CARBON HILL

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

105.  HOME AGAIN

Jimmy peeked cautiously out of his father’s doorway.
Children are far more accepting of the unusual than adults; their minds are young and flexible, not ossified into the “This is how it should be” like adults:  when Jimmy took a step and went from hand fitted plank floor to polished quartz, when he went from a log fortress that smelled slightly of wood smoke and more of bay rum and sweat and saddle leather and gun oil and with his next pace was in his own Sheriff’s inner sanctum, smelling of gun oil and Old Spice and coffee, his reaction was to blink and to grin and then to take advantage of the moment and use his Sheriff’s – his Sheriff’s! – computer to send a personal letter to Mars.
Jimmy opened the inner-office door, looked; he blinked, grinned a wide, delighted grin, for he could see a big familiar horse face looking through the glass double doors at him.
“Stomper!” he exclaimed:  stealth and caution were forgotten, abandoned, cast aside:  he ran to the front doors, a youthful streak of blue denim and polished boots, he thrust splay-fingered palms against the doors, pushed his way outside, stopped.
“Whoa,” he breathed.
He had no idea at all how Stomper got saddled, but that was his saddle, so that was all right, but it’s what hung behind the saddle that seized his attention.
He climbed up on the mounting block, got his leg waaay up into the stirrup and with much effort got himself hauled up into saddle leather, then he turned one way, he turned the other, he grinned, he grabbed, he unbuckled the flap of one, the other, a look of utter, absolute delight on his young face.
One held a clutch of old-fashioned pencils in a cloth poke, and tied to the poke was a small folding knife, kind of like the one The Pretty Lady used to sharpen his pencils with, only hers was pearly handled and dainty, a girl’s knife, and this was a genuine Barlow and a proper knife for a boy to carry.
He stuffed the knife in his pants pocket and looked again to find four pads of drawing paper.
The other saddlebag had a sandwich, wrapped in cloth, and he realized he was hungry again, so as he and Stomper headed back for home, he ate the sourdough bread and back strap sandwich and considered that this was probably one of the best sandwiches he’d ever had.

Linn had business to tend, and tend it he did; as befits the dignity and authority of the county Sheriff, his face was solemn, his movements carefully, tightly controlled, and as he finished, he saw there was something yet undone.
He tightened the last lug nut and cranked the jack down, packed away jack and handle, fetched an old blanket out of his cruiser and wrapped the flat tire before putting it in the woman’s trunk – her car was spotless and so was her trunk and he wasn’t going to put that dirty old tire in on her clean trunk carpeting – and, wiping his hands on a shop rag (he had several in his cruiser), he went down on one knee and motioned the woman’s little girl over.
The child was giggly and bashful and the Sheriff gripped her ankle and brought her foot up on his thigh:  he carefully, precisely, tightened the laces on her sneaker and then re-tied it.
“There,” he said.  “Don’t want you steppin’ on a shoelace.”
“Thank you,” she said in a shy little-girl voice, and the Sheriff winked, remembering when his Marnie was that little:  he rose, trying to hide his grimace, looked at the relieved and rather pregnant woman who’d almost cried with relief when he came wheelin’ in behind her.
Linn slid two fingers into his shirt pocket, pulled out a common spiral notebook, flipped through it, withdrew a folded paper, handed it to the woman.
“Now if you turn around and go back into town,” he said, “the first garage on your right – the one with the tall, old-fashioned gas pumps that don’t work – that’s Emmett’s Garage.  Tell Uncle Emmett that you need that tire replaced and give him this.”
The paper was tri-folded and held shut with a red-wax seal, a seal with three roses embossed on it.
The woman turned it over, looked at it and looked at the Sheriff.
“What is it?”  she asked, feeling foolish, for the Sheriff’s grin and his gentle “It’s a gift certificate” confirmed what she’d already concluded.
She bit her bottom lip and nodded, then looked up and squeaked, “Thank you,” and the Sheriff nodded:  he knew her family had it hard times, and he kept a few of those home made gift certificates in his notebook for just such occasions.  
He and Emmett had an arrangement:  the certificate was hand written, and the Sheriff, like his Mama, wrote with a calligraphy pen most times:  the seal was an old one, handed down in his family, and reputed to have been used by the Black Agent herself:  Emmett would read it and nod, and knowing him, he’d fill her tank and likely give her an oil change unless she was in a rippin’ hurry, and the Sheriff would square up with the man afterward.
Besides, Linn considered, if he stopped a stranger with a headlight out, or a tail light out, it was easier to steer them to a fast repair than to give them a ticket, especially when he told them there was a real grouch of a State Trooper just down the road givin’ out tickets like a politician gives out lollipops to little kids the day before election, and he specialized in stopping cars with a headlight out or a tail light out.
Linn swung back past his house on his way back in.
Connie had worried because Jimmy apparently went who-knows-where on Stomper:  as the Sheriff came wheeling up the driveway, he saw Stomper in the field beside the barn, and when he came through the door, he was met by a seven year old, blue denim streak of enthusiasm with a delighted hug to match.
Linn laughed and stood up, both arms full of chattering little boy, and he grinned and said “Slow down, Tiger, run that by me at half speed,” and Jimmy happily lifted Linn’s Stetson and dropped it onto his own head – dropped being the operative word, for the skypiece fell down to his ears and pretty well covered his eyes:  Connie pressed the button on her cell phone, and another moment was captured to send to Marnie, along with a few friends and neighbors.
“Hey Connie,” Linn said in a gentle voice, “I found Jimmy,” and he and Jimmy looked at one another and laughed.

 

Two women talked quietly in the big round barn’s hush.
One woman was smooth-muscled and slender and wore a whole body leotard; her face was flushed, her breathing deep, controlled, as she ran through her ballerina exercises, then climbed the rope, hand-over-hand, legs straight out and toes pointed:  she ascended to the rafters, slapped the rafter and climbed back down; Sarah waited for Daciana to descend, then they sat on square bales and regarded one another with the quiet expressions of women who hold a mutual secret.
“You shouldt not brink him acrost time like zat,” Daciana scolded her gently.
Sarah smiled.  “It wasn’t entirely me,” she admitted.  “I helped a little.  I was kind of the anchor on this end, but … I think it was me-who-I’ll-become that actually did it.”
Daciana shook her head.  “You must be careful,” she murmured.  “Change nottink here or it changes much yet to come.”
Sarah shook her head.  “I think time heals itself when something like this happens.”
Daciana looked at the floor, ran her hand over the crisscrossed ribbons of her satin ballet slipper, looked up.  
“My people haff done zat,” she admitted, “but grand-mère was very … careful.”

 

It wasn’t until the next day that the Sheriff found Jimmy’s new saddlebags.
They were hung with his saddle and the carving matched the carved saddleskirt on Stomper’s huge saddle, so the Sheriff knew these were his, and not a surprise gift for the lawman.
He studied them, appreciating the craftsmanship; they were handmade, but expertly so, and a quiet, musical voice asked “Well?  Do they meet your approval?”
“They do,” he nodded, looking up.  “Mine?”
“His.”
He nodded.
“Your work.”
“I gave them to him, yes, but I had them made.”  A figure glided out of the shadows, a figure all in black wearing a broad brimmed hat and a black duster, and he saw knee-high, flat-heeled cavalry boots as she advanced.  "I have many talents, but leatherwork is not among them."
“Thank you,” Linn said.  “That was very kind.”
“He will find them useful.”  She lifted her head, her pale eyes striking under the shadow of her hat-brim.  “I took him back to my era.  You’ll see what he saw.”
“I saw his work when they recovered that copper sleeve in the far right hand column at the Denver Opera House.”
“Oh, yes, that,” she smiled, nodding a little, just a little.  
“It made the newspaper.”
“Really!”  Her smile was quick, genuine.  “I hadn’t imagined that would happen.”
“There was a second drawing with it, a woman on stage, apparently in song.”
Sarah smiled.  “I do love to sing,” she admitted.  “In another lifetime, perhaps, I was a performer.  I did so love the stage.”
“I would like to have heard you.”
She gave him a mischievous look.  “That could be arranged, you know.”
“Not today, I’m afraid,” he said, shifting his weight and grimacing.
“How’s the leg?”
“Better.”
Sarah sighed, shook her head. “The least you could do is sit in the presence of a lady.”
“Wouldn’t be polite,” Linn replied with deadpanned humor.  “My Mama worked awful hard to beat some manners into mmm … to teach me good manners.”
Sarah laughed quietly.  “You remind me so very much of Papa!”
“I’ll take that as a complement.”
“You should.”  

 

Cindy blinked as the grinning man dropped a rather expensive panatela on her dispather’s desk.
“The Sheriff changed my wife’s tire yesterday,” he explained, “and right after Emmett fixed her up with a new tire and a full tank, she went into labor and drove herself to the hospital
“Tell the Sheriff,” he said, “it's a boy!”
 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

106.  DEMON!

 

Jimmy stopped, tilted his head a little to the side, the very picture of puzzlement.

He hadn’t expected to find someone sitting on the top rail of their corral.

He certainly didn’t expect it to be a woman, her shoulders rounded, elbows on her knees, looking down at the ground, the very image of … well, she looked just plain discouraged.

Jimmy’s hand sought The Bear Killer’s ruff.

He felt The Bear Killer’s head come up and he heard the great mountain Mastiff make a funny little sound and start toward the corral, and Jimmy kept his hand on The Bear Killer and kept pace with him, until he looked up at the woman.

He climbed up the rails and set down beside her, hooked his heels into the next plank down.

“Hi,” he said tentatively.

“Hi,” she said quietly, then looked at him with pale eyes.

Jimmy started to grin but then he stopped and realized this woman had The Pretty Lady’s eyes but … but she was different, she wasn’t …

“I’m not her,” she said quietly.

“O…kaaaay,” Jimmy replied hesitantly, then he frowned. 

“You look awful sad.”

“Yeah.”  She raised her eyes, looked toward the horizon.  “I made a mistake.”

“What kinda mistake?”

“I thought …”  She paused, pressed her lips together.  “I thought I would see someone I knew, and he … didn’t want to see me.”

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said softly.

Silence grew between them; The Bear Killer reared up on his hinders, coming easily into range of her hands:  he snuffed her jeans loudly, washed the back of her hand in greeting, then, satisfied, he dropped back to all fours, turned around twice and lay down, gave a great, contented sigh.

 

Chief of Police Will Keller rubbed his face.

It had been a long day.

He’d been rolled out of the bunk before dawn – another fight, this time involving a drug stash as well as booze and a trouble making girlfriend – he’d ended up breaking a man’s finger as he stripped the gun from his grip, he’d backhanded the woman hard enough to dislocate her jaw, but not before she slashed the sleeve of his long sleeved uniform shirt with a scalpel stolen from her last ER visit – he’d personally served a warrant on a man he knew, rather than giving it to the Sheriff’s department, because he felt he had a better chance of talking the man into coming along peacefully than if a pair of uniformed deputies came beating on his door.

His idea hadn’t worked.

The ambulance’s lights flashed alarm a mile and more ahead of him; the man decided he didn’t want any part of warrant, lawman, summons, the legal profession or much of anything else, and it was reflex and muscle memory that shot Will’s hand up to seize the descending wrist, practice and more practice that wound the man’s arm up behind his back, at least until he back-heeled the Chief and pulled free:  after that it became general, at least until Will got him down and put his knee into the man’s gut and broke two ribs – the other guy’s, not his own – and it wasn’t until after he’d slammed the offender’s head against the hardwood floor a few times that he relaxed enough Will could get him in irons.

“I don’t know what he was on,” he said aloud, “but whatever it was, he damn neart had me!”

“I know,” a female voice said, and Will jumped, twitching the wheel momentarily:  iron discipline returned his attention to driving the Crown Vic, and once he’d swallowed his hammering heart out of his throat and back down into his chest, he looked at the passenger he didn’t know he had and said “How’d you get here?”

She smiled, regarded him with pale eyes … his sister’s eyes.

His dead sister’s eyes.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, reaching up and twisting the rear view mirror hard to see if she had a reflection.

She reached up, gripped his wrist quickly, released:  “Do I feel real?”

“Demon!” he hissed.  “Willa is dead!”

“Did I claim to be your sister?”  she asked, smiling the secret smile of a woman who knows something the other person doesn’t.

Will’s hand dropped, came around hard:  he drove six inches of honed blade into the woman’s gut.

Or tried to.

His hand passed through nothing and drove hilt deep into the back of the seat.

“Did I forget to mention,” she said casually, “that won’t work?”

“DEMON!”  Will roared.  “IN CHRIST’S NAME I COMMAND YOU RETURN TO HE WHO SENT YOU!”

“That would work on a creature of evil or a creature of the dark,” she said gently, amusement in her voice. “As you see, it doesn’t work on me.”

She looked ahead.  “Rather than risk damaging this fine silver buggy, why don’t you pull in at the truck stop up ahead.  We can have coffee and talk it over.”

Will noticed she wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

He looked in his mirrors, nailed the brakes.

Tires squalled, he sawed the wheel to keep his beloved Crown Vic nose forward, he was thrown forward against his shoulder belt.

He reached over, yanked the door latch, stomped the gas and spun the wheel:  he burned several miles’ worth of rubber as the engine sang power, the door flew open, he hauled his beloved Miss Vickie around in a tight, tire smoking circlespin –

The woman sat there, grinning like an excited kid.

“I can see why you like this buggy so well!”  she exclaimed.

He tried to push her out, his hand went right through her as if through a holographic projection.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU!” he screamed, bringing the cruiser to a hard, lurching stop squarely in the middle of the absolutely empty road.

“I’m –“

“NEVER MIND THAT, DEMON!  BEGONE!  GET OUT OF MY CAR AND DON’T EVER COME BACK!”

“Will, I –“

“Don’t tell me you’re Willamina,” he growled, his voice low, menacing:  he reached through her, found the knife handle, pulled it free, tried to slash her.

He may as well have tried to cut a swirl of fog.

“You’re thinking of a sharpened blade as injurious to a spirit,” she said quietly.  “Is that what you think I am?”

“A demon would know everything about my sister,” he hissed.  “You are not she and you are not welcome here!”

She nodded.

For a moment he felt a stab of guilt, for he’d put that look of rejection on her face, and he’d done that to a woman once before, well long in his past, and half a century later he was still kicking himself for it.

She turned, stepped out of the cruiser without benefit of opening the door first; she swung up on a horse that wasn’t there, at least until she was in the saddle, then she turned an impossibly-huge, absolutely-black mare and rode away from him, kneeing her mount into a slow, mile-eating gallop.

Will shook his head, took a long breath, looked at the passenger seat where he’d driven the knife into it.

He slid the honed blade back into its sheath; he pulled the shifter into gear and started out again for Firelands.

 

Jimmy scooted a little closer to the woman, until their hips just touched.

She turned and looked at him, smiled a little, laid her hand on his, and he turned his hand over and gripped hers.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“For what?”  Jimmy asked, surprised.

“Sometimes –“

She smiled a little, squeezed his hand ever so gently, relaxed her grip.

“Sometimes just being nice helps someone.  You helped me, just now.”

“Oh.”

They listened to the evening and to the birds, the sound of horses grazing, the stamp of restless hooves; they heard the slash of tails, industriously discouraging the local fly population.

“I like holding hands,” Jimmy finally said.

The woman with pale eyes looked over at him and smiled a little.

“My Mama and I used to hold hands.”  He blinked a couple times.  “She’s dead now.”

“So is my Mama.”

“I miss her.”

“I miss mine, too.”

“Do you have another Mama?”

The woman considered his question, gave him an inquisitive look.  “How do you mean?”

“I got Mr. Sheriff and I got Mrs. Sheriff.  I call her Mama too ‘cause she didn’t … she didn’t feel right with me callin’ her Mrs. Sheriff.”

The woman laughed quietly, then shook her head.

“No, Jimmy,” she sighed.  “I don’t have another Mama, but I am really glad you have.”

“She’s nice,” Jimmy said, “only …”

“Only what?”

His hand tightened a little on hers, then released and pulled away.

“I’m kinda scared.”

“Why are you scared?”

“I useta get beat.  When my … when that man Mama married got … he took the belt to me an’ he hurt me too.”

“He hurt you in other ways than the belt.”

Jimmy nodded.

“He’s gone, Jimmy.  He’ll never, ever hurt you again.”

“I know,” Jimmy whispered.  “It’s just … I’m afraid … if something bad happens it’ll be my fault an’ they’ll yell at me an’ they’ll … that’ll hurt worse than if they took the belt to me.”

“Yelling … will hurt worse?”

Jimmy nodded.

The woman put her arm around Jimmy, drew him gently against her.

“I understand,” she whispered.  “I … felt the same way when I was … young.”

She felt him nod again.

“Names,” she said.  “It hurt when they called me names.”

Jimmy nodded again.

“They did that … he did that to me too.”

“I have to go,” she whispered. 

“Aw,” he protested, and she slid off the top rail, stopped, turned around.

She took both his hands in hers and looked him squarely in his hazel eyes.

“You’ll see me again.  I promise.”

He smiled half-heartedly, the corners of his mouth quivering up a little, and she knew he’d been lied to so often and so steadily for so long, that sometimes it was really hard for him to accept something, especially a promise.

“I have to come back,” she said, pulling out a pocket watch and pressing the stem. 

Jimmy grinned, quick and broad, as he saw she had the watch he’d painted for her:  he’d done her face with fine brushes and portrait grade paint, on the inside of the watch’s cover, and he’d done a remarkable job.

“I have to come back and get the one you’re doing of Esther.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

107.  IF MY DOG DOESN’T LIKE YOU, I DON’T LIKE YOU

Chief of Police Will Keller frowned a little, turned to his right, to the framed picture on the wall of his office.
Just like the Sheriff, he had a framed print at about standing eye level, a print of a pale eyed lawman with an iron-grey mustache, his tall, lean son and chief deputy, and to the right – their left – a young woman in a fashionable dress, standing severely facing the camera with an expression that made it plain she’d like to take the wooden box with the ground glass lens and crush it, burn it, take a sledge hammer to it and then get mean with it, in that order.
He held the phone’s receiver loosely, pressed firmly enough to his ear to hear well, but not so firmly as to lose binaural hearing in his office.
“I know,” he said, his voice deep and reassuring.  “Lawyers practice to be irritating in court.  It’s how they elicit a spontaneous eruption they can use to discredit the witness or get the jury’s sympathy.”
He glared at the pale-eyed woman glaring back at him from the framed print.
“Yeah, come on over, things are down to a dull roar here.”  He chuckled; things had been so quiet it scared him, but he’d put most of his adult life “under the siren” and he’d come to appreciate quiet and boring.
Matter of fact – as careful as he was never, ever to utter the dreaded “Q-word” – the last time he had, he was a very young paramedic in ER, he’d innocently wished the charge nurse a “Quiet” night, and she jumped right down his throat for it, claiming he’d just jinxed them.
Will muttered a good-bye and hung up, rubbed his face, looked at the picture again.
Since that unexpected … apparition?  Appearance?  Manifestation?
Since what looked like his dead sister appeared in his cruiser, he’d been looking at that glass-plate print more and more often, considering just how much that … that Sarah Lynne McKenna looked like Willamina.
“Demon,” he muttered, shaking his head.

 

Linn spit on the whet stone, stroked his pocket knife one way, then the other, smooth, steady strokes with a practiced hand:  the whet stone was as long as his middle finger and worn thin in the middle from years of use.  
Jimmy watched closely as Linn concentrated on sharpening his lock back pocket knife, and Linn looked up and smiled at the lad’s intent study.
“Want to try it?”  he asked, and Jimmy nodded, ran his hand into his pocket, brought out a new looking Barlow knife.
Linn bent forward and frowned.  “Now that’s interesting,” he murmured.
Jimmy froze, feeling a familiar chill claim his flesh:  You’re guilty, you’re guilty, an inner voice screamed, you did it, you did it, you’re in trouble, you’re in trouble –
Linn opened a drawer, reached in, brought out a very similar knife.
“Take a look at this one,” he said.  “See the word BARLOW here” – his finger nail ran along the lettering on the knife he held.  “This one’s made in China and the stamp is … the letters are rounded and kind of shallow.  Yours” – he raised his chin, thrust his jaw out a little – “yours is clean cut with square corners.  That’s an oldie but goodie.  Had it long?”
Jimmy shook his head.
Linn smiled.  “A man ought to have a good pocket knife on him all the time, and a clean white handkerchief.”
Jimmy nodded solemnly and Linn figured the boy would probably make a beeline for his chest of drawers once they got home and see if he had any white hankies available.
“Now here’s how you sharpen a knife,” Linn said.  “Open up your blade … there you go.  Now we’ll set the stone here” – he spit on it again, set it down between the two of them – “you set your blade on it like … so.  The whole secret is to keep a constant angle on your blade.”
“How come you spits on it?”  Jimmy asked.
Linn smiled a little, remembering when he asked his Uncle Will that very thing years ago.
“It keeps the cuttin’s floated up and doesn’t clog the stone, otherwise she’d pack full and glaze over and wouldn’t sharpen anything.”
“Oh.”
“Some fellas use cuttin’ oil. If you oil your stone once you’ve got to oil it forever.  Long as I’ve got a stone in my pocket I can sharpen my knife, but if I oil the stone I might not have oil when I need it.”
Jimmy nodded solemnly.
“I’ll leave you to work on that.”  He wiped his blade on a paper towel, folded the lockback and slid it back into his jeans pocket.  “Right now I’m going to go see Uncle Will.  We have a verdict.”
“Can I come?”  Jimmy asked hopefully.
Linn grinned.  “Yep.  Wipe off your blade and the stone and bring ‘em both.”

Will looked up as the Sheriff and Jimmy came in.
“Grab a set,” he rumbled, then frowned a little at Jimmy.  “What do you have there, son?”
Jimmy wasn’t afraid of having it taken away – no, he had the stone by order of his Sheriff! – so he held it up and said “A wet stone.”
Will nodded, looked at Linn, raised an eyebrow.
“I believe you were his size when I showed you how to whet a blade,” he said, his voice deep, gravelly.
“You believe correctly,” Linn nodded.  “And that’s the stone you gave me.”
“Do tell!”  Will’s grin was instant and broad, and Jimmy saw Uncle Will’s mustache was taking a handlebar curl better and faster than his Sheriff’s mustache.  
“That one is getting’ kind of thin,” Linn said thoughtfully.  “I reckon I might ought get a bench stone, something thick, maybe in a stand.”
Will nodded.  “That little stone is fine for a shirt pocket,” he agreed.
“They no-billed me,” Linn said, jumping right into the subject.
“Good.”
“Course those lawyers like to make an honest man look as bad as they can.”
“They’re good at that.”
“They tried to make me out to be a bloodthirsty cowboy.  Said I practiced fast-draw in the bathroom mirror and asked me how many mirrors I’d shot, asked why I carried a non-standard sidearm, suggested that I was just itching to be an Old West gunslinger, called me Matt Dillon and Doc Holliday.
“My lawyer called  Doc to the stand and they brought out that I was so fevered I was not remembering a thing – which is true – they said I am a good man, as evidenced by my actions, which were entirely on the subconscious level, that even not entirely in my right mind from a high fever, that I got a hostage out alive in spite of the kidnapper having a gun to her head and screaming he was going to kill her.
“The cheerleader testified as well.”
Will nodded, listening closely.
“They asked her what she thought when I had a gun pointed at her.
“She said I never did point a gun at her, she said all of a sudden my gun was out and rolling up toward the ceiling and the abductor’s arm fell from around her throat and she ran like a scared kid, and she was absolutely certain that if I had not killed him, that he would have killed her.
“Long story short, the Grand Jury came back with a no bill and you already know the State Police investigation said the same thing.  Righteous shoot.”
Will nodded.  “Damned glad to hear it,” Will said, his voice deep, resonant.  
He looked at Jimmy.  “How about you, son?  You do any good with that stone?”
Jimmy blinked a few times, looked guiltily at the Sheriff.
“I haven’t tried it yet,” he admitted.
Will raised a finger, opened a desk drawer, opened another:  he leaned over, reached waaaaay down and then came back up with what looked like a wood box.
Linn’s eyes tightened at the corners, crinkling a little with recognition, and he nodded approvingly.
“Here, Jimmy.  A man ought to have a stone he can work with.  That’un you set out is almost worn out.”
“Thank you,” Jimmy breathed, his eyes big.

 

The Bear Killer pushed past Will’s leg as the police chief opened the door to their little whitewashed church.
Reverend John Burnett rose and extended his hand.
“Mrs. Pastor said you wanted to see me,” he said, “but she didn’t say why.”
The Bear Killer wandered down the center aisle, nose busy, seeking out secrets from the freshly vacuumed carpet.
“I need some good sound advice, Reverend,” Will said, his uniform cap correctly under his arm.
“Advice is easily got.”
“Wait’ll you hear what I have to say,” Will cautioned.  “You might not say so quite so fast.”
Reverend John sat, his hand cupped over his kneecap.
“Mileage?”  Will asked and Reverend John nodded.
“You know you’re not supposed to imitate my bad examples.”
The sky pilot and the lawman both chuckled; it was an old joke between them.
“Parson, I had something … I had an experience that troubled me.”
Reverend John rubbed his palms slowly together, nodding encouragement to the man.
“I was comin’ back from serving a warrant when of a sudden I had a passenger, someone I didn’t recognize.”
“Oh?”  The Reverend’s tone was carefully neutral, but his tented eyebrow bespoke his interest.
Will took a long breath, blew it out with puffed cheeks.
“You recall that picture I’ve got in my office, the one with Old Pale Eyes and his son Jacob and his daughter Sarah.”
“I recall,” the Reverend John nodded.
“You recall how much that pale eyed woman in that picture looks like my dead sister.”
Reverend John nodded again.  “I thought for several years that it was your sister, and that was a modern photograph.”
Will shook his head.  “Oh, no.  No, that one is very antique.”
“They do bear a remarkable resemblance.”
“So did whoever was in my cruiser.”
“You saw her in your rearview?”
“Rearview hell,” Will growled.  “She was in the seat beside me!”
“Was she there when you got in?”
“No.”  Will shook his head.  “I had some papers on the passenger front seat.  If anyone had set on them, I’d have known it, once she was gone there wasn't a wrinkle on 'em.  No, Parson, whoever it was looked like my sister.  I tried to stab her and cut her and all it did as l …”
Will stopped, pressed his lips together, took a long breath.
“I tried to knife her.  Arm and hand and knife went right through her.  I’ve got a new stab wound to the back of the passenger front seat.  I tried to cut her and may as well have tried to carve fog.”
“Hm.”  
“I called her a demon and ordered her to return to whoever sent her, I ordered her in Christ’s name to begone and she didn’t.”
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“When I was in college …”  Will looked down at the floor, looked back up at the Reverend.  “The floor above ours was girls.  One of them right above me – Janet – had a Wee Gee board."

The Parson suppressed a smile as Will pronounced the board's name as two words, as he'd always done.

"One night she was doing something, I don’t know what, but her desk lamp behind her was on and shining over her shoulder against the wall.  She said she could see shadows of demons jumping out of the board.”
“I see.”
“I was layin’ on my bunk next floor down and of a sudden somethin’ heavy set down on my chest.  I remembered a girl telling me to get rid of an attacking spirit was to tell it in Christ’s name to return to he who sent it and it had to return, but would be so mad it would render tenfold on the sender whatever it had been sent to do.  I had wind enough to grunt ‘God!’ and it let up a little, I got a short breath and ordered it in Christ’s name to begone, and it left, so that’s what I did again.”
“You did the right thing,” Will nodded.
“Thanks.  Now what do I do about that spirit?”
“Is that what it was?”  a woman’s voice asked, and Parson and Lawman both looked to the front of the church.
A woman with pale eyes and wearing an old-fashioned gown sat on the kneeling rail, The Bear Killer’s head on her lap:  she was rubbing his head and neck and his eyes were closed with pleasure.
“Was it a spirit?”  the woman asked, “or was it something else?”
“What else could you be!”  Will challenged loudly, rising, fists clenched.
“You called me a demon,” the woman said quietly.
The Bear Killer rolled over, pawed playfully at her grasping fingers.
“YOU'RE NOT MY SISTER!” Will shouted, his voice echoing shocking-loud in the otherwise-silent church, thrusting an accusing finger at her.
“You’re right,” she nodded, then looked at Will, who was quivering a little, looking like a drawn arrow, ready to be loosed.
“Then who are you?” he asked -- hissed -- in an accusing tone.
“Does it matter?”  she smiled.  
“IT MATTERS!”
She nodded.  “You are properly suspicious.  Good.  You’re not a trusting man and that’s good also.”  She stood, The Bear Killer standing with her.  "That, and curiosity, are proper traits for a badge packer.
“Do you remember your sister saying to someone, “If my dog doesn’t like you, I doesn’t like you’?”
“Yeah," he grated.  "I remember.”
Sarah tilted her head, looked down at the mountain Mastiff.
“Bear Killer,” she said, “do you like me?”
The Bear Killer whuffed quietly, chopping his jaws with a big doggy grin, his great plume of a tail swinging happily.
The woman raised her arms, spread them wide, tilted her head back, sang a single, high, pure note, her voice that of a trained opera singer, then looked at the men and smiled.
“I used to sing opera.”
She looked down at Will, her expression suddenly serious.
“How well can you swim?”

Reverend John Burnett rose, Scripture in hand, advanced on the pretty young woman, raised the Book before him like a shield.

The young woman rose, wrapping dignity about herself like a cloak, and took one pace toward him, stopped.

Reverend Burnett extended his much worn Scripture, its covers soft with much use, and opened it.

"Place your hand on the Word," he said, his voice quiet, commanding.

The woman did.

"Ecclesiastes," she said, smiling .. almost sadly.  "I know a man who favored Ecclesiastes and quoted it often."

Reverend John Burnett blinked, surprised: he wasn't sure if her hand was supposed to catch fire, or if she was supposed to explode in a silent detonation, but he was quite certain a creature of evil could not set foot in the House of the Lord, and he was absolutely convinced no get of darkness could lay a hand on the Book without drawing back a smoking stub.

The woman tilted her head a little.

"Let me tell you what evil is," she said quietly, and raised her hand, laid it gently against the side of his face.

"NOOO!"  Chief of Police Will Keller roared, surging out of his chair and seizing the Reverend by the back of his shirt --
 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

108.  REMEMBER

 

 

"NOOO!"  Chief of Police Will Keller roared, surging out of his chair and seizing the Reverend by the back of his shirt – he hadn’t expected her sudden surge, he did not expect this pretty, pale eyed woman’s hands to suddenly lock around his head.

Reverend John hit the floor with a grunt, his eyes squeezed together, teeth clicking together with the impact on the smooth, clean boards. 

  

Will opened his eyes.

He was lying on his back in a ... 

Why am I in a tent?

A hand was over his mouth and a blade just kissed the flesh of his throat.

A woman bent over him, a woman with a gem in the center of her forehead, held with a gold band that circled the white silk scarf covering her head and her face.

“You remember me,” she whispered.  “You saw me on the red mare.”

He could see her eyes narrow a little, at the corners, as if she were smiling.

“Blink for yes.  Die for no.”

He blinked, once, then wondered …

Where the hell am I?

“You remember this place,” the woman whispered.

He shook his head, very slightly.

“It is in your memory, just as I am in your memory,” she whispered, her sibilants loud in the nighttime quiet:  without, he heard the soft, measured tread of the sentry, he smelled the beeswax candle, he smelled …

He smelled the desert.

He remembered.

He was a Crusader.

He was in the Holy Land, fighting the Saracen.

He’d seen the woman that day, riding with the archers that swarmed down on them and then were gone, leaving arrows and dead men in their wake.

“That’s right,” came her whisper.  “You remember me now.”

She lifted her hand.

“You …”

“Yes.  I was with the Arab surgeon.”

He’d exploited a truce, he’d gone to the Arabs – at their invitation – he’d observed their methods, spoken with their surgeons with the help of two surprisingly good translators, and he’d come away impressed.

The invaders – his people, British and French and Europeans – had little concept of cleanliness, not even of simple handwashing:  the surgeon he’d visited, had guested with the French surgeons, and was gentleman enough to not comment adversely on the crude and primitive … the butchery, actually … of these less enlightened Europeans.

A man had taken an arrow through the thigh, the wound suppurated, and where the Arab would have expressed the corruption, washed out the wound, kept it clean and kept the man in clean surroundings, airy and fresh with sunlight and green plants round about, these Europeans kept their wounded in dark and damp places, simply wrapped the wounds – seemingly to contain the corruption – and when convenient, hacked off the offending limb, which in and of itself was generally fatal to the sufferer.

All this he remembered, for this woman, this woman with pale eyes and the silk-veiled face, this woman with a diadem worth a young fortune about her head, was the Arab surgeon’s right hand.

She was also a screaming warrior on a red mare, driving arrows into his troops in a lightning raid.

“I have chosen you,” she whispered.  “Of all the invaders, you alone have shown honor. You are strong in battle and you are … not dishonest in your words.”

The blade lifted.

“Come with me, into the desert.  We are under truce.  None will harm you.”

He blinked, sat up, threw back his light sheet:  as he’d done for years, he slept in nowt but his linen drawers.

“Why should I trust you?”  he asked in a near-whisper.

“Your life was mine to take,” she replied, slipping the knife back into its sleeve-sheath.  “Had I wished your death, you would have died without a sound, and I would have escaped as easily as I entered.”

He reached for his breeks and she rested a hand on his wrist.

“No,” she whispered.  “You will not need those.  Nor your jerkin.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“The night is yet warm.  It will be chill in an hour, but you will …”

Her hand closed about his wrist.

“Come.”

She led him – not to the front of his tent, but to its rear – through a clean-cut slit, into shadow:  she froze until his sentry passed by, the length of two arms away, not seeing them:  he was beyond them now, the space of ten heartbeats, and they rose, the woman’s grip about his wrist.

They ran into the night, ran like lovers, ran like they were young – like he was young again – their bare feet were silent on soft sand, with no trace of the coarse stones that littered the desert – and in the shade of some bushes, they stopped, and the woman turned, took him by both hands.

“It is given the women of our tribe a vision,” she said, her voice low, musical, almost seductive:  “we can see a man’s soul, and we can see whether it is tainted with cowardice, or dark with cruelty.”

She released his hands, raised a hand to the corner of her head, hesitated.

His breath caught.

A woman – a Saracen woman – who removed her veil … he swallowed, his heart running like a stag through the forest – a woman who removed her veil was as a bride, removing her garments for her husband.

He felt suddenly ashamed, unclean, needing a bath –

She dropped the face veil and let it dangle, lowered her head a little, she gazed into his eyes and he felt himself falling into those broad, pale orbs, and her lips touched his, an electric thrill –

He felt young, suddenly young, and fires started in his belly he hadn’t felt since … since he was a young man.

 

She drew her hands from the sides of his head.

Will gasped, shuddered, blinked, almost losing his knees:  she turned him around, he sat, coming down on the padded kneeler in front of the altar rail.

He looked up at her, eyes wide, confused.

He felt her fingertips at his temples.

 

Yells … and horses?

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, threw back his covers.

It was not yet dawn, but near to it:  he came out of his bed, feet landing on the puncheon floor, his heart picking up with fear.

No.

Not here.

Dear God, not here!

He looked back at the bed, groaned:  his wife was gone, and he had the terrible feeling he knew where she was.

He ran to the mantle –

His musket was gone, as was powder horn and warbag.

He ran to the door, lifted the latch, hauled it open.

There she was – she was running, running with the desperation of one in fear of her very life.

He saw two of his neighbors running, stop, fade behind a building’s corner, musket at the ready –

His wife turned, raised the musket.

Two British horsemen thundered around the corner, followed by a third:  the third wore an officer’s tricorn hat.

He gripped the door frame in desperation, knowing what was about to happen, helpless to prevent it.

She raised her musket, fired between the two troopers:  the officer’s hat fell away, he folded into himself and then went over backwards, over his horse’s tail, fell limp and very dead to the ground, and Will imagined he could see a red stain on the man’s front.

His wife turned, looked at him, he saw her pale eyes, wide, she turned and began pulling out the ramrod, she ran, but ran as if to pass their house, there in their little village, and one of the pursuing troopers leveled a pistol and fired and he heard his voice scream “NOOOOOOOOO!” as his wife flinched and fell forward, just before two more muskets boomed and the troopers parted company from their saddles.

 

Will blinked his eyes again.

He was back in their little whitewashed church.

The woman was standing before him, very proper, very reserved, looking at him with pale eyes, but … but very old eyes.

He did not draw away as her hands came up, came together, as her fingers pressed into his temples again.

He was a child, a little girl child, in pain, in more pain than he’d ever known, a little girl child who watched, agonized too badly to make a sound, as her Mama was beaten, beaten with fists and kicked, until blood came out of her mouth and she lay without moving, and the man seized the child and dragged her out of the house, threw her into the back of the wagon.

He was kinder to his horse than he was to either his wife, or this wee child with the pale eyes, this dirty waif in a torn frock and a bloodied and welted body.

He’d driven – as he always did – to a dirty whorehouse he knew of, the one over top the Silver Jewel.

He grabbed the child by the arm, nearly twisting it out of socket, pulled her inside and up the stairs.

He threw her at one of the working girls, grabbed another one, pulled her inside a room and slammed the door.

The working girls came to the child, bathed her wounds and washed her hair, they washed her frock and mended it before it was yet dry:  she was the one bright spot in their lives, and they showed the child the only kindness she’d known in a very long time.

He felt the fingers come off his temples, then press back in, and he knew … he knew what it was to be a decent and honorable woman, married to a rancher … a man who was poisoned, the woman who was given a knockout drink, a woman who woke chained by one ankle to a whorehouse crib:  a woman who was kept in irons until her spirit broke and hopelessness claimed her utterly, at least until the man was killed by a woman who would not be beaten, shot through his evil gut with a dainty little two barrel Derringer that had just enough punch to push its pointed, hollow base bullet through his belly and into the great vessel descending from the heart.

The fingers lifted again and this time she pressed her hands flat against his head, covering his ears:  she bent her forehead down against his and whispered, “Ride with me.”

He was in Hell.

He was a twisted and misshapen waif, wearing the frock and little straw hat of a child, running from half-seen, half-glowing creatures that called her name, that promised more of what her father had given her, creatures that seized her very soul after that most terrible, that most brutal beating, creatures that ripped her soul in half and dragged it down to eternal torment because that is what evil does, it rips apart that which is good and pure and decent and kind and seeks to destroy it utterly … a child’s soul is so very much fun to torture, for children feel so much more completely, and a child’s soul, ripped away and dragged away from the World of Light, chased and terrorized forever –

“That was not my end,” a woman’s voice whispered, and he saw another pale eyed girl, one who wiggled through a small hole in the mountain, a girl who dropped to the hot red sands, a girl who found the waif and held her and soothed her and he felt the two halves of his soul come together.

They walked together to an arena, an arena floored with sand and surrounded by huge stones, stones taller than three men and twice as wide as the span of a man’s arms, and beside each stone, a woman with pale eyes.

He saw the woman in Colonial dress and mob cap, leaning casually on a Brown Bess musket.

He saw one in a Grecian tunic and sandals, a quiver of arrows at her hip and her beautifully recurved bow slung across her back, her fair skin tanned but her eyes as ice-pale as each of the others.

He saw one on a blue suit dress and heels, looking at him the way he remembered, but she was young, so very young –

And one in a … in a skin tight suit with a helmet … and an odd, blunt, plastic-looking pistol on her belt, held in place without benefit of a holster … he looked closer and saw that, behind the gleaming glass visor, this front plate of what looked like an atmosphere helmet –

Marnie? he thought, his mouth dropping open, and then he saw it …

The woman in the blue business suit dress turned her lapel over to display a six point star, one he was very familiar with …

Willamina –

He saw the six point star embossed on the left breast of Marnie’s Olympic skinsuit –

Marnie!

The hands came away from his head and he threw his head back and gasped, took in a great noisy breath like he’d just come up from too deep a dive.

“I am much more than you realized,” the woman said, “and I am not done yet.

“Our line must continue.  There is much yet to be done and only we can do it.”

“You,” he gasped, trying to make sense of it all – “you … you seduced me?”

She smiled.  “You might say that.  Did you ever wonder why you like the cool and quiet of the night so much?  Why you …”

She lowered her eyes, smiled a private little smile.

“Do you remember, when you were in high school … the putting green?”

He looked up, alarmed, his ears turning an incredible shade of scarlet.

“Before you ask,” she raised a forestalling palm, “no I did not watch, but I could see the shadow of your memory.  You still remember her and you still remember that night, and so does she, even after all these years.”
“But you –“

“I had to bring you into our line and you’ve been in it ever since.  Why do you think you were born a twin to a pale eyed woman, why you have her pale eyes, why your son had them?”
Will felt suddenly weak.

“Nicodemus …”

He raised his head.

“Can I see him?”
Reverend Burnett watched as the woman knelt before the Chief, took his hands in both hers.

He could not see the tear that ran wet and shining down her cheek as she said, “I’m sorry.  I … I’m not … I can’t do that.  I’m sorry.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

109.  SO YOU’RE THE GHOST

 

Reverend John Burnett was not a man to scare easy.

The good folk of modern day Firelands knew him as a tall man, broad shouldered, a man with an easy laugh, quick to listen:  where most people listened in order to make a reply, their Parson listened closely, and waited, and listened some more.  Sometimes he asked a question or two but it was always a question to help him understand what he’d been told.

The man listened – and he was loved for it.

Some folks are in love with the sound of their own voice.

Reverend Burnett’s voice was strong and carried authority and conviction, but he used that grand voice of his on Sundays, to deliver his sermon; when he spoke of the bulletin, of community announcements, when he told the Sheriff of his wife’s gravid condition, and that she carried a girl-child, every ear in church that fine day could hear the smile in his voice.

He’d not spoken of his own past; he was known to be an experienced pulpit pounder, a man who’d pastored churches back East, and there was some skepticism when his name was put forth as a candidate for their Pastorate.

They were, after all, Westerners, and the Western mindset is distinctly, if subtly, different than the mindset of “back East.”

Reverend Burnett was a most pleasant surprise.

He lacked the arrogance too often found among Easterners; completely absent was any trace of superiority, nowhere was found the attitude that he was God’s gift to the howling wilderness – this might be due to his having seen student teachers from Ohio University in Athens, practicing their craft in the local high schools:  he’d quietly noted their tendency to regard Appalachian Ohio as just such a howling wilderness, and most, to be honest, did regard the natives are barefoot savages, interested in drag racing, procreation and drinking.

He’d endured these fools most patiently, he’d asked forgiveness of the Almighty for his dislike of their attitude, and he finally concluded a week before he was graduated, that these were lessons set before him for his own edification.

“Good examples of bad examples,” he’d explained to a classmate, “these are signposts, pointing the direction we don’t want to go.”

His classmate, of course, laughed politely and immediately disregarded his studious companion’s observation.

Now, years later, that conviction still guided the Parson’s actions:  he knew well that every word we say, or say not, that every thing we do, or do not, is seen by someone, and noted; heard, and remembered on some level; and he knew that he wished that the lessons he taught with his everyday life never, ever would be a sign post pointing the wrong way.

The Parson sat up, rubbing the back of his head.

The Chief’s sudden snatch-and-yank took the tall Parson completely by surprise.

He’d known the Chief was a strong man, but he scaled about two hundred – “two hundred pound of beef on the hoof,” he’d joked – and the Chief hauled him back and threw him like he was a preschooler!

He’d landed on his back, which half knocked the wind out of him, his head banged painfully on the thin carpet, which did not pad very much at all, and though he was too stubborn to admit he saw stars, he silently admitted to having observed two planets and a comet when his scalp banged hard against the thin pile.

He rolled over on his side, came up on one elbow.

The woman stood, head bowed, her hands on either side of the Chief’s head.

The Parson blinked, confused.

She’d been sitting where he is.

When did they change places?

He rubbed his head again, squinted against the painful echoes in his skull.

He heard the woman’s voice, felt her touch.

