The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery) (17 page)

“Why?”

He put the gun in the satchel and tossed it out of reach. Then he pulled a knife from his boot, a knife with a six-inch blade that was crusty with the old man’s dried blood.

“I told you, turn over, onto your stomach,” he said. “I don’t want to look at your face when I cut your throat.”

“No.”

He hit me in the face. Hard.

I fought back, trying to kick and claw my way free. He climbed on top of me and pinned my upper arms with his knees. He grabbed my hair with his left hand and jerked my head back, exposing my neck.

Then he placed the cold blade of the knife to my throat.

“Have it your way,” he said. “It makes it easier for me.”

Then he pushed a little harder with the knife, and it was so sharp I didn’t feel the cut, but I did feel the warm trickle of blood spilling down my neck. Then he got an odd look in his eyes and eased the pressure on the blade.

“You know, you’re right about one thing,” he said, leaning so close I could smell the tobacco on his breath. “If I didn’t have to kill you quick to save my boss’s political career, I would fancy having a go—”

He didn’t get to finish the thought, because a great rock came smashing down on the top of his head. His eyes went unfocused and his mouth went slack, but he did not drop the knife. Then the rock came again, a sideways blow to the temple, and Cade gave a small cry and the blade slipped from his fingers and he toppled over, falling unmoving on the ground.

I snatched up the knife and threw it in the water.

The Sky Pilot stood over me with the bloody rock in his left hand.

The right side of his body seemed to droop, his right arm was limp, and his right foot was turned at an unnatural angle. The gunshot to the left side of his head was wet with blood and flecked with bone and little bits that may have been brain tissue.

The preacher looked at Cade, and he looked at me, and then he let the rock drop to the ground. He nodded, as if acknowledging I was safe; then he sat on the gravel bar and stared at the river.

“Jordan,” he said, slurring the word badly.

“Yes,” I said. “Jordan.”

“Say it.”

“Say what?” I asked.

He tried to make a sentence, and although I heard only two words, “a comfort,” I understood.

He slumped over and I pulled his head into my lap. He was still wearing the green kerchief I had loaned to him in Dodge City, but it was now caked with blood.

“‘Take no thought for your life,’” I recited. “‘Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?’”

“Amen,” the Sky Pilot said.

And there he died.

My jacket still lay folded on the flat rock. The garment still had my notes and the cipher that Hollister had given me tucked safely into the pocket. It was also dry, so I threw it over my shoulders, because I was shivering from the cold. Then I felt the apple, the one the bartender had given me at The Great Divide, and was grateful to have a little something to eat.

After I finished the apple, I went over to Cade’s body and kicked it, to make sure he was truly dead. He didn’t move, but I wasn’t convinced. So I may have picked up a rock and struck him in the head one or three times more, just to make sure.

Then I slung the satchel over my shoulder, the one with the ugly British Bulldog revolver, and set out in the direction of Leadville. It was late in the afternoon now, and I did not want to spend the night on the river bank with two dead men.

My shoes were wet and my feet soon began to hurt, and as the sun got lower in the sky it became colder right quick. But in less than a mile I came to a bend where I could see a coach road close to the west side of the river, and eventually I found a shallow place to cross by hopping from one boulder to the next. I fought my way through a willow tree, then scrambled up the bank to the road.

Before long, there was a coach. It was going at breakneck speed, all flying hooves and spinning wheels, and it must have been the look on my face that made the driver stop, because I didn’t even raise my arms. He eased back on the reins and stood on the brake, and the coach slowed and finally jerked to a stop beside me.

“What on earth?” the driver asked.

“There are two dead men on the bank downriver,” I said. “One is a murderer and the other was murdered. I am a witness and an intended victim, and I would be grateful for a ride to the authorities.”

“Boy, howdy,” the driver said. “I’d welcome you to Leadville, miss, but it seems you’re already acquainted. Climb aboard. Make some room inside, gents. Just one of you get on top and shut up about it.”

The door of the coach swung open.

“Obliged,” I said.

Then I paused before pulling myself up.

“There’s also a dead man, murdered, at Oro City.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” the driver said. “Are you all right? You’re bleeding in a couple of places. Maybe you’d best see the old doc when you get into town.”

“The marshal first,” I said.

Taking my place among the eight men in the coach, I had plenty of elbow room. Nobody wanted to get too close to me.

Soon after reaching town a search party was organized and, before midnight, the bodies of Cade and the Sky Pilot were carried back to Leadville. The Lake County sheriff had already found the body of Hollister, and it, too, was taken to Leadville, where the coroner was kept busy all night. I was questioned for three hours by the sheriff and the city marshal, and then was examined by the coroner, who was also a town doctor. He said I might have a scar on my throat from the knife blade, and that Cade had loosened one of my teeth with his fist, but that my scratches and bruises would eventually heal and that, otherwise, I was fit enough.

