of his face, a gunshot that had carried away his left ear and much of the side of his head.

The Bible fell into the water and floated downstream.

The preacher released me, and I half swam and half clawed my way to the gravel bar. I rolled over onto my back, wheezing and coughing up what seemed like half of the Arkansas River.

“Jack!” I shouted, trying to get the hair out of my eyes so I could see. It had to be Calder. McCarty must have told him I’d gone to Denver, I thought, and he had tracked me down from there.

I sat up and saw the preacher on the gravel bank, ten yards away, facedown. The blood dripped from the side of his head into the water, carried away like red ribbons in the current.

“Jack,” I said again, turning around.

“Calling for your partner?”

An English accent.

It was Chatwin, the mudlark. He was standing twenty yards behind me, a revolver in his hand, the satchel over his shoulder, and the briar pipe in his mouth. The breeze was bringing the smell of the pipe tobacco in my direction, and it seemed discordant with the scene that had just played out.

“Calder’s not here, I’m afraid.”

“But you,” I said.

“I told you I was going to Leadville. And lo, here I am.”

“You saved my life,” I said, the phrases coming out in spurts. “I thought I would drown. I was in the water such a long time. And you shot Cade Harland. He killed Howart and also the old man at Oro City.”

Chatwin walked down the bank, his boots crunching on the gravel. Then he turned and sat on his kneels next to me, holding the nasty little revolver up over his right shoulder, so the barrel lay behind his neck.

Where I couldn’t reach it.

“You have it all wrong,” the mudlark said. “The preacher was nobody. I wasn’t trying to save your life. I was aiming at you and hit the lunatic instead.”

He paused.

“I’m Cade Harland.”

“Oh, no,” I said, burrowing the back of my head into the gravel. “The old man, Hollister. He had called Cade Harland the kid. I had just thought it was a gang nickname.”

“No, I really was a child,” he said. “Barely in my teens.”

I thought of the boys in Leadville, the ones who had delighted in kicking the preacher.

“Where did you get the gun?” I asked.

“I carry it in the satchel,” he said. “It’s a handy little thing, a .44-caliber Belgian-made British Bulldog. I had it when we spoke on the bank of the river at Dodge City, when I said that I was disarmed by your beauty. Alas, you were right—I was merely distracted. If I had known what trouble you would make, I would have killed you then.”

“Feeling’s mutual,” I said.

“I heard everything, from around the corner of the porch,” he said. “I had to kill him, before he identified me, before you could get a sworn statement from him. When you went inside for a few minutes, it gave me enough time to come up behind him and do the job. If anybody saw it, they would have thought nothing of it—just a friend with his arm around an old man, leaning close, offering a bit of comfort.”

“And to think,” I said, “I had made up my mind to allow you into my bed if I ever saw you again. But now I’m reconsidering that decision, because everything you told me was a lie.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “It was all the truth, except about my name and serving in the place of a rich man’s son and then deserting. Instead, I came west as soon as I reached America, and joined with Jackson Miles and his gang in 1860. I couldn’t really tell you the truth about that, could I?”

“But why did you tell me you were coming here?”

“I thought things might lead you here,” he said. “So I told you that so you wouldn’t be suspicious if we ran into each other here. It would make it easier, you know.”

“To kill me.”

“But you’ve made things very hard indeed,” he said. “I didn’t count on having to kill the old man before he died of cancer, or chase you down to the river here. But it’s fitting in a way. This is where we met—on the banks of the same river.”

“So you’re going to kill me here.”

“Of course, but I’m not going to leave your body here, because it would cause an inquiry. Nobody cares about the crazy preacher—nobody even knows his name—but you, you’ve already made friends with Augusta Tabor, and you’ve told everyone you’ve met that you’re investigating Jackson Miles. I can’t just leave your body here on the gravel bar.”

I began to shiver.

“I’m going to haul your body over this bloody rock garden called Colorado and drop your body down one of the old shafts on the hillside behind us, so nobody will ever find you. Just like Angus Wright.”

“You killed him for Jacks.”

“He didn’t have the stones for it, but I did,” Cade said. “Old Angus found the bonanza, and Jacks wanted it. I chained him up to a bloody huge slab of rock in the Great Divide mine and left him there. Then Jacks built the saloon on the spot, to seal off the drift where I’d left Angus. He’s added to The Divide over the years, made it fancier with that mirror and such, but it is still a monument to greed and murder.”

“His greed,” I said. “Your killing. A partnership in murder.”

“Don’t let anybody tell you crime doesn’t pay,” Cade said. “It pays bloody well, and keeps on paying. Jacks has made more money off the silver boom than he did on the gold—and it was old Angus Wright’s gold that made him rich in the first place.”

“You’ve done all of his killing for him, from the beginning,” I said. “You killed Charlie Howart, didn’t you? Made it look like a suicide. You must have had some conversation with him first, and he may have told you about the haunting, so hanging him over the rafter would seem appropriate. But you didn’t find the book, did you?”

“Not so bad,” he said. “You might make a good detective after all, if you only had another two or three lifetimes of mistakes to make. Tell me, where was the book?”

“The kindling box had a false bottom.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Do you still take your orders from Jacks via coded messages?”

He shook his head.

“No need,” he said. “I anticipate what he needs and take care of it.”

“Like killing me,” I said.

I crossed my arms and hugged my own chest. “You’re scared.”

“I’m shaking because I’m cold,” I said.

“No shame,” he said. “The fear of death is quite natural. Why, I’ve seen grown men shake like lambs when their time had come.”

“My only consolation,” I said, “is that Jackson Miles will eventually hire someone to kill you, too. He has to. Once I’m gone, you’re the only thing left connecting him to any of this.”

“Jacks doesn’t have the stones.”

“No, but he’ll get somebody who does to do it for him,” I said.

“Now, isn’t this where you say it would be better for me to go to the coppers? That I’m only safe if Jacks is in prison, or hanged?”

“You already know that.”

“Then this is where you beg.”

“Va au diable,”
I spat.
Go to hell.

“You first, love. Now, turn over.”