“Here, let me help,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper:  a cool hand, soft, smelling of lilac and soap and sunlight, pressed gently against his forehead; another hand, just as gentle, cupped the curve of the back of his head.

“Let me take the pain,” she whispered, and the pain turned and walked out of his skull like a cat walking out of a room, and suddenly his head did not hurt any more.

She ran her off hand down the back of his neck.

He’d strained his neck when he went down and it hurt, and as she ran her palm down the back of his spine – it wasn’t a caress, a caress is motherly and gentle, or seductive, and this was different, this was …

Healing, a voice whispered in the silence of his mind, and he realized that was exactly right.

“On your feet,” she said, and this time he heard amusement in her voice.

He rose, stood, her grip firm on his elbow.

“Thank you,” he murmured, raising a wondering hand to his head.  “What … how did you do that?”

She smiled secretively.  “I made it go away,” she said, as if explaining to a child.

“It worked, thank you.”  He looked over at the Chief.  “Are you okay?”

Will nodded thoughtfully.

The Parson turned to the pretty, pale eyed woman in what he finally recognized as a McKenna gown and asked, “Might I counsel with you?”

She smiled, looked at the Chief.

“I have business in Rabbitville,” she said quietly, “but yes, I would counsel with you as well.”

Reverend Burnett looked closely at the woman.

“Yes, I do look like her,” she smiled, completing his unspoken thought.  “But I am not she.”  She turned to Will, still sitting on the padded kneeling rail. 

“I believe there is pie.”

Will realized with surprise he was actually hungry.

“Parson,” he said, “if you’ve the time, I am for the Silver Jewel and a meal.”

Parson Burnett turned to the Chief and nodded.  “I have the time.  Mrs. Parson is out visiting today and I’m on my own for lunch.” 

He turned back. 

“If you’ve time before you leave –“

She was gone.

“So you’re the ghost,” he murmured, then turned back to the Chief, shook his head.

“I believe she said something about pie.”

 

Brother William was a tall man, dignified and lean in the simple white robe of his office.

He was Abbott now, he was in charge of the Rabbitville monastery; his days were full with its administration, with leading services, receiving and accommodating important visitors:  , his second-in-command, Brother Giovanni,  was his right hand and his chief administrator:  this freed Brother William for the higher administrative duties, and allowed him the freedom to travel a little, secure in the knowledge that Brother Giovanni, his his Claustral Prior,was ensuring the smooth operation of their Monastery.

Brother William generally traveled with two others, one of the Faceless Sisters and one of the Brethren, or sometimes two of the Sisters:  they ministered to the community, the village and the ranchos surrounding the monastery.

A young man came running up to the Abbott, grinning as he always did:  he stopped, dropped to one knee, took the Abbott’s hand and pressed it to his forehead.

Brother William laid his other hand on the lad’s head and murmured, “My son, rise,” and the lad flowed easily to his slender height:  he was tall for his people, but only came to the Abbott’s collar bone.

“I run,” he said simply, “thanks to the Sister.”  He slapped his leg and laughed.  “Had she not healed me, my leg would have rotted and fallen off and I would be a pirate!”

He and Brother William laughed, for it was an old joke between them:  when the young man was but a boy, he climbed trees, as boys will, and the tree he climbed was dying and had a thick branch at just the right height to start the climb – but it had a dead stub, a weathered, almost sharp spike, that stuck straight up:  the boy had fallen, impaled his thigh on the stub, and his Mama, having no one to help her, ran for the only help she could count on.

She ran for the Monastery.

As she came in sight of the adobe walls she began screaming for help, screaming in the name of El Senor Dios that her son was dying, that he was impaled and she could not get him free, and the heavy wooden valves opened and one of the Sisters ran out and seized her, seized her arms and stopped her like she’d run into the wall itself – she remembered the Sister’s veil, how it covered her face, she remembered the voice, she remembered a stray gust of the hot, dry wind that teased up a corner of her veil to reveal a terrible scar.

The Sister almost whispered, which forced the woman to calm herself, to swallow and start over and to blurt out her story.

The woman never released her grip on the woman’s arms:  she turned and in a great voice, a voice full of power, a voice that knew command, she began ordered Brethren and Sisters alike:  she turned to the woman and snapped, “Wait here!” and the woman did, her feet nailed to the dry ground as effectively as if she’d been spiked through the arches like Nos Christo Himself!

Brother William was with the Brethren who ran with the Sister, his were the hands that gripped the lad and hoist him off the stub, his were the hands that stripped off the lad’s breeches and held him while the wound was cleansed:  his was the voice that soothed the terrified boy, who kept him from twisting and kicking, and his were the arms that carried the child back to the Monastery, who explained in his quiet, reassuring voice what the Sister was doing to his leg, who gave the lad a stick to bite and the warning that it would hurt to clean out the wound, but the wound had to be clean to keep it from infecting, and he did not want his leg to infect and have to be sawed off, eh? – for then he’d have to become a pirate, for only pirates wore the wooden leg!

Brother William’s hand was firm on the young man’s shoulder, his tanned face beamed with approval. 

“Sebastián,” he said in his great voice, his words echoing across the plaza, “El Senor Dios has blessed your leg!  You run as if you were the wind itself!”

Brother William looked closely at the young man, lowered his voice:  “What is this I hear of a young lady, eh?  The one with hair as a raven’s wing, eyes like the night itself, black as velvet and bright as stars?”
Sebastián’s ears turned dark and the young man turned away a little, trying without any success at all to hide his smile.

“Sebastián, you have paid proper court to la seniorita.  You have been entirely proper, eres un caballero – you are a gentleman, and in this El Senor Dios is well pleased.”

“I have asked her father for her hand,”  Sebastián admitted, “and he is agreeable.”

Brother William gripped the young man’s shoulders firmly, threw back his head and laughed that great booming laugh of his. 

“Sebastián,” he declared, “have you asked the young lady, does she know your heart?”

Sebastián’s dark ears reddened further, if such a thing were possible.  “Yes, Abbott,” he stammered.

Across the dusty square, a pencil industriously influenced the paper beneath, bringing forth the figure of a tall man in a white robe, a man with a balding head and a little hair from one ear, around the back of his head, to the other ear:  his hands were on a slender, grinning young man’s shoulders, then pencil’s quick sweep catching the drape of the robe, the shared expression of a happy secret on their faces, even a chicken scratching in the foreground.

The Abbott reached into his green cloth traveling sack, the bag he wore across his body, the bag in which he kept his necessities:  his hand came out with a small pouch.

He cupped Sebastián’s hand in his, dropped the bag into the young man’s palm.

“You will need a start on your marriage,” he whispered.  “You spoke of a rancho and cattle.  This will give you a start.  See Santiago at the Rancho Vega y Vega and tell him Brother William sent you, and he will show you a rancho that can be bought for less money than the coin in this pouch.”  He winked.  “You have a way with animals, Sebastián.  I believe your rancho will prosper.”

Later that afternoon, another man’s hand felt another sack drop into it:  he nodded his thanks, his protests stifled by the tall Abbott:  “This is a blessing on me” he whispered, “take this from a man whose child lies deep in the earth.  Your daughter is young and beautiful, as mine once was, and you can yet hear her voice and touch her cheek and see her smile.  Take this, my friend, it is a blessing on me, from one father to another.”  He smiled sadly.  “I will never know what it is to give my child to a fine young man, I will never see her eyes shine as she dances with her husband for the first time, I will never know the joy of holding my first grandson.”  He stopped, blinked, and the villager stared, surprised, for he realized the Abbott’s eyes were bright, too bright, and the sight of the man wiping away the water with his sleeves was a secret he would keep.

“No bride should be without a dowry,” the Abbott whispered hoarsely, and turned away, and the man hoisted the heavy sack in his hand, marveling that he, a poor man, should suddenly be so blessed!

He turned away and went back into his small home, he opened the pouch and found it contained a second, smaller pouch, tied with a ribbon.

The old man could read, and he read the words written on the ribbon:
No daughter should be without her dowry.

Give her this for me, and the rest is yours.

The old man lifted out the smaller poke, poured out the contents of the first:  a young fortune spilled out onto his table, and he realized that he’d just been given money enough to last the rest of his life, if he were careful, and he smiled.

He knew how to be careful.

He raised his eyes to the ceiling and gave thanks to El Senor Dios, for this blessing was entirely unexpected, but it was indeed very, very welcome!

 

“How come you’re dressed like that?”  Jimmy asked.

“Because I am in disguise,” she explained.

“Oh.”  Then, with a wrinkle of his nose, “How come you’re in disguise?”

“Because you and I are going to do something nice.”

“Oh.”  He grinned.  “Do I get a disguise too?”

The Pretty Lady turned to face him, forearms across her belly, hands hidden in her sleeves.  “Would you like to be?”

“Yeah!”  he exclaimed, grinning.

“We’re going into a monastery,” she said thoughtfully.  “Now what would blend into a monastery?”  She paused.  “Have you ever worn a dress?”

Jimmy made a face as if he’d bitten into an unfrosted persimmon.  “No!” he protested.

“Then we’ll not use a dress.  How about …”

The door to the Scriptorium opened.

Scriptoria in Medieval times were well lighted, populated with slanted writing desks, precursors to the drawing boards of later centuries:  scribes stood, or sat on tall stools, whittled quills and inscribed calligraphic characters and brightly colored illuminations on vellum, scraping off the occasional error or edit with a short, curved, very sharp knife.

Today’s project was a history of Rabbitville, and the current Abbott had recruited one of the Sisters to head the work:  he’d never seen her face, but he’d heard her voice many times; she was one of their best singers, and she had a gift for organization, and so he recruited her for their History.

She was able to produce a surprising number of illustrations from their early days, and the Abbott looked up as one of the Sisters marched into the Scriptorium with an acolyte in robe and sandals and yellow rope-belt strutted in behind her, carrying a bundle of papers and a satchel.

The woman motioned the lad to set his burdens on an available table, then she sorted through a folder, withdrew an illustration:  she fed it into the copier, pressed a few buttons, waited until the first of the copies came out into the stacker, drew it out.

She carried it to the Abbott.

“This,” she said, “is Brother William. He was Abbott in the late 1880s.”

The Abbott could not help but smile broadly when he looked at the illustration.

The chicken in the foreground was in mid-scratch, the look on the Abbott’s face was one of delight – no, of a shared delight – it was as if he and the young man whose hand he gripped were in on a secret, and he could almost hear the clink of hard coin in the poke that was very obviously being dropped into the young man’s hand.

She raised a finger, went back to the stack.

Jimmy pretended not to notice that the drawing she selected was of her, but earlier, when she was still dressed as The Pretty Lady.

She ran this one as well through the scanner/copier, knowing it would save both images for her to insert into their history they were writing.

“This one,” she said, presenting a copy to the Abbott, “is rare.  This is Sister Mercurius, just before she entered our Order.”

“Oh,” the Abbott breathed, “my,” he looked up at her in awe, “goodness!”

He blinked, swallowed, studied the copy of the pencil drawing.

“How did you find these?”

He could hear the smile in her voice.

“I was an investigator, remember?” 

She laughed quietly.

“I find things out!”

“I see,” he said.  “And who is the young man you have with you?”

“This is a visiting acolyte, James.  He is on special assignment, but his assignment ends today and I must be returning him.”

The Abbott bowed to Jimmy.  “James,” he said, “it is a pleasure to meet you.”

James bowed in return, not knowing what to say, reasoning that perhaps silence was his best choice.

“I will return with the citations for these,” Jimmy heard his Pretty Lady in the white nun’s habit say, her words clear for all that they originated behind a silken veil that covered her entire face.  “I have yet to find the report of her assault, the one that left her with that terrible scar.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

110.  SELFIE

Jimmy stood in front of the full length mirror and studied himself.
He knew priests wore robes and he’d met monks today – he’d heard of monks before, he’d seen pictures of monks and of monasteries but this was the first time he’d ever seen them – and now he wore a robe, a light tan robe with a yellow rope belt, a robe that came down not quite to his ankles.
He wore sandals.
He frowned a little.
He refused to wear sneakers.

He wore boots 'cause that's what his Sheriff wore.

He would not ever have chosen to wear sandals, for the same reason, save that it’s what he found himself wearing when The Pretty Lady was suddenly in white and he was in a robe and she called him an acolyte.

He'd never heard the term and he wondered if she was calling him a spark plug or something because he remembered out at Emmett's garage they were talking about genuine Acolyte spark plugs, but he dismissed the thought because it didn't make sense.

He looked in the mirror again.
He turned one way, turned the other, wished he could see himself from behind, then he remembered … he could use his cell phone as if he were taking a selfie.
He didn’t have any intent of taking one, he just wanted to see himself from the back so he could draw himself.
Jimmy’s selfies were hand drawn and he liked what he drew more than what he took with the phone’s camera, and as soon as he hoist the phone and looked at the reflection of his dorsal aspect, he smiled again.
I can draw that, he thought confidently.
He looked down at the knot, his fingers went to it and he grinned.
That’s a square knot, he thought, and he remembered sitting on a bale of hay with a length of line, the Sheriff seated beside him, showing him how to tie a square knot – “not a granny,” he said, “a square knot is a bend, and a bend in the line will hold way more and not break as easily.  Try it again, watch me, I’ll go slow... that’s right … left over right, then right over left.”
Jimmy looked up at his reflection, surprised at his own expression.
He hadn’t seen himself looking quite so pleased in a very long time.
He realized he hadn’t felt quite so pleased in a long time.
His was a young and inquisitive mind, and he looked inward at his pleased response and examined it curiously to find out just why he was so pleased, and he realized it’s because the Sheriff had set down with him and showed him something, just like the time he’d set down on Jimmy’s bedroom floor with his long legs stuck under the skeleton of a bed frame and showed him how to run a ratchet wrench.
Jimmy hung up the light tan robe and hung the rope belt over the hanger, he parked the sandals in his closet, then he looked over on his chair and stopped.
The clothes he’d been wearing earlier, were on his bedside chair … clean, folded, ready to be put on, everything, even his socks and boots, and his boots were clean and polished.
Jimmy blinked, surprised and a little uncertain, feeling like he should thank The Pretty Lady, but she wasn’t there, so he looked around – a little boy in his underclothes, looking around the room with big and innocent eyes – and in an innocent little boy’s voice he said, “Thank you.”
His voice sounded big and almost loud in the room’s hush, and then there was a little whispery scrape and he looked over toward his dresser, toward a movement, and he walked barefoot over to the dresser and picked up a rose … a single, fresh-cut rose, with drops of water gleaming on its fragrant petals, and he thought he heard the whispered, “You’re welcome” from a familiar voice.

The Sheriff did not see Jimmy’s selfies for a few days, and by that time they were old news to Jimmy, but they were a source of curiosity and of speculation to the lean waisted lawman with the greying, handlebar mustache, and at his next transmission to his extraplanetary daughter, he scanned the picture and sent it with the comment, “Jimmy may have another career in mind.”

 

Abbott William drank slowly, grateful for the wellwater’s blessing.
He’d learned the true value of good clean water during what his old friend called “That Damned War.”
Twice through that internecine conflict, he and his boon companion stood with their Confederate counterparts to guarantee a truce at a well they’d found, a well from which they sent a runner under the flag of truce to inform their enemies of good water to be shared, and both times it ended up with water being shared, and coffee, and tobacco and sometimes a drink of something a bit stouter if it was available.
He dunked the dipper into the bucket again, raised it wet and dripping to his lips, closed his eyes and allowed himself feel the good honest pleasure of freshly winched out, good, cold, well water.
One of the families he’d visited presented him with a fine, healthy baby boy, and they pointed out a birthmark on the child’s foot, a line with a short cross bar near its forward end.
“It is the mark of the Lance,” the father said proudly, and the Abbott looked sharply at the man.
“Mi hijo was … I labored but he would not come out  … I feared I would die and my soul would go to hell because my child was still inside me,” the mother whispered.
The Abbott looked at the yawning little boy he held, looked at the father, then at the mother.
“Our Lady of the Lance rode through the door,” the father explained.  “She lowered the lance and touched mi esposa’s great belly with its shining blade, and mi hijo was born!”
His chest puffed out with pride, his voice was filled with joy.  “Our son was born with the blessing of the Lance, and here – you see it, here – the blessing of the Lance is on his foot!”
The Abbott remembered seeing the woman, all in white, riding on a great black horse, a horse that flew more than ran, she rode in robes of flowing white silk that floated in the air behind her, she rode with the Lance of St. Mercurius socketed in her right stirrup, held upright like a bright, shining beacon, a silver-headed, sun-bright spear, the cherished relic kept secure and safe behind the great and ornate altar … a lance that was brought out only with due ceremony and ritual, a lance that tended to disappear without warning, and reappear just as abruptly.

Just like its white-robed Lady.
Upon his return to the Monastery, Abbot William found another two drawings on his desk, dropped there as if in a hurry, and beside them, a dew-wet rose.
One drawing was of the Abbott, his hands on a young man’s shoulders, an expression of shared delight on both their faces.
The other was of a very young … not a priest, the Abbott thought, this is but a boy …

... his robe is not Benedictine black, nor Cistercian white ... Carmelite, perhaps? ...
An acolyte? …
… no, not in a monastic robe …
… Have I seen him before? …
Brother William puzzled for several moments, staring at the far wall, then he looked down, picked up the rose, inhaled its fragrance, his eyes closed.

Our Lady will reveal its secret, he thought, in her own good time, and in that thought, the tall man with tanned, bald tonsure was content.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

111.  THE CALL, THE HAUNT AND THE SONG

Linn’s head came up at the tone of Cindy’s voice
“Slow down now,” the Sheriff’s dispatcher said into the phone, “give that to me again but slow down so I can understand you!”
An excited caller was not infrequently a caller with bad news; the Sheriff rose and walked slowly over to the dispatcher’s desk.
“Okay, I’ve got you over at Carbon Hill, you’re where in Carbon Hill?”
Linn picked up his Stetson, settled it on his head, looked at Cindy’s yellow legal pad as she wrote.
Old church, he read, sing ghost retreating.
“We’re on our way,” she said, then drew the handset away, looked at it like it smelled bad.
“They hung up,” she said.  “The nerve!”
“Did you get a name?”
Cindy pulled up the caller ID and nodded.  “I thought I recognized the voice,” she murmured.  “The Starner boy, the younger one.  Big green truck, big tires –“
“I know the one.”  
“What did they say?”
“They said they were going to look in the old church and there were ghosts inside, singing.”
Linn raised an eyebrow and managed to look not terribly skeptical.
“Ghosts.”
Cindy nodded.
“Singing.”
“That’s the report.”
“What else?”
“They are scared white, they’re committing that classic military maneuver called an Advance to the Rear, and they’ll probably be here before you get there.”
Linn sighed.  “If they show up before I hook up with them, take a report.”
“Right, Boss.”
Linn strode for the door.
I’ll hustle on out there, he thought, but I won’t light up.
He pushed through the doors, snorted once he was outside.
Run lights and siren for a ghost?
He climbed in his Jeep, twisted the key.

On the far edge of the county, a panicked hand tried desperately to find the ignition.
The key, unfortunately, insisted on going anywhere except its appointed receptacle.
Get in there get in there get in there get in there get in there –
“Start the truck, start the truck!” Kendra screamed, her voice running lacquered, sculpted fingernails down the blackboard of his spine.
He took a short grip on the key, twisted his head around and looked at the ignition, managed to get the tip started, rocked the key up and down and it finally went in.
He looked up, looked out the windshield, the big blueprinted, balanced, custom exhausted, tuned and balanced engine fired easily into life:  he stomped the brake pedal, yanked the shifter into gear and with an absolute, utter lack of delicacy, jerked the transfer case lever into engagement and stomped the throttle hard enough to trim his toenails on the fan blade.
The big Ford surged, throwing them deeper into the seat, and he cranked the wheel, slinging dirt in four, big, separate, fore-and-aft rooster tail dirt fountains.
They went screaming the length of the dirt street and ramped the culvert on the far side, not quite a yard of air between spinning rubber and hard packed dirt.
The Sheriff saw headlights in the distance, saw them swing and rock wildly, and he knew that was probably the vehicle he wanted.
He grunted, took a long breath, reached over and wiped his finger across the row of horizontally-mounted rocker switches.
Blue and red LEDs along the top edge of his windshield began spitting alarm, thrusting sharp azure daggers into the night, and he reached down to the knob beneath and cranked it past WAIL to YELP and drove a hundred watts of Federal go-power into the two bumper mounted speakers.
A mustard yellow Jeep screamed through the night at the top of its lungs, a pale eyed man gripping the wheel hard enough to blanch out his knuckles.

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”  Kendra screamed as David Starner took the right fork instead of the left.
“I KNOW A SHORTCUT!” he shouted back, glancing down at the big illuminated tach, knowing just how far he could push that big engine he’d built up himself.
“DAVID, THIS ISN’T THE WAY, THIS RUNS OUT OVER THE RESER –“
Her words dissolved into a long, sustained scream as the truck shot off the edge of what used to be a road, where a section of guardrail used to be, and they fell through black eternity into the equally black surface of what was still a reservoir.

 

Chief of Police Will Keller blinked, chuckled.
“They called in what?”
“Ghosts,” Cindy repeated patiently.  “Ghosts, singing in the old church over in Carbon Hill.”
Will shifted his uniform cap from one hand to the other, reached up and scratched the back of his head.  “I’ve never heard singing ghosts before.  Do you suppose Linn would object to my taggin’ along?”
“I’ll get fresh coffee going.”
“I love ya from the bottom of my heart,” Will winked, pushed out the doors.
“And you’ve got two other girls in the top,” Cindy sighed as she watched the Chief’s retreating backside disappear into his silver Crown Vic.
She dumped the old grounds, measured in fresh, muttering “I know his standard lines, I finish his sentences, that man needs a good woman in his life and what am I saying.”  
She pushed the button with a savage thrust of her thumb and started the fresh batch a-brew.
“I may as well flap my arms and fly to the moon.”

 

I know Linn, Will thought.
He would’ve gone the north bend.
I’ll take the south, just for grins and giggles.
That’ll bring me into town from the lower end. 
The road’s not quite as good but if anyone tries to leave, I’ll be in position to stop ‘em.
He picked up the mike, trailed his finger along the row of black buttons, pushed one, then another.
“Sheriff One, Chief One on mid channel.”
There was a wait, a hesitation, then the background of a siren running yelp.
“Sheriff One, go Chief.”
“Sitrep.”
“Responding to report of a disturbance.”
“You’re going North Bend?”
A few seconds of siren, then Linn’s quiet, reassuring “Ah-firm.”
“I’m sound bend.”
“Roger that.”
Linn leaned forward a little, hit the brakes, hard.
His Jeep dropped its nose a little, the antilock groaning and shivering his brake pedal under his boot sole.
Linn swore – loudly, most heartily – then Will heard the light hum of radio carrier and Linn’s voice, no longer quiet and reassuring … now he heard the hard edge of anger in his nephew’s voice.
“Looks like they took the reservoir road.  I’m seeing the road’s tore up, they must’ve taken this turn close to two wheels, they were under pretty hard throttle.”
Will hit the brakes, cranked the wheel.
If they took the reservoir road, he knew, the guardrail was gone, eroded away and due to be replaced:  he’d heard the sawhorses placed for temporary warning were stolen that morning.
If there were no sawhorses –
He swore, mashed the throttle.
Tires squalled on hard packed dirt and the Crown Vic surged forward, the Chief’s teeth bared, clenched as he read the road, rode the high center and one edge to keep from dragging off the exhaust.

 

Linn hit the brakes hard, swung the wheel, threw the Jeep side-on, skidding to a stop in a cloud of dust.
He reached for the flashlight, yanked it out of the charger clip, took two running steps toward the edge, shot a beam of blue-white light down at a steep angle, swore.
The lights of Will’s Crown Vic rocked into view:  a moment later, another hand light pointed down into the dark water.
Linn ducked back to the Jeep, seized the microphone.
Will scaled his uniform cap back into the cruiser, thumbed the belt keepers free, yanked the double-hook free and tossed his gunbelt in after the cap:  he knew this reservoir, he knew how deep it was, he knew he could reach the truck as fast as a man could swim, and he knew he could swim very well indeed.
He kicked out of his burnished boondockers, seized the uniform shirt’s gig line in both hands and yanked, hard, losing at least half the buttons with the violence of his effort:  he yanked his trouser belt free, swore as the zipper tried to jam, gripped the material and ripped it open:  he shoved his trousers down, stomped them down and left his carefully-pressed uniform trousers on the ground. 
He stopped long enough to reach in, grab the combination glass breaker and seat belt cutter from its clip.
Will took four long, running steps, leaped from the edge, dove into the waiting darkness as he’d done a thousand times before.

 

Four sets of eyes snapped open as the speakers gave a quiet pop, then a little hum, then the Pee-doo-SQUEEEEE! of their station’s alert tones.
Covers were thrown back, men who slept in socks and undershorts shoved sock feet into fireboots, hauled up the silver bunker pants and hooked red suspenders over their shoulders, headed for the polished, waxed, slick-as-a-gut brass firepole.
The Captain came boiling out of the officer’s quarters on the apparatus floor, roaring the ancient and traditional war cry of the Irish Brigade as men seized coats, thrust muscled arms into bunker coat sleeves, snatched scientifically-designed, pressed-plastic helmets off hooks, fast up the chin straps and swarmed aboard their apparatus:  “ALL HANDS ON DECK!  NO IRISH NEED APPLY!  TURN TO, DAMN YOU, OR I’LL HAVE YOUR GUTS FOR GARTERS!”
Next door, the squad was doing the same thing:  polished leather boots and Nomex coveralls, the lighter weight medic’s helmets, blue in color with the blue Star of Life on either side and PARAMEDIC on the shield.
Bay doors rumbled open, hard hands gripped the three-position battery switches, cranked them three clicks:  the German Irishman, as the engineer was known, thrust two fingers into the dash, pressing two black buttons, engaging two starters, turned by two batteries, separate systems to guarantee the truck would absolutely, positively, no excuses guaranteed, start, and start it did:  as the door raised out of the way, the big red Kenworth with gold leaf lettering opened its eyes and gathered its black-rubber legs under it and tasted the night air rolling into the station, ready to run and run hard.
The dispatcher’s voice repeated the call they’d heard while sliding down the pole, while suiting up:  “Vehicle in the water, Carbon Hill Reservoir, Sheriff on scene, swimmer in the water.  Time out zero two thirty.”
A heavy black engineer’s boot mashed down on the Kenworth go pedal and the big Diesel responded with a will.
Fire truck and ambulance rolled into the night, splashing red and white alarm on the Silver Jewel and the Sheriff’s Office as they went, and they also lit up the old-fashioned front of the funeral parlor.
One of the medics looked over at the mortuary and shivered.
Not tonight, Lord, he whispered.  Please, God, not tonight!

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

112.  I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED

 

Will stroked powerfully through the dark water, heading for the flashlight’s beam, for the glow under water that marked headlights still burning.

He cut easily, swiftly, through the water, something Linn envied as he fretted impotently at the brink of the eroded roadway.

He held his light steady, driving the tight beam down, shining on the truck’s tailgate, just visible – just, but no more:  the tail lights glowed dully, headlights made a faint nimbus, maybe too close to the bottom to help –

Will came into the beam, turned.

“TAILGATE!”  he shouted triumphantly.  “GOING DOWN!”

Linn heard the Kenworth roaring in the distance:  at this late hour, there was no traffic, no need for a siren, but the unmistakable sound of that big Diesel engine being run hard carried on the cool night air.

Linn looked to the horizon, hoping to see the responders’ lights, then looked back down at the water.

Will was gone.

 

Will followed the edge of the truck bed, found the door, gripped the door handle.

Locked, part of his mind said.

Will gripped the seat belt cutter by its handle, swung it, drove the weighted, pointed nose into the sideglass, felt it shatter and crumble.

He pulled himself into the cab, up to his waist, squinting:  there was almost no light, but his hands had eyes:  he found the passenger, felt the seat belt, ran his hand diagonally, following the chest belt –

Female, part of his mind registered, as if it were a statistic, as if it were data to be entered on a report:  his hand slid down to the buckle, pushed the release.

He pulled the belt free, grabbed the front of her blouse, braced one hand against the top of the door frame, towed her out into the dark water.
He pulled her free, gripped the top edge of the door, used it to start their ascent.

 

Powerful quartz floodlights were hung over the edge, shining down on the dark water below.

Two medics rappelled down the eroded dirt face, a Stokes basket between then:  they got down to within a foot of water’s edge, braked, staring at the water’s surface.

A head – a hand, a splash –

“THERE!” a man’s voice shouted – it may as well have been every man’s throat that shouted, for every heart quickened, every man felt that surge of adrenaline that comes with the view-halloo – Will brought his head up, slung the water free, took a deep breath:  he towed the limp form with trailing, blond hair to the bank, to the waiting medics:  they lowered the Stokes into the water and he rolled the girl into the waiting wire litter.

Ropes were tied off, a command given, the girl began her steady ascent.

Will turned, stroked back to the truck, took three long, deep, fast breaths, folded like a jackknife and surface dove for the truck’s cab.

 

Later that night, after he’d gone home and taken a shower, after he’d gotten into clean, dry clothes, after he’d set down with firemen, medics, the Sheriff and the ER staff and they had their mandatory debrief, after everyone went back to quarters to get what sleep they could before the sun gripped the horizon and chinned itself up over the mountains again, Will sat with Linn, his hands cupped around the big mug of coffee.

Silence grew long and deep between them, which was not uncommon:  the two were comfortable in their mutual silence, comfortable as only old friends can be, for they were more than blood relatives, they were friends as well.

“I’ll take a look in the catalog,” Linn said at length, taking a noisy sip from his mug.

Will favored him with a curious look.

“Remember when you delivered that baby over on Sawmill Road?”

Will’s eyes smiled a little.

“You were invested with an official pink stork to apply to your cruiser.”

Will nodded.

“I’m not sure the right sticker for a water save … a Scotchlite life ring, maybe?”

Will grunted, took a drink, frowned.

“Always did envy how well you can swim.”

Will quirked an eyebrow.  “Swim?” he grunted.  “I remember the damned zipper wouldn’t work, I recall making the dive and busting the sideglass and I remember gettin’ the two of ‘em to the Stokes basket.”

“You’re a hero, you know.”

Will snorted.

“I’ve known heroes,” he muttered, frowning.  “I ain’t no hero.”

“Town council will pass a resolution, you’ll be presented with an award, you’ll get your picture in the paper.”

Will shook his head.  “All I did was my job.”

Will stopped, blinked, looked at Linn, surprise and realization competing for space in his expression.

“She said I’d swim … she … what the hell did she say?”  Will muttered, frowning, his gaze swinging away, trailing along the baseboard, then he looked back at Linn.

“She … who?”  Linn asked carefully.

Will closed his mouth, shook his head.

“Nobody.”

 

Connie was awake when Linn got home.

He’d been late at work – the curse of being Sheriff – he wasn’t sure if she’d waited up all night or not, and he honestly could not tell.

Connie, bless her, looked as fresh as if she’d had a good uninterrupted night’s rest.

The sun wasn’t up yet, but it wasn’t far behind, he knew; even if he’d not been at the office, he’d have been called for the night’s adventures, and chances are right fair he’d be short on sleep anyway.

The Bear Killer was asleep on the front porch – he’d gone out sometime in the night and didn’t bother scratching to come back in – the Sheriff stopped and sat down on the top step, rubbing the big mountain Mastiff’s head.

“I had a hell of a night,” he almost whispered.

The Bear Killer washed the Sheriff’s under jaw and behind the man’s ear with a practiced industry.

He heard the door open behind him:  The Bear Killer turned, tik-tik-tikked back inside, blunt claws loud on the hardwood floors:  Linn smelled coffee and he stood, and Connie smiled that quiet smile of hers and handed him a mug of coffee.

He took the coffee, then kissed his wife, leaned his forehead on hers.

“Rough night?” she asked quietly.

“Uncle Will saved two kids from drowning.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Oh, hell, Connie, I know everyone in this county!”  Linn complained.  “Two kids who got scared over in Carbon.  Said they heard ghosts singing in the old church.”

Just inside the door, barefoot and big-eyed, Jimmy felt his stomach shrivel and he tasted copper, and it felt like the icy hand of doom itself just grabbed him by the stomach.

He lowered his head, shuffled outside, leaned abruptly back against the front of the house.

“I know about the singing ghosts,” he said in a scared-little-boy voice.

Linn squatted and then sat down cross legged.

“How’s that?” he asked, blowing on the coffee, blowing a big cloud of steam into the chilly air.

Jimmy looked like he was almost ready to cry.

“Please don’t be mad,” he said, almost pleading, then he looked up at Connie and back down to the Sheriff.

“I’m … I was singing and they weren’t supposed to be there and we were singing and it was really pretty and I didn’t mean …”

Jimmy was shivering and he flinched as Linn reached out and very gently cupped his hand around Jimmy’s elbow.

“Tell me what happened,” he whispered.

Jimmy swallowed hard, wet his lips, nodded.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

113. “SING WITH ME, JIMMY”

 

 

Linn listened to the frightened boy’s explanation, looked at his wife, looked back at the boy.

He drank half the mug on one breath, rubbed his face, considered what had transpired this night, and now he was given what was supposed to be the cause.

“Jimmy,” he said, “how was the church when you left it?”

Jimmy blinked.  “I didn’t draw it,” he admitted, “but I can.  Just …”

Linn nodded.  “Go on.”

“It’s … it’s pretty.  There’s statues an’ everything an’ lots of colors.  I can draw it but …”

He blinked, considering, then blinked again and looked up at the Sheriff.

“I can show you.”

“You can show me?”
Jimmy nodded. 

“Why not,” Linn sighed.  “The night’s shot.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Jimmy offered hopefully.

“It’ll be Saturday before we get back,” Linn smiled crookedly.  “Get dressed.”

“Can I come too?”  Connie asked.

Linn nodded tiredly.

“I’ll get us saddled.”

Less than twenty minutes later, husband, wife, son and infant set out for Carbon Hill, cutting across the back pasture and steering a course they all knew well.

Linn moved easily with his Appaloosa, eyes busy:  he always felt better setting a saddle, he always got a second wind when his legs were wrapped around a good horse’s barrel:  he took a long, appreciative breath of the cool, predawn air, considered that maybe this was the right way to unwind after the night’s excitement.

Jimmy rode abreast of his Mama, looking around, eyes big and interested:  he looked at little Wesley in his papoose carrier, he saw Connie turn her face toward him and smile that patient Mommy-smile he was coming to love so much.

He looked toward the East, toward the lightening sky:  it was almost a melon color, more to the yellow, and he knew they wouldn’t have to worry about rain that day:  there was a good dew on the ground, which also argued for a dry day.

He blinked and smiled secretively to himself, for he recalled it was the Sheriff who taught him that.

Jimmy looked off to his right and took in a breath.

Jimmy was riding his big Stomper-horse, the tall, draft-bred warmblood gelding he loved so well, a horse bigger than most.

Off to his right, just shy of the woodline, another horse, every bit as big as his, maybe bigger, and black.

Shining, healthy, muscle-rippling, gleaming, black.

He looked ahead, looked to see if the Sheriff, his Sheriff, was seeing this.

The Sheriff was looking ahead.

He hadn’t seen it.

Jimmy looked again, delight flooding his young heart.

It’s her, he thought, it’s her, it’s really her!

Connie looked to her left, frowned a little, her head tilted in curiosity.

She, too, looked ahead to see if her husband – normally alert, normally observant – saw the newcomer in her port side.

He was looking ahead, looking toward the dried-up, falling-down ghost town that still wore the name of Carbon Hill.

She looked to her left again, saw a tall man with a broad hat, a man absolutely at home in the saddle, a man who looked almost frighteningly familiar.

Maybe it’s his Uncle Will, she thought, they do look so much alike, and felt a tick of womanly worry behind her breastbone, for part of her knew just as sure as the sun crowding the lightening horizon that it wasn’t Uncle Will approaching on a copper-colored mare.

Linn drew up at the culvert, the high place where the four wheel drive had gone airborne in its haste to leave town.

He frowned, studied the story ripped from the hard packed dirt road.

He turned in the saddle, saw a man he’d seen before riding a horse he’d seen before.

Linn’s jaw eased forward a little and he nodded, once, and the lean older man with the iron grey mustache nodded once in reply.

He turned – a movement, at the edge of his peripheral – his jaw took a hard set and he nodded again.

A pale eyed young woman in a riding-outfit raised her crop in salute, just touching the brim of her gleaming top hat with its black-velvet ribbons trailing behind:  she rode erect, sidesaddle, as if she were the Queen herself, riding out to inspect the troops.

Connie’s paint walked up beside Apple-horse, Jimmy beside her:  Old Pale Eyes took his place on the left, and Sarah, on the right:  five mounted figures looked down at what used to be Carbon Hill.

They didn’t see the ruin it had become; gone were the screaming ruts newly dug into the dirt, gone were scattered beer cans, gone were buildings dried out and half rotted and mostly collapsed.

They saw Carbon Hill in the dawn’s first red rays, and it looked new.

Rough sawed timbers glowed yellow-red where they weren’t painted, and signs and trim, painted and fresh, looked like they’d barely dried.

The saloon, the general store across from it, the company store – the biggest building in town – there were miners and merchants, there were women out early to do their marketing the moment the Mercantile opened, others going into the company store to buy supplies with miner’s scrip because they didn’t have money this deep in the month.

Loaded wagons rumbled and creaked, big draft horses and draft mules plodded in their traces, and the five riders assumed an arrowhead formation and rode down the middle of the street.

The town marshal’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the new arrivals.

All but the boy were wearing sidearms.

He looked at the man on the far end, a pale eyed fellow he knew well, and nodded, once, slowly, and Old Pale Eyes nodded back at Law and Order Harry Macfarland.

They continued down the street, Jimmy marveling wide-eyed at a Carbon Hill he’d never seen, a Carbon Hill that was alive – it was a living, breathing community – he looked beyond the last building, to the stacks that drove smoke into the air – he heard the steady chuff, chuff, chuff of a steam engine, then he heard its exhaust sharpen, bark, crack, almost, as the load came on it – and somehow he knew it was turning a massive winch, hauling a ton of brown coal out of a vertical shaft, the only vertical shaft in the mining complex:  the other mines were horizontal digs, boring into the side of the mountain.

Jimmy leaned forward, his eyes big and excited:  “There!”  he pointed.  “There!”

Linn raised a hand and called a musical, two-note “Hoo-ooo!” – it sounded like he was singing “Whoah,” or so it seemed to the boy:  he had no way of knowing that Old Pale Eyes had done this very thing, any number of times, and perhaps there is a very deep memory that travels with the blood, travels to the next generation, and the next:  it was the same gesture, the same command, the same call that the original Linn Keller had used when he was a cavalry officer in That Damned War.

Five riders halted.

Five riders dismounted – well, the men dismounted first.

Linn went to Connie, raised his arms:  Connie leaned forward, into his grip, laughing a little, for he’d taken such delight in dismounting her in just this way when they were both much younger.

Old Pale Eyes went over and raised big and callused hands in the identical manner, and Sarah leaned forward, surrendering her weight to the familiar strength of the man she’d adored as a child and never saw fit to change ever since.

Jimmy waited patiently for his Sheriff to fetch him out of the saddle.

The man with the greying handlebar gripping his waist wasn’t his Pa.

Old Pale Eyes turned and looked at the boy, pale eyes crinkled up with pleasure, and he said “Now you look familiar,” and gripped the lad around the belt and hauled him out of the hurricane deck.

Jimmy’s laugh and Wesley’s happy squeal merged delightfully on the morning air, Wesley reaching out towards The Pretty Lady, who came up to the lad and took his hand in a delicate, gloved, thumb-and-forefinger grip.

“Now if you aren’t a fine young man!” she cooed, and Wesley squealed again, arms flailing up and down with delight.

Jimmy took one man’s hand, the other’s:  “This way,” he said anxiously, pulling them toward the church.  “Let me show you!”

Pale eyes turned and looked into pale eyes, two tall men saw the other’s eyes tighten a little at the corners, then they went at a rapid walk with the lad toward the church’s double doors.

“Gentlemen,” a feminine voice said, stopping the trio as effectively as a stone wall.

“I believe,” Sarah said primly, “it’s ladies first.”

Linn looked at Linn and both men looked down at Jimmy.

“I reckon,” Old Pale Eyes said, “she’s right.”

They released Jimmy’s hands, gripped the twisted-iron, hand-forged handles, pulled.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Sarah smiled:  she gave Connie a long-lashed look, nodding her in first, then swept in after her.

Linn looked at Old Pale Eyes as Jimmy scampered in after the women.

“Why do I get the feelin’ she has something in mind?” he muttered, and saw the tightening of amusement at the corners of the older lawman’s eyes.

“I reckon because you’re right.”

Both men reached up, removed their Stetsons, stepped in, drew the heavy timber doors shut behind them.

 

Chief of Police Will Keller threw his covers back, muttered his way to an upright position, growled his way to the bathroom:  he cussed with every step between handwashing and pouring himself a mug of stale coffee, most heartily profaning early mornings, long nights, jumpy kids, idiot drivers and the demands of an old man’s bladder, not necessarily in that order.

He set the mug in the microwave, hit 2, turned and squinted out the window.

“Not even sunup.”

He coughed, reached into the fridge, brought out the last of a quart of milk.

“Meant to get some,” he grunted.  “Hell with it.”

The microwave dinged, he drizzled the last of the milk into the coffee, drank.

It tasted awful.

He didn’t care.

He sighed, snarled his way back to his bedroom, found a pair of socks that matched, muttered something about a minor miracle right there:  jeans, boots and a flannel shirt, and he snatched the ballcap from its hook, shoved it on his head.

“Now,” he snapped at his reflection, “let’s go see about them singing ghosts!”

 

Jimmy waited until the pale eyed lawmen were seated:  each man had gone to one knee, crossed himself out of respect for another man’s church, risen, sidled into the handmade pew, the older man closer to the aisle.

Jimmy scampered up to him, reached in a pocket.

“I finished your watch,” he said anxiously, his voice shivering a little with anticipation.

“Why, thank you, son,” Old Pale Eyes rumbled, accepting the timepiece.

Linn looked at the watch, blinked, looked again, reached into his own vest pocket, hooked out an identical, hunter cased, nickel plated watch with a locomotive engraved on its cover.

Both men pressed the stem at the same moment.

Old Pale Eyes was silent for a very long moment as he studied the very lifelike, very detailed, utterly perfect, hand painted miniature portrait inside the Hunter case of his watch.

Linn looked at the painting inside his own watch, looked at the one the lean old lawman held, raised an eyebrow:  quietly, unobtrusively, he closed the case, slipped it back into his vest pocket.

“I hope you like it,” Jimmy said tentatively, almost hopefully.

The pale eyed lawman with the iron grey mustache nodded slowly. 

“I do, son.  That is a fine job and I thank you for that.”  He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a double eagle, handed it to the boy.  “Thank you.”

“Jimmy,” The Pretty Lady said, touching his shoulder, “sing with me.”

He looked up at her, smiled shyly, then nodded.

She put her hand between his shoulder blades and the pair walked toward the ornate, hand-carved altar with its gold altar furniture, flanked by its painted plaster statues of the Holy Family.

“Just like we practiced,” The Pretty Lady said, and Jimmy nodded.

She placed one hand between his shoulder blades, one hand flat on his chest, and the two turned round, once, quickly.

 

Will Keller had toured Europe, courtesy Uncle Sam, when he was a young man.

He took advantage of the guided tours offered in the old European cities, marveling at their architecture, the sense of age, the beauty of centuries that remained in spite of modern changes.

He’d had occasion to attend a number of churches, to gaze in awe at several cathedrals, imagining what it must have been like to carve stone and shape stone and finish stone and then to hoist it an ungodly distance above the ground and set it in place.

He’d done a little stone work and he knew how easy it wasn’t.

His travels took him to Vienna, and he traded schedules with another officer so he could attend the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

He’d worn his class A uniform to attend; there was no way he would attend such excellent work in casual attire.