A reporter for the Leadville paper,
Reveille
, asked to interview me, but I was too tired. I asked him to come back the next day.

I hadn’t told the law officers about my notes from the library ledger, or the cipher that Hollister had given me, because I was afraid if they were entered into evidence, they would conveniently disappear. Afraid they would search me, I hid the paper in my underthings, but it was an unnecessary precaution. They went through the contents of the satchel, of course, and said they were going to keep the revolver as evidence in the murder of the preacher, and I had no objection because I had no use for guns. They also said they were going to search the river for the knife, but I knew they would never find it.

But I asked if I could keep the satchel.

A gruesome souvenir, I know, but I wanted it. At the very least, I had earned it.

I was allowed to leave with Augusta Tabor. She took me to the mercantile and after a bath and a light supper, I retired to the little sleeping room upstairs. Before I went to sleep, I picked up the hand mirror from the nightstand and gazed into it.

There was nothing there except my own bruised reflection.

At ten o’clock in the morning, I walked into The Great Divide in a fresh suit of clothes and with an eight-pound sledge that I had borrowed from Tabor Mercantile over my shoulder. The sledge had an octagonal, steel-forged head with a thirty-six-inch hickory handle. The only thing, I had decided that morning, was to be direct about my intentions.

“Hold on there,” Francis Gallagher said, throwing his hands up. “You can’t bring that thing in here.”

“You told me to come back to see you, Frank. Here I am.”

The bar was full of miners getting an early start in celebrating the Fourth of July, and they began to tease Gallagher about having his manhood flattened by an irate woman with a large hammer. The reporter from the
Reveille
had seen me walking down the street, obviously intent on mayhem, and he had fallen in behind me and was now standing to the side, furiously taking notes.

“You’d better move aside, Frank,” I said.

I could see Horrible Hank floating in the mirror, his eyes wide.

“You’re not intending to . . .”

“That’s exactly my intent,” I said. “Now, move aside so you don’t get hurt.”

Hank nodded wildly.

The miners hooted.

“Don’t you want a drink first, Miss Wylde?” Gallagher said.

“No, Frank, I don’t want a drink. Move the hell out of the way.”

I was standing at the middle of the bar, one foot up on the brass rail, getting ready to heave the sledge at the mirror. Hank was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear him for all the commotion behind me.

“Can’t hear you,” I shouted.

Hank pointed to a spot three feet to the right of where I was standing.

“Right here,” I heard him say.

I nodded.

“Let’s talk this through,” Gallagher pleaded. “Andrew Jackson Miles will have my head if I let anything happen to this mirror. That mirror is worth a fortune, and I can’t let you do this.”

“Andrew Jackson Miles is a horse thief and has commissioned murder and doesn’t deserve a single vote for governor,” I said. “Stand with him or stand aside.”

Frank dove for cover as I drew back the sledge.

“Duck, Hank!”

Now that the miners were sure I was going to do it, they rushed forward to stop me. But they were too late. Keeping my eyes fixed on the point Hank had indicated, I swung the sledge forward with both hands—and then let it fly.

It spun once in mid-air and then struck the mirror perfectly. The head sank into the quick-silvered glass as if it were water, and I turned away as the mirror exploded, shooting a geyser of glass shards spraying over the bar. The sound was like a thousand crystal tumblers shattering on a steel floor.

“Oh, no,” Gallagher moaned.

I turned back.

Some cracked pieces of the mirror remained, mostly at the sides, and a few hung precariously from the top, like a mirror of Damocles, but where I had aimed there was nothing but a splintered backboard and a two-foot diameter hole that led into darkness. The sledge had passed completely through, and there wasn’t even a sign of the yard-long hickory handle.

“Well done,” Hank said, from the reflection in a shot glass on the bar.

Gallagher set off running.

“I bet he doesn’t stop until he reaches Utah Territory,” Hank said.

The miners came forward, their boots crunching on the glass, and they crawled over and around the bar to inspect the damage. They peered into the hole in the backboard, and then one of them said he felt cool air, and another called for a light. The miner took one of the candles offered, lit it, and thrust it through the hole.

“Do you see the sledge?” somebody asked.

“I see more than that,” the miner said, and asked for help as he began to rip pieces of the backboard away, revealing the wall behind. The sledge had gone through the wall as well, and the miners began tearing at it, now using small hammers and pliers and whatever tools they had on them. Out came slats from packing crates, stamped with names like GIANT BLASTING POWDER and VIN MARIANA TONIC WINE. Then, when the hole was judged of sufficient size, more candles were lit and three of the thin miners squeezed through, one at a time.