It may have been unbecoming for an officer to be seen in public with tears on his face, but Will honestly did not give a good damn what anyone thought; the sheer beauty of the Choir brought water from his eyes and humility to his heart, and when the audience rose to its feet to applaud, he stood, tall and unashamed, with saltwater running down both cheeks.

He’d stopped in surprise at the sight of doors on the ruin of a church.

Part of the back wall still stood, the sides were reduced to sagging framing; rubble within was all there was – but the front doors stood, solid, strong, looking very nearly …

… new.

The word whispered itself into the ear of his consciousness.

Will stopped, stared at the doors, and then he heard it.

Voices?

Two women …

no …

two boys?

It sounded like two young boys singing in the high register that only the well-trained, prepubescent male can manage …

Will seized the wrought-iron, twisted-metal handles, pulled.

The heavy doors swung easily toward him.

Ahead, directly ahead, at the ornate Altar, a nun, and a boy in a tan monk’s robe:  the nun wore all white, and her face was entirely covered by what looked like a white silk scarf, a modest veil he’d heard about, somewhere.

The boy in the monk’s robe held the nun’s hands and looked up at her with innocent and adoring eyes.

They sang.

The doors closed silently behind the Chief of Police and he blinked, his eyes stinging, for their voices were blending in a flawless harmony, and Will was reminded at once of that magical night in Vienna, and of seagulls soaring on a steady breeze, hovering magically over blue ocean and golden sand, the sun shining through porcelain wings …

That’s what their voices sound like, Will thought.

They sound the way soaring gulls look, shining on a shore breeze.

Each man had heard the Ave sung before; none had ever heard it so beautifully.

Connie pretended not to notice when all three lean-waisted, pale-eyed lawmen wiped their eyes a few times.

The song ended, its echoes thrilling in the church for several moments before remaining only in the memories of those few souls who sat the pews this morning.

The nun turned, slipped her hands in her sleeves, as if addressing a class.

“Carbon Hill,” she said, her voice firm and clear, “was a center for mining the brown coal found in the region.  Wet coal, it was sometimes called, and the good black bituminous from back East was much preferred, if you could get it.

“The miners were imported from back East, generally European hard rock miners who sometimes stayed, and sometimes moved on to gold mining, believing they could find a fortune.  Those who didn’t, returned and mined coal again.

“For the most part, these people were Catholic, and so the Carbon Hill church was a Catholic church.  There was a Protestant church as well, but we remember this one.” 

She paused, as if to gather her thoughts before continuing.

“What was heard last night was … us.  We two.  We sang for the joy of singing.  I never knew Brother James had such a voice.”  Her hand caressed the grinning, red-eared and pink-faced lad’s head, as if caressing a favorite child. 

“I very much regret that our late night visitors chose to run instead of enter.”

“Were the doors there?”  Will asked, rising, tucking his ballcap under his arm as formally as if it were his uniform milkman cap.

“They were not.”

Will nodded.

“I should like to borrow Brother James from time to time,” the Faceless Nun said.

“Seems like you’ve been doing that right along regular,” Linn said.

“Does for a fact,” Old Pale Eyes agreed.

“Yes I have,” came the reply, and they could hear the smile hidden behind the veil, “and we’ve had such a marvelous time of it!”

She turned, took both Jimmy’s hands, and the two spun again, and suddenly the adults found they had to catch themselves and stand, for the pew they’d been sitting on, was no more:  they were in what could politely be described as the utter ruin of a church.

The Pretty Lady and Jimmy – no longer in clerical garb – picked their way back to the adults.

Will found himself facing the same individual he’d accused of being a demon, the same one he’d tried to knife in the front seat of his Crown Vic.

Her expression was too polite to be amusement, but too secret not to be:  she said, “There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than all your science can explain.”

“Yeah,” he said uncertainly.  “I reckon so.”

The Pretty Lady clapped her hands briskly together.  “I’m hungry.  Who’s for breakfast?  I understand the Silver Jewel has an excellent board!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

114.  THE COLORS OF WATER

 

They rode toward the reservoir, toward road’s end, toward the story engraved in dirt tracks and gouges in the edge of the breakoff.

Jimmy looked down at the water below with the innocent expression of a little boy who wasn’t terribly impressed with what he saw.

Linn and Will saw painted wood floating over at the edge of the water, each of them turning and saying “Look down there” – and then laughing, for they’d spoken the same words in exactly the same manner.

They three were alone here, where the road was swept away by erosion and running water; their pale eyed companions were nowhere to be found once they turned and pushed out the heavy, solid doors – as a matter of fact, when they turned around, the doors themselves weren’t there anymore, nor was the beautiful, clean interior of the old church.

Jimmy’s head was on a swivel as they rode down what used to be a main street; he looked at what used to be buildings, and he remembered what they looked like when they were riding in the other direction.

“Sheriff?”  he asked tentatively.

Linn looked over, a smile hinting in the corners of his eyes.  “Yes, Jimmy?”

“Sheriff, if we rode the other way like we did coming in, would we see what we saw?”

Linn leaned back in the saddle; Apple-horse stopped, turned easily.  “I don’t know.  Let’s find out.”

Connie turned her mare as well, and they rode back to the old church, and its graveyard.

Linn’s eyes automatically went to a particular grave, and as usual, there were very well cleaned out tin cans on it, neatly stacked in a very precise row.

“I’ll leave you more,” Linn said to the wind, and the wind whispered something back, something only he could hear.

Jimmy’s expression was one of genuine disappointment.

“I wanted to see it nice again,” he complained.

“I liked seeing it like that,” Connie said.  “I didn’t know Carbon was ever nice.  I’ve only known it like this.”

They rode back out of town, and followed the road’s right fork, Will maintaining a reserved silence:  he swallowed a lump in his throat, for he’d come over here with his boy, when his Nicodemus was Jimmy's age, and they’d speculated together on how it must have looked:  Will pointed out the cinder bed where the steam boilers stood, he squatted in the dirt and drew with a stick, drew a rough diagram of the winch mechanism, of the tipple and conveyor and pickin’ shack where gob and rock were picked out of the coal dumped on the broad, segmented, steadily moving belt.

Will closed his eyes and remembered Nicodemus, as a little boy, and how his voice was very much like Jimmy's.

They rode across the humped-over culvert and up the road and up the right fork, always uphill, uphill, until they overlooked the reservoir, until both lawmen spotted floating, painted wood.

They’d found the sawhorses.

The truck had already been winched out.

“How much you want to bet,” Linn speculated, “our diving driver scarfed up those sawhorses himself?”

“I’ll find out,” Will muttered.  “They’re keeping them in hospital a couple of days.  Understand they’re afraid of pneumonia.”

Linn nodded, studied the shoreline.

“I make two … two long boards and three A-frames.  Were the sawhorses double ended or were they A-framed on one end and the long board just triangled down?”

“They were both double ended.”

“Likely it’s there somewhere.”  He squinted a little, followed the shoreline, smiled just a little.

“I spy.”

Will nodded, grunted.

“Reckon we can get down there?”

“Without gettin’ all wet?”  Linn laughed.  “I reckon we can find us a way!”

“Can I come?”  Jimmy asked hopefully.

Linn turned his Apple-horse, looked squarely at the boy, then stepped his stallion close enough their stirrups nearly touched.

“Jimmy,” he said frankly, “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have with me!”

Jimmy’s grin was instant and so broad it threatened to run three times around his young face.

 

A gloved hand reached into a cloth sack, withdrew a stamped metal box, hinged along its long edge.

The hand disappeared into the sack again, came out with a clutch of brushes, some heavier paper:  these were placed on Jimmy’s desk, the watercolors and brushes arranged neatly, precisely.

There was the sound of a woman’s delicate heels, retreating across the hardwood floor, then the door opened, and the door closed, and the house was silent once more.

 

Linn rode Apple-horse around the lower side of the reservoir.

“There is a path,” he said slowly, “if I recall aright …”
Jimmy turned Stomper a little to the right, took him several steps down stream, then turned him and gave him a quick little nudge.

The big warmblood gelding leaped easily across the sparkling run without touching horseshoe nor hoof to the running waters.

Jimmy looked up, looked after the broad shoulders of his Sheriff, rather pleased that he’d gotten Stomper across the water without stepping in it.

He’d heard his Sheriff’s chief deputy tell someone that it was a mark of respect that one did not step in a stream, that his people took pains not to offend the spirit of the waters.

Jimmy wasn’t sure about spirits of the waters, whatever they were, but he knew what it was to respect someone’s belief, and he did so now.

Pale eyes saw this, and a greying head nodded approvingly, and Will Keller considered that if character was doing what was right when nobody was looking, and Jimmy didn’t know he was watching … why, the lad was every bit as decent as Will had originally thought, and that pleased the older man.

Linn rode out onto a short, sandy slope:  the boards were close enough to get with a quick toss of the loop on his lariat:  two A-frames and their long boards, the third A-frame, and then he disappeared into the brush, emerging after ten minutes with the fourth, carried in his off hand.

“A hundred per cent recovery,” he declared.  “Do you reckon we’d ought best set these back up?”

Will leaned his weight on his crisscrossed palms on the saddle horn, easing the weight off his back, pushing up with his arms until something in his spine popped twice.

“Yep,” he gasped.  “Reckon so.”

 

For all that young Wesley was content to sleep on his Mama’s back, secure in his papoose board, he was happy and energetic when Connie wanted to fix a meal, and so Will volunteered to ride herd on the lad, taking him by the hand and walking with him.

“He does right well walking,” Will said approvingly.

Linn nodded, grinning.

“Let me show you something,” he said, squatting in front of the happy, grinning lad in the blue corduroy bib overalls and flannel shirt.

Wesley squealed with delight, reached for his Da.

Linn stood, stepped quickly behind his boy, reached down with index and middle fingers stuck out:  Wesley gripped these and strutted across the floor, dear old Dad penguin walking along with him.

They turned and Linn worked one finger free, so Wes was hanging onto just one finger, chubby fists and both arms overhead, a cherubic grin on his young face.

Linn came halfway across the living room, stopped; he reached into a vest pocket, brought out two clothes pins, held these:  Wesley gripped the clothes pins and Linn marched him around the periphery of the living room, until he and Wes were at the farthest point from the delighted Uncle Will.

Linn turned and took one step – but only one step – back toward Will … and he let go of the clothes pins.

Wes happily strutted across the living room, both arms overhead, squealing happily, until he suddenly stopped, blinked, looked up … and sat down.

Uncle and father both laughed and converged on the lad, picking him up and setting his miniature cowboy boots on the floor and telling him “Walk again, Wes.”

Connie smiled as she listened to the men making fools, and damn fools, of themselves with the laughing little boy, and she knew that by the time she got the meal prepared, little Wesley Albert would be happily charging across the living room, arms overhead, gripping a pair of nonexistent clothespins, while the two men stood grinning and watching the sight.

 

Jimmy carefully placed the clear plastic cup of water on his desk.

He’d worked with water colors before and he’d found he could do stuff with the pigments he couldn’t do with a pencil – but he still loved his pencils, they were definite and unambiguous … but what he had in mind would combine the reality of pencil lines with the pigmented ambiguity of a water washed landscape.

He frowned with concentration, his pencil busy, and the ruined street of Carbon Hill emerged from his knife-whittled, eraserless pencil, a pencil manufactured in the 1880s and sold to a little boy and a pretty young woman in a shop in Denver, more than a century before.

Jimmy’s concentration was absolute; when he was bringing something to reality on the page before him, he was very hard to distract, and only the fact that his Mama’s cooking was really, really good, and it smelled absolutely, positively wonderful, did he lay down his pencil and mentally file what he intended to produce, and as he usually did, after he ate he immediately went back to his work.

That night, as the paper lay drying on his desk, a gloved hand brought it off the newspaper on which it was evaporating:  careful hands brought it up, pale eyes regarded his work, a woman’s head nodded slowly, for it was Carbon Hill as he remembered it.

It was Carbon Hill as it was – dirty, broken, crumbled, in shades of grey and lead … and rising, ghostly and ephemeral, in the colors he remembered, Carbon Hill as it used to be.

It was the main street they’d ridden that morning.

Gloved hands placed the damp paper very carefully back onto the newsprint, but a little to the side, so an article’s title could be read.

When Connie went into Jimmy’s room the next morning, she stopped and tilted her head a little to the side, her hand rising involuntarily to her mouth.

Beside Jimmy’s ghostly watercolor, as if intended by an unseen hand, the article titled “CARBON HILL:  WHAT WAS IT LIKE?”

She looked over at the sleeping lad, then back at his superimposed pencil sketch and watercolor painting.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

115.  “BECAUSE I’M OLD, SON"”

 

Will’s breath was cold in his throat, he felt himself shivering, fine whole-body shivers that almost vibrated, only he was too busy running, skidding, ducking behind cover.

It started out such a lovely sunny morning, at least until he saw a familiar car, one he’d intended to stop because it looked like the driver was selling something – drugs, most likely – a customer would come up, a quick exchange, the customer would slouch off – but the car got away, got around a corner and was gone before Will could get into gear and give pursuit.

He didn’t want to scare him off … he wanted to catch him.

Will slipped out of the silver Crown Vic, shut the door quietly, hit the unlock:  he’d had the unlock custom programmed so that’s all it did – just locked, or unlocked, no horn, no lights, just the solid klunk of twelve volt solenoids.

He ran, light, on the balls of his feet, ran down the alley, stopped just short of the building’s edge, stopped and took a long breath, blew it out, glanced at the window, swore because light conditions didn’t let him use it for a mirror.

He squatted, took off his uniform eight-point cap, peeked around the corner.

There he was.

This time he was out of the car and it looked like a sizable buy:  one fellow had an open briefcase, a baggie of something white in one hand, the other had two bundles of greenbacks in his hand, and each had the predatory look of someone who was convinced the other was going to try to skin him out of his eye teeth.

Will reached down, his hand wrapping around the revolver’s rubber grips, the thumb break releasing easily:  blued steel emerged from suede leather lining without a sound and Will came around the corner fast, a double handful of .357 Magnum thrust out before him:  “BOTH OF YOU FREEZE RIGHT THERE!  SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!  SHOW ME YOUR HANDS, DO IT NOW!”

The pair turned to face him – he expected that.

One dropped the baggie of powder – it hit the ground, burst open.

He expected that.

He didn’t expect the driver to pull a pistol, shoot the other dealer in the gut, then turn the gun toward Will and squeeze off a fast burst.

Will fired once, ducked back around the corner.

He looked behind him, thought about running down the alley, around the building and back up the other side.

Too long, he thought, came back around the corner, down on one knee –

He saw the door slam shut and a coughing shot of black smoke blast out of the exhaust, then …

Then the engine stalled.

Will surged to his feet, came up behind the car, took a careful sight on the driver through back window glass.

“TURN OFF THE IGNITON!” he yelled, “THROW THE KEYS AND THE GUN OUT THE WINDOW OR I WILL SHOOT YOU DEAD!”

The engine caught, the driver turned around, fired through the back window.

Will fired once.

The driver dropped the gun, the engine began screaming and so did the driver.

Will circled around, circled to the passenger side, keeping his gun muzzle trained on the dealer –

Bullets began spanging around him, funny whacking noises as the wild spray punched into siding and adobe and the whistling whine of ricochets and Will turned and saw another just like the driver, same color jacket, same bandanna around his head, screaming “DRIVE, MUTHA! GET UP HERE AND PICK ME UP!”

He raised the pistol and began blasting again, a desperate, staccato, to-whom-it-may-concern with absolutely no regard for who or what may be behind the police chief.

Will ducked behind a rainbarrel, heard slugs whizz by overhead and three chug into wooden staves, then silence.

Will leaned over to his left, took a sight, fired once.

He never heard the report of his own revolver and for a moment he wondered who was shooting his gun, then he realized he had a perfect sight picture and he’d placed the front sight on the other dealer’s face and he released his finger and the trigger swung forward and he brought a little tension on the narrow grooved steel and the second dealer collapsed like a baggie of ground meat.

He turned, rose, walked over to the car, the business end of his .357 taking a long look at the first dealer’s head.

Will stood outside the shot-out window.

“Turn it off,” he said, his voice harsh in his own ears.

“Man,” the dealer whined, “why you shoot me?”

“Because I’m old,” Will growled.

The holdup coughed blood, his head dropped, slowly, and he collapsed onto the console.

Will pulled the revolver back, turned left, turned right, scanning round about, cussing himself for not seeing that second attacker, the one that came pretty damned close to hitting him.

Will opened the cylinder, rolled the muzzle up, smacked the ejector rod – hard – then rolled the muzzle down, dumped in the speedloader of fresh rounds, not remembering having unsnapped and drawn it but there it was in his hand and he twisted the knob and closed the cylinder, shearing off the speedloader and letting it hit the ground just like he’d trained and trained and trained again.

He holstered his revolver, made fast the thumb break, reached up to his lapel, gripped the speakermike that connected with a curly cord to the heavy talkie on his belt.

He fumbled with the speakermike for a moment, finally found the top mounted, rubber covered push-to-talk bar, pressed it.

“Firelands Dispatch, PD One.”

There was no little pop when he released it.

He looked around, then went around to the driver’s side of the car, opened the door, reached in.

He felt the driver’s neck, found the Adam’s apple, dropped his finger to the side, pressed, searching for a pulse.

Nothing.

He withdrew, straightened, looked down, swore.

The curly cord on his speaker mike was parted.

About three curls were still attached to the mike, the rest hung down to about his knees from the top of the boxy Motorola five-watt with the black rubber antenna.

Will popped the snap off the talkie, unscrewed the curly cord, pulled it out and dropped it, raised the talkie and pressed the side button.

“Dispatch, this is PD One.”

 

Chief of Police Will Keller was twin brother to the legendary Willamina Keller, late Sheriff of Firelands County and mother to the current Sheriff.

Like his sister, Will had pale eyes and a definite sense that people hadn’t ought to do unlawful things in his jurisdiction, unless the law was stupid, or he wanted to make an exception.

In her time, Willamina had gone into the Spring Inn – while it was still in business – she’d gone in wearing jeans and boots and a broad Stetson instead of her usual tailored business suit dress and heels, she’d gone in with rifle in hand, she’d taken a water glass full of distilled amber detonation, downed it with one long breath, slammed the empty glass to the table and shouted “I SENT ANOTHER ONE TO HELL TODAY!” and then walked out.

Will knew he would not be wise to imitate his dead sister’s example; lawyers were forever looking for something to hold against an honest man, and such a thing would be grist for a shyster’s money hungry mill.

No, Will turned the investigation over to the Sheriff’s office:  his people were well trained but so were the Sheriff’s deputies, and he was content to let them handle this shots-fired investigation.

Will held up all right through all the questions, the phone calls, the public comments; he was circumspect in his replies, parsimonious with his words:  in fact, it wasn’t until Jimmy crawled up on his lap like he did when Will came to visit, and he asked in that scared-little-boy’s voice, “Uncle Will, did you shoot that bad man?” and he said gently, “Yes, Jimmy, I sure as hell did.”

Jimmy looked up with those big sincere eyes and said “How come?” and his Uncle Will laughed a little and said “Because I’m old, son.  Old men tend to shoot back and I did.”

Jimmy dropped his head against his Uncle Will’s chest and thought for a moment, then he looked up and said “I’m glad you’re old, Uncle Will.  That means you’re alive.”

Will laughed quietly and hugged the lad and took a long breath, laughed again.

“I’m glad too, Jimmy,” he said quietly.  “I’m glad too.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

116. “I COULD BE RUDE”

 

Linn kissed his wife and she handed him their year old bundle of squeal and grab, and sure enough Wesley grinned a big wide baby grin and grabbed his Da’s mustache and pulled.

Linn grunted and laughed, grimacing at the pain and chuckling at the spontaneous innocence of his get, and he managed to get the surprisingly strong grip from around his left hand handlebar.

Wesley looked at his chubby little hand, rubbing his fingers together, his pink, scrubbed-clean face running swiftly through the several emotions of a little child suddenly unsure of what to make of a hand suddenly coated with mustache wax:  he solved his youthful conundrum by chewing on his palm, and Linn laughed again, reaching up and reshaping the handlebar with a quick sweep and a twist.

“I’m meeting Bruce’s daughter this morning,” he said, “so the gossip net will likely spread the word fast that your scoundrel of a husband is seein’ a younger woman.”

Connie laughed, hugged him quickly, kissed him again: “You scoundrel,” she laughed, “now go forth and ruin your reputation!”

Linn shook his head in mock sorrow, turning and settling the Stetson on his short haircut as he crossed the threshold: “Trust me to cause trouble,” he quavered in his best imitation of a crotchety-old-man’s voice, and then he turned back:  “Jimmy, could you fetch me that satchel off my chair, please?”

Jimmy turned, scampered for His Sheriff’s chair, seized the brown, ribbon-tied expanding file, scampered back, boots loud on the hardwood floor:  he handed it to the Sheriff with a grin and the Sheriff grinned back and winked.

Jimmy watched His Sheriff drive off, then he reached down and rubbed The Bear Killer – the great Tibetan Mountain Mastiff with fangs long as a man’s hand, jaws that could crush a man’s knee, descended from those fearsome Oriental lion-hearted war dogs bred to protect an entire village, a dog big enough for seven year old Jimmy to ride without his legs touching the ground – this blooded warrior, who’d gone to war beside the Sheriff, who knew the taste of man-blood, hot and fresh, who knew what it was to bear an enemy to earth and deliver a crushing bite and to stand over the carcass and howl victory, this Bear Killer responded to the unexpected touch by rolling over on his back and waving his forelegs, begging a belly rub.

Linn strode into The Silver Jewel, eyes busy as they always were:  the moment he came through the doors, he looked up the stairs, then down and to the right, smiled at the girl behind the hotel’s counter – she was universally known as Tilly, just as the chief cook in their kitchen was Daisy, never mind their actual names – a quick glance across that part of the bar that could be seen, and he swept the dining room, all this with his left-to-right sweep:  another step, his gaze swung back to the left, this time across the back half of the room, across the little stage with its thick burgundy curtains (genuine asbestos, if you please!) and a third step allowed his left-looking-gaze swing down the length of the bar and down the hallway that led past the stage door, past the back stairway access, past Daisy’s kitchen on the left and to the back door.

A third step and his head turned back to the right and he resumed a normal man’s thought processes and manner, or at least part of him did.

He’d learned the hard way to keep part of his mind watchful, part of his mind suspicious, part of his mind looking for the catch, for the trap, for the Sunday punch, and that habitual paranoia was the only reason the man was alive, three times over.

He certainly did not expect anything unpleasant, not here, not in his Silver Jewel, not in this hub of the community’s life.

Like the tavern of eras past, like the saloon of the American West, if you wanted to know something about the area, if you wanted to know something of a local personage, this was the place to go, here was where the answer could be found, and today one of Firelands’ own was coming home, and Linn was quite pleased to hear it.

Just as the chief cook was known as Daisy, the wait staff were known as Daisy’s girls:  the story was well known of the original Daisy, wife of the great mountain of a red-headed Irish fire chief, and she with the same red hair and legendary temper:  it was said Daisy brought the Silver Jewel’s original owner, Dirty Sam, to the floor more than once with a hard-swung frying pan, and this cachet of authority extended through time to the modern day, and no one – no one! – crossed Daisy.

It simply Was Not Done.

For the same reason, Daisy’s girls were treated courteously, at least by the locals, and if an outsider chose to be rude, crude or socially unacceptable, it was a matter of record that the constabulary would turn a blind eye to said less than polite folk as they went flying out the double doors of the Silver Jewel, slung into the outer world as a rebuke for their discourtesy.

In point of fact it took a bit to irritate the locals, but once the threshold was reached, Tillie was out of her chair and holding the door open, Mr. Baxter was swinging the bung starter in his good right hand, ready to come around the bar and lay about the Philistines with the jawbone of an Osage-orange-root bung starting maul.

History lay thick about the shoulders of the Silver Jewel, like unto a thick, warm cloak, and as the long tall lawman with a lean waist and a mustache going to iron grey strode into its dining room, he winked at Tillie, nodded to Mr. Baxter behind the bar, and headed for the one particular table he favored, the one in back, the one where he could sit with his back to a wall, where he could park his rifle in the corner and hang his Stetson on the peg overhead, as had his Mama, as had her thrice-great-grandfather, as historically had the lawmen of the region.

Daisy’s girl came swinging back – she always walked like that, taking advantage of her full skirt, a shameless sashay intended to flirt with every man there:  it was ever her habit to lay a hand on a male diner’s shoulder and call him Honey or Darlin’ or something of the kind, especially the older diners:  few things warm an older man’s heart than the kind attentions of an attractive younger woman, and this translated into better tips, and of course Daisy’s girl liked the prospect of more money in her apron pocket at day’s end.

Linn parked both his Stetson and his Winchester before finally parking his carcass, settling back and twisting a little until something popped in his back:  he sighed with pleasure, looked up and smiled as the waitress came bearing down on him with her usual sassy grin.

“Why hello, darlin’,” he greeted her, “and how’s your pulse a-beatin’ today?”

“Why Sheriff, honey,” she teased him right back, “my heart just goes pitty-pat a-seein’ you again!”

Linn laughed.  “Flattery,” he declared, “will get you everywhere!”

The waitress sat across from him, her face suddenly serious.

“Sheriff,” she whispered, “thank you.”

He blinked.  “What did I do now?”  he asked, trying to look innocent and not quite succeeding.

She colored a little, dropped her gaze shyly, bit her bottom lip, looked up again.

“I got the scholarship,” she whispered.

Linn grinned – broadly, quickly – he leaned forward a little, forearms on the edge of the table.  “I reckon you earned it, dear heart.  You’ve always been good at what you do.”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance,” she admitted.  “Your recommendation did it.  Thank you for that.”

Linn nodded, reached into his vest, pulled out a fat envelope, slid across the table to her.

“Scholarship or not,” he said, “college is expensive.”

Her jaw dropped at the sight of the thick yellow envelope.

“There is ten thousand dollars.  Here are my terms and conditions.”

His eyes were pale and bored through her dark blue eyes and drove into her very soul.

“First, I want you to get the most out of your college education.  You alone can determine how that is done, and to what degree.

“Second, I want you to use your good common sense.  You’ve always conducted yourself as a lady and I cherish that in a woman, and I have no doubt at all that you will continue.”

He reached across the table and took her hands gently in his, squeezed her hands the way a father will when he’s about to say goodbye to a daughter.

“Third, dear heart, today is your birthday and …”

He stopped, swallowed, bit his lip, looked away.

Oh my God, she thought, feeling suddenly as uncertain as if the universe itself shivered on its stony foundation, is he going to cry on me?

“You already know I have a daughter,” he said slowly, “and I knew your father, rest his soul, and I told him I would tell you this on your birthday.”

He looked at her and she blinked quickly, feeling suddenly all stirred up inside.

“Now that you have reached the age of consent,” he said, his voice low and intense … “now that you’ve reached the age of consent, darlin’, please don’t!”

She blinked, she laughed, she dropped her head:  she looked up, bit her lip again, nodded.

“Thank you,” she squeaked, then she snatched up the envelope, thrust it in her apron pocket, came around the table and gave the Sheriff a quick, impulsive hug.  “Thank you!”

He rose, hugged her back, remembering when he hugged his little girl for the last time, hugged her at Langley Air Force Base, held her for a very long time, crushing her to him, and he realized he missed his daughter more than he realized.

He released the cute little hash slinger with the damp eyes and grinned that ornery grin of his.

“Dear heart,” he declared firmly, “go forth and conquer!”

As she skipped back to the kitchen he couldn’t help but laugh to himself, and as he sat, he wondered if she was going to come back to take his breakfast order.

He wouldn’t have blamed her one damn bit if she didn’t.

It was Mr. Baxter who migrated back to him, a broad grin splitting open his face under his own black handlebar.

“I think we just lost our breakfast waitress,” he chuckled.

“Yeah, trust me to cause trouble.”

“Daisy can call in another one.”  He raised an eyebrow.  “You didn’t have somethin’ to do with that, now did you?”

“Reckon I did.”

Mr. Baxter sat, nodded.  “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“What did you give her?”

“Some sound advice.  Promised her father I would.”
Mr. Baxter nodded.  “That was kindly of you.”

“I got her a scholarship.”

Mr. Baxter slapped his palm happily on the table top.  “Good!”

“I told her … ‘course you know her father passed away here about six months back.”

Mr. Baxter nodded.

“I promised the man I’d tell her what he planned to.”

Mr. Baxter quirked an eyebrow, turned his head a little as if to bring a good ear to bear.

“I told her now that she’d reached the age of consent, she shouldn’t!”

Mr. Baxter laughed, then he stopped and dismay claimed his beefy-red features.

“Aw,” he admitted, “today’s her birthday and I forgot!”

“Has she left or is she just back in the kitchen?”

“Sheriff, I am so sorry, I meant to take your order!” the waitress declared, laying a hand on Mr. Baxter’s shoulder.  “The usual?”

Behind the waitress, a hand rose, waved, and Linn slid out of his seat, stood.

“Mr. Baxter, you’re not too late, you’re right on time.  Dear heart, the usual will be fine, thank you, and give the lady what she’s having.  Marsha, good morning, it’s good to see you again.”

Mr. Baxter rose, the waitress withdrew a few steps; Marsha Jones advanced a little uncertainly, extended her hand.

Linn took the offered hand, raised it to his lips, kissed her knuckles, then gestured to the recently vacated seat: “Please.”

Marsha smoothed her skirt under her, sat.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

117. ASSESSMENT

 

Linn paid careful attention as the attractive younger woman looked up at the waitress and back at him and then at the waitress again, and gave her breakfast order.

He’d learned long ago he could judge people pretty accurately by the way they treated their dogs and how they treated a waitress, and time had proven him right.

Marsha was nothing short of just plain gorgeous.

The waitress was pretty, but a little plain; she was one of those girls who didn’t look that wonderful until she opened her mouth.

Freemasonry teaches it is the inner, and not the outer, that qualifies a man, and so it was with her case:  her inner self was beautiful, and the moment she spoke, she went from plain to lovely.

Linn waited until the waitress gave him a quick, warm glance and turned, swinging her full skirt as she sashayed back to the kitchen.

Linn looked back at Marsha, wondering momentarily if that cute little waitress ever had any walk but a full-on sashay, and realizing he’d never seen her outside the Silver Jewel, in the only outfit she wore to wait on customers, that full skirted shirtwaist dress.

He disciplined his thoughts back to the subject at hand, a gorgeous young woman in a fitted dress, nylons and heels, made up and presentable and obviously intended to present to a more urban audience.

“Thank you for seeing me, Sheriff,” she said, and her voice was distinctly at odds with her sophisticated and polished appearance.

Marsha Jones was the daughter of Bruce Jones, now retired from the Firelands Gazette, their county newspaper; she’d worked the big city newspapers, one back East, one out in California, most recently in Denver, and now she’d come home.

Linn remembered the girl she’d been as if remembering someone long dead.

He was surprised to consider her in this manner; he was regarding her as someone he was meeting for the first time, but with a good foundation of research and investigation into who she’d been – he shoved the surprise to the side, and concentrated on his visitor.

“Sheriff,” she said, stopped, cleared her throat nervously, then looked away and laughed a little, then dropped her head, her hands clenching where her wrists pressed against the edge of the table.

“I’m sorry,” she half-whispered, another nervous little laugh escaping her carmined, wet-looking lips. “I was … I had a pretty little speech all prepared, and …”

She looked helplessly up at the Sheriff.

“I interviewed the President,” she said in a wondering, almost little-girl voice.  “The editor rewrote my article and didn’t give me the by-line, but I did the interview.”  Her eyes changed and hardened a little and she looked at the lean lawman with the curling mustache, looked at him almost as a challenge:  “I didn’t hesitate to speak with the most powerful man in the world and I asked him questions as if it were … “

She shook her head, laughed again.

“And here I am tongue tied like a moonstruck teen-ager!”

“How long has it been since you said moonstruck?”  Linn asked quietly.

Marsha blinked, laughed that little laugh he remembered from her girlhood, back when she was a giggly little teen-ager who adored him with big, shining eyes, and even earlier, when she was a little girl in blue jeans and saddle shoes who loved it when her Daddy took her with him when he went out to the Sheriff’s house and she got to ride the Sheriff’s shiny red mare, with the grinning lawman himself leading the gentle old horse across the pasture and around in a big circle, and how he would bring her finally back to the barn and reach up, and how safe she felt when she leaned over and he gripped her under the arms with those big strong hands and she let him lift her down, but not before bringing her in close and tickling her nose with his mustache.

All this sailed past the back of the Sheriff’s eyes as he looked at what had been a composed young woman, before the red-faced, giggly little girl peeked out her own eyes.

He smiled a little, reached across the table, and she reached for him, and they held hands and looked at one another for several long moments.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Linn said.

She blinked and this time he read sadness in her eyes.  “I’m glad too.”

“IF it’s any help, from one orphan to another, you have my understanding.”

Marsha nodded, the last of her reserve crumbling, and the Sheriff was grateful her back was to the rest of the Silver Jewel:  in all likelihood, he knew, she would have to avail herself of a kerchief, and soon:  he released one hand, reached back, came back with a pressed, clean, unused bandanna, slid it back across the table and into her hand.

“Thank you,” she whispered, unfolding it and pressing it carefully to her eyes:  she frowned at the material, looked helplessly up at the lawman.

“Which way is the powder room?”  she whispered through a tight throat.

“Same as it’s always been, dear heart.  We haven’t moved it.”

Marsha nodded. “I’ll be right back.”

The waitress drew back as Marsha swung blindly past her and down the hall, came swinging back to the Sheriff, set his plate down, looked at her vacant seat.

“I think she went to fix her face,” Linn said quietly.

“Oh, did it break?  I was afraid with all that makeup it would crack and fall off.”

Linn ignored the waspish comment.  “I watched that little girl grow up,” he sighed, looked up at the waitress.  “I prefer my women without all that face paint.”

The waitress, who used less than a minimum of “face paint,” thanked him with her eyes:  “I’ll keep her plate warm,” she offered.

“Keep mine warm too,” Linn said, handing the fragrant, stomach-growling porcelain back to the cute little hash slinger:  “it wouldn’t be polite for me to oink into my feed trough without her.”

He smiled.  “I would take attair coffee, though.  The Navy runs on coffee and so do I.”

“I thought you were a big tough Marine.”

“Mama was a Marine,” Linn grinned.  “She always thought well of you.”

“Why, Sheriff!”  The waitress batted her eyes, one hand on her hip.  “Are you-all flirtin’ with little old me?”

Linn laughed.  “Dear heart,” he chuckled, “at my age, flirtin’ is about all I can do!”

“I’ll take care of these.”  She swirled, sashayed and disappeared around the corner.

It was a few minutes before the well-dressed young woman returned to the Sheriff’s table, her face stripped of most of its makeup.

“Don’t ever fear showing your natural face to the world,” Linn said in a fatherly voice.  “Marsha, you are a beautiful young woman and you always have been.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, blushing a little, and Linn thought that he probably would not have seen her blush with the war paint she’d worn earlier.

“Breakfast will be along directly.”  Linn poured some milk into his coffee, took a noisy slurp, then dashed the coffee off his mustache with a bent forefinger.

“I understand you’re taking your father’s place.”

Marsha nodded, looked down at her hands, wishing she had something to occupy them:  as if divining her wish, the waitress lowered a fresh, hot, steaming cup of coffee down into the restless nest of manicured fingers.

“Thank you,” Marsha said, surprised, smiling a little, then looked up to see an approving look in the Sheriff’s eyes.

Two plates followed the coffee; the waitress carefully topped off the Sheriff’s mug, more a formality than a need, but he thanked her with his usual grave courtesy.

Linn reached for the pepper shaker.  “Daisy is a good cook,” he complained, “but she always fries me bare naked eggs.”
Marsha laughed.  “I remember,” she nodded, picking up her fork.  “Oh, God, this smells so good!”

“Dig in.  There’s more where that came from.”

“I’ll ruin my diet,” she groaned.

“Yeah, but what a way to go.”

Marsha was most of the way through her eggs and diced, fried potatoes when she hesitated.

“I’d planned a formal interview,” she admitted.  “I was going to be a probing, sophisticated …”

She shook her head.

“You can be formal later.  I’ll wear a tux if you like.”

She looked at him surprised, then giggled like a little girl.

 

Jimmy dumped another wheelbarrow of stall scrapin’s with his usual lack of delicacy.

He was, as the Sheriff describe it, “built kind of close to the ground,” and while he could load a wheelbarrow and he could dolly the Irish buggy out to the manure pile, he lacked the “Structural Altitude” (as the Sheriff put it) to dump the wheel barrow in the traditional manner.

Jimmy ran it out just to the side of the pile and let it fall over on its side.

It was the only way he could manage to disabuse it of its fresh, noisome cargo.

He dragged the wheelbarrow back, thumped it a couple times:  it was heavy steel, it had a steel, spoked front wheel, it was solid built and the Sheriff had beaten it in just such a manner when dumping a load of stall scrapin’s.

He wallowed the barrow back into the barn, turned at the sound of a vehicle coming up the driveway:  curious, he set the legs down on the wheelbarrow, scampered to the doorway, then, grinning, ran with a little boy’s happy abandon for the house.

His Sheriff was back home.

He was a little boy and it didn’t matter why he was home.

His Sheriff was home, and that was all right by him, and his Tingley overboots clumped rapidly as he leaned into his seven-year-old’s gallop.

Linn grinned as he turned, caught Jimmy coming in, swung him up and high and wide to the side, as much to hear the little boy laugh as to keep any muck off him, and man and boy took a few quick steps back and to the side as Jimmy threw his head back and laughed, white teeth flashing in the midmorning sun.

Marsha wished she’d had a camera in hand to capture the moment:  the Sheriff swinging a laughing little boy, with delight on his upturned face, and an equal joy on the boy’s visage:  she may or may not use the photograph with an article, but she wished most sincerely to have it for her own, for she remembered the Sheriff picking her up in just that same manner when she was a little girl in pigtails and a flannel shirt.

Jimmy ran over to the faucet once his feet hit the ground again, washed the muck off his boots, followed the Sheriff up onto the porch and pulled off the Tingleys with a boot jack.

Linn waited for Jimmy, Marsha hanging back a little:  she’d heard the Sheriff was married now, and she didn’t want to just walk into his house unannounced, even with the great man himself holding the door.

Connie was just inside, smiling patiently, bouncing the one-year-old a little:  young Wesley Albert chewed happily on a fist, twisted impatiently in his Mama’s grip.

Linn motioned Jimmy and Marsha inside, followed; he hung his Stetson on a peg.

He kissed his wife, lifted Wes from her hip, grimaced as the happy little boy grabbed at his mustache.

“Dearest,” Linn said, “this is Marsha.  She’s the younger woman the gossips will have me carousing with.  Marsha Jones, this is my wife Connie, and this” – he nodded to the big-eyed, solemn lad standing beside his bride – “is Jimmy, who is a fine artist in his own right, and this –“  he pulled his head back quickly to avoid another pass of the juvenile lip-ripper – “is Wes.  I named him after an ancestral moonshining, moonrunning Appalachian ancestor.”

Connie stepped up, gave the surprised Marsha a quick hug:  “I’m so glad you’re back,” she said quietly, “and I was so very sorry to hear about your father!”

Marsha wasn’t really sure what to expect.

She’d spent too much time in the city, most likely, and was used to knives in the back, verbal bayonets or thinly veiled inferences in even a casual conversation.

Connie saw relief in the uncomfortable young woman’s eyes.

“Thank you,” Marsha whispered, looked at the Sheriff, and Connie saw … guilt?

“Sheriff, I am so very sorry,” Marsha almost stammered.  “I was in Cincinnati when I heard of your mother, and I never even –“

Linn’s expression was unreadable, but his action wasn’t.

He went from bouncing the restless one-year-old in bib overalls and a flannel shirt, to hugging the one-year-old in bib overalls and a flannel shirt.

He looked at Marsha. 

“Thank you,” he said softly.

Jimmy spoke up, shattering the moment:  “I’ve got a horse.  He’s big.  His name is Stomper.  Wanta see him?”  He grabbed Marsha’s hand, looked at her with big and hopeful eyes.  “He doesn’t even bite!”

Marsha laughed, squatted, took both Jimmy’s hands in hers.  “Thank you,” she said, “I’d like that!”

She rose gracefully, looked from the Sheriff to his wife:  “If you’ll excuse me, I think I have an appointment.”

“Let me get you a pair of boots,” Connie offered, and Marsha laughed, reddening a little, looking down.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.  “Heels wouldn’t do too well in a pasture, would they?”

“Mama managed,” Linn shrugged.

Marsha followed Connie into the next room and Linn looked at Wes.

“Whattaya say we go take a look at Stomper with Jimmy?”  he asked, and Wes laughed, the gleam of new teeth through healthy-pink gums bringing a second look from the lawman.

His cell phone vibrated in his vest pocket.

“Oh, bother,” he muttered:  he’d cleaned up his language considerably since Jimmy came into his life:  he’d grown careless after his Mama’s death, and his language had taken a turn from what Connie called “kind of salty,” and when the big-eyed, big-eared lad became part of his new reality, he considered he didn’t want what he’d been saying to come out of a little boy’s throat.

He learned this most profoundly when he had a right-of-way disagreement when driving fence staples – it turned out the rigbuilder’s hatchet had the incoming right-of-way, and not his thumb – he drove the hatchet into the fence post, wrapped his bleeding thumb in his bandanna and roared in a pained voice, “CAD, BOUNDER, BLAGGARD, RASCAL, SCOUNDREL!  ILLEGITIMATE SON OF A BESSEMER BLAST FURNACE AND FURTHERMORE IF I AM ELECTED I PROMISE A LITTLE POT IN EVERY CHICKEN!”

Later that day Jimmy cracked his shin on something and declared “RAD FLOUNDER!” and the Sheriff was grateful he hadn’t uttered something more potent.

All this zipped through the Sheriff’s memory with an incredible velocity as husband and wife, sons and guest trooped down to the barn to visit Stomper, with the eager lad happily towing their guest by the hand, telling her how Stomper was the biggest horse he’d ever seen and he was the best horse in the whole world but he didn’t like trains and the Sheriff got his lariat back when he roped an elk ‘cause he didn’t want it to run into the train and had she ever rode a horse ‘cause he was sure Stomper wouldn’t mind.

Marsha couldn’t help but smile as she looked at this familiar old barn and the same white-painted board fence she remembered, and for a moment she thought she saw a shining red mare and a pale-eyed woman, but she blinked and realized it was just her memory playing tricks on her, and then she saw what must have been Jimmy’s big Stomper horse, and suddenly she felt like that little girl in pigtails again, looking up at the Sheriff’s shining copper mare, realizing as she was lifted into the saddle she was suddenly taller than anybody in the whole world.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

118.  HORNETS

 

Will sat up on the side of his bed, ran long, slender fingers through sweat-damp hair, stood:  he shuffled to the bathroom to get rid of the coffee that woke him, washed his hands and his face and stared at his reflection for a long time, palms braced on the welcome coolness of the porcelain sink.

“I was in the right,” he said hoarsely.  “I was in the right and by God! the only thing I regret is that some slimy shyster will try and crucify me for killing someone’s sweet little boy who was just turning his life around.”

He looked at his watch, glared at the reflection frowning back at him.

He shook his head, crawled back in the bunk.

His breathing was labored and he stared into the darkness, he took a long breath, blew it out, rolled over, mauled the pillow mercilessly and without good effect:  it was still just as uncomfortable as before he tried to pound it into submission.

Finally he sat up again, drove his fist into the pillow, hard.

“Willamina,” he hissed, “why did you have to die!”

He looked around the tidy bedroom, as neat and orderly as any ship’s berth:  since his wife died, he’d become an utter neat freak about his house, and his gaze met nothing but tidiness and orderliness.

“Willa would tell me I’m …” he whispered, then shook his head, looked up to the ceiling.

“Dammit, Little Sis, if ever I needed someone to talk to, I need you now!”

He shook his head, looked at the clock, groaned.

“Might as well lay back down,” he muttered.

He fairly threw himself onto the mattress, and the moved saved his life:  a burst of machine gun fire shattered the window, ripped a hole in the air where his head had been a moment before.

Will was instantly well more than wide awake.

He rolled off the bed with a double handful of revolver, low-crawled a few feet, stopped, looked at the shattered window and the holes in the wall over his bed.

There was the scream of tires, the roar of an engine under hard acceleration, the sound of a car retreating, fast, fast.

Will stood, twisted to the side as another burst of hot jacketed lead screamed through what used to be the privacy and safety of his bedroom.

He ducked back, to the side, three running steps and he was at his back door:  the only light in the house was from the night light in the bathroom, he sprinted through the darkness, gripped the back doorknob, then twisted the deadbolt open, jerked the door.

He fired twice into the figure’s belly, smacking the gunbarrel to the side, then kicked him hard, knocking him to the ground:  Will surged around the corner of the house, ran into the second, drove into him hard enough to down the both of them.

He raised his pistol, chopped it down, hard, felt bone crush under the blow:  his left hand was hard around the rifle’s receiver and he felt the bolt jerk back under his fingers, but his grip was more than tight and it fired only once.

Will slammed the revolver’s frame down twice more into the fractured skull, beating the second attacker to death, then he came to his feet, more animal than man, looked around.

A third figure was running.

Will took out, fast, silent, barefoot, Death itself in white undershorts.

The race was brief and the race was not won by the last attacker.

Will grabbed the hair of his head, jerked, slid to a stop as the attacker’s legs kept running and ran right out from under him:  Will was on top of him, dropping his weight through his knees into the attacker’s ribs.

They fought for the carbine the attacker carried, another burst slammed through the night air and Will twisted the barrel away, slammed his revolver’s blunt handle into the attacker’s face twice, hard.

Reason was long gone, rational thought was fled like a frightened ghost.

Will dropped his revolver and seized the third one around the throat, crushed it hard in the hard grip of a man insane with killing rage and the knowledge that whatever he did would be more than justified.

“YOU MURDERED MY BOY!” he roared, both his hands tightening, one to maintain control of the attacker’s weapon, and the other to guarantee compliance, and he felt the cartilage crush under his grip and he continued squeezing in an absolute, utter, red-eyed fury, squeezed until the futile fist beating on his arms fell away, until the legs stopped kicking, until the hand fell away from the weapon, until the eyes bulged and so did the tongue and he felt this third one die.

Will stood, finally, stood and looked around, then he bent and picked up his bloodied revolver and walked back to his house, stopped at the pile of empty casings where one burst of full-auto had been fired, and then he walked over to the second scatter of brass, and he walked up to his front door and parked the captured carbine in the door frame and grabbed the doorknob.

It didn’t turn.

Will stared dumbly at it for several long moments, then he laughed and shook his head.

“It’s locked, dummy,” he said out loud.  “You locked it yourself.”

Chief of Police Will Keller walked around his house, looking around, feeling almost normal – I feel normal, he thought, except for my feet are cold.

He stopped when he stepped on something hard and round and metallic and he kicked the body next to it and realized he’d best get some light on the subject.

Might be I’d best call for backup, he thought.

He reached inside the doorway, flipped on the light switch, looked at the curled up carcass on the ground, still and bloody and wearing the bandanna that declared his allegiance.

Will recognized the gang colors.

He’d killed one of their drug suppliers.

They’d come after him.

He nodded.

He walked into the house, tracking dirt as he did, picked up the phone’s receiver left handed, punched a few buttons.

“This is Chief of Police Keller,” he said in his best formal, for-company voice.  “Could you send my nephew out here, please?  I couldn’t sleep so I beat one man to death, strangled a second and shot the third.”

 

It is a maxim that lawmen are like a bunch of hornets.

Kick one nest and all of them are ready to go to war.

It didn’t take long for every one of the Firelands Police Department’s officers, on duty and off, to show up, with every last bit of departmental rolling stock; the Sheriff’s Office was present and as well represented as when Linn threw a cookout before a departmental meeting:  State Police came screaming in, bristling with weapons and aggravation, every man Jack of them ready to go to war with whoever dared attack one of their own.

Marsha Jones was no stranger to crime, nor to violence, but Marsha had grown up in Firelands, and it was absolutely unprecedented in her experience that something this unusual, this outrageous happened – not here, not where I grew up! – and yet as she looked around at hard eyes and hard faces and at scene lights, the portable crime lab vehicle, at sheeted bodies and numbered evidence tipis marking spent shell casings, she knew that her beloved Firelands was grown up now and had joined the rest of the world.

She looked around, recorder in one hand, cell phone in the other.

A hand gripped her shoulder.  “Marsha,” a familiar voice said, and she turned, startled.

“Sheriff!”  she blurted.  “I’m um, what happened, I just got –“

“They tried to murder my Uncle Will.”

Marsha felt like someone just dumped a dipper of cold water down her spine.

Linn took her arm, walked her toward the yellow tape, lifted it so she could duck under.

“That group of casings – and that.  Three attackers.  These two used shoulder fired machine guns, full automatic, military ordnance.  We’ll have BATFE backtrack the serial numbers.  These are not something you can buy over the counter.  One around back.  They shot through the window here when they saw him sit up in bed, then when he moved.  The third one was waiting for him to come out the back door.  Will was ready for him and he’s dead.

“He caught the second one and downed him, the third ran and Will ran him down.  There was a struggle for the third machine gun and Will killed the third one with his bare hands.”

Marsha blinked, surprised:  she closed her mouth, then looked at the pale-eyed, solemn-faced Sheriff.

“I’m not used to such a… so much straight … I’m used to being told the investigation is proceeding and a statement will be forthcoming.”

Linn took a long breath through his nose, nodded. 

“That’s what we’re supposed to do so if something goes wrong we haven’t put out too much information or painted ourselves into a corner, but this is different.  Will caught a drug dealer in the act.  He was pushing bulk and he tried to kill my uncle and paid for it.  A second one tried the same thing and Will killed him.  This is the gang retaliating.”

“Will they come after him again?”

“Count on it,” Linn said, his voice rough.  “Count on it.  How’s your television presence?”

“I’m not bad, I was a stringer –“

“Good.  You’re now our PR person, you’ll stand in front of the camera, you are the pretty face of Firelands, Colorado.  Here comes the camera.”

Marsha took a long, steadying breath, raised her chin, and as the blinding lights lit up the lawman and the lady, Marsha stepped forward, relieved a surprised reporter of the microphone, stepped back beside the Sheriff, looked into the camera and spoke.

Later that day, after Will showered and belted on more duds than just his underdrawers, he and Linn and Marsha sat down in the Silver Jewel and watched the wall mounted TV that was only rarely swung out into view (and then only to show the weather reports) – and Mr. Baxter stopped his perpetual bar-polishing to watch the broadcast with them.

The composed young woman with the microphone, standing beside the hard-eyed Sheriff, gave a quick, concise report of what had happened; she spoke circumspectly, she spoke accurately, she spoke factually, and she finished with, “Martha Jones, for the Firelands Gazette,” and nodded to the cameraman, her signal that the presentation was ended.

“That’s my girl,” Linn murmured, and Will put his arm around her shoulders and nodded:  Mr. Baxter set a shimmering, long-stemmed glass of fragrant, fermented sunshine in front of her.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Linn said firmly.

“Damn straight,” Will rumbled.

“The lady has hers, now what will you gentlemen have?”

Will laughed quietly.  “I’d like a good night’s rest,” he admitted, “but we’re just now crowdin’ onto noon and I’ve got to go give another damned deposition, and then there’s paperwork to consider, and dammit to hell, that was my backup revolver and now it’s in evidence until Hell freezes and the devil learns to figure skate!”

Linn reached under the tail of his vest, pulled out a blued-steel sixgun, slid it in front of Marsha to his uncle.

Surprised, Will picked it up, opened the cylinder, pulled one round and nodded:  he closed the cylinder, looked closely at the engraving around the muzzle and leaned forward, looked past Marsha at the grinning Sheriff.

“That’s Willa’s revolver!” he exclaimed.

“Yep,” Linn grinned.  “She said you always did want to swindle her out of it.”

Will looked at machined steel and checkered walnut as if he were looking at a firstborn infant – pleased, most pleased, but … uncertain.

“She’d want you to have it,” Linn said.  “Pass it along to me when you die.”

“Yeah,” Will rasped, then he swept back his own vest and slid the revolver in his empty holster.

It fit like it belonged there.

“That was a good and trusted friend who spoke loudly and most persuasively on her behalf,” Linn said, accepting a steaming mug of coffee and pouring in a good shot of milk to cool it.  “I think it’ll be happy living under your roof.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

119.  AND THAT’S THIRTY!

 

The Firelands Gazette was a weekly county newspaper.

It had been started “back when” – in the mid-1880s -- by a woman, a newcomer, a stranger; its articles were written by its violet-eyed editor and her pale-eyed assistant, but they remained factual – for the most part – except where they were opinionated, and editor Wales saw to it that opinion was restricted to the editorial page.

This worked well until she realized that, for two consecutive editions, the editorial had taken an entire page.

The readership didn’t seem to mind; the Firelands Gazette enjoyed a brisk circulation county-wide, both over into Cripple Creek (which had its own newspaper) and also over into Carbon Hill (which didn’t) – but the county shared one common element:  a thirst for information, a desire for news.

When the pretty young editor confided in the pale-eyed Sheriff, that lean man with iron grey mustache and a quick temper, that she wasn’t sure she could write effectively for such a community, he laughed and patted her hand in a fatherly manner and said, “Dear heart, I was in that damned War” – she didn’t have to ask which one – “and Harper’s Weekly was eagerly sought after by North and South alike.

“The North read it, convinced its words were gospel and divinely inspired, nothing but absolute truth and fact, and the South read it just as eagerly, but convinced to their core that it contained not just lies, but damned lies, but each side read it just as eagerly as the other.

“Besides” – his eyes crinkled a little at the corners, the way he did when he was smiling inside – “people don’t read the local paper to find out what’s happened in the world, they read it to see who got caught here locally!”

The newspaper was burnt out by two drunks who were so stupid they couldn’t tell Firelands from Cripple Creek – they burned up the town’s library with the newspaper, and for a time Firelands was without its printed page – but it resurrected under the hand of another Easterner, one Bruce Jones, a man who was tired of Eastern politics and wanted to come West and breathe clean air for a change.

He’d brought in a new cast iron press, more modern than the one that was hauled off as rust-red, burnt-metal scrap, he’d consulted with the Sheriff and had the structure rebuilt:  he’d recruited lads to peddle the papers, he printed up string-tied bundles that were shipped by rail to Cripple and to Carbon, and the Firelands Gazette was back in business.

It was no accident that Marsha’s father’s name was Bruce Jones:  the original ancestor who’d moved to Firelands saw no good reason to leave, and his family remained in the newspaper business, and though they’d seen some pretty lean times, the newspaper stayed in business.

As a matter of fact its circulation increased, thanks to Marsha’s signoff when she had the television camera’s eye – “This is Martha Jones, for the Firelands Gazette” – suddenly she had demand, not only for the print edition, but also for an Internet circulation.

She’d taken her father’s advertiser’s list and personally visited every last advertiser, she’d left her business card, she’d capitalized on the fact that she was her late father’s daughter, come home to stay:  she could tell this struck a resonant note in most of the people she met; she visited the fire department, stopped in with a box of doughnuts, another box for the paramedics next door; she sat and talked with them – but she listened, and there are few things a man likes better than the attention of a pretty young woman.

She knew how to listen, and she knew how to listen to what wasn’t being said, and so she learned about the police chief diving into the night-black reservoir to bust a window and rescue to kids.

She made a mental note for a possible story, but she was careful not to take notes – not only would it slow her down, it would establish a more formal distance than she wanted for this first encounter.

No, far better to get on their good side, listen to what they had to say, give them the impression she was fascinated by their every word, and in future they would be far more inclined to speak with her when she might need information for a story.

Truth be told, she didn’t have to pretend:  it’s always interesting to look at the world through someone else’s eyes, and she found the depth of their free-wheeling conversation to be rather surprising, ranging as it did from the department’s origin to the modern day.

She left her card on the table, but handed another to both the Chief and to the captain:  each man carefully slid the card into a shirt pocket, and the Chief thanked her gravely for it:  “If we must notify the public,” he said, suddenly serious, “can we reach you at this number … anytime?”

She patted the familiar black rectangle on her skirt’s waistband.  “It sleeps on my nightstand,” she smiled, “and when it’s not sleeping there, it’s riding here.”

The Chief nodded, and Marsha saw something behind his eyes that told her he’d seen things that just might incline a man to having the public’s ear in an emergency.

She did not stop there:  she visited the doughnut shop at least four times that morning – five, actually – she knew an army marches on its stomach, and men like to be fed, and so when she visited the police station and the Sheriff’s office, she came bearing gifts, and when she went home that evening, she took a small box of chocolate iced, cream filled, stick doughnuts for herself.

After smelling them all day, there was no way she was going to deny herself the pleasure any longer!

She made it back home in mid-afternoon.

Never one to sit idle, she opened her father’s computer and read one of his most recent entries, feeling like a little girl again sitting at her Daddy’s big desk, only now the desk was nowhere as big as it was then, and she didn’t feel nearly as tiny sitting in his big chair.

It was an article on early Firelands, apparently one of a series.

I’ll have to pull the past issues and see what he’d written, she thought.  If it was well received I’ll want to continue it.

It was titled “That’s Thirty!” and it didn’t seem to be complete.

It looked like the very end of the article.

Puzzled, she browsed through the files, looking for the same date:  finding it, she opened the beginning of the article, read.

 

The Old Sheriff looked like a man going to his own hanging.

He had the lost look a man gets when someone closer to his heart than he wanted to admit, has suddenly left – and this someone was closer than he’d ever admitted even to himself.

The pale eyed old lawman was the sort who didn’t let people get close, but those who did, were not just close, they were family, and the newspaper editor was more than just a print setting newshound.

She was family.

She was related to his wife and somehow to Bonnie McKenna, she was young and all woman, she had violet eyes, big and long lashed, and when they had a barn dance, or when they had a dance at the Silver Jewel, they cleared the floor when she was in his arms.

That may not be exactly accurate, to hear the lawman describe it:  he likened it unto him dancing, and her floating in his arms, her slippers not touching the surly, soiled floor beneath her.

There are dance partners who anticipate every move, and they are rare, and she was one such, and when he danced, he gazed long into those big violet eyes, eyes he could lose himself in, eyes he could have swum in …

She’d taken ill and she’d died quickly and unexpectedly, and she was a distance from home when she did.

The circumstances were such that he rode out alone for her burial:  he, and one other, prepared the body, dressed her; wordlessly, in the hard-faced silence of two broken hearted men, they built her coffin, built it solid and sealed it with pitch:  they dug her grave in a shadowed cove, where the creek ran nearby, chuckling its way down the mountain, there where the air was cool and sweet and easy to breathe;  they buried her under a rock face, on which a deep and complex man chiseled her name, and her deathdate.

When the Sheriff rode out, wearing his best suit and an impassive face, the editor’s assistant ran out from the newspaper office.

She handed him the steel nib pen with which she’d written her articles, and she handed him two pieces of linotype, and he looked at them, pressed together the way she’d held them.

They read 30.

He nodded, his sorrow so consuming he couldn’t frame to thank her with words:  he touched his hat brim, pressed his heels into his red mare’s ribs, and rode off for the legendary Sopris Mountain for the last time.

While the mountain’s sole resident addressed obdurate stone with a chisel and a setting-maul, the Sheriff considered the mounded earth over the raw, fresh grave, and then he dug a slit in the soil.

He laid in the pen, and atop it, the newspaperman’s term for an article’s end.

He waited silently while the other man formed the letters, cleaned them, shaped them, brought them into being:  his labors took him through noontime and into the evening, and when done, the two men sat in silence on the bench they’d built some time before.

They stared numbly at the grave, at mounded earth that held what was left of someone who’d been precious to both, and they sat through sunset:  sometimes the silence of a friend is a mighty comforting thing, and so it was here.

Marsha read the Sheriff’s elegy, spoken simply and yet eloquently from the pulpit the next day, a Sunday:  she read of the ladies, pressing lace-edged kerchiefs to their eyes, she read of the men who surreptitiously wiped at their own eyes, harrumphing and putting on a stern face, and of the wives who looked at them with understanding, for Duzy had touched nearly everyone in Firelands, and for the good.

I’d like to have known her, Marsha thought, then smiled a little as she backed the column up and read again her father’s name on the by-line.

Marsha had been in the air, returning to Denver, when her father passed:  she hadn’t known how bad he really was, and by the time she reached his side, he was dead by several hours.

She re-read the article, stopped at the moment young Sarah McKenna came running out of the newspaper office to hand the pale-eyed Sheriff the pen and the linotype.

“Papa,” she whispered, resting delicate fingertips on the edge of her father’s green desk blotter, “I wonder … when you died, did you say ‘That’s Thirty!’?”

She sniffed a little and realized that wasn’t going to stem the tide.

Her hand reached blindly for the box of paper hankies her father kept on his desk, and when she realized that even in death he was still taking care of his little girl, she cried all the harder.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

120.  THE DIRTY DOUBLE DOG DARE

 

Jimmy stood across from the firehouse, eyes big, his chest tight, fear on his face and in his stomach.

He watched the doors swing open at the top of the hose drying tower.

His throat was too dry to speak, he was too terrified just looking at this to move:  he watched, frozen, as a pretty young girl stood on the stone sill and looked down, shouted “You ready?” and the men in big black curly mustaches and red wool shirts with the gold Maltese cross embroidered on their breasts yelled “LASS, DON’T YE DARE!” or words to that effect, while unfolding what he recognized as a canvas life-net with surprising speed.

The pretty girl spread her arms, looked up to Heaven, then looked down.

She didn’t just jump.

She leaped, arms and legs together, hands and toes pointed:  she did one complete somersault, fell through space like a wingless angel, landed flat on her back with the sound of taut canvas being hit by both open hands:  the men in the red flannel shirts dipped with the impact, brought the net back up to collar bone height as the pretty girl bounced once, came to her feet, one arm on her hip and the other overhead, for all the world like a circus performer after a fancy dive:  she skipped to the edge of the taut-drawn, man-supported canvas, bent and gripped its wooden rim:  she made a quick, somersaulting dismount, landing again like a circus performer, laughing.

Jimmy realized his lungs were starting to burn with stale air, surprised that he’d been holding his breath:  he swallowed, gasped, took a quick breath, took another.

The pretty girl skipped over to him.

She was his height and somehow he knew she was his age, she was young and pretty and she wore an old fashioned dress and she took him by the wrist and pulled hard and he had to run to keep up.

While the firemen were folding the canvas life-net, the girl pulled him inside the brick firehouse.

It smelled of rubber coats and coal fire from the banked boiler of their steam machine, it smelled of horses, and he turned and looked around the interior of the fine brick firehouse, taking it all in for several long moments.

Finally he turned and followed the girl, followed her around a corner and down a short hallway and they stopped when she pointed up.

Jimmy cranked his head back.

He saw metal-ended, woven-linen firehose hanging, suspended from – something – well up in the tower.

“This is how they dry their hose,” the girl explained, “after they’ve washed it.”

She looked at Jimmy.

“I climbed up and jumped out,” she teased.  “Betcha can’t!”

He shook his head, looked away.

“Dare ya!”

“No,” he shuddered.

“I dirty double dog dare ya!”  the girl challenged.

Jimmy shook his head and walked away, ears and face aflame.

He stopped, blinked:  instead of the firehouse hallway, he was suddenly in his own barn, and The Pretty Lady was looking at him like a schoolteacher will a student who has just achieved an unusually difficult goal.

“Well done,” she said frankly.  “You have sense enough to say no, even to a dirty double dog dare.”

Jimmy stopped, dropped onto the bale of hay he’d set on when he and his Sheriff sat together the night before, and talked, and sharpened their knives.

The Pretty Lady settled delicately onto the other bale.

“Most boys would have taken the dare.”

“I didn’t wanna.”

“And you didn’t.  Jimmy, you did the right thing.”  Her hand reached out, laid itself flat on his belly.  “You followed your gut, Jimmy, and your Sheriff will tell you ‘When in doubt, son, follow your gut,’ or at least that’s what he told me.”  She smiled.

“Of course it was my Sheriff, and he didn’t call me son.”

She propped her elbow on her knee, laid her cheek on white-gloved knuckles, smiled again.

“I don’t think I look like a son.”

Jimmy looked up at her, surprised, then grinned that quick, bright grin of his.

“That was me, jumping out of the hose tower.”

He blinked.  “You?”

She smiled, nodded.  “When I was much younger.  I was a rich woman’s daughter.  I’m afraid I caused them quite a fright.  I knew no fear, but they did, and they were terrified at the thought of not catching me.”

Jimmy blinked, his eyes wide with concern.

“Now, Jimmy,” The Pretty Lady said, “I understand your Sheriff is hosting the Ladies’ Tea Society at an alternate location tomorrow, and he will need your help.”

“But I’m not a lady,” Jimmy protested, and The Pretty Lady laughed, caressing his cheek with her fingertips.

“Of course not,” she murmured.  “You are a big brother and that’s why your Sheriff will need you.  Your Mama is going and she’ll need you to ride herd on Wesley.  He depends on you to keep him safe, because he doesn’t know what will get him in trouble.”

Jimmy’s young face was serious as he nodded solemnly.

One thing he took seriously was his watch-care of his younger brother, and he was very careful how he did it, for Jimmy knew the taste of utter terror, and he didn’t want Wesley to ever, ever feel what he’d felt!

 

There had been several offers of a place to stay while Will’s house was processed; he’d thanked the many who offered, and he’d been able to resume residence by sundown of that first day:  he’d screwed plywood over the shattered window, stuck silver tape over the holes in the siding, over the splintered wood paneling inside, and over the holes in the drywall above the headboard in his bedroom.

He frowned at the damage, his mind busy, planning how best to repair what was damaged.

He had homeowner’s insurance, yes, but the damage wasn’t enough to turn in a claim, and besides he had little use for insurance companies that dropped a man after he turned in one claim.  No, better to wait for a hailstorm to pound his roof to death, or a fire to gut the house, then the insurance would pay for itself before dropping him.

Will fixed supper, as he generally did, a small meal for one.

He was just finished when there was a heavy scratching at the back door.

Will rose, opened the back door.

“You might as well come in,” he greeted the curly furred black dog, and The Bear Killer padded in like he owned the place:  Will put his dishes on the floor and The Bear Killer took care of the prewash cycle, along with what few leftovers there were.

He looked up, licked his chops, walked over to the sink and then looked back at Will.

“You’re dry, eh?”  he chuckled, and opened the cupboard;  he took out a stainless steel bowl, filled it with tap water, set it down.

The Bear Killer drank noisily and not at all fastidiously, and when he came up for air, the bowl was nearly empty.

Will refilled it, rubbed The Bear Killer’s back.

He looked at his television.

He hadn’t had it on in better than a week, and he really didn’t feel like turning it on now.

“Bear Killer,” he said, “I’ve had a long day, how about you?”

The Bear Killer sat down, chopped his jaws once, then yawned – a great, gap-jawed yawn that showed off his fighting fangs.

“Yeah, me too.”

Will headed for the bedroom, The Bear Killer following.

Will offered no protest when The Bear Killer surged up onto the bed and lay down beside him; he laughed a little as The Bear Killer industriously laundered behind the police chief’s ears, then cuddled against the blanket covered lawman and gave a breezy sigh.

“Yeah, me too,” Will said quietly.  “Night, fella.”

Will woke once through the night, woke to get rid of some second hand coffee, then let The Bear Killer out for a similar detail:  the night-dark canine trotted into the shadowed silence, returned after a few minutes, drank the water bowl nearly dry again.

Will did not begrudge the time or effort in letting The Bear Killer out.

If anything was out there that should not be, he'd know it, and as he stood to one side of the back door, his hand reached up to the top of the cupboard where he kept an ancient, slab sided and very serviceable pump gun.

He locked the door when The Bear Killer came back in and the pair retired to the bunk once more.

When Will woke, he was rolled up on his side, his arm laid over onto The Bear Killer’s ribs, and he realized he’d had a better night’s sleep than he’d had in a very long time.

 

The Ladies’ Tea Society was most happy to welcome one of their own home again:  Marsha remembered the Society members generally wore attire of a bygone era, but she lacked a proper gown, and so she wore her usual suitdress instead:  though she was professionally attired, she felt a little out of place, a bit self-conscious, at least until the Society descended upon her and made it clear they were more than delighted she’d come home, come home to Firelands.

The Society met in the back room of the Silver Jewel, the private room reserved for meetings or for intimate dinners, or for special gatherings:  the did not stay there today, though, for today the Society was proceeding to an alternate location, and it did not escape Marsha’s attention that several of the ladies wore pistols of one fashion or another, belted about corset-cinched waists, and they seemed to wear them with a degree of comfort, of familiarity, and as the ladies exited the Silver Jewel and boarded the horse-drawn carriages which awaited, most had a long-gun case of some kind with her.

Marsha was beginning to wonder just what kind of a society this really was.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

121.  THE UNCERTAIN

 

I don’t know what to call this column, she began, her fingers swift, sure, absolutely at home on the keyboard.

A new editor’s introductory opinion should be firm and certain and confident.

I’m still getting my feet under me, so please forgive me if this column is a bit tentative.

Marsha looked at the piles of file folders she’d excavated from one of the steel drawers in another room, some of her father’s research into the newspaper’s early history:  there were interviews, letters, copies of legal papers, material that never made it into print.

One of the earliest editors was an ancestor, for whom her father was named; this desk, she knew, was used from the first day of the newspaper’s inception, and she doubted not other artifacts in the room dated back to the same august era.

She frowned at her glowing screen, then reached for one of the files.

It contained a handwritten account, a vignette that was described so accurately that the writer, that earliest Bruce Jones, had to have been there.

It was called Granadillos, and it was written, not as an article – it lacked the formal, stilted language of a newspaper column – no, it was written by a man who loved to write, and who tried to bring what he saw, what he heard, he felt and he smelt, to the printed page, so a future generation could rehydrate these dry and printed words and experience what he was experiencing.

Marsha smiled a little as she’d read it.

She’d heard of this Sarah – she wasn’t sure where, but she’d heard of this legendary soul – and she imagined a young, pretty woman, slender and proper, wearing a mousy-grey schoolmarm dress, with her round spectacles riding down her nose and a tight walnut of hair on the very top of her head, transfixed with a whittled pencil, like a literary weathervane in high-button shoes.

She picked up the bundle, read the handwritten, pencil-scribed account.

 

 

GRANADILLOS

 

Click!

The sound was sharp, loud, distinctive, the sudden snap of a clamshell of polished wood.

Emma Cooper looked up, eyes disapproving; her round-lensed spectacles were near the end of her nose than the bridge, and so were more easily seen over than seen through.

The class looked up, looked around; she saw curious expressions, but no red faces, no giggling, no quick glances-to-the-side.

With a final slow, methodical sweep of the classroom, she returned her eyes to the lesson she was preparing.

Click!

Sarah was on her feet, pacing gracefully down the center aisle, more gliding than walking:  she turned, walked more quickly between two rows of benches, looked out the window, obviously searching for something:  she smiled, just a little, then turned, walked straight to a dark-eyed Mexican lad who was trying his very best to look innocent.

She held out her hand and he reluctantly surrendered what looked like dark clamshells, loosely hinged with string.

Sarah transferred the device to her free hand, held out her right hand again, wiggled her fingers.

The lad’s shoulders sagged and he surrendered the item’s mate.

Sarah slipped her thumbs through the string loops, hefting the body-warmed pulgaretes, and smiled.

She bent over and whispered something in the black-haired schoolboy’s ear.

His smile was instantaneous, brilliant:  no sooner had the gleaming, white-toothed smile flashed across his face than he was on his feet and running for the door.

Emma Cooper tilted her head a little, curious as to what her assistant was up to.

Sarah paced, silent on the balls of her feet, up to the teacher’s desk, showed her dark and shining prizes.

“Granadillos,” Sarah said in a hushed voice.  “The very best made.”

“Yes,” Emma Cooper said, “but what are they?”

Sarah laughed.

“Castanets.”

Emma Cooper saw an idea moving behind her assistant’s pale eyes.

“I think a recess is called for.”

“A recess?”

“Children!”
 At Sarah’s call, the class looked up, expectantly, not knowing quite what was happening, but with the word “recess,” they anticipated a brief freedom from the classroom.

“Class, there is a new section of boardwalk in front of the barber shop,” Sarah said, “and a convenient bench.  Let us all stay together, and let us learn a slightly different lesson than we’d planned!”

Sarah raised her chin, lifted her skirts, grasping material between thumb and forefinger – a little awkward, as her palms were filled with the domed, dark wood clamshells, but she managed:  the neat little whitewashed schoolhouse quickly emptied of its young student body, preceded by Miss Sarah in her mousy-grey dress, her hair drawn severely into a walnut atop her head; behind, riding drag as the drovers would call it, Emma Cooper, one hand lifting her hem and the other holding the schoolbell before her like a scepter.

An old man rose as Sarah approached:  she dropped a flawless curtsy and addressed him quietly in his native tongue:  the old man’s black eyes flashed approval, and Raimundito, his grandson, watched as his grandfather’s thin, knotty fingers caressed the neck of the double-strung, deep-toned Spanish guitar.

Miss Sarah was squarely in front of the barbershop door as she turned, throwing a spiral twist in her skirt, one arm raised overhead, her head back, her wrists bent, concealing what she held in her hands.

The old man was weather worn and dried out from a lifetime in the desert country:  he was parchment-thin, like vellum stretched over a framework of dried reeds, light and fragile and likely to blow away in a good wind, but there was magic in those dried-up old fingers, magic fit to catch the ear and draw the heart.

Where a man spins the song and a woman carries the rhythm, men’s hearts seek to join this musical union, and Sarah’s fingers teased and coaxed the shaped-hardwood clamshells, her hands each with a life, a mind of its own:  as the guitar began a deep, glowing cadence, the schoolmarm’s hard little heels began their own rhythm, resonating through the entire length of tight-fitted, seasoned planks:  the Daine boys had laid that section of board walk not two days before, and the wood had yet to warp:  it was smooth and suitable for a woman’s heels, and as the guitar picked up speed, Sarah’s fingers played their own tune upon the finest castanets money could buy.

Her left hand set the rhythm, flawlessly in time with the old man’s guitar, her heels a precise counterpoint to the higher-pitched, more deliberate cadence from her left hand: with her right hand, a quick one-two-three-four, so quick it was one snarl:  men stopped and stared, for the sight of a woman, especially a decent woman, dancing – dancing! – on a public street … why, this just wasn’t done … and with a crowd of curious children about?

Men, and a few women, drifted their way; the barber paused in his careful scraping of a lathered man’s face, both the razor-bearing proprietor and the half-shaved customer drifting to the front door, the front windows, to behold this marvel.

Sarah did not so much dance as she flowed – her hips writhed, she was boneless beneath her skirt – she moved not so much with the music, as the music moved her – her eyes were for the old man and the guitar, she danced for the man weaving the magic, each spinning melodies and counter-melodies impossible to play and yet play they did, heels and castanets drumming together with the big guitar’s deep-throated song.

Musician and dancer lost track of time, of this earth, of reality:  there was only the music, a living river of rolling sound, it was like being immersed in an ocean, a living, breathing ocean of dark and shining life –

The old man spun a quicker rhythm and Sarah’s heels danced to its tune, her mind surrendered itself to nothing more than the moment:  she could have danced forever, carried by this magic, then she felt the guitar was ready and when the music stopped – as if cut off with a knife – she stopped as well, her head back, one hand raised overhead, her wrists bent, the same posture as when she began.

It took several moments for Sarah to recover, to realize she was standing in front of the barbershop, that what she heard was not hailstones on the roof, but applause, that men and boys and even the women were clapping for her, were whistling for her, and she was suddenly weak in the knees:  she squatted beside the old man with the big guitar, and he grasped her hands:  they leaned their heads together, and several people saw them talking, briefly:  Miz Sarah, their beloved young schoolmarm, slipped her thumbs out of the string loops, and tried to give the old man the castanets:  he took them, stared at them for a long time, then looked up at her, his face wet, and he said something again, and Sarah pulled a kerchief from her sleeve and pressed it to his eyes:  one, then the other, and she bit her bottom lip, and she nodded.

He handed them back to her and she shook her head, then he said something more, and she looked him in the eye and finally nodded.

There was some speculation as to the nature of their conversation; there was quite a bit more talk about how good that pretty young schoolmarm was at dancing, and how she’d make a fine painted lady, which pretty much evenly divided the group present and caused at least two separate fist fights – fortunately these evolved after the students were back in the schoolhouse, safe and out of sight.

Business was quite good at the barber shop for the next several days.

 

Marsha leaned back in her father’s high-backed chair, staring at the ceiling, wishing for a long moment she could have heard that deep-toned guitar, could have felt the boardwalk under her feet thrilling with the cadenced punishment from the young woman’s hard little heels, imagining what it would feel like to have a handful of castanet, turned to hide it from the audience, knowing that as she danced, as she turned, her eyes modestly lowered, men were watching …

Marsha took a long breath and smiled a little, then turned to her keyboard.

 

My father taught me a useful rule – two rules, actually – about public speaking, and to a degree they apply to an editorial comumn as well.

The first rule he taught me, as we endured a droning, monotonal presentation, was the quiet observation that “The mind absorbs only until the backside grows numb,” and I agreed, especially when he added, “The longer the speaker’s wind, the harder these chairs get!”

To that end, this column is nearly finished:  I am still excavating my father’s work, his research, some truly ancient material dating back to the founding of this very newspaper.

These oldest articles may make an interesting column in and of themselves, but not today.

Today I’m just trying to get my feet under me so I can write something interesting for you to read.

If it’s not interesting, it’s not worth my time to write and it’s surely not worth your time to read, so I’ll try not to waste your time or mine, either one.

Marsha smiled, nodded.

“That’s thirty,” she murmured.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

122.  CUTTING THE CORD

 

Marsha peeled the tin lid back on a can of mixed nuts, dropped the curled pull tab lid in the trash can, set the can on the desktop beside her coffee.

What she’d found was like that can of nuts.

She did not want to stop.

She turned over another page, read the graphite-circumscribed memories of a man dead a century and more, looking through the page like she would look into a screen, a window, into a world she’d only heard of.

Her pupils dilated as the story gripped her.

She wasn’t sure if she fell into the narrative, or if it swarmed up like its own reality from the page and enveloped her, and it really didn’t matter.

Marnie’s hand lowered from its reach, closed on nothing, the nuts forgotten.

 

Sheriff Linn Keller raised the .44 revolver, the hammer chuckling back to full stand, the blued steel cylinder rotating and dropping very precisely into battery.

He was using the one revolver he shot best, a Ruger with adjustable sights, and his eyes tightened a little at the corners as he brought the front sight into alignment.

He exhaled, inhaled just a little, the trigger pushing on his finger a little.

Jimmy watched, big-eyed, looking from his Sheriff to the target, a playing card he’d set in place himself:  as he looked back at the card, the gun cracked and Jimmy exclaimed in delight as the playing card flew apart – half still wedged in the weathered, cracked top of the fencepost, and the other half fluttering to the ground.

Linn looked down and Jimmy saw the smile in his eyes.

Linn’s eyes went forward again and his thumb swung up, wrapped around the engine turned stainless steel, fetched it back again.

Jimmy looked from the blued-steel revolver to the stub of a playing card and laughed as a strip of pasteboard flew into the air.

“I don’t think there’s much left,” Linn commented, the revolver coming down out of recoil and the hammer coming back:  Jimmy grinned with anticipation and sure enough, when the Sheriff’s revolving pistol spoke for the third time, the stub of a playing card was spun into the air.

“Climb up on attair fence post,” Linn said casually, bringing the revolver in close and kicking out the empties into his cupped hand, “and tell me if I cut any wood.”

Linn turned away so his gun muzzle was looking in a safe direction while he reloaded – “Load one, skip one, load six, cock” he thought – then holstered.

Jimmy climbed up the railings, gripped the fence post, hoisted himself far enough to look down on the weathered top of the fence post.

“Did I get any wood?”  Linn called, grinning.

Jimmy grinned back, shaking his head.

Linn strode over to him, lifted him carefully off his perch, set him on the ground, squatted, looking at the young boy.

Jimmy looked happy.

Linn had the notion that the boy hadn’t had much of this in his previous life.

“You know something?”  Linn asked gently as Jimmy pulled off his earmuffs.

Jimmy blinked, his eyes bright, anticipating.

“I’m just awful glad you’re here,” Linn said, and Jimmy hugged him – quickly, impulsively, and Linn hugged him back, laughing quietly, going from a squat to down on both knees.

 

The bundle of waxy looking sticks crowded a little as they were shoved hard between the steel bars covering the Marshal’s office window.

A trembling hand struck a match on the rough surface of the bars, the hand shaking a little – a set of hard eyes turned and gave the door a poisonous look, the thoughts behind the eyes as toxic as the expression.

A pale eye was steady behind the sights, a thumb swung up and rolled the hammer back:  he’d positioned himself carefully, his tread silent:  he could tell from the man’s gait, the way he carried himself, he was up to no good, but until he pulled the bundle of blasting powder from under his coat and shoved it into Marshal McFarland’s office window, wedging it between wooden shutters and steel bars, his exact intent wasn’t known.

Part of the lawman’s mind registered that he had wood behind the target, his bullet would not be slowed in the least by its intended goal, but seasoned timber would be more than enough to stop the .44 slug.

The revolver fired, the would-be bomber jumping back as the lighted, sputtering fuse jumped:  the bullet cut it in two, its lit end falling to the board walk, the slug driving into the timber corner jutting out from just past the window.

The man’s eyes went as wide as his face went pale:  he stumbled back two steps, just in time to catch the impact of a hard-swung, cast-iron frying pan.

The pale eyed lawman looked at the pale-eyed young woman in the fashionable gown and nodded, once, and his daughter met his hard-eyed gaze fearlessly, nodding once in reply.

Old Pale Eyes looked around, brought his hammer back to half cock, flipped open the loading gate and casually kicked the empty hull out into the palm of his hand.

He dropped a fresh round into the empty chamber, rotated the cylinder, hearing the chant “Load one, skip one, load four, cock,” in a little boy’s high-pitched voice:  he eased the Colt’s hammer nose down on his buryin’ money, holstered the left-hand revolver with a decisive thrust.

The Marshal’s door swung open and the slow moving, quick minded lawman looked around with an exaggerated air of casual inattention, which was quite the opposite of his actual state:  Old Pale Eyes had known the man for many years, and he knew the man to be neither casual, nor inattentive.

He paced slowly out onto the board walk, looked left, looked right, looked at the bundle of powder sticks.

He looked at the pale eyed lawman with the iron grey mustache.

“Yours?”

“Yours if you want ‘em,” came the quiet voiced reply.

“Yeah, likely I can use ‘em.”

Law and Order Harry McFarland frowned a little, leaned against the post holding up the roof over his board walk.

“Kind of an odd place t’ take a nap, ain’t it?”  he drawled as Old Pale Eyes squatted, twisted up a good handful of the supine character’s coat, stood:  the man hung limp, bent backward, arms almost dragging the ground as his heels left drag marks in the dirt.

“This fella,” he said, “give you that bundle of happiness hangin’ in attair winda.”

“You don’t say.”

Harry pried himself away from the turned post, grabbed the limp figure’s hair, hauled the head up a little and frowned down at him.

“Yep,” he said.  “I remember him.”

“Friend o’ yours?”

Harry released the head, let it fall back.  “Nah.  Don’t reckon so.”

“He must’ve take a powerful shine to you, though.”

“Yep.  Ain’t it nice when folks brings me gifts.”  He shook his head.  “Hell, park him in the cell.  Reckon I’ll get some sense out of him once he wakes up.”

 

Marsha pressed the plastic lid on the can of nuts.

She picked up her camera, looked around, found her shoes.

I wonder if the old Marshal’s office is still standing, she thought, feeling the delicious tickle of excitement as she anticipated corroborating what she’d just read.

 

“There’s a trick to splittin’ a playing card,” Linn explained, wedging another playing card in the fencepost.

He squatted, picked up Jimmy, walked back to where he’d fired from, turned.

“Now.”

He drew the .44, pointed it at the fence post.

“Take a look at yon playing card.”

He holstered his revolver, then ran his arm under Jimmy’s backside, hoisting him a little higher, giving him a comfortable seat rather than an encircling arm around his waist.

“I see it,” Jimmy said eagerly.

“Now let’s step over this way, like this … now see how much harder it is to see?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy breathed, surprised at how slender it actually looked.

“It’s awful hard to see something that slender.  Now if we take a little step to the side – like this – see how we see more of the card?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said eagerly.

Linn squatted again, set his boy’s boot soles on the ground.

He pulled another card from his vest pocket, then worked a loaded round from its leather loop, held it up so the base was against the edge of the card.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said quietly, winking:  “You can be off this much” – he slid the rim of the cartridge to the left – “or this much” – he slid it the opposite direction – “so you can be off this much” – he swung the cartridge back and forth –“almost a full inch, and still cut it in two.”

Jimmy nodded eagerly.

“Tricks to everything,” Linn murmured.  “There is nothing wrong with taking every advantage.”

Jimmy blinked, frowned, his eyes casting back and forth.

Linn studied his young face.

He was pretty good at reading a grown man but young boys weren’t that easily read – excitement and delight sometimes looked remarkably like distress or guilt – Jimmy turned, scampered for the barn, disappeared within.

He’s got an idea, Linn thought, and felt the corners of his eyes tighten, the way they did when he approved of something. 

He’s intelligent, he’s impulsive.

I wonder if I was like that at his age.

He smiled, just a little, at the thought.

I’d like to think I was!

Jimmy came running back with a length of hay string dangling from his young fist.

“What about this?”  he asked breathlessly, and Linn took the string, considering.

Jimmy saw the pale eyed lawman smile a little.

He looked around, found a fist sized rock, wrapped one end of the string around the rock, started to throw a turn into the line, then looked up.

“Jimmy,” he grinned, “can you tie a square knot?”

 

Marsha stopped her car short of the road’s deterioration.

There was no traffic this far out.

She pressed the lock button on her fob, dropped her keys in her blazer pocket, shifted the camera’s shoulder strap a little – more habit than necessity – and began walking, stopping as she crossed the dirt mounded culvert, her eyes sweeping over the ghost town of Carbon Hill.

“It’s a good thing I brought that diagram,” she murmured aloud, then set off down the little grade, down onto what used to be the main street.

She consulted the photocopy of the hand drawn map, looking up to orient herself – “This was the Mercantile,” she said softly, then turned – “that was the saloon … okay, over this way, back behind them is the Depot, it’s been rebuilt … now where …”

She looked up, saw a surprisingly solid metal wall – a box, little more – where the entire side of the building was crumbled down in ruin.

“That must be their jail,” she said aloud, swinging up the camera and taking a few shots, blessing whoever invented memory cards and remembering how her father rejoiced at being able to use a roll of 36-exposure film.

Marsha remembered how delighted the man was, suddenly able to take three times the number of photographs as the twelve exposure rolls he’d always used!

Now I can take several hundred, she thought, and switch memory cards if that gets full!

How Papa would have loved this!

She lowered the camera, walked toward the Marshal’s office.

 

Linn hung the rock from the top rail.

“We can shoot safely in this direction,” he said casually.  “You have to remember that bullet won’t stop for paper or rope.”

Jimmy nodded, paying very close attention, the muffs dangling from his hands like luggage held in front of his belt buckle.

“When she goes bang, that bullet will keep on a-goin’ but it’ll hit the side of the mountain and stop.  A man has to consider what’s behind.”

Jimmy nodded again.