“What is it?” somebody called. “Tell us.”

A miner stuck his head through the hole.

“Miss, I think you want to see this,” he said.

The miners helped me climb up to the hole, and being about as small as the smallest of the men, I was able to make my way through with only a little difficulty. I found myself standing in a drift, with aging timbers all around. The three miners were clustered to the side, their candles held low. One of them was in front, so I couldn’t see.

“Move, dummy,” one of the miners said, pulling him back.

A skeleton was slumped to the floor of the drift, chains crossing his shoulders. The skull was resting against the wall, and the jawbone had fallen to the bony chest, which was covered in a ragged plaid shirt. On the wall near him, but just out of reach, was a pickaxe.

“Who do you suppose he was?” one of the miners asked.

“Don’t know, but he’s been here a while. A long while. ”

“Miners always put their names on their tools,” the third one said. He brushed the dust away from the handle of the pick with his hand, then brought the candle close and tilted his head to read the name.

But I already knew what he would say.

“Angus Wright.”

We crawled back out of the hole in the broken mirror, and the last miner out handed me the eight-pound sledge I had borrowed.

“Thanks,” I said. “I imagine Augusta Tabor will have this back, or know the reason why.”

“What do we do with the . . . with the skeleton?” someone asked.

“Summon the marshal and the coroner,” I said. “And then the undertaker can do his work. Angus Wright will finally get a proper burial, after all these years of waiting.”

There were more questions from the miners, but I held up a hand.

“I’m tired, boys,” I said. “And it’s time for me to go home.”

I stepped out onto the street and took a deep breath of the cool air.

The
Reveille
reporter stepped out with me, his hands in his pockets. He looked up at the cloud-flecked sky, then looked at me, and shook his head.

“How did you know what was behind the mirror?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” I said. “But I had my suspicions.”

“Cade Harland, the murderer. He told you before he died.”

“That was part of it.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “But tell me, who is Hank?”

I smiled.

“Son, there are some things a detective just doesn’t reveal.”

It began to snow then, big flakes drifting down to land in our hair and dust our shoulders. I reached out and caught a snowflake in the palm of my hand, where it quickly dissolved.

Then I set off walking, back to Tabor’s Mercantile, to return the sledge and to gather my valise and other things, and to catch one of the twice-daily coaches for Denver.

The Denver Board of Education had put all of the crates from the recently closed library association in storage, in a warehouse on Blake Street, pending the construction of a new high school library. It took me the better part of one morning, and uncrating most of the 600 volumes that Patterson had boxed up, before I found
Syrinx of the Seven Worlds
.

It was then but a matter of minutes to decipher the coded message that Hollister had saved for all of those years (I was now carrying paper and pencil and other necessary things in the brown leather satchel, now my detection kit). The message was, indeed, instructions for Hollister and Miles to steal horses from an immigrant family camped near Auraria City.

After that, I visited Eureka Smith at his studio. After describing the events in Leadville, and what had been found behind the diamond dust mirror at The Great Divide, I had him photograph the old coded message, the relevant pages from
Syrinx,
and my copy of the library ledger list. Then I asked him to send copies to the biggest Denver papers and the Leadville
Reveille.

The political career of Andrew Jackson Miles was over—already news of the discovery of the skeleton of Angus Wright had made it to Denver, and the Republican party made it clear that Frederick W. Pitkin would get the nomination—and be the next governor of Colorado.

But that wasn’t enough, at least not for me. I wanted everyone to know the extent of his thieving and murderous deceit, and I wanted him prosecuted for it—although I knew convincing Decker or anyone else to bring charges based, in part, on spectral evidence was remote.

I asked Smith about his fraud charges, and he said the case had been withdrawn by Decker the day after my testimony. Then Smith asked me to have dinner with him, but I declined, saying I wasn’t in the mood for fowl. But I did agree to have a cup of tea; then I asked to borrow twenty dollars, so I could buy a train ticket back to Dodge City.

He insisted I take forty.

As I left Smith’s studio, two brutish men in derby hats and dark suits fell in beside me. They didn’t speak, just crowded me so expertly that I was forced against a carriage at the curb side.

Fearing the worst, I turned and faced the pair.

“Hurt me,” I said, “and you will surely regret it.”

Behind me, the door of the landau opened.

“They’re not going to hurt you, Miss Wylde,” a voice called. “At least not until they are instructed to. Please, get in.”

It was dark inside the carriage, because the shades were drawn, but I could see a man sitting inside, with his hands resting on top of a silver-knobbed cane.

“Councilman Miles,” I said. “What an unpleasant surprise.”

“Get in,” Miles said, “or my men will toss you in.”

“When you put it so nicely, how can I refuse?”

I stepped into the coach, taking the bench opposite Miles, and one of his thugs slammed the door after me. Then the driver cracked the whip and the landau jerked forward, then settled into a slow and steady rocking motion. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the gloom inside.

“Where are we headed?”

“I assume you need a ride to the train station.”

“I’d rather walk.”

“Give me a few minutes of your time,” Miles said. “After all, you have taken so much of mine.”

He gave me a stare that was at once distant and menacing.

“I see you have a taken a prize,” Miles said, indicating the brown leather satchel over my shoulder. “Do you hide a revolver in it as well?”

“It seemed appropriate to put it to less violent uses.”

“It is odd to see someone other than Cade carry it,” he said. “But then, change is the nature of life. One day you’re on top of the world, and the next . . . well, the next you are waiting for indictments to be handed down.”

“Eureka Smith says that you will serve no time.”

“He may be right, but public pressure will demand that I be charged with something, and horse theft is still a capital crime,” Miles said. “But it was so long ago and there are no witnesses save an obscure book and a scrap of paper. I assume both are in your newly acquired bag.”

I didn’t reply.

“You’re safe,” he said.

“Of course I am,” I said. “I had photographs made.”

“You would be safe enough anyway,” he said. “If you stumbled now, I would be there to catch your fall, because anything bad that happens to you would just make it harder on me. It is hard enough already.”

“I’d imagine it would be a relief to know that, in all probability, you aren’t going to spend the rest of your life in prison.”

“There are other punishments,” Miles said. “The wreckage of a political career, for example. Having one’s name dragged through the mud by the newspapers. The reduction of status in the eyes of one’s family and friends. The loss of a certain beautiful cigar girl.”

“Those aren’t punishments,” I said. “They are results of the choices you made, and they don’t begin to reflect the pain and misery you’ve inflicted on others.”

Miles smiled.

“Nobody’s innocent,” he said. “They would have done the same to me, if they’d had the chance. You, of all people, should know this. I have a complete dossier on your previous career as a confidence woman. What’s the saying, you can’t cheat an innocent man?”

“No, but you can kill one,” I said.

Miles snorted.

“What, the insane preacher?”

“He was innocent.”

But was he, I thought? Was he trying to drown me, or did he keep me under the water for so long because he was afraid Cade would shoot me, too? I had turned it over in my mind a thousand times and had yet to reach a conclusion. And I knew I never would.

“I have a proposition, Miss Wylde.”

“I’ve seen your work. Not interested.”

“The damage could be contained,” he said softly. “There is only your word for what Cade Harland and Ben Hollister said about my involvement, and you haven’t given details to the press, or been asked under oath, at least not yet. I can’t deny that I was involved in some youthful indiscretion—my word, who wasn’t?—but it is possible, with your help, to shape this in such a way as to mitigate my involvement. A. C. Ford was the real mastermind, and then Hollister took over after his death, and Cade was the homicidal maniac who began tracking down . . . Well, you see what I mean.”

“You still wouldn’t be governor.”

“No, not anytime soon,” he said. “But the public has a very short memory. Allow a few years to pass, create a home for orphans, build a library or two, endow a university here in Denver. Become the Leland Stanford of the Rocky Mountains.”

I didn’t reply.

“You would be richly compensated, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

I took the Brothers Upmann from my breast pocket—the cigar I had paid too much for in exchange for information—and removed the wrapper. It had been only slightly bent during the course of the adventure.

“You cannot imagine the kind of wealth I speak of,” Miles said. “What is the most you’ve ever held in your hand at one time, even during the best years of your trance medium days? Five hundred dollars?”

“I was much better than that.”

“A thousand dollars? Imagine a thousand dollars as pin money.”

He produced a small knife, took the cigar, and notched the end for me.

“You could leave Kansas forgotten and far behind,” he said, producing a match and lighting the cigar. “You could return to a city where you feel more at home—Chicago, or St. Louis, or New York. Think of the art, of the culture, of the ease of life.”

I sucked flame into the cigar.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I can see the thought excites you.”

I puffed and was surprised by the taste—a combination of oak leaves and coffee, if that mix were smoldering and about to spontaneously combust. There was also an acrid aftertaste that trickled down my throat, and I fought the urge to gag.

The landau pulled over and stopped. We had arrived at the station.