Linn worked the earplugs into place, waited until Jimmy had his earmuffs on and worked into a good seal.

He drew the .44, eared the hammer back.

 

Marsha took several shots of the old jail cell, catching the light across the iron plate that formed the front of the door’s ornate lock plate:  an old padlock was in the staple, the lock was closed, preventing the door from being closed.

Marsha stepped back outside, out into the middle of the street, looked at the front of the Marshal’s office, frowning.

Where would the window have …

Her eyes narrowed and she walked quickly back to the building.

She picked up a sheet of corrugated tin, threw it to the side, stopped, her mouth opened and she hissed out a quiet “ahhhh” of satisfaction as she found what used to be the front wall, fallen back.

The roofing tin came from somewhere -- an adjacent building, maybe, or thrown there -- but it had hidden the barred window, still with the closed wooden shutters behind.

She raised the camera, focused the long, heavy lens, took a shot of the metal bars still over the window.

“Now if the window was here,” she said aloud, excited, backing up, “the window … here, the doorway had to be here, that means the Sheriff shot … which direction?”

She took several quick steps to her left, then ran in the opposite direction.

“Which way would have put wood behind him?”

She blinked, trying to picture the way the building looked:  she consulted her diagram, turned it over.

There were pencil sketches of several buildings, each one labeled.

Her breath caught and she brought the picture closer, looked up.

Marsha ran toward the jail cell, stopped, casting about like a hound seeking a scent.

She grabbed a chunk of weathered timber, turned it over –

Her mouth opened again and she giggled like a little girl, then she squatted, considering.

I could take this home, she thought.

Or I could leave it …

Leave it for who?

She stood, took a few more shots, then slung the camera across her back, reached into her warbag for a pair of leather gloves.

A half hour later she had the chunk of timber under a strong light, on a table back in her office, and she was able to place a short ruler across the hole for another photograph.

Nearly a half inch.

I found it.

The Old Sheriff shot that fuse in two and I found the spent bullet!

 

Jimmy looked from the Sheriff’s revolver to the hay string, to the stone turning slowly under it.

The .44 barked and Jimmy jumped up and down, excited, as the string parted, one end flying up, the other streaming as the plummeting stone hit the ground.

“Yep,” Linn said, the corners of his eyes tightening a little.  “It can be done.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

123.  REPRINT

 

Marsha rewrote her editorial.

It was her first issue of the weekly newspaper.

She’d direct-mailed everyone in the county to apologize for the lack of a newspaper the previous week – the postcards arrived the day the newspaper would have come out, and she printed a short run of masthead only to put in the county’s paper boxes – a headline that read “THE FIRELANDS GAZETTE WILL CONTINUE” and beneath that, “Give me time to grieve.”

Beneath, a very short, one-paragraph statement, to the effect that Marsha was taking her father’s seat, the paper would meet its obligation, but for this week, publication was suspended so she could settle her father’s affairs, and advertisers would be reimbursed for their loss.

Marsha was surprised at the number of cards she received – astonished, really, for she never thought of a newspaper editor as that popular:  his funeral was just plainly packed, which on some level, she was surprised … part of her mind remembered how crowded it was, but most of her was numb, staring at the still, waxy figure in the long box.

She took a long breath, started again.

 

Editorial:  We don’t stop here!

I sat on the front row in a folding wooden seat, staring at a waxy figure that looked more like a tired old mannequin than like the strong, laughing man that was my Daddy.

My Daddy ran the Firelands Gazette all the years I remember. 

I grew up with deadlines and editorials, advertising and articles, reporting and writing, as part of my everyday life.

I followed my Daddy’s example by getting my degree in journalism and then by working as a reporter and with television, both reporting, behind the camera, and in front of the camera.

I remembered all this as I sat in the funeral parlor and stared at the long wooden box, as I wore a black dress and a little black hat and black gloves that matched the sorrow flooding my scared little girl’s heart.

I’ve reported from active crime scenes, I’ve spoken to the ground glass lens of a shoulder mounted TV camera while a conflagration steamed firehose overspray from my shoulders.

I’ve interviewed bomb technicians who were suiting up and this little scar on my cheek is from a piece of shrapnel that cut me when the device they were going to try to disarm, detonated before they could get ready. 

(There was another sharp-edged piece of the pipe bomb that cut through my blouse and nearly killed me.  It left another scar and no, I won’t show you that one!)

I have interviewed large and hostile people, some who attacked me for doing my job – verbally and physically – I’ve been shot at twice, and once, straight-line winds rolled the news van we were using for shelter.

When I was still in school here in Firelands, I remember talking with the Sheriff, who said something about her own experience:  I remember her laugh, how she said that an ancestor of hers said “I have been over the mountain and seen the varmint,” and now that I’ve come home, that’s kind of how I feel.

Daddy taught me that a newspaper ought to be interesting.

I never forgot that.

I’ve worked with big-city television and big-city newspapers, both back East and on the Pacific coast.

I’m told I am good at what I do.

If your newspaper is not interesting, it’s not worth your time to read.

I’ll do my best not to waste your time.

 

One last thing… personal, not editorial.

When I sat in that folding wooden chair, uncounted people came up to me and spoke carefully crafted words, laid a comforting hand on my shoulder.

I will never, ever remember a single word that was said to me that day.

I will never, ever forget that they cared enough to speak, or to gently place that comforting hand.

Marsha Jones

Editor, The Firelands Gazette

-30-

 

It wasn’t until the week’s papers were printed and distributed, not until a high school student stopped her in the drugstore and asked, that she realized she’d made a mistake in her editorial.

Normally the “30” was removed before the article went to press – it was more an internal communication to indicate end of article – but this time it slipped through.

Marsha smiled.

Maybe she’d just leave it in future editorials.

 

Jimmy managed, by stacking bales of hay like stairsteps, to fashion a ladder from which he could saddle his Stomper-horse.

Stomper patiently endured the little boy’s efforts:  a saddle is heavy and awkward, and it was just plainly all the lad could do to haul it up the three hay bales, and it took two tries and nearly falling backwards before he got the saddle over the saddle blanket he’d carefully smoothed across the big warmblood’s back.

Once the saddle was on, Jimmy kind of sagged, but it was a happy sag.

It was an achievement – he was saddling his own horse! – and he jumped off one bale, off the second, jumped off the third.

He scampered around behind Stomper, reached up, bent over, made fast – the Sheriff hadn’t shown him the trick of knuckling a horse’s ribs to keep him from taking too deep a breath, then exhaling after the saddle was cinched down, generally resulting in rider on ground, saddle under horse, and less than Christian language given freely to the open air.

Fortunately, Stomper was a patient sort and not given to such tricks.

Jimmy and Stomper came out of the barn at a walk, then a trot:  Stomper was used to the open pasture, and Stomper liked a good easy long-legged pace:  the warmbloods are bred for power, for pulling heavy loads at low speed, but Stomper must have had a runner’s blood somewhere in his ancestry, for his pace was generally faster than a plow horse normally ran.

As a matter of fact, Stomper loved a good, flat-out run, and with his big frame and powerful legs, he might not have had the blazing speed of the Sheriff’s saddle stock, but he could travel at a right fair clip, and owing to his powerful musculature, could keep it up for a good long time.

More than enough time to make a little boy happy.

Jimmy knotted his reins like the Sheriff did, and dropped the knotted reins over the roping horn like the Sheriff did, and Jimmy rode upright with his hands on his thighs like the Sheriff did, and Jimmy and Stomper enjoyed that intimate communication that only a bitless rider knows:  they rode as did knights in armor, with lance couched under one arm, shield in the other – they rode as had the cavalry, with a pistol in one hand and a sabre in the other – Stomper described a big, sweeping turn, came back on the near side of the little run below the house, ran a high speed slalom in and out of the ancient apple trees.

Stomper came back into open ground and Jimmy felt the power building under him and Stomper laid his ears back and drove hard hooves against the sod and surged uphill, powered toward the fence, showing absolutely no sign of either turning or slowing.

Jimmy’s eyes widened and he leaned forward in the saddle, hands flat on Stomper’s neck, the weight on the balls of his feet, knees flexed –

 

Marsha smiled as she hung up the phone.

She’d just called the Sheriff on his private line to thank him.

The Ladies’ Tea Society met at what he called “an alternate location” earlier that week, and Marsha – although an invited guest – had no idea this alternate location happened to be a shooting range.

Marsha grew up, like most of her generation in that location, with a rifle hung over the fireplace, a shotgun parked in a handy corner; she’d not handled a firearm since leaving home, and now, suddenly, she was surrounded by women not only comfortable wearing, but proficiently shooting, a variety of pistols, a selection of shotguns, and they had what the Sheriff called “a reaction course” which the ladies ran, one at a time … with what Marsha had come to think of as “Assault Rifles.”

It was somehow incongrous to see women who looked so much like absolute, cultured ladies, women in the gowns and fashions of the mid and late 1880s, handling modern, magazine rifles with the ease of long practice, running (with no difficulty!) in long skirts from one position to another, addressing silhouettes and bowling pins with quick, precise shots.

One of the ladies – the fire chief’s wife, she found out later, Mrs. Finnegan, or maybe it was Mrs. Fitzgerald, she wasn’t sure which – offered her rifle.

“I’m not … I’ve never,” Marsha stammered.

A little girl, maybe eight years old, in the frock and stockings of a schoolgirl of the late 1880s, came up to her, smiling:  she had a pistol on her little waist, and she had a rifle in hand, amber shooting glasses covering a comical percentage of her young face, and earplugs dangling around her neck: “It’s okay,” she said in her happy, little-girl voice.  “I’ll show you how.”

And show her, she had.

Abigail took Marsha to the side, to the Sheriff himself, who gave Marsha not only the manual-of-arms for the operation of her sidearm, and of her rifle, but a quick refresher on sight picture and safety:  Marsha was surprised that her childhood training was still with her, and had no trouble with safe operation of her ordnance.

Marsha and Abigail Fitzgerald, for that was her name, ran the action course together.

“Ran” isn’t really the right word for it:  it was more of a slow walk, more a familiarization run than a true, competitive run.

Abigail brought over her spare pistol and magazines and Marsha was handed a nylon gunbelt – she found the pistol’s weight was surprisingly well balanced by the magazines on the opposite – and together the eight-year-old child, and the veteran newshound, went through and addressed the variety of cardboard silhouettes and bowling pins.

Marsha’s score was not what one would call good, but her reasoning was, if a second-grader can handle this pistol, so can I, and she found that she was, indeed, in control … she controlled the pistol, and what it did, she controlled the rifle (contrary to big-city editorial opinions she’d read that declared that these evil machines suborned the mind of the user, turning people into mad killing machines!)

When she put the front sight on a bowling pin and the rifle spoke, she delighted in seeing the bowling pin fly backwards off the rack, its descent and fall causing Abigail’s quick “Yaaaay!” and Marsha’s own surge of accomplishment.

The ladies were delighted that she gave their action course a try:  Marsha knew her scores would be worse than two terribles, to quite her late father, but she’d tried something absolutely new to her experience.

She had the presence of mind to make arrangements to shoot with Mrs. Fitzgerald and her daughter again.

Her reasoning was simple.

Marsha preferred to be good at what she did, and besides …

She laughed as she handed the rifle back, released the belt buckle, placed the gunbelt on the table …

Besides, she realized, this was fun!

 

Marsha smiled as she hung up the phone.

She’d called the Sheriff to thank him for arranging the Ladies’ Tea Society’s outing.

She could hear the smile in his voice as he said “I thought you might enjoy riding in a one horsepower Oatsmobile.”

She laughed again.  “I’ve never heard it called that,” she admitted, “but yes.  Yes, I enjoyed that.  And everything else.”

 

Jimmy screamed as they went over the fence.

Stomper was bred for the plow, for the wagon, Stomper was bred for power and for strength.

Stomper’s bloodline, years and centuries and perhaps a millennium earlier, was also bred for war.

It would not be unexpected for an armored knight, in the melee of combat, to rely on the nimble maneuverability of his mount to keep him from harm:  such a horse had to have strength to carry a plate-and-mail-armored warrior, plus the weight of the horse’s own plate armor, but combat demands not only the straight-line attack of the lance, but also the ability to turn, twist, dash, even leap over the unexpected obstruction:  horses were, in and of themselves, weapons in addition to fighting platforms for their warrior-riders.

Perhaps it was this ancient memory that launched Stomper into the air, perhaps this is why the big warmblood laid his ears back and charged the whitewashed board fence like a personal enemy, perhaps this is why a little boy screamed with terror and with delight as his beloved Stomper-horse launched into a low ballistic arc, and cleared the fence without so much as a touch of hoof on plank, perhaps this is why Stomper landed easily on the other side and kept on going, turning, charging down the long gravel driveway, and why a little boy’s scream turned to laughter, and faintly, ever so faint in the distance, his voice came back on the wind: 

“That was fun!”

Stomper was warmed up and in no mood to stop, and Jimmy was in no mood to stop him:  boy and horse trotted briskly down the blacktop and onto the main street of Firelands, and when Marsha looked out her window, she saw a grinning little boy riding past, looking all the smaller for the truly huge mount he straddled.

Marsha Jones couldn’t help but smile.

Somehow she preferred looking out her window at a grinning little boy on horseback, than looking out a plate glass window at big-city buildings and big-city traffic.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

124.  WEAPON OF WAR

 

“These are not filed in chronological order,” Marsha complained to the empty office as she frowned, sorted through the thick sheaf of hand-written papers:  some ink, some pencil, and so far … all very, very interesting.

She stopped, sat, placed both stacks of paper on her crowded desk, lifted the top sheet of the left-hand stack, read.

The horse was tall enough an average man could not see over its back, and even a tall man would have to stretch to cast a level gaze across its spine.

The pale-eyed woman riding it looked almost like a little girl – not because she was small, but because her mount was little less than huge.

Marsha blinked, leaned back, looked out her window.

The huge horse and the little boy that rode it were long gone.

“I didn’t just see a ghost,” she said aloud, “that was very definitely a little boy – I think it was the Sheriff’s Jimmy …”

Her voice trailed off and she looked again at the handwritten account.

The dog that paced alongside the horse was as black as the equine itself:  shining, healthy, gleaming they were, they shared the same ebony hue as the inside of a sinner’s heart at low twelve.

The dog was much larger than even the greatest timber-wolf of the granite mountains surrounding – blocky, strong, like the great black Frisian with whom this fighting-hound kept pace:  moist black nose wrinkled as he scented the air, a gleam of fighting canines as his lips pulled back in a horrifying grin, an invitation to death and mayhem that would chill the heart of a rational man.

Marsha shivered at the mental picture these century-old words conjured.

She’d suited up for a story on a police department's new Malinois, put on the padded dog-training suit, she’d challenged the big, tan, police K9 and ended up on the ground, feeling like her arm was near to crushed despite the padding, almost pulled out of socket, for the black-and-tan Belgian charged her from half a football field away, seized her arm and used his weight and running momentum to snap her off balance and to the ground, where he used both bite and pull to keep her there, until his handler trotted up and commanded the release.

Marsha had a very healthy respect for the strength and power of the large dog breeds.

She looked at her left arm, hidden in the silky-ivory material of her French-cuffed blouse, remembering the feeling of that living vise clamping hard through the padding.

 

The Bear Killer flowed down the street – that is a better term than “paced” or “trotted” … the dog’s movement was remarkably smooth, and even in daylight, more resembled living ink than the mechanical movements of a walking, trotting or running dog.

The Bear Killer’s jaws were open a little in a happy canine grin, and his fighting canines gleamed white and sharp in the sunlight.

Marsha’s eyes wandered to her window, just in time to miss this sight, but there was no mistaking, bare minutes later, the screaming howl of a war-dog’s full-voiced invitation to hell.

Only the insane, only the very foolish, would trifle with this young woman – scarce more than a girl, truth be told – only those seeking a quick exit from this world, or a most foolhardy stranger, would trifle with the pale-eyed young woman astride this great black mare.

A young woman of considerable talent, a woman reputed to have no conscience whatsoever, a murderess by reputation and an Agent of the Court by trade, wearing all black as befit her fell profession – a young woman with pale eyes, in the drawers and hat and tall flat-heeled Cavalry boots of a man – rode into town, a horse in tow, and a body across the horse, stiff and dead and awkwardly draped over the dead man’s saddle.

There was a challenge – a friend of the deceased, we later discovered – a hand made as if to seize the black horse’s cheekstrap, until grasping fingers closed on nothing, for the horse wore neither bridle nor bit.

Three men accosted this black rider, not realizing they faced the Black Agent herself; perhaps they thought they challenged a boy, pretending to be a man – as I sat at my desk, I heard first a shout, then a shot, then the screaming howl of a war-dog’s full-voice invitation to hell.

I knew without looking it was the great hound that passed my window not a minute before, but I still ran for my door and into the street.

Marsha’s mouth went dry and she came to her feet, ran for the door, her forgotten page falling to the seat she’d so recently vacated:  she’d earlier traded dress pumps for sneakers, and a good thing, for leather soled shoes do not well when the wearer is running and turning quickly on a hardwood floor.

Marsha seized the door, yanked it open and was hit with the scream of a fighting mare, a man’s agonized shout, a little boy’s startled, protesting yell:  she stepped out onto the restored boardwalk and saw the blocky, short-legged figure of the Navajo chief deputy running across the street, followed by a second deputy, and then her breath caught as she saw a little boy on the back of a rearing, twisting, kicking, biting, screaming horse, a horse bigger than any saddlestock had any right to be, a horse that spun, kicked, bit – one man was lifted off the ground by the seat of his pants, his agonized wail adding to the confusion – and the black hellhound shot like an arrow through the very center of this tornado of flesh and violence, bearing another man to the ground by his arm.

She saw something black and angular fly into the street; the man who’d hauled off the ground thanks to equine dentition, descended most unceremoniously into the adjacent horse trough, throwing up a great splash and ending his screaming protestations for the moment.

 

The three came out in front of Jimmy, yelling.

One made to seize Stomper’s cheekstrap.

Stomper threw his head to the side and Jimmy flinched as a hand tried to grab his ankle.

Stomper danced to the side, reared:  Jimmy clung to his seat like a burr on a hound dog, yelling encouragement as Stomper came down, slammed the side of his head into the man who grabbed for the nonexistent bridle.

The first man hit the ground, hard, as The Bear Killer launched with a snarling roar to seize the arm attached to the hand about to close on Jimmy’s retreating ankle.

Stomper spun, kicked:  a third man yelled in pain, collapsed, clutching his broken arm, the pistol he'd seized and jerked from his waistband, lost when his hoof-shattered arm bent in the middle, flying into the street and spinning to a stop on the yellow-painted center line.

Chief Deputy Barrents drove into the middle of the fray, seizing one man, belt and collar, lifting him overhead and slamming him to the ground:  the second turned to run, got all of two steps with The Bear Killer drove into his chest, his slavering, yammering muzzle half a foot from the fleeing felon’s face:  somehow the very close proximity to those fighting fangs froze the fellow in his tracks:  The Bear Killer came down on all fours, grabbed the crotch of the man’s pants, snarling loudly, and the would-be prad-prigger’s face turned a distinct color of pasty white.

Barrents got two of the three in irons.

He sat them on the boardwalk in front of the bank and said “Watch ‘em,” and The Bear Killer lowered his head, curly black fur rippling down the length of his spine and across his shoulders:  his eyes were bloodshot now, almost red, his lips were peeled back and rippling with an obscene invitation to try something, try anything, please.

Barrents looked at the dripping wet felon and shook his head.

“I haven’t fed the dog in a week,” he said, “he usually eats two criminals and a traveling salesman at one time and we’re all out of traveling salesmen, so if I were you fellows I’d hold real still.  You."

He turned his attention to the sick-looking individual with a red welt on one cheekbone, souvenir of a passing hoof's edge.

The man was sick-looking and pale and cradled a visibly angulated fracture of his right forearm on his lap.

"We’ll have that arm looked at, just don’t move or I’ll let The Bear Killer rip your hand off up to the shoulder.”

He turned to the second deputy.

“Separate cells, isolated, we’ll get their story after they’re booked in.”

“Yes, sir.”  He pulled a pasteboard card out of his uniform blouse pocket.

"I am going to read this once.  It goes for all three of you.  You are all three under arrest for a variety of charges."  He focused on the card, looked up again.

“You have the right to remain silent.  If you give up the right to remain silent –“

Barrents ignored this familiar litany, looked up at Jimmy.

“You okay?”  he asked, caressing Stomper’s nose, and the big warmblood sniffed at Barrents’ uniform shirt front.

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said in a small voice.

“Let’s come over here and you can tell me what happened.”

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said."

Barrents turned and walked back across the street.

Stomper followed the deputy like a docile little doggie.

Marnie ran down the boardwalk, eyes huge, at once kicking herself for not getting this on video, and focusing on a knot of people, two of whom had their phones held out before them, apparently getting video of the event.

Marsha ran up to them.

“I’m Marsha Jones with the Firelands Gazette,” she blurted.  “Did you get all that on video?”

“Yeah,” a teenager grinned.  “We both did.  We got it all!”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars for exclusive rights to that video!”

The teens looked at one another.

“I’ve got it too,” a girl said.  “Sell yours and we’ll still have mine!”

The grinning young man with crooked teeth looked at Marsha and said, “Deal!”

Marsha opened her notebook – a steno book she’d had sliced down the middle – and said “Let’s start with your names!”

The next edition of the Firelands Gazette was more interesting than its previous week’s printing.

 

“You have the easy job of it,” the Sheriff observed quietly as they found their seats in the courtroom.

“Oh?”  The pretty editor smiled a little as she smoothed her skirt under her and settled into her chair.

“You get to interview witnesses and then write the story,” Linn elaborated.  “We have to find evidence, gather all the photos, all the surveillance vids, all the witness statements.  People are often reluctant to talk to the law but they’ll bust a gut to talk to the media.”

Marsha laughed.  “Don’t I know it!”  she agreed.  “By the way, I bought the cell phone video of your son’s encounter.  It’s not too shaky.  Do you want it?”

“You bought it?”  Linn raised an eyebrow.

“Call it reporter’s instinct.  It’s good enough I’ll be sending it to the news feed.  You might see it on the evening news.”

Linn grunted, frowned.

“I know,” Marsha said soothingly, patting his hand.  “You’ll have a copy.”

“We got them for possession, bulk quantities, they were also under the influence, we seized their vehicle and quite a haul of drugs and paraphernalia, and no I didn’t use a roadside test kit on a sock full of kitty litter, I’m not as stupid as I look.”

“Sheriff,” Marsha said, a worried tone to her voice, “I never said a thing!”

“I know.”  He rubbed his eyebrows.  “I’m sorry.”

“How’s Jimmy?”

Linn smiled thinly.  “He handled it well enough.  Scared him, but as long as he was in the saddle, he knew he was almost out of reach.  I don’t think he knew that one guy was reaching for his leg.  That’s the one The Bear Killer took down.”

Marsha nodded.  “I’d like to talk about that later.”

“Buy you coffee after court?”

Marsha smiled.  “Do I dare date a married man?”

Linn laughed quietly, rose as the bailiff declared “All rise” in a stentorian voice.

Marsha rose as well, turned over a fresh page in her narrow reporter’s notebook.

She had advertisers to call later that afternoon, but for now, she intended to mine the court proceedings for newsworthy information.

Marsha smiled a little as she remembered the two photographs she had taken.

She’d pulled out her cell phone and gotten two shots, images she in all probability would not publish, but both of them – and the story they told – she would keep.

The Sheriff was on his knees in the street, the huge, blunt-muzzled, black war dog on one side, the impossibly large gelding behind, almost a four legged wall of horseflesh:   the first shot had him holding a little boy by the upper arms, his expression concerned, the little boy anxious:  the second, he’d embraced the child, relief in his eyes-tight-shut embrace, and the little boy was hugging him back, his face toward the camera:  his eyes were shut as well.

Father and son, in a private moment, each comforting the other, and each being comforted.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

125.  GOOD RELATIONS

 

Chief of Police Will Keller looked up from the coffee he was pouring.

“Beware of reporters bearing gifts,” he muttered.

“Good morning to you too,” Marsha countered, setting the box of doughnuts down on the countertop.  “Doughnuts,” she declared loudly, “still warm!  Get ‘em while they’re fresh!”

“Oh, no worries there, lady,” the dispatcher called cheerfully, “did you bring any duct tape?”

“Duct tape?”  Marsha echoed, puzzled.

“Yeah,” the dispatcher laughed, slapping what he referred to as his Equatorial Bulge.  “I might as well just duct tape ‘em to my gut, that’s where they’ll end up!”

Marsha laughed, looked at the Chief.  “How is your day today?” she asked neutrally.

Will grunted.  “Been better.”

“My, you’re the cheerful one this morning!”

He looked up from milking his coffee, opened his mouth to make a reply and inherited a chocolate-iced, white-cream-filled stick doughnut between the teeth.

“Eat,” Marsha said in a motherly voice.

Will ate.

Marsha reached into a small, white-plastic bag, brought out a stack of long, narrow, spiral bound notebooks.

“Here,” she said.  “Enough for all hands, and no I’m not prior Navy, but my grandfather was and I listened closely when he spoke.”

“Hmp.”  Will took another bite of the doughnut. 

“Here’s the trick.  You take a steno book and slice it in two on a paper shear.  One half is the field notebook you actually use.  It’s the one you write the punch lines to all your dirty jokes, your unflattering cartoons of the chief, phone numbers of a hot date.  You know, the useful stuff.”

“Hmp.”  Will raised an eyebrow, took a noisy slurp of coffee.

“Nice mustache, by the way.”  Marsha took a notebook in each hand.  “Unfortunately, when we get subpoenaed into court, they subpoena our field notebook as well and they go through it looking for anything embarrassing they can use to discredit us.”

Will grunted again; so far she was telling him nothing new.

“So you take your working notebook and transfer the information into the other half.  You put in the actual field contact information, calls, everything that’s fit to print – and you eliminate the girlfriends, the dirty jokes, the comments about the boss or a co-worker or unflattering observations about a subject.

“When you’re given the subpoena duces tecum, you hand over the clean copy, and you don’t have to answer any embarrassing questions about the boss’s fat gut or kissing someone’s backside.”

She smiled.  “I dated a cop back East.  He taught me quite a bit.”

She hesitated, then smiled quietly and added, “He was really good with handcuffs.”

“Is that a confession?”

“Not confessing,” she said quietly, giving him a warm look.  “Just … oh, never mind.  I brought plenty of field notebooks for you.”

Will nodded, stuffed the last of the stick doughnut in his mouth:  he chewed thoughtfully, took a swig of coffee, swallowed.

“You’re dangerous,” he said bluntly.

“Most women are,” Marsha agreed.

“You’re pretty, you’re smart, you’re a reporter and you’re right.”  Will reached over and tapped the stack of narrow notebooks.  “We’ll take ‘em. Thank you for these.  How much do I owe you?”

“Same as for the doughnuts,” Marsha smiled.  “Buy me a beer when I’m 99.”

She winked, turned with a quick flare of her skirt; her heels were loud, their cadence brisk as she walked briskly across the polished quartz floor.

The dispatcher leaned over the counter, watching her retreating backside:  “A man has to appreciate moments like this,” he sighed.

“You’re married,” Will grunted.  “Shut up and have a doughnut, and hand two notebooks to each officer as he hits the time clock.  You heard the lady.”

“Can do, boss.”  He looked at the door as if wishing he could still see that set of legs.  “Wish I’d known this notebook trick when I was still a rook.”

“Yeah.”  Will downed the last of his coffee.  “Me too.”

 

The signal took between eight and fourteen minutes to travel from the big equatorial dishes on Earth, to the Red Planet; once intercepted by multiple orbiting receivers, the signal was beamed to the planet’s surface, collected, analyzed, assigned, redirected:  a pale-eyed woman in an Olympic skinsuit, a neutral-grey suit with a silver, six-point star embossed above the swell of the left breast, a star that bore the single word SHERIFF – a woman who hung a hand written shingle on the outside of her office door:  in black ink, a skillfully-rendered skull-and-crossbones, and beneath, I’VE GOT MAIL, DO NOT DISTURB – that intense, pale-eyed woman, Sheriff Marnie Keller of the Second Martian District, sat at her desk, leaning forward a little, quivering like a hound on a hot scent: her eyes were fixed on the computer’s screen, her fingers adjusting size and speed, and she watched for the tenth time the fast, confusing convergence of three criminals, a huge horse, a massive hound, and a little boy in the saddle, riding a living hurricane like he’d done it all his life.

She giggled as one man, knocked to the ground, got hauled aloft with yellow equine teeth locked on the seat of his pants, she laughed aloud at the spray of water as he fell into the horse trough, and she wiped her eyes and sniffed a little at the two still shots that followed the vid … the shots of her Daddy, on his knees, hugging his little boy.

Marnie wished most powerfully she were home again, wished with utter, inarguable sincerity that she was Jimmy’s age so she could be Daddy’s little girl one more time, to know the safety and comfort of those strong, enveloping Daddy-arms.

She bit her knuckle at the last picture in the series.

It was taken in their living room back home.

Her Daddy was sprawled on the couch – he’d come in and collapsed in the center of the sofa, his legs were thrust out into the floor space, he hadn’t even taken off his boots; his hat was still on his head, but tilted forward.

Little Wesley Albert, in overalls and boots and a flannel shirt, was cuddled up against Linn’s right side, and Jimmy, flannel shirt and blue jeans and well polished boots, was just as bonelessly draped against the Sheriff’s left ribs, and the long tall lawman had an arm around each boy, holding them close.

Marnie made a little squeaking noise and damned her weakness and reached for the bandanna she’d brought from Earth, knowing that throw-away tissues would not be available at her new duty station on Mars.

She sniffed, blew her nose loudly, indelicately, and allowed herself a girlish “Oh, Daddy!”

For a moment she could have sworn someone laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, and for a moment she could have sworn she smelled roses, but that wasn’t possible, there were no roses on Mars and she knew she was alone in her quarters, and so she looked at the screen again and smiled a quivery little smile.

A red bar appeared across her screen:  ALARM, it read, and she pressed a key:  the station’s schematic came up, with a flashing red dot, and beside it the word FIGHT.

Marnie sighed, stood, slid her sidehandle baton into its ring on her port side belt; her hand rested momentarily on the handle of her revolver as she stood, then she dropped her visor and strode for the door.

 

Marsha picked up the phone.  “Firelands Gazette, Jones.”

“Hell of a name, Firelands Gazette Jones.  Your parents must have hated you.”

“Sheriff!”  Marshal smiled.  “I’m sorry I didn’t get to keep our coffee date.”

“If I’d brought chocolates would that have made me a candy-date?”

There was a long silence:  when the lawman finally spoke, Marsha could almost see him lower his forehead into his palm and shake his head a little as he muttered, “I know, I know, don’t quit my day job!”

She laughed a little.  “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

“I wanted to ask your advice.”

“My advice?” 

The Sheriff could almost see her raise her head and blink in surprise.

“Yep.  It’s impolite to call and interrupt your work but I don’t have a crystal ball to see when you’re not over burdened, so I thought I’d call and ask.  When in general is a better time of the day or night to give you a ringy ding?”

Marsha laughed, then sighed. 

“Sheriff,” she admitted, “it doesn’t matter.  Just give me a call and if I am able, I’ll answer the damned thing, and if I can’t, the answering machine will take care of it.”

“I take it the answering machine isn’t much for conversation but it listens well.”

Marsha laughed.  “Sheriff, you’re a comedian!”

“That’s commodion,” he deadpanned, “I’m so full of it I need flushed!”

“Are you always like this?” Marsha laughed.

“Generally I’m worse.  Just ask my wife.  She has to put up with me.”

Marsha had a suspicion that laughter was a frequent visitor under the Sheriff’s roof.

“Sheriff, there is something I’ve noticed.”

“What’s that?”

“Coincidences. There seem to be an awful lot of coincidences.”

“How’s that?”

“I was reading some of the handwritten accounts of the past.”

“What accounts?”

“The most recent …”

Her eyes turned to a chunk of weathered timber on the table.

“No.”

“No?”

“The first account I read…”

She looked over at the papers on her desk, looked at the weather-bleached timber with the aged, oxidized slug barely visible in the bottom of the round, splintered hole, and she remembered the account she’d read, written in a long-dead editor’s hand.

 Sheriff, I have something you’ll want to see!”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

126.  A SOLID IMPRESSION

 

A pale-eyed lawman glared down the street of the town he’d shepherded for many years.

His red mare’s ears swung restlessly, her head dipping, dipping again, reminding the idler loafing in front of the Silver Jewel of a delicate little doe deer, uncertain about something seen across the meadow, swinging her ears, dipping her head, tasting the wind.

That is to say, if there had been such an idler loafing in front of the Silver Jewel.

“You didn’t take her up on her offer,” a pale-eyed young woman said, staring down the same street; she was astride her huge, towering, powerfully-built black Frisian mare.

“Nope.”

The pair watched with more than their eyes, listened with more than their ears.

Father and daughter, side by side, each forged in their own fires, each tempered in their own flames, their souls quenched in blood the way a blacksmith will quench spring stock in good black oil:  they were both hard-shelled, but flexible, and incredibly strong … stronger than either one realized.

The street was quiet, this time of night.

A stray dog trotted across the street, stopped, looked at them:  his challenging bark echoed uncertainly from the fronts of the buildings:  a whine, a duck of its head and a lowering of its tail and the stray scampered across the street and into an alley’s shadowed mouth.

“You realize she was testing you.”

The broad shouldered, lean waisted badge packer nodded slowly.  “Reckon so.”

“It wouldn’t hurt you, you know.  It’s been … what, six years, seven, since Esther’s death?”

Again that slow, thoughtful nod, pale and unblinking eyes sweeping the length of the street.

“Near eight now.”

His voice was almost rough, but behind its coarse resonance … a note of unhappiness, of … sadness, an old grief he hadn’t let go of.

“You deserve some happiness,” the pale eyed young woman in the fashionable McKenna gown whispered.

The man blinked, turned his head toward her.

“I am happy.”

“The only time you smile is when you have grandchildren climbing all over you.”

His head turned slowly to the front again.

“Yep.”

The red mare stepped out, her rider’s will and pleasure given through his legs and knees and a twist of his booted feet, and the young woman watched horse and rider walk briskly down the center of the paint-striped pavement, steel-shod hooves loud and sharp-sounding in the evening’s hush.

The pretty young woman took a long breath, shook her head, turned her big mare with the same pressure of leg and knee and a twist of her booted legs.

Had she turned to look, she would have found the lean lawman with the iron grey mustache had disappeared, he and his horse, as if they never were.

She didn’t look back.

Neither did he.

It would have done him the same degree of good, had he looked, as it would have for her, for she’d disappeared as well.

A pickup truck drove down the main street of Firelands, past the heavy glass doors of the Sheriff’s office and the brightly-painted Silver Jewel Saloon.

 

Everything was recycled on the Mars station.

If they needed something, it was made on-site, peacefully or otherwise; their 3D printer ran almost constantly, fabricating an incredible array of materials, generally from the soil itself:  there were technologies nobody talked about, technologies nobody understood, and nobody really cared:  if it was classified, and it made their machine work, who were they to pry into the subject?

Sheriff Marnie Keller slammed a sidehandle baton into her belt ring.

It was fabricated on site, manufactured according to her specifications; her skinsuit, her revolver, her comm gear and atmosphere recycler were all Earth-made, but the rest of what she carried was all fabricated on-site.

She set her ID pinger to remote:  as she approached a door, it released and opened for her:  normally people had to stop and physically present their issue ID, wait for the clearance to cycle through, the door to unlock, then they had to release the door and open it themselves.

The Sheriff was one of the privileged few who didn’t have to do this.

She heard the fight when she was yet one airlocked chamber away.

Her door was a moment longer opening than it should have, and the override light came on beside the control panel.

Why did that override? she thought.  That only happens when two doors are opened at once and only with the authorization code –

Five they were, and one on the ground bleeding from a split open scalp:  he wobbled his way to a sitting position, until he was kicked in the side of the head by a waffle soled boot, which floored him like a head shot beef.

Marnie curled her lip, whistled, loud, shrill, sudden:  it was her personal signal that she was about to kick some serious backside, she’d let it be known twice thus far and she’d demonstrated its sequelae twice thus far, and when she curled and whistled, it was generally understood she was in the process of lowering the boom.

The sidehandle baton rang as it sailed out of its holder, spun in her fist: she swung it in a hard, abbreviated arc, caught the nearest pugilist behind the knee:  she sidestepped, light, a dancer’s move, recovered the baton, letting it spin in against her ribs, then thrust – her fist tight about the molded-beige handle as she stepped into a punch – she drove the full force of her incoming weight through the small end of the baton, ramming the punch through the layers of atmosphere suit and probably breaking a few ribs once its focused energy penetrated.

She looked up, saw an electric-blue sleeve with a white-lace cuff lift and drop suddenly.

Part of her mind registered that the blue-satin cloth was very much at odds with the dust-soiled, once-white suits.

Part of her mind registered that one of the fighters was turning, fist cocked.

Marnie ducked the roundhouse swing, spun the baton, caught the long end in her off hand and drove the long end’s blunt, rounded end into the ribs just below the exposed armpit:  a step, a swing, the sound of a bull swatted across the backside with a 2x4 and the next man went down, his shin screaming like it had just been broken.

She looked up and reflexiely brought the baton up to block a descending length of plastic pipe; as it hit her baton, laying firm against her forearm, the impact shocked through her shoulder and she realized the lightweight, hollow pipe was filled with something that made it quite a bit heavier.

She drew up her knees to kick the legs from under the attacker, part of her mind predicting she would shatter both his knees and require surgery if not a bilateral knee replacement –

The shimmering, blue-satin sleeve raised again, descended fast, hard:  there was the sound of a club hitting a watermelon and the man who’d just tried to club her, sagged, then fell slowly to the precious, cultivated greenhouse dirt.

A pretty young woman with pale eyes stood there with a turned-hickory truncheon in her hand and a cynical smile on her face.

“Nice job,” she said.  “I like your war club.”

She turned and slapped her truncheon hard against the side of a man’s head as he came in, arms wide to grapple:  she stepped back and let him stumble and hit the floor.

“He just plowed up a furrow with his nose,” the pale-eyed woman said conversationally, then looked back at the Sheriff.  “See you around, sweets!”

Marnie scrambled to her feet.  “Wait!”  she barked, her voice loud behind her visor –

She turned –

She heard the sound of hoofbeats, loud, clattering, but diminishing.

She stared at the space where the pretty young woman in pale eyes had been but a moment before, then she looked around her, thrust her baton back into its ring.

She was the only one on her feet.

“Infirmary,” she called.

A click in her earphones.

“Infirmary.”

“John, multiple casualties in greenhouse seven, blunt trauma and possible head injuries.”

“Number?” 

Marnie heard the alert tone, knew the EMTs were scrambling into their suits thrusting sock feet into readyboots, pulling on their lightweight, powder-blue suits, flipping down their visors to guard against decompression.

“Five,” she said.  “Five men down.”

 

Chief Will Keller sat across from the editor, mindlessly stirring his coffee, his eyes staring through the tabletop.

“Don’t fall in,” Marsha said gently.

The Chief blinked, focused.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “What was the question again?”

She laughed.  “You’ve been stirring your coffee for three and a half minutes by the clock. What kind of sugar are you trying to dissolve?”

Will looked at the coffee cup as if it were somehow at fault, withdrew the spoon, placed it carefully on its saucer.

He shook his head.  “I’m just thinking of how close we came to more trouble.”

“More than being machine-gunned in your BVDs, you mean?”

Will raised his cup, one-handed … with his left hand, Marsha thought, knowing he’d chosen their table so he could not only watch who was coming in, but who might be trying to angle in behind, thanks to the several mirrors and the excess of waxed and shiny-clean chrome surfaces in the outdated but immaculate drugstore.

Marsha did not miss the fact that he’d stirred his coffee left handed, his right on his thigh:  he’d eaten his fries left handed, he lifted his coffee cup left handed, though he wore a wristwatch on his left arm and his holstered revolver was on the right side of his broad, black Sam Browne belt.

Marsha tilted her head a little and gave him a very frank look.  “So what shall we talk about?”

Will grimaced and Marsha knew she’d hit a nerve.

“I suppose you want some statement or a good racy quote you can use for your newspaper,” he muttered.

“That would be nice,” she admitted, “but that’s not what I’m after.”

“No?”  His look was openly skeptical.  “What, then?”

“I’d like to get to know you better.”

Will grunted.  “I’m an old man,” he said flatly.  “I retired once.  I came out of retirement because the man I left in charge was impolite enough to fall over dead of an aneurysm.  Hereditary, they said.  No fault of his, they said.”

“And you miss him.”

“Damned right I miss him!” Will snapped, then shook his head.  “I’m sorry.  You don’t need the wrong end of my temper.”

Marsha took a long breath, looked away.

Now I’ve gone and done it, Will thought bitterly.  Damn me, I’ve hurt her feelin’s!

“I miss a policeman too,” she admitted quietly.

“What kind was he?”

“I think he was a quarterback in college.  Built like it.  A fine looking man … he knew how to listen.”

“Most cops do.”

Marsha nodded slowly.  “He … was strong and he made me laugh.”  She looked at the Chief.  “He was about your height but he had dark, dark eyes, like deep midnight pools over an ocean well.”

Will nodded, thinking of a pair of eyes he’d known … his first wife Crystal, long dead now, a beautiful young woman who’d been killed in a head-on with a pickup truck one clear fall afternoon.

Marsha sighed, smiled.  “And he was really good with handcuffs.”  She gave the Chief a warm look and the Chief’s return expression was nowhere as inviting as hers.

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned handcuffs.”  His brows approached one another, just a little.  “Do you like your boyfriend to cuff you up?”

She shrugged.  “If I’m helpless,” she suggested, “whatever happens isn’t my fault, now, is it?”

Will’s pale eyes were hard.  “The answer is no.”

“No?”  She blinked innocently.

Will leaned back in his chair, raised a summoning finger:  behind the chrome-and-marble counter, the soda jerk nodded, totaled up their bill, tore it free of the pad and started to bring it over.

“Congratulations,” Marsha said, rising.

Will’s forehead wrinkled and his brows slammed together as he rose with her.  “Congratulations?”

“You just passed the test.”

Will’s eyes tightened a little at the corners and he snorted, then laughed.

“The test,” he said skeptically.  “You were testing me.”

“The law isn’t the only arena where we have to examine a testimony to make sure it’s whole cloth.”

Will accepted the bill, followed the editor to the cash register.

“Dutch,” she said, pulling a slim wallet from her shoulder bag.

“My Mama,” Will said, “didn’t teach me hi, yes or go to hell about women, but Aunt Martha did, and if I let you pay half she’d climb out of the grave and turn me over her bony knee for a good fannin’.”  His words were hard, but the amusement in his eyes took the edge off his grating syllables.  “She worked hard to beat some manners into mmm … I mean she worked hard to teach me good manners.”  He placed gentle fingertips on the back of her hand.  “Put that away.  The gentleman pays.”

Marsha considered for a long moment, her eyes shifting to the table, and she looked back and laughed.

“I was going to leave the tip,” she smiled, “but you’ve done that too!”

“My baby sis was a nurse, once upon a time, and nurses are tidy and well-organized.  She surely was.  It was more efficient to throw out a tip before heading for the register.”

 

Sheriff Will Keller held his wife’s hand, he held his youngest on his lap, his side was warm where his other son sat beside him:  they were gathered in front of his computer to watch the latest video letter from Marnie.

“Daddy, you were right,” Marnie said to the camera’s tiny lens: “you warned we’d be tried every time we were the new cop in town, and you were right.”

“She did well,” Dr. John Greenlees Jr. spoke up, slipping into the screen, grinning over Marnie’s shoulder at the camera – “Sheriff, your little girl waded into a good knock down drag out and proceeded to Samson five Philistines.”

Marnie held up the translucent, beige-hued sidehandle baton between delicate forefingers, holding it by the ends like an ear of corn.

“Home made and handy,” she declared, “all from local materials.  Meet the Jawbone of a Jack Mule.”

Linn laughed and he looked at his wife.

“She sounds familiar!” he said happily.

“She sounds like you!” she said knowingly.

Jimmy tugged at his Sheriff’s sleeve.

Linn looked at him, puzzled, then reached forward and paused the recording.

Jimmy was holding a sheet of paper and looking at the screen, then at the Sheriff.

“I know what happened,” he said in a small voice, holding out the paper.

Linn reached for what turned out to be three pages.

“See, that’s when she got the call,” Jimmy said, pointing to the first page, to the pencil drawing of a woman rising from her desk, a woman with a six point star and pale eyes, a woman with one hand on a holstered revolver and a sidehandle baton in the other.

The second sheet was a whirling malestrom of fists, feet and a spinning war club, the woman’s eyes narrow and determined, the baton a blur as it smacked into a man’s thigh hard enough to break the knee over and bring him down backwards.

The Sheriff stared at the second page, marveling at the detail, and then he froze and concentrated on the back of the group … back where another pale-eyed woman made war in what looked like a McKenna gown, a determined expression and a turned hardwood club prominent.

The third page showed the pale eyed woman seated at her desk again, but this time the Sheriff’s eyes went to the wall behind her.

An indentation … something that wasn’t there when …

He turned back to the video, resumed play.

He didn’t hear a word his daughter was saying.

He was too busy staring at where her head had been a moment before.

She’d leaned a little to the left, leaned over to set down her Jawbone of a Jack Mule, and there on the wall behind her … impressed into the plastiformed bulkhead …

There it was.

Clear as day.

The impress of a horseshoe, as if a great black horse drove a hind hoof into the wall.

“Now how,” Linn whispered, “did that get there?”

As if hearing her father’s whispered words, the recorded image of his daughter, delayed by transit time of between eight and fourteen minutes at lightspeed from Mars to earth, turned to look at the wall behind her.

He saw her hand raise, her fingers trace the impression.

“Now how,” he heard her murmur, “did that get there?”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

127.  CONFESSION

 

In the days of Old Pale Eyes – at the time gold was being mined in Cripple Creek and only one shaft extended under Firelands, in the days when the Black Agent rode a huge black horse and so did the Lady of the Lance, lawmen welcomed the words of the lawbreaker:  confession was not the sole purview of the Church, unless the unburdening of a guilty conscience can be considered religious.

If that were the case, then the Sheriff’s desk inside his little log fortress of an office, the Deacon’s bench outside the office, his front porch, and sometimes a table in the Silver Jewel, all were pressed into service as places of worship, for the Old Sheriff had received the words of cleaning from many a sorrowful soul who wished absolution for their excesses.

There were times when the law’s formal intervention was called for.

There were times when it was not.

Lawmen in all ages knew the criminal’s own mouth was a frequent source of incrimination, and so it was even now, as Linn knelt by the dying man’s shoulder and held his cold, shivering hand.

The Sheriff knew him as Nick, knew him as a nurse, and a good one, a man with a solid reputation in the medical community:  he’d worked geriatrics and pediatrics both, and the Sheriff first men him when Nick was walking beside a therapy horse, one hand on his young client’s belt, steadying him in the saddle as the horse was led down a gentle trail.

Nick coughed blood, groaned a little, looked up at the Sheriff.

“I need to confess,” he whispered hoarsely.

Linn squeezed his hand a little.  “I’m right here,” he said gently, his voice that of a comforting friend and not a suspicious lawman.  “I’m here, Nick.  I’m listening.”

Nick nodded.

“I tortured an old woman,” he said faintly, closing his eyes, then opened them and took a deeper, obviously pained breath.

Beside him, what used to be a small pickup truck steamed, its front end crushed; Nick had not been belted in and was thrown free when the vehicle left the roadway and rammed a boulder.

The Sheriff didn’t need to be a veteran paramedic to know Nick’s injuries were more than serious:  he’d called for the squad and now all he could do was hold the man’s hand and wait.

 

The old woman blinked.

It was the only response she had to anything, and there never seemed to be a correlation between her blink and a question, or an action, there was never any sign that she heard or understood anything that was said, but she did, oh yes, she heard and she understood quite well.

She’d been a schoolteacher and she’d had to be removed from the classroom when she had her strokes – they were not her first, but one in particular left her face twisted and her body weak on one side and her balance shot to hell, and so the school board removed her from the classroom and she ended up in a nursing home.

With Nick.

Nick was her private duty nurse; he seemed to be ever present, though he did come and he did go:  he was friendly, he was pleasant, he took immaculate, excellent care of the old woman, and if he hadn’t arrived with credentials and recommendations, the staff would have thought him family.

Nick turned her to prevent bedsores, tended her with a professional’s expertise but the patience and kindness of a saint, and no one thought it amiss when he closed her door and hung a DO NOT DISTURB, THERAPY IN PROGRESS sign on its message-hook.

It was storming that night, a rare but vicious mountain thunderstorm:  Nick sat in the chair beside his patient’s bed, and he turned on her overhead light – something he almost never did – and slapped her face lightly, something he’d never, ever done in the past.

“Mrs. Craig,” he said firmly, “wake up.”

The old schoolteacher opened her eyes.

“Mrs. Craig, look at me.”

Thunder shivered the windows; magnesium burned across the heavens, streaking the black glass with silver fire.

Nick held up a towel.  “Mrs. Craig, I am a nurse and I know the human body intimately.”  He stood, wet the corner of the towel at the sink, spun it and then snapped it like a whip against the wall:  it left a wet mark, it cracked sharply, the sound of its impact sharp and clear inside the room, but inaudible outside.

“That,” he said, “would leave a welt half the size of a teacup.”

He took the towel, rolled it into a cylinder, them swung it hard against his upturned shoe sole.

“That is almost a club.  It hits like a nightstick but leaves no marks.”

He walked over to the woman, bent over her.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I am telling you these things.”

She blinked.

“Mrs. Craig, you may remember me from sixth grade.”  He smiled thinly.  “Your teacher’s version of our textbook had different pagination than the student textbooks and you asked me to locate a particular European city on a particular page.

“I studied the map but could not locate it and you asked impatiently if I could find it or not, and then – in a waspish voice” – he turned, looked at her with a hard glare – “you asked me if I was even on the right page.

“I held up the text and put my finger on the page and said “I’m right here,” and you came out from behind that desk with your ping pong paddle and you belted me half a dozen times on the shoulder blade.

“I was more hurt by the humiliation than by your damned paddle.

“Mrs. Craig, I have had many long years to think about that, and now here we are, alone, and nobody to interfere.”  He smiled grimly.  “Now what shall I do, Mrs. Craig?  Shall I return every blow you gave me, only with something that will hurt a hell of a lot more, and return the blows with interest?  A credit card charges eighteen per cent, compounded monthly, what would that be, over this many years?  Six hundred blows, seven hundred, a thousand?”

He unrolled the towel, went back over to the sink, wet a third of it, wrung it out, then twisted it again as if to welt-snap the chair.

“Mrs. Craig,” he said quietly as he seated himself again, “did you know that I am your durable power of attorney?”

She blinked.

“I, and I alone, have been caring for you all these years.  I’ve used your schoolteacher’s retirement  plus my own funds to keep you alive.  I became a nurse and worked for  years to get the necessary experience.  I had you transferred here, where I could be your designated caregiver.”

He leaned closer, lowered his voice to a whisper.

“I hated you for years, Mrs. Craig.  As a matter of fact, I still do.  You earned the fear and the mistrust and the hatred of a little child those many years ago, and I still feel all the fear and all the hatred that I did then, only now I have you in my grasp and I can do truly horrible things to you.”

He smiled grimly.

“I have somewhere private I can take you.  I can lock you in an absolutely black cell deep underground, leave you alone in the dark and in silence, 23 hours a day if I wish.  I can work you over with a wet towel, I can cause you pain beyond description, and I can get away with it!”

His eyes were bright, his stare intense, his teeth clenched as he hissed out those terrible words – I can get away with it! – and the old woman blinked.

He took a long breath, blew it out.

“I have given an immense amount of thought as to what I shall do with you in order to have my revenge, Mrs. Craig.  You were the teacher with authority over me, and now I am your durable power of attorney and your nurse, and I own you.”

He tilted her head, looked at her as if she were an insect pinned to a specimen-board.

“I will have my revenge,” he said at length.  “I will have my revenge, heaped up and running over and pressed down in the golden goblet of vengeance.” 

The old woman blinked.

 

Nick shivered, coughed again, bloody froth spilling out the corner of his mouth.

Linn could hear the approaching sirens in the distance:  the ambulance siren was distinctive, differing even at a distance from any other emergency vehicle in the county.

It was refitted with a generator instead of an alternator, and a Federal dual-tone siren, the kind driven with a Delco starter motor, the kind that put such a slam-bang pull and surge on the electrical system that it tended to eat alternator diodes.

Nick blinked, tried to say something.

“I got my revenge,” he gurled, nodding.  “I hurt her bad, Sheriff.  I really hurt her bad.”

“How’s that, Nick?”  Linn asked gently, his eyes turning pale as he said the words.

Nick’s grip relaxed and his head fell back a little, but he caught himself and grinned crookedly.

Linn leaned close to hear the barely audible words.

“I hurt her, Sheriff, I hurt her bad.” 

Linn felt one last squeeze of the dying man’s hands as he whispered, “I forgave her.”

 

The Sheriff was unusually quiet at the supper table.

Connie recognized that thousand yard stare and cautioned Jimmy with the barest shake of her head when he looked at his Sheriff and started to say something.

Finally Linn blinked and “came up for air,” as Connie put it.

He looked at Jimmy.  “Could you fetch me tonight’s paper, please,” he said softly, and Jimmy slid out of his chair and scampered noisily into the living room.

“He’s in his sock feet and he still sounds like a stampede,” Linn murmured, and Connie saw the corners of his eyes crinkle up a little with amusement. 

“I’ll bet you were the same way.”

Linn nodded, accepted the paper from a grinning Jimmy.

He turned a few pages, stopped, nodded.

“I suspected as much,” he said quietly.

“What is it, dearest?”  Connie asked.

Linn looked up, closed the paper.

“The obits.  Two people I knew.”

“Oh?”  Connie asked as he handed her the folded weekly.

“Friend of mine.  Nick.  He was a nurse.  And a retired schoolteacher, Beulah Craig.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

128.  ONE MAN, ALONE

 

Chief of Police Will Keller looked around.

Carbon Hill always did feel empty and today it felt even more … more hollow, more forsaken.

This may have had something to do with the fact that Will was in an ambush.

He knew it was a setup, he knew it was an ambush, but he went anyway, went alone, like he always did.

It wasn’t particularly smart and it wasn’t according to his own rules for the Department, but here he was, intending to catch someone – and at minimum, make them tell who was behind getting him out of a comfortable seat to come all the way out to Carbon Hill.

None of this was going through his mind at the moment.

At the moment, though, he was damning the fact that money talks, and lots of money talks loud – loud enough to have purchased military grade, full-automatic weapons.

Will ran at an angle, bullet spats kicking up dirt well behind him:  whoever was shooting, knew nothing about leading a running target – Will made the ruin of the Marshal’s office, ducked behind it, squatted as a row of holes and flying splinters ventilated what little was still standing on this end.

Will froze, then picked up a chunk of wood, tossed it high in the air, in the general direction of the gunfire.

“GRENADE!” he yelled, launching into a sprint behind the steel cube that served as the Carbon Hill lockup many years ago.

There was a noise inside the steel cube and he saw a face behind the barred window in back, the little square high up, and a gunmuzzle thrust out between the bars.

Will shoved the barrel up with his off hand, stuck his revolver’s muzzle between the bars and triggered three fast rounds.

The gunbarrel fell back and so did a body.

Will dropped, opened his cylinder, pressed the extractor rod delicately:  he pulled out three hot brass hulls, dropped them, brought three rounds out of his shirt pocket and dropped them in.

He closed the cylinder with both hands, gently, quietly, the way he always did:  he took a long step toward the corner, another, stopped.

If I were going to kill me, he thought, where would I hide?

He took three long breaths, gathered himself to slice-the-pie around the corner, thinking he’d have to get to the steel cube’s front door, make sure nobody was inside waiting to backshoot him –

Will froze, eyes narrowing, his right ear pulling back as if drawn by an invisible thumb and forefinger.

Hoofbeats?

Hearing that gunfire and someone is riding in anyway?

A gangsta raised his head, stared, the muzzle of his stolen, police-issue H&K submachine gun sagging as he rose, incredulous.

A pretty young woman in a shimmering, electric-blue gown and hat was riding down the street on a huge black horse, a young woman of such beauty as to cause a man’s breath to catch in his throat.

The young woman looked at him and smiled, and her smile was like the sunrise itself.

It was the last thing the ambusher ever saw.

Chief of Police Will Keller laid the sights level and eased his finger back against the narrow, grooved trigger, and the .357 Smith and Wesson barked, once, loud and sharp, and the MP5 fell from nerveless fingers as the ambusher’s body collapsed like a baggie of ground meat.

Will’s eyes were busy – he was still close to the metal cube, grateful that it remained surprisingly solid after all these years of neglect – he did not see the pretty young woman raise her left hand, but he did hear the distinct, deep BOOOOMMM of a large bore, blackpowder round, and he felt as much as heard a body fall against the inside of the cube.

He looked around the corner, stared as she brought a bulldog .44 in close to her bodice, opened it, plucked the empty hull from the extractor star with ladylike, gloved fingers; she replaced the fired round, smiling and relaxed as a woman tending her embroidery.

She closed the pistol, slid it through a neatly-hemmed slot in the skirt material, back into the holster belted securely about her hidden thigh.

“You might want to look at the old saloon,” she called cheerfully, and Will saw movement as she did:  the old lawman’s voice was loud and commanding in harsh contrast to her pleasantly framed words.

“COME OUT SO I CAN SEE WHO YOU IS,” he challemged, “OR I WILL COME OVER THERE AND SEE WHO YOU WAS!”

There was a short burst of fire from within and a handful of bullets spanged into the inside of the cube, then there was a deep BOOM, BOOM from inside the old saloon, and a wisp of sulfurous blue smoke drifted out of what used to be part of the front wall.

A familiar-sounding man’s voice called, “COME AND GET ‘EM, THEY AIN’T GOIN’ NOWHERE!”

“Who is that!”  Will demanded.  “Show yourself!”

His revolver’s sights locked onto a black form that emerged from the shadows of the ruined saloon:  he blinked, lowered the revolver, then holstered.

“You,” he breathed.

A pale eyed lawman in a black suit paced out of the saloon, a double barrel shotgun in hand.

“Who else is there?”  Will asked.

“Good guys or bad guys?”  the pale-eyed young woman laughed.

“Both,” Will said, blinking.

“Don’t worry,” the old lawman with the iron-grey mustache said, his voice deep, rough-edged:  “you’re not dyin’ and this is not a dream.”

He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

“I back shot the both of ‘em.”

“Are there more enemy?” Will challenged.

“Don’t reckon,” Old Pale Eyes growled.

The pretty young woman gave some invisible, inaudible signal and the huge black mare knelt, allowing her a graceful dismount.

She flowed more than walked, her blue-satin gown rippling in the sunlight.

Her hand extended; in her gloved grip, a bulldog .44, handle first.

“You were going to come out for a relaxing day of shooting,” she said pleasantly, “and you received word that these fellows were … well, I’ll let you tell what you want on that count.”  She winked and the pale eyed old lawman with the iron grey mustache held out the double gun.

“You were not intending to go into a pitched battle,” Old Pale Eyes rumbled, “but when the enemy came at you, you used the tools you had.”  He looked down at the Highway Patrolman on the Chief’s belt.  “You’re good with that.”

Will grinned.  “It’s my sister’s,” he admitted.

“She always did have good taste,” the black-clad badge packer affirmed.

The pretty young woman tilted her head and regarded the Chief with a surprising frankness.  “I do believe you Keller men get more handsome with each succeeding generation.”

She looked at the Old Sheriff, smiling, almost a challenge, an invitation to dispute her statement.

The Old Sheriff’s glare was his only comment.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

129.  HIDE

 

Jimmy drew his knees up, buried his face in pants-leg denim, did his best to turn invisible.

He was behind the Sheriff’s office, he was hiding in the stable out back, he was shivering and terrified and he was in the most remote corner he could find, hidden behind hay bales, shivering in fragrant darkness, more afraid than he’d been in some long time.

His mouth was dry and it was hard to breathe and he was waiting for the angry voice and the hard hand seizing his neck and pulling him out and the rumbling whistle of a hard-swung belt –

Linn set his untasted doughnut back on the paper plate and glared with hard and pale eyes at his uncle.

His bottom jaw was thrust out, he took a long breath, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and glared again at the police chief.

Will glared right back at him.

Each man challenged the other in silence and each replied to the challenge with silence, until finally Linn threw up his hands and clenched his teeth and seared the stamped-tin ceiling with an icy gaze.

“If it’s any help,” Cindy offered from her desk, “your father looked just like you when Willamina went into a situation without backup.”

Nephew and uncle both stopped, blinked, then looked at the dispatcher’s carefully innocent expression:  they looked at one another and Will said, “You’d look funny in a dress.”

The spell was broken.

Linn sat heavily in a folding tin chair, lips pressed together, handlebar mustache raising a little:  Will sat more carefully, stroked his own greying handlebar.

Finally Linn rubbed his hands together, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees:  Will assumed the same position and as the men leaned toward one another, each regarded the other’s burnished boots and finally looked up.

“You’re the only one of you I’ve got,” Linn said quietly.

Will was about to say something, but the Sheriff’s quiet words took the wind out of his sails instantly.

He closed his mouth, frowned.

“Yeah,” he finally grunted.

The two lawmen sat in silence for several more moments.

“Y’know, Linn,” Will finally said, “I think that was the most eloquent silence you’ve ever come up with.”

Linn grinned, a quick, sardonic twist of the lips, then his face relaxed and the expression became more genuine.

“Will,” he said softly, “I genuinely hate funerals and I especially hate buryin’ family and I utterly and absolutely loathe and despise plantin’ family that’s …”
His breath came quickly for a few seconds and Will saw past his nephew’s reserve.

He’d breathed like that a few times when they buried his pale eyed Mama, when it was genuinely all Linn could do to hold it together when the words were spoken over his Mama’s still, pale form in that fancy wood box.

Will reached over and laid a hand on his nephew’s shoulder and nodded.

Linn looked up, the misery in his face reflecting the grief that was fresher than he wanted to admit.

“I don’t want to plant you too, Uncle Will.”

“You’ll have to eventually.”

“Yeah.” 

Linn dropped his head, frowning, then raised it again.

“I reckon we ought to have a forensic re-enactment.”

“We could do that.”

“I reckon it’ll come out that a man has to be a damned fool to go into a known ambush with a six shot revolver.”

“Reckon it will.”

“Alone.  No backup.”

Will bristled.  “That’s Carbon, son.  That’s where we hunted one another when I was a boy with BB guns.  That’s where we hunted one another with paint balls.  That’s where we run and hid and played and I could find my way through that place blindfolded and have!”

Linn raised a hand.  “True enough,” he admitted.

Will leaned back, threw his head back, glared at the ceiling.

“You’re right,” he muttered, then looked back down at his nephew. 

“Sometimes,” he said a little more softly, “an older man hates being corrected by a younger man.”

“Especially when the younger man is right?”  Linn grinned.

“Especially when the younger man is right,” Will agreed.

Will looked around, frowning.

“Where’s Jimmy?”

“He was here a minute ago,” Linn said, surprised.

 

Jimmy twisted in fear, shivering.

He heard the approaching footsteps.

He heard hay whisper and felt hay bales move and he flinched and whimpered when he felt the Sheriff’s hand brush his leg.

Linn scooted in close to him, pulled the hay bale into place, blocking the entrance.

“Can I hide here too?”  he whispered.

Jimmy was shivering and in the little light that struggled in between bristling bales of fragrant, sweet-smelling hay, Linn could see the lad’s face was big-eyed with terror.

Linn put his arm around Jimmy’s shoulders, drew him tight.

“The world is a scary place,” he whispered, “and sometimes it feels good to hide away from it.”

When the Sheriff and his boy finally came back into the Sheriff’s office, they borrowed a broom from the janitor’s closet and stepped outside, took turns brooming the hay and chaff off one another.

Cindy giggled as she watched the pair plying the bristles with delicate, short strokes, each one a mirror for the other in their attempt to remove the evidence of their hiding place, and when they finally came inside, Linn held up the broom and deadpanned, “Just getting in our flight time.”

“Have a doughnut, Sheriff,” Cindy groaned, giving him a disapproving look and giving Jimmy a wink.

 

Will was restless.

He’d brought the doughnuts but he didn’t have any appetite for them, and now he realized he was kind of hungry.

He looked at the glass panes with the very old, hand-painted legend FIRELANDS GAZETTE in an arc spanning two of the panes.

He considered for a long moment, then turned and went into the Silver Jewel.

If he was hungry, there was the off chance a certain editor might be hungry as well, and it would be gentlemanly to assuage the lovely young woman’s appetite.

He turned and climbed the three steps to the Silver Jewel’s front door.

Marsha watched him through the gap between the two Ts in “Gazette,” disappointed that he hadn’t come over.

She’d seen him looking in her direction and she’d seen him twist his handlebar mustache, and she remembered wishing she’d stroked it, wished she knew how it might feel against her face, and then he turned away and went in the opposite direction.

A half hour later she found out, after the picnic basket was emptied, after Will laid a picnic lunch on the red-and-white checkered cloth spread carefully on her table, after she laid a hand on his forearm and whispered, “I was worried when I heard what happened.”

Yes, Marsha found out what his mustache felt like as it pressed against her face, and she found what it was like to be held by those strong arms.

It’s a good thing a picnic lunch is intended to be eaten cold.

They didn’t get around to satisfying that particular appetite for some little while.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

130.  FROM HERE TO NELSONVILLE

 

Linn had business in Cripple Creek.

As usual, this being summer and school in recess, Jimmy was invited along.

He was, to be real honest, kind of disappointed they were riding the train.

When Jimmy thought of “The Train,” his mental picture was that of The Lady Esther in profile, all drivers and diamond stack and spoked, cast-iron wheels, parts and pieces turning and rocking and thrusting back and forth.

Here in the private car there was no sense of that magical symphony of cast iron and the controlled, powerful dance of many moving parts.

Jimmy was polite enough not to look too bored; as a matter of fact, he drowsed a little, and once he thought he saw someone sitting across the car from him, an older man with a white, dignified, spade-cut beard, a man with a gavel in front of him and a cigar clenched between yellowed teeth, but he blinked and it was gone and he realized he must’ve been dreaming.

Except that he dreamed he smelled cigar smoke but maybe that was from the locomotive.

Jimmy’s eyelids drooped again and he leaned against the solid reassuring warmth of his Sheriff.

Linn’s eyes were busy and he had a half smile trying to lay claim to his otherwise solemn face.

He’d smelled cigar smoke too, just a whiff, and had Jimmy not been asleep against his side, he would have spoken a challenge to the unknown guest.

It was on their way back that the Sheriff changed seats, parked himself beside the far window, looking forward as they pulled the grade, the engine’s exhaust barking sharply against the sheer granite cliff on one side:  they were going about as fast as a man could walk quickly, which meant the scenery was passing slowly.

Linn thrust a chin at a widening in the ballast.

“Right there, Jimmy,” he said.  “See that?”

Jimmy came up close, fingers on the window sill, peered out the wavy glass:  he saw an opening in the side of the mountain, saw a set of rails going into the dark, irregular, generally oval shaped opening.

“That goes down into the mine,” Linn explained.  “It’s railroad gauge for about a quarter of a mile and then it stops.  Mines run a narrow gauge” – his hands spread out the approximate distance – “and for the life of me I don’t know why they ran railroad gauge and line-weight rails into that mountain.”

Jimmy frowned a little, considering.

“There was a … a gambling car went in there.  My four times great grandfather was Sheriff and that car was full of men sent to kill him, so he went in and killed them first.”

“Really?”  Jimmy breathed, his eyes going big and round.

“Yep.”  Linn’s eyes tightened a little at the corners and Jimmy saw the man’s eyes go pale and kind of hard looking.  “He had someone on the inside so when the shootin’ started the bad guys came out in second place.”

Jimmy considered this, his eyes following the tunnel mouth as it passed slowly by.

“We’ve got a heavy timber gate to keep people out,” Linn explained.  “We can switch from the main line into that quarter mile spur but it’s locked so no one can switch a train in there without our let-be.”

Jimmy blinked, considering that he had no idea what a railroad switch was, but from context he was kind of getting an idea.

“There’s mine shafts enough under here you could walk from here to Nelsonville underground.”

“Where’s Nelsonville?”  Jimmy asked innocently.

Linn laughed and Jimmy relaxed a little.

He liked it when his Sheriff laughed, for it meant chances were minimal that he was going to get beat.

So far the Sheriff had not once ever raised a hand nor his voice at Jimmy, but the boy had been beaten so much, hurt so deeply, trust was one of those words in his vocabulary he never related much with.

“Nelsonville?”  Linn chuckled.  “My Mama used to say that.”  He stood, went over to the big, heavy, rolltop desk, opened a drawer, then the rolltop:  he unfolded a map, motioned the boy over.

“This-here is the Newninety States,” he said with a perfectly straight face.  “We are here” – he planted a finger on Colorado – “and over here in Ohio, in southeast Ohio to be exact” – he thumped another finger on the indicated location – “Nelsonville is in the north of Athens County.”

Jimmy considered the distance separating the two, looked up, skeptical.

“Mama worked for the village of Chauncey.”  Linn reached into the drawer and pulled out another map:  he unfolded it, laid it on the map of the US.

“Here is an Athens County map.  Here’s Athens, home of Ohio University, and the county seat.  Follow 33 north and west” – his finger traced a mustard-yellow line broad as a kitchen match head – “and here’s Nelsonville.  Now back down here across from the old Pepsi plant” – he placed a second finger on the map – “the village of Chauncey.  Mama and Uncle Will both worked there.  Up this hollow is a salt spring, or was, and it’s where Barnum & Bailey Circus used to winter over.”

Linn thumped both fingers at the same time, drumming them on the map, sounding ominously hollow through the desk top.

“When they mined coal, they ran big long shafts following that thick rich strata.  At one time they had so many miles of holes in the ground, a man could take off a-walkin’ from Chauncey and make his way entirely underground to Nelsonville.”

“Wow,” Jimmy said quietly.

“It was more a stunt than it was useful.  When the mines went out of business they abandoned them, they’ve filled with water, but I’d like to have seen them when they were still working!”

Jimmy remembered the tracks arcing back into that dark hollow in the mountainside.

He hadn’t seen any big heavy doors.

“Are there any other ways into the gold mine?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah.  Several.  I’ll show you sometime.”

Linn looked at Jimmy, and Jimmy’s excited grin matched the quiet look of a shared conspiracy he saw in his Sheriff’s face.

 

There was no companionable expression when Jimmy went over backwards, ripping down the shower curtain and bouncing his head off the white-plastic shower wall.

His whimper was cut short by his teeth clicking together and a grunt of pain.

Bleach and glass spun in the air and the Sheriff made a vain grab, first for the desperately-retreating boy, and then for the heavy-glass eye cup.

He managed to miss the boy but caught the faceted glass, and as its contents slung into the air, his nose caught the familiar odor and the presence of the white-plastic jug on the sink’s laminate countertop came together in the man’s mind.

He set the faceted, heavy-glass cup down on the counter, seized the towel, wiped his hands free of the liquid:  the shower curtain was down, torn free of the wire rings, and Jimmy’s face was screwed up with pain, and as he saw the Sheriff reaching for him, his expression went from pain to sheer terror and he shrank back in a most sincere effort to practice Zen Shower Stall:  he was doing his best to become one with the plastic surround.

Linn’s hands were big, strong, his fingers spread wide; he took Jimmy around the ribs, drew him out:  he sat down on the floor, utterly ignoring what he knew to be bleach he was sitting in.

Jimmy’s face was not quite the shade of a sheet of writing paper but it wasn’t far from it.

Linn’s expression was serious and scared both:  he looked closely at Jimmy’s face, looked at one side, then the other, then he looked very directly at the boy’s eyes.

Jimmy was stiff, frozen, his breath quick, gasping, almost:  Linn raised his hand, placed it on Jimmy’s shirt front.

His young heart was beyond hammering.

It was running so fast it was almost vibrating.

“Jimmy,” Linn said, very quietly, “did you get any of that in your eyes?”

Jimmy shook his head.

“Anywhere else, is it on your skin anywhere?”

Jimmy shook his head again.

Linn pulled him close, held him, then laid down on his back, holding the terrified little boy.

“Oh, God,” he groaned, then “Thank You, God,” and Jimmy felt his Sheriff’s arms tighten a little more.

Linn sat – did a regulation sit-up, with a seven-year-old held tight to his chest – he sat up, then picked Jimmy up a little and crossed his legs like Big Chief Mug Wump himself.

“Jimmy,” he said carefully, “what … tell me what …”
He tilted his head toward the sink.  “The bleach.”

Jimmy swallowed, certain that doom and violence and pain beyond description was about to descend upon his young backside and he’d end up welted from neck to ankles again.

He hung his head, resigned to his torture as certainly as any victim of Torquemada’s Inquisition.

“I was g-g-gonna …”
His expression went from terrified to sorrowful.

“I wanted my eyes to be pale too so I …”

His eyes turned to the white plastic jug on the sink and flicked over to the eye cup, still wet with bleach, and the Sheriff’s jaw sagged a little and he looked just a little sick as he realized what Jimmy was saying.

They heard Connie at the doorway and realized they’d heard her running up the stairs, taking them two at a time, but they were too busy looking at each other to register the sound.

“Okay, who’s hurt?”  she demanded.

“Jimmy,” Linn said softly, “did you get any bleach on you?”

Jimmy shook his head.

Connie took a step into the bathroom.  “Yes you did,” she said in her Mommy-voice:  “Strip out of those clothes, they’re ruined” – then another step and she looked closely at Jimmy’s face, gentle fingers busy exploring – “Jimmy, did you get any bleach on you?”

Jimmy shook his head and the Sheriff considered that the boy was terrified of what he might do, but not his wife – and he remembered all the times Jimmy had looked so very surprised when he took Connie in his arms, or held her hand when they walked, or kissed her in a gentle moment.

He was hurt by that … monster … but never by his mother, the Sheriff thought, nodding at the realization. 

Good.

He doesn’t fear everyone.

Just me.

I can work on that.

“You too,” Connie said, laying a maternal hand on the Sheriff’s shoulder.  “That shirt is ruined and you’re sitting in the stuff.”

The Sheriff and Jimmy looked at one another and in one voice said “Uh-oh,” and then Jimmy giggled, and the Sheriff realized he may be making some progress already.

Connie waited until her men were showered and in clean clothes before they converged over popcorn and iced tea.

“Just what went on up there?” Connie asked, shaking seasoned salt into the steaming-hot, buttered delicacy and shaking it vigorously.

“We kind of started to change out the shower curtain,” Linn deadpanned.

“It sounded like a range bull hit the back wall,” Connie said in her I’m The Mommy And I Don’t Believe It voice.

“I don’t think it was quite the way we’d planned on doing it.”

“And what were you doing with bleach, anyway?”  Her smile took the sting out of her words.

Jimmy looked at the Sheriff, his expression sincere and without the least trace of guile.

“My Sheriff has pale eyes,” he explained, “and The Pretty Lady has pale eyes, and I wanted pale eyes so I figured bleach makes clothes pale –“
His voice ground to a halt at the horrified expression Connie wore.

“It … doesn’t quite work like that,” Linn said slowly.

“You didn’t get any in your eyes, did you?”  Connie asked suddenly, gripping Jimmy’s face in both hands, pulling his eyelids down.  “Look up.  Did you get any in your eyes?”

“No,” Jimmy protested.  “My Sheriff grabbed it away from me before I could.”

“Could what?”

“He had the eye cup,” Linn explained.  “I kept him from … he … I think I scared him and he jumped back and fell over the edge of the walk-in shower.  The eye cup flipped and spilled and I grabbed it and set it on the countertop but by then the shower curtain was wrapped around Jimmy and he was a-layin’ back in the shower and rubbin’ his head.”

Jimmy raised a hand and explored his goose egg.  “Still hurts,” he admitted.

“You can’t bleach your eyes, Jimmy,” Connie said sternly.  “It’s … bleach won’t …”

“Bleach will turn your eyes red, Jimmy.  Blood red and then they’ll start to bleed.  It’ll cause what’s called a chemical burn. Your cornea will be milky and you will see light and dark but no shapes.  Not to mention the pain and your eyelids will weld shut and stick to the eyeball.”

“Ow,” Jimmy whined.

“Ow is right.”  Linn tilted his head a little to the side.  “Actually, Jimmy, I like your eyes just the way they are.  They suit you and you will have way less chance of cataracts.”

“What’s Cadillacs?” Jimmy asked, scooping up another handful of popcorn and wiping his buttery hand on the paper towel his Sheriff handed him.

“It’s a thickening and opacification of the lens in the eye that happens from too much sun exposure.  When you’ve got pale eyes like mine, cataracts are almost guaranteed.  Old Pale Eyes himself went almost completely blind because of ‘em.  I’ve got the beginnings of cataracts right now.”

Jimmy frowned, trying to figure out just how a luxury car could fit inside the human eye. 

He shook his head, dismissed the idea.

“I’ve got a book over here that might help.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

131.  BLACK WOLF, WHITE WOLF

 

“I think Linn could have been a teacher,” Connie said into the phone, her voice smiling as quietly as her face.  “Mama, you should have seen him.  Jimmy – no, Mama, Jimmy didn’t – no, Mama, nothing happened.  Jimmy’s fine.”

Connie giggled a little. 

“You should have seen them, Mama.  They were sitting on the couch and Jimmy was on his lap, and Linn was showing him pictures from an anatomy book.
He was so reassuring, Mama.  It was like” – she bit her knuckle – “Mama, he was showing Jimmy a picture of the human eye and explaining how the … he was showing Jimmy why bleach wouldn’t work.”

 

Jimmy looked through one side of the binoculars, then the other side:  he hadn’t quite gotten used to using both halves at the same time.

He studied the black wolf with his right eye, frowning a little as he did.

“He’s big,” he whispered.

“Yes he is,” Linn whispered back.

Jimmy wiggled a little, just a little, cuddling his side up against his Sheriff, and Linn draped his arm across Jimmy’s shoulders.

They were both bellied down on a little rise, looking through a grassy screen at something the Sheriff had only heard about.

“The Bear Killer mated with native wolves long before we were born.”

Linn’s voice was almost a whisper as they watched the massive lupine scenting the wind.

“They’re only supposed to … they’re legend.  Stories.  And here he is.” 

The Sheriff felt a delightful excitement, as if he were looking through a tunnel at the past … a past that was still alive, and very, very real.

The wolf was as tall as The Bear Killer and just as black, it was wolflike in profile and build … except for heavier muscles in the shoulders … and the neck …

“Cooool,” Jimmy breathed, and the Sheriff could hear the grin in his voice.

“Remember this moment, Jimmy,” Linn whispered.  “Remember this for the rest of your life.  We just saw history.  We just saw a living legend!”

Jimmy handed the binoculars back to the Sheriff.

Linn put the glasses to his eyes, focused on the absolutely huge, incredibly black wolf, drinking in this impossible moment.

Jimmy turned, sat up, tilted his head curiously.

A white wolf was three feet from him.

A white wolf every bit as big as the black one.

A pure white wolf with a wet black nose and bright yellow eyes, a white wolf that stood like a statue, if statues had ears that swung and twitched and noses that wrinkled a little as they scented the wind.

Jimmy reached over and patted the back of the Sheriff’s thigh.

Linn turned his head, looked curiously at Jimmy, saw the boy’s expression of awe and wonder.

Linn rolled up on his side and came up on his elbow, and his jaw sagged in amazement.

The white wolf regarded him with calmly blinking eyes.

Linn looked from the black wolf to the white wolf, looked at Jimmy, and Jimmy’s eyes were bit and round and he looked at his Sheriff and the white wolf turned its head and looked back, looked to the Sheriff’s right, bristled:  her head lowered, the fur stood straight up across her shoulders, her lips pulled back off gleaming-white teeth.

Linn came up on fingertips and knees and rolled up onto the balls of his feet, his hand wrapping around the plow handle of his favorite revolver.

A shining black arrow was launched from an invisible bow, a long narrow streak that left a barely audible snarl in its wake.

The black wolf spun, bristling, its ivory canines shocking-white against rippling black lips, Jimmy saw the black wolf’s haunches gather and surge and the black wolf thrust hard into The Bear Killer’s attack.

The sound of their collision was like dropping a side of beef on a cement floor, all except the deep, hate-filled snarl that came from – one throat, both? – neither man nor boy was certain and neither one really cared, for in that moment it was like watching the collision of two locomotives.

There was a brief swirl of spinning bodies, slashing fangs, the horrible sound of two murderous throats screaming their intent to tear the other into bloody gobbets:  the two separated, each dropping into an identical crouch, each with black lips rippling in canine and lupine obscenities:  ears were flat against their heads, yellow eyes burned into black eyes, the two shining, jet-black warriors quivered with their eagerness to tear into one another.

Jimmy’s jaw hung down about his belt buckle and his eyes were the diameter of tea saucers.

Linn rose, stood, looked at the White Wolf.

“Why are you here?”  he whispered.  “What are you telling me?”

He looked at The Bear Killer and the Black Wolf, then back to The White Wolf.

The White Wolf blinked, sleepy in the sun, then looked at Jimmy – looked at him with sleepy, half-lidded eyes, like a cat drowsing in a sunny windowsill.

Jimmy turned and looked behind him, looked at The Bear Killer, alone in the meadow, a wisp of fog twisting into the ground before him.

Jimmy turned back to The White Wolf, tilted his head a little, and the pristine white lupine tilted her head in the identical manner.

“Hi,” the lad said in a tentative, little-boy voice.  “I’m Jimmy.”

The White Wolf turned her head, looked directly at the Sheriff, then she too disappeared as had the black wolf – she simply … wasn’t there, just a little wisp of fog twisting on the ground.

Jimmy’s eyes got a little bigger and he turned to the Sheriff and he turned a little more to look at The Bear Killer as if afraid they too might disappear on him.

The Bear Killer planted his square backside on the grass and yawned, a great, whistling, jaw-stretching, tongue-curling yawn:  he licked his chops and blinked in the sun.

“This,” Linn said quietly, “is either very good, or very, very bad.”

He put two fingers to his lips, whistled a shrill, sustained note.

Jimmy saw their horses raise their heads, then head toward them at a trot.

“Jimmy,” Linn said, “stay close.”

 

Connie heard hooves, running hooves, and she heard the SPANG boom! of the signal – Linn seldom used it, but when he did, it was urgent, this business of bouncing a .44 slug off the cast iron dinner bell.

Connie looked at a grinning Wesley, happily stacking scrap-wood triangles, cut off and discarded by his father from some project in the basement and packed upstairs by a grinning big brother, and the subject of considerable use by both boys.

Connie wiped her hands on the dishtowel, flipped it over her shoulder, pushed open the front door.

Apple-horse danced as he came to a stop, very obviously ready and quite willing to keep running, and Linn’s eyes were pale as he snapped, “Dearest, is all well?”

“Yes, why?”  Connie asked, surprised.

“Make secure, intruder alert, we’re headed for Will’s!”

Connie did not hesitate.

She pulled back into the house, slammed and locked the outer and inner doors, then reached up and pulled the double gun off the rack, opened it and took a quick look.

She parked the shotgun in the corner, opened a drawer, pulled out a gunbelt and slung it around her middle, or tried to – she’d forgotten for the moment she was becoming great with child – she considered for a moment, then hung the shotgun back up, opened a closet door and pulled out an M1 Carbine.

“This’ll do,” she muttered.  “Wes, you stay right there, I’m going to check the back door!”

Wesley Albert sat on the living room floor and stacked the cut-off scrap wood triangles, paying no attention at all to the metallic sound of the carbine’s bolt chuckling back, nor its brisk snap shut.

 

Father and son steered their course for Uncle Will’s house:  Jimmy’s legs tried to grip Stomper’s barrel as the big horse gathered itself for a jump, and the boy was not successful in his attempt:  he had that roping horn in a death grip, his backside floated up off saddle leather, his teeth clicked together and he felt the jolt the length of his young spine as the big warmblood gelding sailed easily over the board fence, following the Appaloosa’s easy leap.

Linn reached down and back and pulled his ’73 rifle free of the carved leather scabbard:  he laid his thumb over the hammer, felt its position – half cock – his pale eyes were busy as he rode in, as he orbited the house, as he reined Apple-horse to a stop in front.

Linn walked Apple up to the front door, leaned over and rapped gloved knuckles on the portal.

Will opened the door, surprised:  when the Sheriff appears at your front door astride a good looking Appaloosa and he has rifle in hand, generally that means something is in the wind.

“Will, is all well?”  Linn asked without preamble.

“Fine as frog hair,” Will replied mildly.

“I’ll check dispatch.”

Will’s eyes were busy too; he stepped to the side, walked over to Jimmy, looked up.

“You sittin’ on that big horse,” he said in an amused voice, “is like half a ping pong ball on a fat man’s head.”
“O-kay,” Jimmy replied uncertainly.

Will waited until the Sheriff thrust his cell phone impatiently into his shirt pocket.

“All quiet,” he said irritably. 

“Mind fillin’ me in, hoss?”

Linn bent backwards a little and slid the Winchester’s octagon barrel back into its scabbard.

“We saw the White Wolf,” Linn said.

“Ah,” Will replied, as if that explained everything.

Jimmy’s expression was as plain a question as the spoken word.

“Something,” Linn snarled, “and I don’t know what!”

“Who can we ask?” 

Will’s voice was as gentle as the Sheriff’s was irritated.

Linn’s laugh was a harsh, sharp bark.

“Could I raise her shade, I’d ask Mama, or maybe that Daciana Sarah knew. She was a gypsy, and gypsies know things.”

“We’re good here,” Will said thoughtfully.  “Everything okay at your place?”

“Yeah.  Connie is at general quarters.”
“Since this is your day off you might head back out there,” Will suggested.  “Everything is hunky dory here.”

Linn nodded. “You were the second one I thought of, Uncle Will,” he called as Apple-horse whirled and headed for home, Jimmy’s big Stomper-horse following.

A feminine hand gripped his arm and another slid around his off side ribs, a warm body molding herself to his back side.

“Is everything all right?”  a woman’s voice asked softly, and Will shut the door, shot the bolt, turned.

“Everything’s fine, Marsha,” he whispered, watching the pair riding into the distance.  “It’s just fine.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

132.  THE MAN’S HANDS

 

“You have a question.”

Linn willed himself not to startle.

He was alone in his office, or had been, until the woman’s quiet voice stepped through the doorway of his swift-paced thoughts.

He looked up, laid down the paper and the ballpoint, nodded.

“I have.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down?”

“Since when do you even knock?”  Linn growled.  “What I’ll ask is if I can get you something at the Silver Jewel.”

“Oh, Sheriff,” Sarah McKenna sighed.  “Seen in public with a younger woman?  Whatever will the town’s gossips think?”

“They’ll think you’re some relative, with those pale eyes and a McKenna gown.  In-law or outlaw, they’ll figure you’re related.”

“How little they know.”  She swept up her skirts, sat across from him, gave him a warm, almost amused look.  “Now how can I help?”

“You’re familiar with The White Wolf.”

“I am.”

“How about the Black Wolf?”

Sarah’s eyes widened a little and her head turned ever so slightly:  her spine straightened and she raised her chin, just a fraction, regarding the Sheriff with suddenly-pale and unblinking eyes.

“He’s here?”

“Yep.  He and The Bear Killer got into it, matter of fact.”

“Tell me what happened.”