“What excites me,” I said, exhaling smoke, “is the thought of you, a broken and pathetic man, living out the rest of your days in that monument to incomplete dreams and unfulfilled ambition you call a saloon at Leadville. I knew the moment I saw the saloon that it was a manifestation of your authentic personality, a clue to your loathsome and self-defeating nature. I am not interested in your money, Councilman Miles. And before too long, you won’t have any money to offer anybody to do your killing and lying for you, because it will have all been taken by those who are like you, but stronger, and who don’t have to answer to the charge of horse thief, no matter whether you serve time or not.”

I stepped out of the carriage, took a last drag on the cigar, and threw it into the gutter.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

I hadn’t slept well for a fortnight, and had slept barely at all in the last seventy-two hours. Every time I drifted off to sleep, I found myself on the dream train, on the way to Brookwood Cemetery. It was no different on the trip back home. It was late in the afternoon when the Denver & Rio Grande train pulled out of the station on its way to Pueblo. After a short wait, and a dinner of toast and coffee, I boarded the Santa Fe eastbound, and began the long and gradual descent to the plains of Kansas.

For most of the night, I stared out the coach window at the dark prairie rushing by. Periodically, Hank would appear in the glass, but sensing my mood and perhaps chastened by his brief entrapment in the diamond dust mirror, he left me mostly to my thoughts.

I was afraid to sleep, for fear the next dream aboard the death train might tip me over into insanity—or that I would impulsively decide to get off the train at Brookwood Cemetery when it arrived, just to have things done with.

But perhaps none of it was real anyway.

Perhaps I had been mad all along.

It was 102 degrees when I walked with my valise up the steps to the Dodge House and paid the twenty-three dollars I owed in back rent. At least, that’s what Jimmy said the official weather station on top of the hotel had recorded just minutes before.

“They say it might get as high as a hundred and ten in August,” he said.

“Something to look forward to,” I said.

“Are you coming back to the hotel?” Jimmy asked. “Your room is still open.”

Paying the hotel had wiped me out, once again. Between it and the train ticket, I had one dollar and twenty-seven cents left.

“I don’t know, Jimmy. We’ll have to see.”

Determined to run up no more debt, I picked up the valise and walked out the door. It was another Sunday and hardly a soul was moving on Front Street. I was tired and longed to put my feet up and simply rest, but there was a stop I had to make first.

It took me only a few minutes to walk to the house on Chestnut Street with the two pear trees out front. I knocked on the door, and in a few moments Molly Howart appeared.

“Miss Wylde,” she said. “Do come in.”

Molly Howart was wearing a dark bombazine dress trimmed in black crepe. She invited me into the room where Charlie Howart had been found hanging. It was the same, with the exception that the windows were open and the curtains drawn, and a bit of black cloth hung over each.

“Would you care for some tea?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I said. Etiquette may have required I take the tea, but what I really wanted was a strong cup of coffee, but I could not bring myself to trouble the widow. We sat in the straight-backed chairs and Molly held her restless hands in her lap and waited for me to begin.

“Charlie did not commit suicide,” I said.

Tears of relief welled in her eyes.

“How do you know?”

“His killer told me before he, himself, was slain,” I said. “His name was Cade Harland, and he came here to silence Charlie and to recover the book he possessed, but accomplished only one of his goals. Had he found the book, the crime would have gone unsolved, because our only clue would have been the train ticket to Canon City, and that would have been a dead end.”

“But why did Charlie have that ticket?” she asked. “Was he planning on . . . ?”

“No, he did not intend to abandon you,” I said. “His intent, I believe, was to travel to Leadville and uncover evidence that would have exposed Andrew Jackson Miles and provided some safety for the both of you. But there are two ways to get to Leadville, and each take about the same time from Dodge City. One goes via Pueblo and Denver, as I went, and the other goes to the end of the tracks at Canon City. From there, a stage line provides service up the Arkansas River valley. He choose the Canon City route, I think, to avoid Denver—and Jackson Davis Miles and his thugs.”

She nodded.

“What about the life insurance policy?”

“Once I describe what I’ve learned to our coroner, Doc McCarty, the official finding will be changed to murder,” I said. “Mister Clement Hill of the Western Mutual Life Assurance Company will then be forced to approve your claim, all five thousand dollars of it.”

Molly Howart leaned forward and squeezed my hand.

As I walked from Molly Howart’s home toward the agency, I thought about Molly Howart’s security in the form of the $5,000 policy—and I thought about my own lack of means. I couldn’t even bring myself to ask for my wages from her, at least not until she received her due from the insurance company. As I passed Beatty and Kelly’s Restaurant, I considering stopping for a large cup of coffee, with real cream, but didn’t; I had to make the dollar and twenty-seven cents in my pocket go as far as possible.