The Sheriff did, his voice quiet, unemotional; the simple declarative sentence is still one of the best means of communication, and he painted a simple and straightforward word picture of the previous day’s adventure.

Sarah blinked, leaned back, allowed her attention to float upward, to the rifle in the glass front display box over the Sheriff’s head.

To my beloved husband Linn, the engraving on the receiver read, Sheriff of Firelands County, Colorado, from your loving wife Esther.

Sarah nodded a little, for she well knew some of the tales that old rifle could tell.

“I don’t have all the answers,” Sarah said finally.  “Will wanted to see Nicodemus.  I can’t make that happen” – she held up a gloved palm – “no, don’t ask, just … I can’t.  But I can tell you about the Black Wolf.”

Sarah opened a satchel she hadn’t had a tenth of a second before, brought out a sheaf of papers, spun one across the Sheriff’s desk.

It was a pencil drawing of a fire, a fire in a city long gone, of what was obviously one of The Bear Killer’s breed, bristling and snarling at the flames while another ducked into a burning house:  beneath that, on the same page, what was obviously the mama dog was curled in a corner, with three curious sets of fur-mounted eyes peeping over her, curious as to the smoke hazing the underground room.

Another page, another pair of drawings:  two dogs coming out of a smoking pile, from what looked to be a ruined set of stairs going underground, each with a bottom-curled pup in their mouth, a third fat little round-bottom pup with black eyes and little bearlike ears curled up on the ground.

The Sheriff dropped his eyes to a dog, reared up on its hinders, placing a pup in the back of a wagon; two others peeped from under a canvas, and then the two dogs, pacing the wagon, keeping it in sight.

Mountains now, a moon, men at a campfire, dirty and dejected and looking back at the smoking ruin of what the Sheriff guessed was San Frisco, for he knew The Bear Killer’s distant antecedents were a breeding pair of Tibetan Mastiffs brought over by a rich Chinese businessman who was killed in one of the several San Francisco disasters.

Behind them, outside the firelight, two great, dark figures, and between them in single file, three fat little pups.

There were more drawings:  a wolf, silhouetted against a full moon, watching, its sharp muzzle lending it an almost vulture-like appearance:  a fight, fangs, blood or slobber being slung, two Mastiffs back-to-back, bristled up and snarling, surrounded by a wolf pack.

Linn looked up, raised an eyebrow.

“They survived, obviously,” Sarah said, her voice serious, quiet.  “They interbred with the wolves.  That’s how we have our legends of giant wolves.  They are not many; the only trait the wolves kept was size, and the muzzle is a little more blunt.  The Bear Killer is slightly smaller than the pure Mastiff, but is otherwise … “
Linn nodded.

“You may remember reading of Charlie Macneil.”

Linn nodded.

“His Dawg was more wolf than Mastiff but had the size and the strength of The Bear Killer.  He also had the intelligence of both breeds.  Remarkable creature.”  Her expression softened.  “When he sired on one of the Black Wolves, the line we know as The Bear Killer came to be.  All black, almost all Mastiff, highly intelligent.”  She reached inside her cloak, drew out a black ball of something with button-bright eyes and a startling pink tongue that reached up to lick her under the jaw.  “This is how big he was when Macneil left Firelands for a promotion in Denver.  I was just a little girl and I loved Dawg and cried for his leaving more than for Charlie’s.”

Her smile was distant, sad, her hands were gentle as they cradled and caressed the little, black, roly-poly pup.

She looked up at the Sheriff, stood.

“The Black Wolf is a sign.  In that you are correct.  You are worried because the White Wolf appears almost as a messenger of death.”

Linn nodded.

“Consider The Bear Killer’s admixture of traits.  Mountain Mastiff and Rocky Mountain grey wolf.  Now think of Jimmy.  He’s not gaining from your blood but he is gaining from your heart.”

Linn frowned.  “Come again?”

Sarah sat, slipped the grunting, wiggling pup under her cloak, patted her palms thoughtfully together.

“Think of him as an empty vessel.  A boy needs what you are giving him.  He’s never had these things.  He’s never been told, ‘Come here and try this.’  He’s never been shown how to use a chalk line or a plumb bob, he’s never been shown how to put a bed together or repair a fence or how to saddle a horse.”  She looked directly at him as if making a point. 

“He’s never been shown how to treat a woman and treat her right.”

Sarah took a long breath, blew it out through pursed lips.

“He’s never forgotten that you chose him, Sheriff.  You chose him as your son.  You have the get of your loins and he has pale eyes, but you chose Jimmy and you spent time with him.”  She looked at him again, and this time her expression was softer, more understanding.

“Thieves can steal money, Yankee greenbacks can rot or be burnt up, gems can shatter if dropped, but the time you spend with your son is time truly invested.  My Sheriff spent time with me.  Charlie Macneil spent time with me.  My Mama spent time with me.  They all gave me memories – good memories! – and those memories lasted me my lifetime.

“Had I died bankrupt and without a sou in my purse, I would have died the wealthiest woman in the world, for no dollar could every buy the memories I was given!”

“So far so good,” Linn nodded, “but what has this to do with the Black Wolf?”

Sarah stood. 

“Jimmy is part of your family now, and he’s an important part of your family.”

The Sheriff’s phone rang.

Sarah smiled and nodded, and disappeared, not even a twisting wisp of vapor to mark her passing.

The Sheriff picked up the receiver.  “Sheriff Keller.”

A grinning voice on the other end greeted him.

“Linn, this is Judge Hostetler.  Your adoption went through!”

Out at her dispatcher’s desk, Cindy knew it was probably coming, but she still jumped a little at her boss’s full-throated EEYAHOOO! that not even his closed door could contain.

 

The funeral parlor smelled funny the way it always did.

Jimmy wore his shirt and tie and his dress pants and his boots were burnished to a high shine just like the Sheriff showed him.

Jimmy was small enough and silent enough he could glide easily through the crowd; he was unobtrusive enough he could listen, and hear, and he looked at the pictures on the easel, and he looked at the woman in black that all those people were going up to and talking to, and he didn’t know what to say to her.

He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what, so he pulled back into a corner, almost behind a big potted plant, back where Connie parked Wes, who wore a bow tie with his shirt – he’d worn a sleepy expression when they arrived, and now he was sound asleep – Jimmy sat beside him, knowing it would help Wes sleep, and he reached into a pocket and pulled out a spiral bound notebook.

Someone, somewhere, found pocket sized notebooks of plain, unlined paper.

The Sheriff bought all they had and left them on Jimmy’s desk in his room, knowing he’d put them to use.

 Jimmy fished out a pencil, one of several he had stuffed in the inside pocket of his dress jacket.

He looked at the dead man’s pictures and he remembered the man, and he smiled a little as he remembered, and he began to draw.

Connie glanced over at intervals and smiled a little, for Wes was leaned over against Jimmy, and Jimmy was drawing steadily – he was having an easier time of it, as a matter of fact, for the funeral director brought him a slim, hardback book to lay on his lap, and the man smiled at the little boy’s bright smile and his “Thank you, sir,” and then returned to his skilled labors.

Jim Thorn tried to bring his Eastern dignity when he moved West and bought out the Firelands funeral parlor, but he learned traditions run deep, so he kept the building’s external appearance, he smiled tolerantly when he was referred to as “Digger,” and he was surprised when his horse-drawn hearse was an item of actual use instead of a display piece:  he himself had no experience at all with horses, but fortunately this was the West, and many people did, and when the two high-school boys he hired as horse-handlers showed up in perfectly-tailored black suits that would have been flawlessly in style in 1885, complete with black gloves and black-silk top hats with black satin ribbons cascading down their backs – well, if local talent enhanced his business, who was he to say no?

Jim Thorn, like most morticians, had a gift for sculpting; he worked mostly in mortician’s waxes and mortician’s clays, often working from a photograph to restore a lifelike appearance when the family needed to say a final goodbye, and so as an artist himself, he recognized the boy’s talent, and marveled at what Jimmy was producing.

The widow Phillips dabbed at her eyes and blinked in surprise as the solemn-faced little boy walked up to her and handed her a pocket notebook.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said simply, “so I did that for you.”

He turned and disappeared back into the crowd, and the widow slipped the little spiral bound into her purse and forgot about it.

That night, as this woman alone sat in the empty bedroom, this bedroom she’d shared with the same man for just over a half century, she looked around with a lost expression.

The hairbrush, where Frank set it down after he’d used it last.

Frank’s closet, the closet full of his clothes that still smelled of his cologne.

Their portrait, there on the wall, taken at their fiftieth.

Another, when they were much younger, with four children, one on each lap, and she smiled, for those were loud and happy days, full of the confusion and delight that comes of a house full of children.

Her daughter knocked at the open door.

“I brought your purse, Mama,” she said, handing it to the woman.

The widow Phillips automatically opened the purse, reached in, frowned:  something was there that wasn’t usually –

She brought out the notebook.

“What’s that?”  her daughter asked, curious.

“I don’t know,” her mother admitted, “a little boy gave it to me at the funeral.”

She opened the cover and her mouth fell open.

Her daughter sat down beside her, ran her arm around her Mama’s shoulders, took a sharp, surprised breath.

“Mama, it’s him!”

The late Frank Phillips looked at them with that wise and understanding look they both knew so well.

She turned the page.

It was a close view of his hands.

He was gripping a wrench, turning a nut on a child’s bicycle:   a pair of shorts, a dimpled knee could be seen behind the bicycle spokes, but the hands, the hands they knew so well –

Another page, the hands pouring coffee from a battered and dented coffee pot they remembered from his work shop.

Another page, another memory:  here, putting a bandage on a skinned knee; there, gripping a ruined tire and swinging the shredded-rubber carcass away from the car’s hub:  here, gripping an electric drill while it turned thick, rich shavings from soft pine, and there, gripping another man’s hand in the firm handshake that was his trademark.

“He got the ring right,” the daughter whispered, staring at the flawlessly executed Arc-and-Compasses on the black-onyx ring.

Page and page again, and widow and orphan gasped and marveled and hugged one another, and finally they came to the last page, and the widow fumbled blindly for a kerchief.

His face and hers, looking at one another, and his hand raised to her cheek in that gentle caress she could still feel.

The boy may not have known what to say in words, but he’d found a way to say what she needed to hear.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

133.  HOME EDITION

 

Sheriff Marnie Keller laughed as she read from her glowing screen.

The old-fashioned font read FIRELANDS GAZETTE, and it gave the date, and it was this week’s edition, and she laughed at the sub-masthead, where Bruce Jones was fond of putting some smart remark or another:  “Either it’s news fit to print or it’s who got caught doing what,” and she nodded, for that sounded just like Bruce’s rotten sense of humor.

She and her husband were in their quarters, each hunched a little at their respective work stations, each studying a screen:  Dr. John Greenlees Jr. looked over at his wife, smiled.

“May I join you?”

Marnie patted the thinly-padded bench beside her and Dr. John settled in hip-to-hip with his pale-eyed wife.
“Your newspaper is more interesting that the Earth news,” he admitted.

“We know the people they name in the Gazette,” Marnie nodded.

“Kind of like ours.”

“Only not as dry.”

Marnie laughed and leaned against her husband with a happy sigh.

“Well, come on, let’s see what’s happened back home!  Births, deaths, who got caught doing what?”

Marnie scrolled to the “Births and Deaths” page, frowning as she read.

“I’m not a big sis again,” she murmured, “at least not yet, but Mama has to be getting close!”  She looked over at Dr. Greenlees.  “I’m worried, John.  They had their family, I’m grown up and gone and they started a second one?”

John laughed.  “You know your father,” he said reassuringly.  “He’s not happy unless he’s got a battalion of pale eyed kids around him!”

“He’d be happy with a dozen,” Marnie agreed.  “He pretty much adopted the football team that year.”

“Grief response,” John said in his professional voice, and instantly regretted saying it.

“You’re right,” Marnie agreed.  “His Mama’s death hit him so very hard.  She used to run with the football team.  She’d run in full field gear – I mean everything, she was kitted out for war.  Boots, helmet, field pack, flak vest, rifle, rounds, rations, she had a hell of a loadout and she still ran right with them!”

“And they loved it,” John chuckled.

“Wouldn’t you?  She was drill sergeant and mother hen both, she’d run at the front and sing dirty marching songs at the top of her voice, she’d drop back and run with Tail End Charlie, she’d grab an arm and pull it across her shoulders and run with someone who was hurtin’, I watched her throw one fellow across her shoulders and pack him a quarter of a mile until the squad could meet them.”

“I remember when she was in hospital that last time,” John chuckled.  “The whole damned football team showed up in uniform with that running flag they made.”

“The totenkopf?”

“That’s the one.  Badly drawn with a marker but by God it was theirs!”

Marnie smiled and nodded and carefully refrained from mentioning that she was the one that drew it.

“I think the Marines acquired a record number of recruits from Firelands, because of her.”

“I think you’re right.”  She frowned, leaned a little closer to the screen.  “Now this is different.”

“What’s that?”

“Look at the … the headline.  It’s got multiple sub-headlines, just like the papers used to have!”  She clapped her hands, delighted, then her face fell as she read what they were.

“POLICE CHIEF ATTACKED IN HIS BEDROOM,” she read aloud:  beneath it, “ATTEMPTED MURDER!  MILITARY GRADE ORDNANCE!  DRUG RELATED OR GANG RELATED?  OUTRAGE IN THE COMMUNITY!”

“Nothing like a little sensationalism, eh?”  Dr. John murmured.

“Listen to this,” Marnie said, an edge to her voice.  “Chief of Police Will Keller is uninjured after a cowardly attack by two machine gunners, apparently intent on extracting a pound of flesh after the Chief interdicted their drug shipment and killed their middle management in a daylight shootout.”

John frowned and leaned closer, reading along as his wife read aloud.

“The attack came at lonely midnight hour, when the man was just rising to tend a nocturnal need:  a burst of steel-jacketed Soviet slugs screamed through his front window, reducing it to a shattered ruin and driving through multiple walls before stopping just short of the siding on the other side of the house.”

“Nice alliteration.”

“Shut up.  It says he shot another attacker at the back door, he beat one to death with his pistol and …”

She swallowed, looked at John, her eyes pale and hard.

“I’m needed here, John, but I wish there was some way I could go back and lend a hand!”

Dr. John Greenlees Jr. took a long breath, nodded.

“Yeah,” was his only reply.

 

Marsha shifted uncomfortably as the Sheriff came in.

As he always did, the man tucked his cover under his off arm.

“Is Will treating you all right?”  he grinned, and Marsha’s face turned an incredible shade of scarlet.

“He’s,” she stammered, “we’re … yes, Sheriff, he’s …” – she swallowed – “the perfect gentleman.”

“He’s like that,” Linn settled into a chair, laid his Stetson on another.  “He’ll have you so high on a pedestal you’ll get nosebleed and he’ll treat you like the Queen herself.  Treat him decent, Marsha.  He’s a good man.”

“Yes he is,” she said faintly.

 

“Do you think we could send news back for her to print?”  John suggested.  “News from Mars.  Home folks edition.  Glowing reports of bubbling sewage tanks, soil transformation, baking bricks in … no, we’re not allowed to talk about that.”

“I know,” Marnie sighed.  “There’s so much we can’t say.  They’ll get tired of the same old ‘Stars are bright, everyone’s well, love you’ every report, and I don’t think the Powers that Be want to admit that we’ve had fights, murders, one man went insane and killed the Director, we don’t want to admit to a seal failure and four miners dead.”

“Yeah, that would never pass the censors.”

“And if I use the private channel to tell Papa, once it hits the papers I’d be shut off.”
“True enough.”

“Maybe we’ll just let the Agency handle it.”

John made a face.  “So much for my literary aspirations.”

“Hardly,” Marnie laughed.  “You’re working on that report on the physical and psychological effects of living on Mars!”

Yeah,” he admitted.  “I am, and that’ll be famous.”

“So I’m married to a famous author!  How cool is that?”

She looked at the screen again, scanning down the columns.

“Oh, dear,” she sighed.  “This will have been so very hard on Papa.”

“What’s that?”

“Here.”  She reached forward, stopped short of touching the screen.  “Gailen Maxwell passed away.  Papa and Frank Phillips did the Masonic service.  Papa is Master of the Lodge this year and Frank is Chaplain, and they are the most called upon Low Twelve Team in the District.”

“Low Twelve Team?”

“They put on the Masonic funeral service.”

“Ah.”

“Frank and Papa work so very well together.  One stands at the head of the casket and one at the foot and they take turns, one line then another, each alternating. It’s quite impressive.”

John nodded.

“We’ve known Gailen just forever.  He had a tree farm back East and I just loved Patty.”  She shot a sidelong look at Dr. Greenlees and smiled knowingly.  “Patty was his high school sweetheart.  They’ve been married for donkey’s years.”

Marnie turned back to her screen, scrolled on down, stopped, her mouth dropping open.

Alarmed, John brought his hand up, rested it between his wife’s shoulder blades.

“Dearest …?”

Marnie’s voice was flat, emotionless.

“Frank Phillips is dead.”

“What?”

“The … oh dear God.”  She brought the back of her hand up against her cheek and looked with lost and sorrowful eyes at her husband’s concerned expression.

“This will crush Papa.”

“Frank Phillips, the Masonic chaplain?”

Marnie nodded.  “He and Papa are old friends, dear friends.  Now Papa will have to do the service with Frank in the box instead of standing at its foot.”

“I’m so sorry,” John whispered, hugging his wife to him.  “I’m so sorry, dearest.”

Marnie hugged him back, groaning a little.

“I remember his hands,” she whispered. 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

134.  THE IDEA

 

Hulda Hayden looked up, surprised, as the police chief leaned into her doorway and knocked carefully, shave-and-a-haircut.

“Permission to come aboard?”  he grinned, and Hulda motioned him in.

Hulda had her leg off and she sat in her wheelchair, rolled up beside her sewing machine:  piles of material, bolts of cloth, dressmaker’s dummies, all the tools of the tailor’s trade surrounded her, and Hulda turned back to the little girl with twin ponytails as she measured the skirt’s length, added a half dozen straight pins.

She removed the other pins from between her lips, thrust them quickly into the strawberry-shaped pincushion on the sewing machine’s table and said “Okay, honey, step down.”

The little girl stepped off the stool, looked at the Chief with a bright, quick smile and waved:  “Hi, Chief!”  she called, and Will laughed and waved back.

“Now if the Chief will step out and close the door,” Hulda said, shooting the Chief a wink, “we’ll get that dress off you and you can either wait on it, or I can call you when it’s done.”

“I’ll wait,” the child said with a quick nod, her ponytails bouncing as she did.

Will pulled back, closed the door, pulled the eight-point uniform cap from under his arm, turning it nervously around in his hands:  one way, until he came to the cap’s bill, then shuffled it the other.

The door opened and the little girl came skipping out, stopped, looked up at Will.

“Are you gonna bring Sheer Energy to school again, Chief?”  she asked hopefully, and Will laughed.

Where the Sheriff’s office had The Bear Killer and Tank – the enormous Tibetan mountain Mastiff, and the Belgian Malinois, surplus from the US Marine Corps – the police department had Sheer Energy.

Sheer Energy was half bench-leg Beagle and half Basset.

Sheer Energy looked perpetually mournful, he moved slowly, he had the saddest, most pitiful half-howl, half-bark, and when he stopped, he flopped down and went to sleep.

He was a favorite when he and the Sheriff’s Office put on a demonstration event for the schoolkids.

Will loved that old dog – he had the best nose of any canine he’d encountered, he’d found drugs hidden in some interesting places, including sealed in plastic, soldered into a coffee can and immersed in a tank of gasoline – he detected this hidden stash, God alone knows how, and they’d gotten a conviction … and when an attorney for the defense claimed Sheer Energy had attacked his client, or had acted menacing or threatening, or the police coerced a confession using their trained attack dog, Sheer Energy came shuffling across the courtroom floor, yawned, flopped down and went to sleep right in the middle of the floor, his long basset ears laid out to either side:  his appearance, his utter lack of response to any attack command, and mostly his quiet, gentle snore, not only discredited the false claims, it endeared the friendly old hound to jurist and jury alike.

Will went to one knee, slipping his cap back under his arm:  he smiled a little, remembering when his little girl was this size, and just as bright and outgoing.

“Dear heart,” he said quietly, “if it’s at all possible I’ll bring him!”

“Can I pet him?”  she asked hopefully.

Will nodded.  “Yep.  You can pet him.”

Will laughed as the little girl gave him a quick hug, then skipped happily out the front door.

He tapped again at Hulda’s door and opened it a little.  “Safe to come in?” he called, and was answered with a muffled “Come in.”

The hum of the Singer brought him another smile, another surge of good memories.

“Don’t tell me you need your Sunday dress hemmed too,” Hulda called as she fed red cotton under the busy needle.

“Nope,” Will replied, looking around and finding a chair that wasn’t stacked up with material or projects.  “I need your advice.”

The sewing machine stopped.

Hulda reached down, unlocked her chair’s wheels, spun expertly and came within an inch of touching the Chief’s shin bone with the chair’s only foot rest.

Her eyes were serious, with amusement hiding in their depths.

“So you’re going to ask her.”

“Now hold on,” Will cautioned, raising a forestalling palm, “I didn’t say –“

“And you want a wedding gown made for her.  What period, 1880s, 1890s, post-1900?”
Will opened his mouth, closed it with a resigned sigh.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”  He considered a moment.  “I have my methods and you have yours.  How did you know…?”

Hulda laughed.

“Chief, a woman knows.  Marsha probably doesn’t know yet but she’s inclined to say yes.  How do I know that?”  She smiled, leaned forward, grabbed the Chief’s hand, squeezed it quickly, then released.  “Chief, you two were holding hands in church.”

Will considered, nodded.  “Yes.  We were.”

“When you were in the Silver Jewel after church, she was talking and you were listening closely to her.”

Again Will nodded.  “I did that,” he admitted.

“Will,” Hulda whispered, her eyes bright, delighted, “when a man cares that deeply for a woman that he’ll actually listen to her, I mean really listen, when she trusts him enough to hold hands right in front of God Almighty and –“

She blinked, delight claiming her face as she eased her weight off her backside.

“I have to come out of that leg sometimes,” she admitted, “but I rode a wheelchair for so long my backside gets tired really fast!”

“I’m glad you can drive that Iron Horse,” Will muttered, shaking his head. 

Hulda laughed.  “You’re remembering when you ran over a food cart and an intern!”

Will nodded ruefully.

She patted his arm.  “You were unwell, Chief, go easy on yourself.  Now that you’re going to marry her … you are going to ask her, aren’t you?”

He nodded, grinned.  “I’d like you to make her something she can wear to the Ladies’ Tea Society.  Have her try on the wedding gown and fit it to her, make up something if you have to about a client that’s her size and I’ll bring the dress in to the Tea Society and ask her if she’ll …”
Will ground to a stop, his face reddening, and he shook his head.

“I can’t do that,” he whispered.

“Then let me make the first dress,” Hulda smiled.  “Let me make it and I’ll have the pattern for the wedding gown.  What color do you want?”

Will blinked.

“White didn’t come into fashion until Queen What’s-her-name with the twisted spine, the one who rode sidesaddle because her back wouldn’t let her ride astride.  Back in the 1880s a woman wore what she had.”

“Emerald green,” Will said firmly.  “It’s been a good color for the women of our family and …”  He frowned, then looked at the seamstress, suddenly uncertain.

“What if she doesn’t like it?”

Hulda laughed.  “Leave it to me, Chief,” she smiled.  “Now let me make a phone call and get her in here.  I’ll take care of it.”

“How much do I owe you?”  the Chief asked.

“I’ll let you know.”

Will reached in a shirt pocket, pulled out a foldover of bills.  “I’m payin’ cash.  You are an artist and you do first rate work.  I’m a tight fisted sort but I’ll not go cheap on this one.”

Hulda looked at him, nodded.

He handed her payment in full, and some over and above – “You never know when you’ll need material,” he explained, and then he went to one knee, held her hand in both of his.

“This means the world to me, Hulda.”

Will was not more than five minutes out the door and Hulda had Marsha on the phone.

“You were right, Marsha,” she giggled.  “My God, the man is a romantic!  He’s having me make your wedding gown!  How do you feel about a rich emerald green?”  A pause, another giggle.  “No, no, I had to pull it out of him like I was pulling his teeth out!  He’s going to propose officially at the – no, no, it’s all right, now listen – he’s going to have me make you a dress for the Ladies’ Tea Society meetings.  No, no, come on over, I have just the pattern!  You are going to look sooo good!”

Hulda had no more than hung up the phone when she looked up, surprised, at another knock.

Will thrust his head through the door, a distressed look on his face.

“Hulda, I am so sorry … if I’m going to propose to her I’d like to propose at the Ladies’ Tea Society and I’d better look the part!  Could you possibly make me a proper suit of that era?”

Hulda laughed.  “Come on in, Chief, and let’s get some measurements!”

Will drew back as a giggling little girl slipped around him and came into the room.

Hulda held up her dress.  “All done, dearie!”

 

Will muttered his way back to the silver-grey Crown Vic, only just returned from reupholstering the passenger front seat.

“Dumb, dumb, dumb!” he raged at himself, his voice barely audible:  “What business do you have marrying someone that young?”

He eased the shifter into drive gently, carefully, the way he always did.

“You could be killed any time. If they’ve put a cholo out on you, you’re dead meat, old man.”

He accelerated easily up the main street.

 “Why in God’s name would you want to make her a widow?”

Marsha stepped out the front door of the Gazette’s office, saw the silver cruiser, waved, and Will’s chest tightened a little to see her.

That’s why.

You’re mooning like a lovesick calf, the voice whispered between his ears, to which he replied out loud, “Aw, shut up!”

 

Linn pulled into his parking space in front of the Sheriff’s office, shut off the engine.

Chief Deputy Barrents grinned from beside the dispatcher’s desk, threw him a wave, and Linn waved back.

He turned and looked up the street and Barrents saw his grin spread over a significant acreage of the man’s face, and then his face went white and tight and it was like the skin stretched over the bones and every bit of color ran down to his boots and hid.

Barrents turned and make three running steps, seized the door of the gun case, yanked it hard enough to bust the latch:  wood torqued, glass shattered and his blunt fingered, sun-browned grip locked around the fore-end of his favorite fighting tool, an M14 his father carried in Vietnam, or one just like it, he never knew if it was the same one or not and he didn’t care:  he liked that old rifle, it spoke loudly and most persuasively, and in that moment, Chief Deputy Barrents, based solely on the look on his boss’s face slammed a magazine home, yanked back the bolt and sprinted for the heavy glass doors, a man fully committed to war.

The first bullets went wild, three of them slamming into the Sheriff’s jeep.

Linn had his shorty M16 out, released from its ceiling mount:  he was powering into a run, swearing wordlessly as he cranked a round into the chamber, willing the broad stern of the silver Crown Vic to get the hell out of his way so he could take the shot!

Marsha’s hand was still raised in a wave when the first burst of gunfire ripped from the oncoming sedan, powdering the Crown Vic’s windshield:  the big silver cruiser’s back end dropped and 460 rompin’ stompin’ cubic inches of four-barrel Ford go-power began to sing as only a big block engine can when the driver’s hoof is mashed down on the go pedal, and the big heavy cruiser launched herself to her attack.

The sedan tried to swerve out of the way, tires screaming with panicked acceleration, and the front corner of the Crown Vic tore into the oncoming sedan just ahead of the driver’s door, mashing steel and glass into the cabin, ramming the lighter vehicle into a cement planter and over the sidewalk and into the corner of the solid quartz library building.

Marsha stood, frozen, her hand sinking slowly, until both hands were clutching her high stomach and she sank slowly to her knees.

One moment it was all engines and acceleration and tires screaming and gunfire and now it was silent.

Time froze.

Steam and smoke rose in the still air, echoes of the concussion rebounded from some mountainside, people looked, curious:  some walked, numbly, like people attracted to the magnet of a horror they could barely stand to look at; some started to run.

Marsha reached up and slapped herself, came to her feet, jumped to the street and ran, ran toward the silver Crown Vic, ran toward her worst fear, the one thing she was most afraid would happen –

Barrents ran up, laid his rifle across the ruined windshield, pointed at the murderous vehicle:  “SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!” he yelled, his voice loud, commanding.  “DAMN YOU, SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!  DO IT NOW!!!”

The Crown Vic’s passenger door clicked, swung open, hard, and Marsha saw a foot, a leg, then a pale eyed lawman with blood streaking his face rolled out, clutching a shotgun like a man grips a lover:  he fell to his knees, struggled upright.

The metallic shak-shak! of his street howitzer coming into battery was loud, shocking, brittle on the shocked-still air, and the man limped around Barrents, the riot gun to his shoulder, his cheek welded down on the oiled-walnut stock.

Will moved in on the ruined, steaming sedan, looked in:  Linn, on the other side, shoved the muzzle of his ’16 through what used to be a window.

He drew back, slashed at something with his gunmuzzle.

Marsha saw a flash, heard a muffled BANG and saw the Sheriff’s silent obscenity.

Will reached in, then a moment later drew back out.

He turned and looked at Marsha.

His eyes were pale and the flesh was drawn as tight across his cheekbones as the
Sheriff’s.

Marsha had heard – local legend, girls’ gossip, word of mouth – she’d heard the Sheriff and his mother both got absolutely pale eyed and their skin tightened and lost its color when they were powerfully unhappy, but this is the first time she’d seen it, and she saw it in both these men of the pale eyed blood.

“Did you get a picture?”  Will gasped, then sagged:  Barrents was at his side, ran an arm under the older man’s armpit, caught him before he fell.

Linn ran around the back of the Crown Vic, came up on the other side of his uncle.

They laid Will down in the street and Marsha came running over.

She knelt beside the Chief and took his bloodied face between her hands.

“Don’t you dare die, damn you,” she whispered fiercely, tears running down her face.  “Damn you, Will Keller, don’t you dare die on me!  I will not countenance it!”

“I ain’t gonna die,” Will muttered.  “I ain’t hurt bad enough to die.”

Linn looked up, glared down the street.  “Where’s that damned squad?”  he hissed between clenched teeth.  “I could carry him over my shoulder faster!”

“They’re comin’, Boss,” Barrents soothed.  “Takes a little to open that garage door.”

Linn looked down the street, saw the ambulance nose out of the bay and turn toward them.

“I don’t reckon they’ll have any trouble findin’ us,” Linn muttered.

Will looked up and laughed, blood streaking his teeth.

“Ya think?”

 

Marsha took a few quick shots with her phone.

She’d been shooed back when the medics took over; she realized she’d better get into professional mode or she’d lose one of the best stories of the season.

There was not room to get past the ruined vehicles; the squad backed up a little distance, turned around in the middle of the street, flashed its way to the hospital – there was no need to run its siren – and Marsha went back inside, grabbed her laptop, thrust it into its shoulder bag and ran back out the front door.

“Marsha!”  Linn yelled.  “With me!”

Marsha ran down the sidewalk, less than a block, to the Sheriff and his butterscotch-yellow Jeep.

He was frowning at the holes in the sheet metal.

“Damn near got me,” he said thoughtfully, then shivered.

Marsha ran around to the passenger side, climbed in, slammed the door.

Linn slid the ’16 back into its overhead ramp, made fast his seat belt, fired the engine.

He looked with pale eyes up the street.

Barrents was overseeing the scene, and would make sure everything was thoroughly documented before overseeing the wrecker’s removing the vehicles;

they would both be impounded as evidence.

Barrents already had one deputy and two police officers helping him take measurements, and he had the spinning laser on a tripod set up to very precisely document the location of absolutely everything on scene.

Linn backed out, pulled the shifter back, eased down on the throttle.

“Marsha, you okay?” he asked, his voice gentle, and Marsha jumped a little.

“I’m fine,” she said, a little more abruptly than she intended. 

“I’m sorry.  I mean … yes, I …”

“Yeah.  I’m scared too.”

He reached over and she reached for his hand.

He gave hers a gentle, reassuring squeeze.

“He’s a tough old bird, Marsha.  He’ll be okay.”

Marsha’s expression hardened.  “I know you’re the Sheriff,” she said, looking icily ahead, “but I didn’t know you had a crystal ball.”

“God loves you too.”

She looked at him like he had a fish sticking out of his shirt pocket.

Linn chuckled as they turned the corner; the hospital was just ahead.

“Story at eleven,” he explained.  “It’s one of my favorite responses to an insult.”

He pulled into a reserved space – LAW ENFORCEMENT ONLY – popped his belt, shut off the engine.

Marsha climbed out, the laptop over her shoulder.

Linn locked the doors, shut his gently, gripping his rifle casually by its pistol grip, swinging it slightly as he walked.  “With me,” cautioned.  “On my arm and we can go anywhere.”

“Rank hath its privilege,” Marsha said coldly, taking his arm.

“You’re damned right,” Linn snarled.

Marsha looked over at the black rifle in his fist, looked at him, shocked.

“Someone just tried to kill my uncle,” Linn explained.  “If they try for him here they’ll have to come through me.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

135.  THE VISITOR

 

“I understand you know the Chief,” an accented voice said.

Marsha jumped, startled.

“You will not be harmed if you do exactly as I say,” the voice said, and a man in a dirty, ragged work coat came into the light, a torn T-shirt tied across his face below his sunglasses.

“Do not be alarmed at my appearance.”

“How can I not be,” Marsha challenged.  “You’re trespassing!”

“I’m here with a message.”  The voice was quiet, self-assured.

Marsha felt like a rabbit facing a python.

She had no weapons, she had no idea what to do – in the city there was the police, here in town, if she could get to a telephone –

How long would it take them to get here –

If she screamed, would anyone hear her –

The figure picked up a stainless-steel briefcase from the floor, placed it on her desk, turned it toward her, opened the lid.

It was filled with bundled stacks of money.

“We need you to give your Police Chief a message.”

Marsha took a few breaths.  “I’m listening.”

“Some very bad people tried to do very bad things to him and that is very bad for business.  Our business is making money.  Your Chief tried to stop us from making money.  That is his job.

“Our people made mistakes.”  His voice was soothing, reasonable.  “There will be no more attempts on the Chief’s life.  This” – gloved hands tapped the bundled currency – “is by way of apology.  Please take this to him and tell him it is for his hospital bill.”

Marsha waited, letting the silence grow between them.

She had been in situations before, dangerous moments, but never had she been this alone with this much danger.

She’d never felt this … helpless, this defenseless, this utterly, absolutely, vulnerable!

The figure backed up one step, another, a third, immersing deeper in shadow:  he turned, there was a moment’s silence, then her back door opened, and shut.

Marsha almost collapsed with relief that he was gone, at least until she thought, What if he’s not alone? – then, I need to get out!

Marsha sidled along the wall to her front door, turned the dead bolt’s knob with numb fingers, opened the front door:  she looked outside, one way, then the other.

Nothing.

She slipped out, then ran down the three steps to the street, ran down the pavement, elbows pumping and hands fisted in fear, she ran for the nearest refuge where she would be safe.

She seized the handle on the heavy glass door, hauled it open, breath sobbing in her throat:  she twisted through the opening in the inner doors and ran blindly, running into something solid and warm that smelled of Old Spice and coffee, something with firm hands that gripped her upper arms, and she seized this something like a drowning man will seize a life-ring in a stormy sea.

Linn held her for several long moments, held her while she shivered and she got her breath, held her until she could stand unassisted, held her until she gripped his forearms and blurted, “Someone broke into my office and left me a briefcase of currency and said to tell the Chief there will be no more attempts on his life and then he went out the back and I’ve never felt so scared in my life!”

“I think,” Linn said quietly, steering her toward a chair, “you could use a drink.”

“I need to see Will,” she gasped, sinking into the chair, shaking her head.  “I need to see Will.”

 

 

It had been a few weeks since the violence on the main street, a few weeks during which people quietly went about their business – that is, if you considered the number of rifles carried in pickup trucks’ cabs, the number of people who walked carefully, perhaps a little more slowly, a bit more watchfully:  even the Parson tore down a 1911 Colt, an old and dear friend he’d carried when the need arose, a machine in which he placed full faith and confidence, a slab sided scion of justice among the lawless that rode well under his suit coat, inside his waistband scabbard.

More than just the Parson “walked heavy” for those few weeks:  Tony, the barber, had one drawer reserved for a particular purpose, and one purpose only:  he kept the drawer locked, and its key on his watch-chain, and Young Tony watched as his father unlocked the drawer before he opened for business, opened the drawer and withdrew the Beretta model 10 sub-machinegun, checked to make sure the magazine was full, the chamber empty, then with a wink to his son, the retired Godfather replaced this souvenir of his earlier days to the towel-lined drawer.

Tony closed the drawer and smiled a little, and tucked his watch back in his vest pocket, letting the little key dangle as it always did.

He did not lock the drawer.

Nor did he have to look to know that Young Tony had his lupara in its corner, the double barrel, outside hammer twelve gauge, hidden from the common eye, but ready to hand should the younger man have need of it, nor did he have to pat his firstborn’s bottom to know there were two buckshot shells in his left hip pocket, and two in his right.

On the first day of the third week, the Chief received a group of visitors; their arrival was noted, for dechromed sedans with government plates generally brought little by way of good news, and when solemn-faced men in conservative, dark suits filed into the police station, looks were exchanged and a quiet speculation begun in places where men gathered.

When the Sheriff’s phone rang, and it was picked up on the first ring, when the Sheriff spoke into the mouthpiece with his usual quiet, confident voice, it was his uncle’s words that made reply to the Sheriff’s self-assured “hel-LO.”

“Linn, could you come down here, please,” the Chief said.  “I think you’ll want to hear this.”

Marsha, in turn, looked up as the Chief came into her newspaper office, uniform cap in hand, bandage strips on his face where he’d been cut by shining crystals of flying glass.

“Marsha,” he greeted her.  “A word, if I may.”

“Of course.”  She rose and he gestured her down.

“This won’t take long.”

She sat, worry tightening her stomach.

“Marsha, I’ve given thought to … us.”

Marsha’s stomach fell about ten feet.

“I thought of what it would mean to be a policeman’s widow.”

Her stomach fell another twenty and teetered over a bottomless pit.

“I was just in a meeting that gives me cause to change my mind.”

“Change your mind,” she echoed, a trick she’d picked up from a nurse some years ago.

“Mm-hmm,” Will nodded.  “You see, Marsha, I’d … I’d thought to propose to you, and then things happened and damned if I would make you a widow.  You don’t need that.”

“Will, I –“

“Hear me out.”  His voice was gentle, his voice without an edge.  “Marsha, this is not for publication, and I’m afraid I’m going to make a great deal of trouble for you.  You see …”

He considered, plunged ahead.

“I have two things.  First, the attacks. It seems the entire nationwide community of law enforcement officers at all levels were so incensed at what happened here that they’ve made things very difficult for drug trafficking and for the first time in recorded history there is a … truce.”  He smiled a little, kind of a twist of his mouth.  “It’s big news but please … don’t print that, at least not yet.

“There is … another matter.”

Marsha raised an eyebrow, tilted her head a little, ticking off a mental list – the man’s change in voice, a slight shift of his posture, the way his bottom jaw thrust out a bit as he seemed to come to some decision.

“Marsha, you are a good looking woman and you already know I made so bold as to commission you a gown – an 1885 McKenna – so you would not feel out of place with the Ladies’ Tea Society.”

“Thank you,” Marsha said carefully.  “That was very thoughtful.”

“I thought I was premature to even think of proposing to you.”

He did not dare look up as he said the words.

Marsha’s mouth opened a little, and she smiled.
Will swallowed, took a deep breath, pushed ahead.

 “And then there were the attempts on my life and I thought I was more than a damned fool.  It turns out” – he stopped, looked directly at her – “it turns out that you were the best way to open the door to that truce.”

Will took a long breath, raised his eyes from the oiled boards to the stamped tin ceiling.

“They’ll do no more business in Firelands County.  It seems …”

He looked at the floor, considered, looked back up.

“I had a visit from some Federal boys.  It seems their sources corroborate what that intruder told you.  They’ll do no more business in Firelands County.” 

Will looked uncertain for a moment, then he looked at Marsha and his uncertainty evaporated.

“Marsha, I am going to trust you with this, but if you are going to be a police chief’s wife you have to understand there are things you can’t speak about.”

Marsha nodded quickly, her eyes big, like a little schoolgirl being sworn to her first cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die promise.
“It’s going to be really hard for you, Marsha, you’re editor of the newspaper and on the one hand you can get some exclusives, I reckon … for all the excitement there is in a little town.  Cat up a tree and a hot game of marbles down in the corral, you know, the usual.”

“Or gunfights in the street.”

“That wasn’t in the street,” he corrected. “It was in a back alley, Marsha.  It’s not a gunfight unless you shoot back and I didn’t shoot.  They turned a buzz gun loose at me and hosed down the street but I didn’t shoot back.  Was no gunfight.”

Marsha stood, trembling, her face a little pale, but the color standing out in her cheeks like they were painted pink dots.

“Damn you,” she hissed, stalking from behind her desk, arms stiff at her side, her hands fisted.  “Damn you, Will Keller!  Don’t you dare – don’t you dare patronize me!”

“I’m not patronizing you, Marsha,” Will said, an edge to his voice:  his eyes were pale now, and hard, and sane and rational men knew that the man’s pale eyes and his quiet, hard voice taken together was a warning and not to press the issue.

Marsha, however, was not a sane and rational man, she was a woman with something to say, and she was going to say it, and damn the consequences!

“Will Keller,” Marsha grated, stalking up to within an inch of the man, then shoving herself into him, “I” shove – “will choose for me”—shove -- whether I – shove, shove, shove --associate with whoever, do you understand me?”

She drew her fist back, hit him in the chest.

“WILL KELLER, DAMN YOU, I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU!”

Will caught her wrist before her second blow could land, but it was not a hard blow:  it was as if she realized just what she’d said, it was as if she went from being an angry woman to a little girl who realized she’d just thrown her birthday cake to the floor.

Will frowned, released her wrist:  he came up on his toes, came back down, lips pressed together as if he were coming to some decision.

“Marsha, you have a dress waiting for you at Hulda’s.  She has it finished and I’d like you to wear it today to the Ladies’ Tea Society.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that,” Marsha said uncertainly.

“I’ll be there, guest speaker or some such stuff.  You can quote me there, but before … Marsha, I have something I have to tell you.”

Marsha nodded, her voice low, musical.  “All right.”

God Almighty she’s beautiful, Will thought, his chest tightening again.

“There’s an age difference between us,” Will said quietly, “and there’s always a danger hooking up with a lawman.  We tend to get killed sometimes.  I’ve considered proposing to you but I wanted to talk it over first and see how you felt.”

Not that she hasn’t made it plain already, he thought, but I have to say the words.

I have to give her an out.

He felt his mouth twist in a wry smile.

There.

 It’s out.

I’ve taken the chance.

Best find out now if I’m just being a damned fool.

Hell, for all I know, she’s got someone back East, some rich man’s son or some society climber –

I should have asked her that first –

Marsha tilted her head a little, smiled a funny little smile he’d never seen before.

“Thank you for fixing my back door,” she said, her voice a little tight, a little quavery.  “And thank you for … for trusting me.”

He nodded once, gravely, his face a mask, hiding his thoughts.

She’s going to drop you like a hot potato, boy.  She’s trying to let you down easy.  You blew it, Will, how did you ever think you’d have a ghost of a chance –

“I think age doesn’t make a difference,” she said carefully, “and I think you are wonderful and I would be proud to be seen with you anytime, anywhere.”

He nodded again, took a step back.

“I’ll see you at the Ladies’ Tea Society, then?”

“I’ll be there,” Marnie said.   “I have to see some people.  You may remember an earlier Tea Society meeting was at the secondary location?”

“I remember,” he grinned.  “A little girl couldn’t wait to tell me about it.”

“I need to see that little girl.”  Marsha almost giggled.  “I need to take some lessons.”

“I think,” Will said slowly, “that can be arranged.”

“I’ll see you then.”

Will settled the eight point cap on his head; he turned, smiling a little, and walked slowly for the front door.

Marsha watched him go, then she ran, skipping, around desk, slipped down the hall and into the back room, made sure the back hallway door was securely barred, then changed clothes.

A certain one-legged seamstress waited with an emerald-green gown hung up beside her.

“Did you hear all that?”  Marsha giggled, and Hulda squeezed her hands, nodding.

As Marsha stripped quickly out of her modern garb, Hulda smiled conspiratorially, and the two of them made short work of converting a modern-day newspaper editor into a fashionable young woman of the late 1880s.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

136.  THE SHADOWED CLIFFS

“Seen Jimmy?”

Connie looked up, surprised.  “No, I thought he was with you.”

“Hm.”  Linn walked over to his desk.

Jimmy often left him a picture, a drawing to show where he’d be, and Linn kept every last one of them.

Sure enough, there was a drawing on his desk.

Linn’s fingers spread and rested momentarily on the paper and Connie looked up, big-eyed, alarmed at her husband’s quiet, “Oh, no!”

 

Jimmy did what boys do.

Jimmy didn’t know what he was looking for, nor what he was running from, but Jimmy knew as long as he had his Stomper-horse, he could cover ground fast, and he had a good general knowledge of the surrounding territory.

Some instinct directed him to a place he’d never been.

His Sheriff said there was an ancient place, a very old place Jimmy should never go, and so that’s where Jimmy went.

He knew the Shadowed Cliffs were somewhere in the direction he was heading and something told him he’d find them.

 

Linn swung into the saddle, made sure his talkie and cell phone were both secure:  he was rigged for an overnight, he had food for two for two days, he could make do for a week if need be, and there’d been times when that need had arisen.

He spoke quietly into the hand-held Motorola, speaking on the channel dedicated to the purpose, informed his segundo where he was headed, and why.

Barrents’ quiet “Be careful, boss,” was his only reply, but Linn knew his chief deputy would be saying something in Navajo, and that something would be a blessing, a canticle of protection, and the Sheriff was grateful for it, for he was riding to the one place where his gut said he should never, ever go.

He was riding to a place where worlds met and it was possible to get lost in among them.

“Yup, Apple,” he said, and his Appaloosa stallion stepped out, hoofbeats brisk and loud in the stillness of the cooling evening.

 

The pale-eyed Sheriff had a fire the size of a teacup, a coffee pot hissing on top of it; his copper mare grazed nearby, saddle laid over against a log and saddle blanket draped over the dead stub of what used to be a tree branch.

The old lawman with the iron-grey mustache hadn’t been out here for a very long time, not since … not since his Sarah danced out on the white sands, and spun, and sank into a little depression … she never told him where she went nor what she did, but he knew when he dove into that little depression he had to find her and he had to bring her back, and he had, and she’d clung to him with one arm, her bulldog .44 in the other, and all she would say was, “I killed him,” and there was a rich exultation in her quiet words.

It was an old place, known to peoples ancient when the natives were on the land, more ancient than even those dimly-remembered ancestors:  Old Pale Eyes sat on the log, smelling coffee, listening to the night, watching shadows dance on the smooth cliff face, a steady procession in silhouette:  flutes they had, and dance they did, and they did with absolutely, positively no sound at all.

There was the soft sound of small feet hitting the ground, as if falling from a height:  he heard a horse’s tail slash its flanks, then the breathy snort of a big horse, the rich smell of urine, the splashing sound as a horse relieved itself on the sandy soil.

Old Pale Eyes looked to his right, looked at a little boy who regarded him with big and solemn eyes.

“I’m scared,” Jimmy said.

The pale eyed lawman raised an arm, Jimmy took the invitation and sat down next to him, cuddled up against the man:  he smelled of horse sweat and saddle leather and wood smoke, he smelled the way a man ought.

“Now what’s got you spooked?”  the old lawman rumbled, his big arm draped companionably over the lad’s shoulders, a warm and reassuring weight that lessened the child’s tremors a little.

Jimmy took a long, shivering breath.  “The drug dealers tried to kill Uncle Will,” he said, “and my Sheriff an’ Barrents went after ‘em but they was dead an’ that’s not the first time they tried.”

The pale eyed old lawman looked over at his mare, who was studying the newly arrived horse; when she lowered her head and went back to grazing, the lawman turned his mind back to the problem at hand.

Old Pale Eyes knew he could trust his horse, and if Cannonball wasn’t worried, he wasn’t worried either.  Her ears and her nose were better than his, and for all that she was a civilized saddlehorse, she had enough of the wild in her to know when things weren’t right.

Old Pale Eyes considered the boy’s words, turning them over in his mind.

He didn’t know about no drug dealers – sounded like drummers, traveling salesmen peddling their snake oil – and he didn’t know who Uncle Will was, but he kind of figured who that “My Sheriff” had to be, and it was no great leap of logic to surmise there was violence in the wind, and the boy wasn’t used to it.

“Was Uncle Will hurt?”

Jimmy shook his head.  “No but they come after him with machine guns an’ shot up his bedroom winda an’ he beat one of ‘em to death at the back door an’ he shot another one an’ the FBI an’ everyone is after ‘em ‘cause you don’t shoot a lawman an’ get away with it an’ my Sheriff was really mad an’ his eyes were really pale” – he stopped, looked up at Old Pale Eyes, then he grinned and pointed.

“My Sheriff has curlies on his mustache like that!”  he said with obvious delight.

“He must be a fine lookin’ fella,” the lawman rumbled, his eyes bright with mischief, and Jimmy nodded.

“Yes he is!”

 

Linn found Stomper’s hoof prints.

They weren’t at all hard to know:  there was not another horse in the territory with hooves the size of dish pans, and only one blacksmith in a half dozen counties he trusted to shoe the big warmblood.

“If you were Frisian,” he said aloud, “you’d get on well barefoot unless we had you on rocky ground.”
He eased Apple-horse forward, slowly, following the prints until they stopped.

They just stopped.

A small set of boot prints, like Jimmy had slid out of the saddle and landed flat footed as was his habit, he’d taken one step, then –

Nothing.

The ground was ideal for tracking but there was not another mark to be found.

Linn looked up, looked around.

Jimmy, where are you?

He paced Apple-horse forward, slowly, until he overlooked the natural amphitheater, the white-sand bowl with the smooth cliff face.

Linn’s chest tightened and his breath came a little more quickly.

He’d read of this place, he’d heard of this place, he’d never seen it – never, until now.

“So this is where worlds meet,” he whispered.

He dropped Apple’s bitless reins over his head and to the ground, swung out of the saddle:  he unbuckled his bedroll and his possibles and carried them over to a place he’d used before, a little level place he could roll out his blanket, where he could set up the little stove and make coffee.

Or I could just build a fire, he thought, and smiled a little.

There was almost a tripod of rocks, red and fire burnt, left by some kind soul who knows how long ago:  they could have been used that morning, for there was no weathering, no wind blown sand on them: he cast about until he found sticks enough to make him a teacup sized fire.

A dip of water from the stream, a careful set of the coffee pot on the rocks and he lowered the cloth ball with ground coffee knotted up in it – “hobo coffee” his Mama had called it – into the cold, shimmering springwater.

He laid out his bedroll, unsaddled Apple-horse and laid his saddle against a handy log.

The saddle blanket he hung off the long dead stub of what used to be a tree branch.

Linn looked at the cliffs, waiting for the shadows to come, waiting for some sign Jimmy was here.

He set on the log, in front of the fire, and listened to the night, listened with more than his ears as the stars pushed their way out of the dark and hung overhead, bright and unreachable.

Marnie would like this, he thought.

I never had her out here.

Wonder what she would think of the shadow dancers.

 

“Have you ever been afraid?”  Jimmy asked in a small voice.

The pale eyed lawman with the iron grey mustache waited a long moment before he gave a quiet “Yep.”

Jimmy looked at him with worried eyes.  “What did’ja do?”

Old and pale eyes looked down at young and blue eyes and Jimmy saw the corners of the lawman’s eyes wrinkle up a little, the way his Sheriff’s did when he was ready to smile, just not with all of his face.

“I ben scared plenty o’ times,” he admitted, his voice quiet, deep, reassuring.

“What did you do?” he asked in a timid little voice.

He felt the old lawman take a long breath, heard him blow it out.

“I did the only thing a man can do.”

Jimmy felt his thoughtful hesitation as much as heard it.

“I faced up to it and I faced it down.  That’s the only thing a man can do when he’s scared.  You’ve got to drive right into it or it’ll drive you away and it will never stop.  You start to run and it’ll be on your heels runnin’ you harder.”

“But I’m just a little kid,” Jimmy protested.

“I knew a boy who was a little kid,” the old lawman nodded.

“You did?”

“Yep.”  He nodded again.  “My son Jacob.”

Jimmy’s eyes widened and he remembered the portrait hanging on his Sheriff’s wall, the one with the old lawman with the iron-grey mustache, the younger man with pale eyes …

Jacob.

But Jacob’s big, he thought.  He’s a grown man.

“Let me tell you about Jacob,” the old lawman’s rough and rumbling voice said.

 

Will Keller moved with the ease of a man comfortable in his own hide.

He was just as comfortable in that new suit he’d had made, and the flat-crowned black hat that went with it.

He had his dead sister’s revolver belted on under it, and a bulldog .44 in the inside breast pocket, his boots were buffed to a high shine, and he made his way through the Silver Jewel with all the fuss and noise of a passing cat.

A very big, very dangerous cat.

He stopped at the door, the one with the old-fashioned, faceted-glass doorknob, the door with the shingle hung on the nail that said LADIES’ TEA SOCIETY and beneath it, IN SESSION – his hand paused, the lean old lawman took a steadying breath, then he gripped and turned.

The fire chief’s red-headed wife smiled at him and declared, “And right on time, our guest speaker!  Ladies, let us make Chief of Police Will Keller welcome!”

Will’s mouth was dry and he did not hear the polite patter of gloved palms greeting his arrival.

His carefully prepared presentation turned to dust between his ears and he saw the young woman who stood beside Mrs. Fitzgerald.

Matter of fact, for a long moment, Marnie was the only thing he saw.

Will took another long breath, paced off on the left, walked deliberately to the front of the room:  he turned and regarded the ladies with pale eyes and a quiet smile.

“Ladies,” he said, “the best speaker I ever heard was also the briefest.  My little sis – my twin sister” – he grinned wryly, for it was ever a joke between the two of them which was the little sis and which was the little brother – “Willamina used to tell me the longer the speaker’s wind, the harder those chairs get” – he gestured toward his appreciative audience – “and Uncle Pete allowed as the mind absorbs only until the backside grows numb.”

There was quiet laughter at this follow-up comment, and a general, if muted, agreement with his statements.

“I therefore will not belabor your backsides, nor will I outrage your sensibilities.  This won’t be the briefest speech in the world but it’ll be in the top ten.”

Will turned to Marsha and swept off his hat, tucked it correctly under his arm:  he dipped a hand in his coat pocket, pulled out a small, hinged box, opened it and went to one knee.

“Marsha Jones,” he declared, his voice firm and confident, “will you consent to be my wife?”

 

“Jacob come to me when he warn’t much bigger than you are,” the pale eyed old lawman said slowly, his voice deep and reassuring.  “I fed him and he started to grow and I reckon he hadn’t growed much ‘cause he hadn’t been fed much.

“Once he took off his shirt I about died.”
“Why’s that?”  Jimmy asked, surprised.

Old Pale Eyes took a long breath, looked up.  “Suppose you tell him.”

A young man nodded soberly and Jimmy turned, startled.

“Where’d you come from!”  he exclaimed quietly.

“Jacob,” the Sheriff said, “this is Jimmy, and he’s kind of scared.  Somethin’ sent him skedaddlin’ out here and I reckon we can help.  What do you think?”
Jacob nodded, went down to one knee, stuck out his hand.

“Now what’s your name?”  he asked, and Jimmy, awe-struck, took the lean young man’s callused hand in an awkward grip.

“My, uh, I’m Jimmy,” he replied.

“And you’re used to seein’ me hangin’ on the wall.”

“Uh, yeah.”

Jacob laughed quietly.  “I never been hung on a wall before.”  He considered a moment.

“I understand you been beat.”

Jimmy nodded.

“You been beat bad.”

Jimmy nodded again.

“I was too.”  Jacob’s eyes hardened and so did his voice.  “I was horse whipped and I warn’t much bigger than you.  My back looks like ... a road map from it.”

Jimmy was pale and his voice was very small.

“He whipped me with a belt most times,” Jimmy almost whispered.

Jacob nodded.  “I got the belt too.  Razor strop, belt, most often that damned whip.  I was too little to use it back on him but he got drunked up an’ beat Mama plumb to death.  He beat me too when I tried to stop him but I was just little … and little can’t do much, least I couldn’t, not yet.

“He got drunk after he beat me unconscious an’ beat Mama to death so whilst he was drunk and asleep I pulled his Army Colt out of its holster and I drove a .44 ball through his ear as he laid there.”

Jimmy nodded, his face very serious.

“I managed to bury Mama and I left him to rot and I set out on my own.

“Folks here an’ there took me in an’ took care of me but mostly I was on my own hook.  A fella named Sopris found me an’ arranged I be took in by a ranch for a few months an’ then he come and fetched me here to this-yere pale-eyed Sheriff, and I been just as happy as if I had good sense, ever since!”

Jacob looked directly into Jimmy’s eyes, lowering his voice just a little, knowing this would make the lad pay very close attention.

“I faced up to what scared me and I killed it.  Now you can’t kill ever’thin’ you’re scairt of.  I had nightmares, God Almighty did I have nightmares!”

Jimmy nodded agreement.

“I was afeared in them-there nightmares so I practiced fightin’ . I got really good with a shotgun and a revolver and I got just plain deadly with an Arkinsaw tooth pick.”  He drew a shining steel blade from his knee-high boot’s inside sheath. 

“Once the Sheriff here took me in an’ I got regular meals, why, I got strong enough to face up to and face down just about anyone I come up against.”

Jacob laughed.

“I never tried Jackson Cooper, though.  He was a full head taller than me or Pa either one an’ he’s got shoulders broad enough to harness him up and break him to plow!”

Jimmy regarded Jacob with big and marveling eyes, then looked at the pale eyed Sheriff, looked back.

“That’s big!” he whispered.

Jacob squatted, grinning a little.  “He’s even bigger in person.  Imagine a town marshal that has to duck to get through the doorway of the Sheriff’s office!”

“Wow,” Jimmy whispered.

He turned to look at the Old Sheriff again and froze.

He looked past the pale eyed lawman with the iron grey mustache and a shadow flowed across the smooth cliff face.

It was a shadow he recognized, a shadow that caught his breath in his throat and seized his belly with a cold, harsh claw, a shadow that hissed and reached for him.

Jacob’s hand gripped Jimmy’s upper arm.

“Steady,” he said in a quiet, reassuring voice.  “This is your fear.  Look at it.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

137.  PICK ON ME!

 

I set on that log for some time, considering.

I can read tracks good as any, I reckon, and I read plain as day where Stomper rode up and stopped, where Jimmy slid down out of the saddle and landed flat footed, where he took two steps and his tracks stopped.

Just like that big warmblood horse of his.

The tracks just stopped.

That did not add up and I do not like puzzles.

I’m kind of like my pale eyed Mama, she didn’t like puzzles neither.

I hung my saddle blanket and set my saddle and then I parked my backside on attair log and contemplated my granite coffee pot set on them fire burnt rocks, and I waited til the water hissed and bubbled and the lid started to rattle just a little.

This high up, water boils early and I knew I’d have to let that coffee ball set in there and repent of its sins for a while, so I wasn’t in much of a hurry to take me a drink.

I looked around and considered, I thought and figured and scratched my head, wondering where Jimmy could have gone from here, how he could have ridden up and taken two steps and just …

… vanished …

I looked over at that smooth cliff face and I felt my eyes narrow down some.

I felt my lips frame my thoughts into words and heard my own voice whispering into the wind.

What can you show me?

I don’t know if I expected words or figures, images or just what, but the blank cliff face was just that.

Blank.

Just like my mind.

I rubbed my forehead, frowning, and considered that Jimmy had to be close.

My gut told me he was there, someplace close.

 

Jimmy stood, his eyes widening, his heart hammering against the backside of his wishbone.

“Don’t hurt me,” he whispered, too terrified to speak.

“I’M GONNA WELT YOU, BOY!” – that voice, that horrible voice, every memory of every terror he’d ever caused the frozen-afraid-to-move child came roaring up out of the well Jimmy tried to stuff everything down into –

 

I rolled out the blanket on the sandy ground.

A black shadow padded over to me and waited until I rolled up on my side to launder me around behind the back of the ear and back of my neck, then The Bear Killer gave a big sigh and laid down against my back, the way he liked to do when I made my bed under the starry decked firmament.

“Jimmy,” I said aloud as I got myself comfortable, “you come to me or I’ll come to you.”

Matter of fact that was my last thought as I went to sleep.

You come to me, Jimmy, or I’ll come to you.

The Bear Killer yawned, his eyes drowsy, and he lifted his head a little as if someone were rubbing his ears the way he liked.

 

The pale eyed old lawman rubbed The Bear Killer’s ears and his eyes smiled a little.

I come awake, rolled over, stood.

“Good of you to join us,” Old Pale Eyes said in that deep gravelly voice of his.

I blinked, grinned, looked at Jimmy.

I’d found him and that was good but then I saw the look on my boy’s face and right away I was ready for a fight.

I turned.

What had been a shadow was now detached from the cliff face.

It was coming together, gaining form, becoming solid, but moving slowly, like it was wading through molasses.

“I’M A-GONNA WELT YOU, BOY!” it roared, and Jimmy whimpered, afraid to move, afraid to look but afraid not to look.

What had been a cliff face shadow finished condensing into a grown man, a man with fury on his face and a belt in his hand and he was reaching for my boy, for my Jimmy, he was reaching for a little boy’s upper arm so he could lay welts from neck to ankles like he used to do.

He drew back that belt, it swung back and I grabbed it.

Now I’ve got me a pretty good grip and when I got hold of that belt there was no lettin’ go of it.

I ripped it backwards out of his hand and I reached up and I taken his upper arm like he’d taken Jimmy’s so many times and I hauled him back fast and hard and unexpected and I drove the heel of my hand into the point of his chin with the full intent of driving his jaw teeth right out the top of his scalp.

“YOU WANT TO PICK ON SOMEONE?”  I roared, and I felt the Rage surge into my soul like a flash flood down a desert arroyo.

“YOU WANT TO PICK ON SOMEONE?”

I reached down and grabbed me a double handful of his shirt front, I hauled him off the ground and off his feet and I shook him fit to rattle the bones inside his hide and I drawed in a big Texas twister of a lung full of air and I blasted my fog horn right in his face.

“DAMN YOU, PICK ON ME!”

Now my Mama warned me that the Rage is addictive.

She warned me that there’s no feelin’ like bein’ right, and I knew to the roots of my eternal soul that I was right when I tore into that man.

I drove my good right fist into his gut up to my elbow, I grabbed his ears and hauled his face down into my up-and-coming knee, I used heel strikes and elbow strikes in his ribs, I hit him fast hard and nasty and I just plainly turned my wolf loose on him.

I didn’t go full blown Rage – the Rage is hot and I was cold, I was cold and I was hard and I busted him up just as bad as I could.

I drove my elbows down on his collar bones to break them down, I kicked his knees to dislocate from the front and hit the other from the side to shatter the joint, I drove my knees into his ribs when he was down and then I dropped into his guts right before I set a-straddle of him and set to beltin’ him across the face, left, right, left, right, just before I broke his jaw and then stomped it back into the back of his throat.

I stood up and I bent over and I slapped both hands hard down on his chest and I grabbed me up a good hand full of his shirt front in each hand and I fetched him off the ground again.

“You ain’t gonna die,” I hissed, “because you are already dead.”

I drove my knee up into him and his eyes rolled up and his head lolled back.

I turned, fast, threw him about six feet.

“You,” I said loudly, “are not alive.  You are spirit.  So am I.  YOU CANNOT HURT THE LIVING!”

I walked over and stood a-straddle of him.

“Spirit on spirit and I can cause you more pain than you knew while you drew breath.  What I’ve done to you so far will heal like that” – I snapped my fingers – “but there’s something I can do that’ll hurt you permanent.”

I reached down into my boot top and I pulled out a long, slender knife.

I’d set and honed that knife until I could shave with it.

“This is not steel,” I said quietly.  “This is iron.  Iron is a base metal and spirits can be hurt by base metal.  Matter of fact” –I sat down on his rib-broke chest, knowing it would blind him with pain – “I could slice off your hands and they never would grow back, spirit or not!”

I stood, slid the knife back into my boot top.

“RISE!”

He rose, his face horribly askew, with his bloodied and broken jaw off at an angle, his nose flattened, both arms drooping and useless from both collarbones being broke; a shift, a twist, and his knees were healed, his ribs repaired, he was whole in the space of two heartbeats.

I drove the heel of my hand into his nose again – hard – his head snapped back and he gave kind of a lost wail.

“I can do all that to you whenever I want,” I said, my voice rough, then I dipped my hand to my boot top and brought it up, fast.

He screamed, stepped back, clapping a hand at his bloodied face.

“THAT’LL GIVE YOU A SCAR TO LAST FOR ETERNITY!”  I shouted, my off hand up to block or grab, the knife gripped point down, like an icepick, ready to parry or slash or stab vertical down behind his made-whole collarbones.

“If you ever, EVER trouble my boy again” – I felt my eyes go very pale – “I will find you, and I will cut you into ribbons, and you will not die no matter how horribly I carve you up, so if you want to wander Eternity with no eyes and your ham strings cut, with no fingers and no tongue, go right ahead and bother him.  Otherwise  crawl back into your grave and  pull it in around you!”

I took a step toward him, took another, a third:  he backed, backed some more, then a pair of black, clawed hands thrust up out of the sand, seized him around the legs, pulled.

A scream, a wild grab of panicked, clawed hands, and he was gone.

I wiped the blade on my pants leg, slid it back into its sheath.

Jacob was first to speak.

“I do declare,” he said softly.  “You fight like Pa here, only fiercer.”

“Yeah,” I coughed, spat.  “Reckon so.”

Old Pale Eyes poured from a worse-the-wear granite pot into a tin cup.

“Coffee?”

“Thank’ee kindly.”  I taken it, blew on it to cool it a bit, took a sip, grimaced.

“That’ll put hair on yer chest,” the old lawman rumbled, setting back down on the log and returning the coffee pot to its perch on the three fire-burnt rocks.

“That’ll peel the enamel off yer teeth,” I gasped.  “You ain’t got any turpentine I could cut this with?”

“No, ‘fraid not.”

Jacob was regarding me with approving eyes.

“I do believe,” he said slowly, “that was one of the most efficient gut stompin’s I’ve ever seen.”

I took another, more cautious sip, handed the cup back.

“Flattery,” I said, “will get you everywhere.”

I handed the cup back.  “Reckon I’ve had my fill.”

Jimmy let go of Jacob and came running over to me, slammed into me and grabbed me like he was never gonna let me go.

Matter of fact he hit me fast and unexpected and I went over backwards and when I did, I grabbed him to me and I blinked a couple times and realized we were a-layin’ on my bed blanket on the sand, me and Jimmy, and he was full awake and so was I.

I set up and looked around and we were alone.

The Bear Killer yawned ag’in and I looked around, looking for tracks, and I saw them.

Two sets of boots, back here, signs of a struggle in the sand, dark spots like blood, and as I looked closely at them, they give a little hiss and disappeared.

“I was scared,” Jimmy whispered, and I run my arm around him, held him close.

“Jimmy,” I said, “I’m wide awake now and I reckon my own bunk would be a sight more comfortable. What say we head on home?”

 

Man and boy rode away from this confluence of worlds, rode away from the white-sand amphitheater, away from the smooth cliff face where it’s said shadows walked, and danced, and sometimes one would scream like he’d been cut with a knife, but you couldn’t hear the scream.

No, you might feel like there was something just at the edge of your hearing, maybe something like fingernails on a black board … and if you’d look again, the shadows were gone.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

138.  SLOW IS SMOOTH, SMOOTH IS FAST

 

The Ladies’ Tea Society as a whole, and as individuals, approved most heartily the changes in their new editor’s life:  first, they all knew and liked the pale eyed police chief, they approved of a local girl coming home – for a rarity they even accepted her advanced credentials, both academic and professional – but they mostly approved because they knew Marsha was seeking advice, and advice meant changes, and changes, in this case, meant shopping – and if the ladies weren’t in on the shopping themselves, they were aiding and abetting the shopping in any manner available to them – whether by a look, an encouraging word, speculation as to what manner of garment might benefit the soon-to-be Mrs. Editor Keller.

Marsha brought the drive of a city reporter with her, and the energies she did not put into the newspaper were instead directed at her new training, for she was bound and determined not to feel as helpless as she had when she looked into the dark lenses of a masked intruder’s sunglasses.

Marsha knew big-city violence and she knew what it was to be assaulted; she’d hoped to leave all that behind when she returned home, home where nothing ever happened, home where it was quiet and sleepy and the newspaper had to come up with enough in seven days to fill a single edition.

She hadn’t counted on Firelands changing.

She knew that – just as Firelands had changed -- she would have to change as well.

Marsha consulted the ladies of the Society, she consulted the Sheriff, she consulted her intended and was at once surprised and gratified when he took her hands in his and said gently, “Dearest, I am the one person you don’t want to ask to teach you to shoot.  I will be your husband and that puts me too close.  Better you get your instruction from the ladies and from the Sheriff or even Barrents.  They are all expert instructors” – and so Marsha went to the ladies, and she went to the Sheriff, and she went to the blocky, solid-muscled Navajo chief deputy.

Marsha found herself the focus of fashion:  she suddenly had to adjust her wardrobe to accommodate a concealed sidearm; she found herself the recipient of sound advice – more than she wanted, really; she’d grown up thinking one pistol, one rifle, one shotgun was very much like another, and of a sudden they were thrust at her in a bewildering array.

The Sheriff came to her rescue and spirited her away to Carbon Hill, where they could work and not be interrupted.

“Arms up,” he’d said in that gentle voice of his, and she’d brought her arms awkwardly up to shoulder height as he snugged a broad, heavy leather belt around her middle:  he’d shown her the right way to open a revolver’s cylinder, he’d had her dry-fire several times, holster, grip, withdraw – “no, not that fast, slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and we want to get you smooth first” – his voice was reassuring, his hands warm, firm and absolutely professional.

She remarked on the shortness of the cartridges he loaded into the blued-steel Smith & Wesson and he laughed.

“I’m using a trick an old gunfighter taught me,” he admitted.  “These are .22 Shorts.  You want to learn on something mild and work your way up.”

He dunked the revolver in her holster, pulled out a tape measure.

“Now as I recall,” he said, “you were about ten feet from that stranger when he come in your office with that money satchel.”

“Yes,” Marsha said faintly.

“Step this way.”  He led the way over toward the ruin of the marshal’s office.

He bent and picked up a rusty-seamed coffee can, hung it by a hole punched near its rim, thrusting this over a nail in what was left of the only wall that still defied gravity’s ruin.

He pulled out the tape measure’s yellow tongue, measured back ten feet, added another three, scraped a line in the dirt.

“That’s awful close,” Margie said uncomfortably.

The Sheriff hung the red-plastic tape from his hip pocket, turned to face Margie, thrust out his hand.

“Shake.”

Margie blinked, her expression that of a person expecting to see a fish sticking out the Sheriff’s shirt pocket, but she took his hand a little uncertainly.

“This,” he said, “is the grip you want.  A good firm handshake grip.  That is the correct angle to put your shots where you are looking.”  He released her hand.

“Put on your earmuffs.”

She did.

“Now face that coffee can.”

She did.

“Grip the pistol.”

She did.

“Draw the pistol, slow and smooth, just like you’ve been doing.”

She gripped the Smith’s checkered walnut grips, drew it out, brought it up and poked the muzzle straight ahead toward the coffee can, her finger tightening on the narrow grooved trigger –

The sudden *blap* surprised her, but the can’s twitch and tink! surprised her more.

“Holster.”

She brought the pistol back in, rotated the muzzle down, missed the holster:  frowning, she looked down, found the leather, holstered.

“Good.  Release.  Arm relaxed at your side.”

The Sheriff’s voice was patient, steady, reassuring:  he coached her through several more draw-and-fire drills, and Margie found she was chafing against the restriction of the instruction, but delighting in the blap! tink! of hitting the coffee can.

Linn reloaded the wheel gun, returned it to her holster:  “Back up two steps.”
Margie backed up two steps.

“Now look at the can.  You’re still just awful close to it.  When you are ready, draw and fire again.”

 

Will shook the Parson’s hand again.  “Thank you, Reverend.  I do appreciate your handling the arrangements.”

The Reverend John Burnett smiled quietly.  “Glad to do it, Chief.  You’re a good man and she’s a good woman.”

“It’s about time you stopped mourning,” Mrs. Parson beamed as the Chief turned to her:  she took his face between her warm, soft hands the way a grandmother will a favorite grandchild.  “You deserve a wife, Chief.  You should let yourself enjoy your life.” 

Her expression was a bit sad as she whispered, “Stop punishing yourself.  It’s time to find joy again.”

Will blinked, nodded, cupped her elbows with his big callused hands, cleared his throat nervously and realized he didn’t know what to say.

 

“Enough for today.”

Marsha was almost disappointed, but she was grateful:  she was having fun, but her shoulders were starting to complain a little.

“You’ve done well.”  Linn’s pale eyes were approving.  “Let’s clean up.”

He walked over to the can, pulled it off the nail, walked back, picked up the trash sack.

“May I keep that?”

Linn stopped, smiled a little.

“If you like.”

“I’d like.”  Marsha tilted her head a little, considered the battered, rusted and now thoroughly holed coffee can.  “A reminder.”

Linn nodded, handed it to her.

“When would be a good time to come back out?” he asked quietly.

Marsha blinked.  “Come back?”

“You’re only just started.  You’re going to work up from a .22 short to duty strength, but we’re not going to do it all at once.”

“Oh.”  She blinked, laughed a little.  “I’m sorry … I thought it would only be one lesson.”

Linn laughed.  “No, ‘fraid not.  Here, wipe down your hands” – he handed her a treated rag – “and drop in here when you’re done.”

“But you haven’t shot.”

“This is your day.”

She paused in wiping her fingers, gave the pale eyed lawman a long look.

“Thank you.”

“You’re worth it, Marsha,” Linn said frankly. 

“Thank you.”

They walked slowly toward the Sheriff’s Jeep.

“I … wasn’t sure how you would … accept your uncle’s remarriage.”

Linn’s tread was silent on the bare dirt, his eyes busy; he carried his scuffed old gym bag in his off hand, out of habit, leaving his gun hand free.

“Will has punished himself long enough,” he said quietly.  “He’s … he does not give his heart lightly.”

Marsha shot him an intense look.

“He has fallen hard for you, Marsha.  I never saw him lay his beating heart at a woman’s feet like he has with you.”

Marsha swallowed nervously.  “I … didn’t realize that.”

“Oh yeah.”  Linn hit the Jeep’s unlock button, opened the door for her.

“I’m, um, still wearing the gun.”

Linn smiled.  “That’s right.”

Marsha raised an eyebrow but made no further comment.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

139. UNEVENTFUL

 

Jimmy opened his eyes at the sound.

Knuckles, gentle and tentative on his bedroom door.

He saw it open a little, saw his Sheriff look in.

Thunder rippled outside, lightning shocking through the window like an insane strobe, throwing stark magnesium-contrast shadows on the far wall.

“You doin’ okay in here?” 

The Sheriff’s voice was gentle, quiet.

Jimmy’s grin was quick, open, unguarded, and Linn delighted to see it.

“I didn’t know if the storm troubled you or not.”

Jimmy blinked, shook his head a little.

“Mind if I come in?”

That quick grin again, and Linn eased into the boy’s room, walked quietly across bare floor and hook rug and felt the bed before parking his backside.

“Don’t want to sit on your leg,” he explained.  “That could lead to misunderstandings.”

“It would hurt, too,” Jimmy affirmed, eyes wide and innocent, and it was his turn to delight at his Sheriff’s grin and his chuckle.

“Yeah,” Linn agreed.  “You could say that.”

Another cascade of lightning, farther away now, the sound of a sustained cannonade in the distance.

“Now that’s some storm,” Linn murmured, then looked at the drowsy but interested boy, chin-deep in quilts and sun-dried bedsheets.

“Did you know,” he said conversationally, “that Bonnie Prince Charlie … you might not have heard of him.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“Ever hear of Scotland?”

Jimmy nodded.

“We’re part Scots, did you know that?”
Jimmy shook his head, imagining how he would look in a kilt and carrying a set of pipes.

“We are Maxwells of the Clan Maxwell, and a sept of the Clan Campbell,” Linn explained.  “Maxwell comes from Maccus Weil, or the Well of Max, and I believe that’s a deep section of river bend.  The ancestral castle still stands at Caverlaoch.  It’s not in livin’ condition but the most of it is still there.  Mama showed me pictures in a book and she always wanted to go there.”

Jimmy blinked, listening closely.

“There was a Scottish prince.  Charles, his name, but he was such a good looking little fellow – bonnie, the word is – so he was called Bonnie Prince Charlie.

“When he was just a little fellow, younger than you, there was a hell of a storm around their castle. Lightning, thunder, rain blasting like a hurricane on the leaded-glass windows, and his nurse heard him crying out when the lightning flashed.

“She snatched up her skirts and ran up the curved stone stairs and burst into his room, for she was afraid the boy was terrified and crying in fear.”

Jimmy’s eyes were still big, but solemn:  he knew fear and he knew what it was to cry for the fear he felt, and to be terrified beyond tears, afraid to even cry.

“He wasn’t crying.”

Linn’s voice was quiet, gentle, just like his smile when he looked at his son.

“He was up on his knees on the window seat.”

Jimmy blinked, surprised, and tilted his head a little to the side, betraying the curiosity of a little boy at this unexpected information.

“He was facing the window and facing the storm, and every time the lightning seared through the rain and blasted into the mountainside, Bonnie Prince Charlie clapped his hands and yelled, “Bonnie, bonnie, dae i’ agane, dae i’ againe!”

Jimmy laughed a little at Linn’s attempt at sounding like a happy little boy with an absolutely terrible Scots accent, and Linn grinned at Jimmy, the way a father will when he’s acting a fool with his boy.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay, Jimmy.  Sometimes a storm can be … frightening.”

“I’m okay,” Jimmy whispered.

Linn nodded, winked:  he got up, went over to where Wes was sound asleep in his bunk:  he stood and watched the youngest Keller, sound asleep, breathing easy, his head turned to one side and looking as angelic and innocent as … well, as a lad of nearly two years, generally wasn’t, at least when awake and buzz sawing his way through the house at not much under the speed of sound.

Linn came over to Jimmy and squatted by the bed, jerked his thumb toward the other bunk.

“I think you could fire cannon outside and he’d sleep through it,” he whispered, then leaned down and kissed Jimmy’s forehead.

Jimmy waited until his Sheriff withdrew, and closed the door, before he threw back his covers and padded barefoot across the floor and to the window.

Rain slashed against the glass like a wet horse tail, ran in ripples and blurry waves down the glass; lightning blasted the air apart, drove into the grainite mountainside, splintered a tree with a great blaze of light and fiery splinters, and Jimmy watched, big-eyed, his breath fogging the window glass.

Another bolt, rippling overhead in angular forks, and he whisper-laughed.

“Do it again,” he begged the night.  “Bonnie, bonnie, do it again!”

 

The Abbott stood in the covered walkway on the second floor of the Rabbitville monastery.

Lightning, probably, caused their power outage, or maybe a tree took down some lines:  no matter, their center of monastic refuge was well lighted with Aladdin lamps, a well-muffled generator purred, its Diesel heart providing power for the critical applications:  wind gusted in wet curtains across Rabbitville, slashing at tile roofs, at shacks and house trailers and turning streets into muddy streams.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” the Abbott whispered, “keep all safe tonight.”

His was no idle prayer.

People tended to turn to more primitive means of lighting when the power went out:  even if they would normally be asleep, a power outage meant some restless souls would sit up, staring at the night, a lighted candle or perhaps a kerosene lantern pushing back the shadows, until the familiar comfort of commercial power returned the civilized blaze of light to their hacienda.

The night smelled clean, the way it always did after a rain, and the Abbott remembered the child that died that morning, a beautiful child taken too early by the tumor that ate him from the inside, inoperable and inexorable:  the child knew he was dying, and the Abbott held the boy’s hand as the tumor ate through the last layer of the ascending aorta.

His death was mercifully swift, but just before his eyes dilated and his hand relaxed, the boy whispered, “It smells like it did before I was born.”

It was not the first time the Abbott had heard this.

A young child walked with him after a rain, a spring rain, when the earth was stretching and green was reappearing, and this young child innocently confided in the tall, tonsured cleric that it smelled the way it smelled before she was born.

The Abbott remembered this and he leaned his callused palms against the rain-wet railing, smelling the rain and remembering what had been a living, breathing child, now still and cold and shrouded below, awaiting his burial.

There was a hand on his shoulder, a quiet voice:  one of the Sisters, come to make sure he was well.

The Abbott swallowed, grateful a gust blew rain into his face, for though he tried to discipline himself against the twin sins of pride and vanity, he was still grateful that the sudden wet gust hid the wet already on his cheeks.

“There is tea,” the quiet voice said, and the Abbott nodded.  “And pie.”

He blinked, nodded, then dropped his head. 

The hand was warm through the heavy white material covering his shoulder.

“Tea, I should think,” he said, then cleared his throat and tried again.  “Tea, thank you.”

He knew without looking that when the hand withdrew, it would go into the angel-wing sleeve, the arms would be drawn back against the belly and the figure in white would bow, then turn and glide soundlessly to the stairway.

The Abbott took a long breath, turned, followed, his bullhide sandals leaving wet ovals on the tile.

 

Will Keller sat at his kitchen table, staring at the untouched mug of coffee.

He looked at the picture he knew was there, invisible in the darkness: it was a framed portrait, he kept it on his kitchen counter, and he looked to where he knew it was, and smiled.

Marsha, he thought, you are a fine-looking woman.

Thunder rumbled, muttered truculently as the storm withdrew over the mountains.

It sounded through the night as if the storm was going to wash the earth free of any storm-shattered trace of civilization; the power had gone out an hour before, which bothered Will not at all:  he got up, got dressed, heated leftover coffee on his gas stove and picked up his police-band talkie, marked in to the battery-powered repeater and thus to his dispatcher, announcing himself available.

The talkie stood, a black, silent brick, beside his coffee cup.

Will checked his wrist watch, luminous in the dark:  he picked up the coffee, drained the mug in one breath, rinsed out the cup and set it upside down on the drain rack.

“Might as well go in,” he muttered.  “Not that long til get-up.”

 

The spirit lamp had been a gift from a British traveler.

The lamp itself was well more than a century old and could have resided in the Monastery’s modest archives, but it pleased the Sisters to use it at times like this, when a little water was to be heated, when they would add alcohol and light the asbestos wick and make tea during power outages, or other times of need.

The Abbot sipped his honey-sweetened Earl Grey, closing his eyes and giving another, silent thanks for the warm, fragrant brew.

The Sister withdrew, leaving the Abbott to his thoughts:  she knew he’d set up for at least twenty hours with the dying child, not wanting him to die alone:  his family had abandoned him – whether meanness, or selfishness, or hopelessness, they didn’t know, and really it didn’t matter:  in his last week of life he’d been in a clean bed, he’d eaten when he was able, which was not often; gentle hands cleaned him, bathed him, dressed him, took him out onto the second floor balcony and let him look at blue sky and birds and the few trees that spread waxy green leaves in the hot New Mexico sun.

The sister withdrew, silent, closing the door quietly behind her:  the Abbott’s self-appointed task was complete, or would be after tomorrow’s interment, but hers was just beginning, her and her Sisters.

The veiled figure in white walked through the Sisters’ dormitory, the little bell in her hand, summoning them from their slumber, and the Sisters rose and made quick their preparations, their dressing, their  assembly and the guest quarters.

They waited for arrivals, for when the Sister summoned them with the handbell with the crooked handle, they knew their skills and their hospitality would be needed.

One of the Brethren sat up all night, listening.

It was at once his delight, and his assigned task:  he came to the Monastery with his skills and his abilities, and with his radios, and the Monastery immediately appointed and assigned him their use:  he sat in his comfortable office chair, watching the red lights running across the face of an old but still serviceable crystal scanner, and when the lights stopped running and the familiar tones came over the speaker, he leaned forward, eager as a questing hound, one hand gripping a pencil, ready to copy the dispatcher’s instructions.

Brother Florian had been a firefighter and a paramedic, and though his certifications were long expired, the experience was still with him:  he copied the location on the yellow pad before him, turned to the Rabbitville map, ran his finger along one particular street, found the cross street, thumped the paper with his forefinger, frowned.

We know the location, he thought.

How many will be displaced?

 

Connie Keller was restless.

She hadn’t been, until the child in her belly became restless, then she knew she’d better get up before the little one stomped on her bladder again.

The life within her grew quiet and content when she rose, when she moved; Connie usually slept on her back, but she’d learned early in her first pregnancy she’d better sleep on her side – her left was best – otherwise the child she bore would protest at lying on her backbone.

Linn was only just coming into the bedroom when she rose.

“Is all well, dearest?”  he whispered.

“The usual.”  She shrugged into her bathrobe, found her furry scuffies, shuffled across the floor toward him.

Linn kissed her delicately, quickly, held the door open for her.

He knew better than to delay her this soon after her rising.

Linn looked at the clock.

He’d been restless and so he’d dressed, all but his boots and his gunbelt.

Close to get-up, he thought.  Might as well finish the job.

 

“Sister Mary.”

Brother Florian’s voice was quiet, confident as he pressed the intercom’s white-plastic talk bar.

Sister Mary’s voice came back through the intercom.

“Sister Mary, ready here.”

“Dispatch indicates a family of four.  They lost everything.”

“Census?”

“I’m sorry, they did not elaborate.”

“Let them know we’re on our way.”

Brother Florian reached for the telephone.

He dialed the fire department dispatcher’s private line from memory.

He’d done it often enough he didn’t have to look it up.

 

Police Chief Will Keller came through the police department’s door to a fragrant cloud of fresh-brewed coffee and the delightful odor of doughnuts, still warm from the local bakery’s oven.

 

Sheriff Linn Keller pulled open the heavy glass doors of his Sheriff’s office and was hit in the face with the welcome aroma of fresh brewed coffee, and the dispatcher waved to a box of doughnuts, still warm from the bakery’s oven.

 

Fire Chief Charles Fitzgerald sat up, quietly profaning the morning, creaking joints agreeing with his muttered maledictions:  he shoved sock feet into his polished Wellington boots, pulled up his trousers, shrugged into his white uniform shirt.

He heard the front door open, the German Irishman’s happy shout: “Get ‘em while they’re still warm!” and Fitz smelled coffee, tucked in his shirt tail and buckled his belt snug around his stout middle.

He opened the door to his quarters and shouted “Sparks!  What’s the word?”

“Rabbitville had a structure fire,” Sparks reported, “one residence, four displaced.  Nothing our jurisdiction.”

“Good thing,” Fitz muttered, scowling his way to the latrine.

 

Marsha woke up after the power was restored.

She sipped coffee as she scrolled through the incoming messages, stopped, smiling.

A correspondent from Rabbitville sent her a picture.

Marsha leaned forward, exhaling coffee scented breath, studying the image that became the front page picture for that week’s edition.

Two nuns, all in white, their faces veiled, helping a family of four into their carriage, a gleaming chestnut harnessed up in the traces: behind them, the Rabbitville Fire Department’s pumper, hoses strung and turgid, their engineer reaching up to adjust a knob on the side-mounted control panel, and behind the pumper, the black, smoking ruin of what used to be a house.

 

Linn stepped out on his front porch, took a long breath, appreciating the clean, rain-washed scent.

“You know,” he mused, “I do love it when nothing happens.”