Authors: Ed Gorman
F
or my noon meal, I decided to eat where the workingmen did. I hoped the place would be quiet enough so that I could look through the sack of Grieves’s things I’d picked up at the boardinghouse.
Nothing made any sense yet as far as Grieves went. He hadn’t filed any complaints via telegram. The handful of people I’d talked to about him hadn’t reported him seeming unduly upset about anything. He’d kept up correspondence with his wife. D.C. had told me that she’d received word from him just before he seemed to have vanished. And he’d lived the way he’d always liked to live, in the constant presence of women and liquor.
I passed a dress shop that was obviously for whatever passed as the carriage trade in Junction City. The dresses cost a lot more than most women could afford to pay even once in their lives. Through the window I saw a woman looking at me. A very pretty, dark-haired woman dressed in a lacy frock that emphasized the slender but well-appointed body. The dark eyes watched me curiously, showing no emotion. It took me a bit to recognize Ella Coltrane, the woman who owned the short-haul railroad. She’d be shopping there, of course.
She surprised me by gathering up her shawl around
her shoulders and coming up to the front door. “You’re Mr. Ford, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Would you like some company?”
“Sure. But I doubt you’ll want to go where I’m headed.”
She hurried out. Joined me on the walk.
“Fine day, Mr. Ford.”
“Fine day.”
And it was a fine day. Clouds like the sails of schooners riding a wind so pure it took you back to your childhood. Even the temperature was cooperating.
We walked. Her skin was fair and freckled, her dark eyes vivacious. She was in her late twenties. She had the kind of intelligence that could amuse you or abuse you at will.
“Do you even know who I am, Mr. Ford?”
“Sort of.”
“That means they told you my name and that I’m rich and that I’m a widow.”
“The widow part I hadn’t heard.”
“Cholera. A rafting trip. Four of them dead in a day. Including my brother.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They used to call me dirty names, this town. Now they feel sorry for me. I don’t know which is worse.”
“There are probably worse problems.”
She slid her arm through mine. I had no idea what she wanted. I was sure that when I found out I’d feel a lot less flattered by her attention.
“So where are you headed that I wouldn’t want to go?”
“I saw a little café. The Cup and Saucer.”
“Oh, my God, take out life insurance before you go in there.”
“The food that bad?”
“Not just the food. The miners. All they do is get drunk and complain about what a bad deal they’re getting.”
“It’s not a life I’d want.”
She stopped, withdrew her arm from mine. Then she turned and said, “You’re not a communist, are you?”
“Nope, not at all.”
“A socialist?”
“If you mean should the workingman get a fair deal, then I s’pose I am a bit of a socialist. Right now they’re the only ones fighting for the common man. The government sure isn’t.”
“But you’re the government.”
“I like to think I’m helping the average man. Not hurting him.”
“So that means you throw in with miners?”
I scratched the back of my head. “I guess it does.”
She didn’t try to hide her anger. “Well, you’re sure not the man Mr. Grieves is. He’s much more intelligent.”
“You know Grieves?”
“I’ve enjoyed his company on two or three occasions.”
“Well, then I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Why don’t you go ask your miner friends some questions?”
And she hurried away.
The Cup and Saucer didn’t want for decorations.
DON
’
T LET HIM CHEAT US ANYMORE
signs had been nailed to the walls every few inches.
I found an empty corner with a wobbly table and two chairs. Tobacco smoke was as heavy as fog in some
places. The air was raw with the stench of bloody meat frying. The man who took my order had the busted nose of a drunken brawler or a former boxer. The atmosphere was saved only by the strong slant of sunlight streaming through the soiled windows.
For the first twenty minutes or so, alone with my coffee and cigarette, I was able to concentrate on the sack with Grieves’s things in it.
Most of it was irrelevant to my investigation. A comb, a handkerchief, a yellowback, change, a letter from his wife telling him how much she missed him and how lonely the nights were now that her pregnancy was in full bloom, and assorted buttons, cravat clips, pens, and a pair of telegrams from D.C. inquiring about his progress on the counterfeiting ring he was trying to locate.
I almost closed the sack up until I realized that stuck into the same envelope as his wife’s letter was another piece of paper.
I opened it up and found it to be a list of some kind.
Nathan Dobbs
The convent
The mansion
Next to each was a penciled check mark indicating, I assumed, that he had dealt with this person or place for whatever reason.
Nathan Dobbs sounded familiar. I wasn’t sure why. But I knew it was a name of some prominence and significance. But why? It didn’t have anything to do with counterfeiting. That I was sure of. Why had Grieves listed it here? Then I remembered the initials N.D. from the gunsmith’s.
For a time my mind was relieved of trying to figure out what the list meant.
The talk among the miners was getting loud, an anger giving the din a sharp edge. I didn’t pay much attention, but I was forced to pay attention when a large bald man was knocked into my table with a fist the size of a boulder. He was even angrier than McGivern, the miner I’d met earlier.
The bald man tried to right himself but couldn’t. Seeing the inevitable, I grabbed my coffee cup, stood up, and walked backward into the wall. The man continued downward, striking the table and knocking the legs out before he crashed on top of it to the floor. His head struck my boot. The crashing sound seemed to hang there for a long time.
The even bigger large man who had put him down them lunged forward, maybe to kick him. Four other miners grabbed him, restrained him.
The man who’d waited on me, and who was apparently the owner, rushed into the melee. He had a club. But not for long. He was shouting for the fight to break up and swinging the club over his head. But one of the men grabbed it from his hand and punched him right in the face. His nose became a red geyser of blood. He covered his face and fell back into a chair.
This was the sort of situation the mine owners could exploit, the arguments among the men themselves. If the owners put out a newspaper they’d splash something like this all over the front page:
MINERS FIGHT EACH OTHER IN CAFÉ—DISAGREEMENT IN THE RANKS
. Then they’d identify the dissenters, the ones who didn’t want to strike, and they’d go after them with bribe money to keep the dissent going. If all else failed, they’d move in their goons, Pinkertons, or freelance thugs. They were everywhere these days. Owners paid top dollar for thugs.
As the man on the floor started to grapple at air and
pull himself up, his opponent said, “You’re the only one what can convince them other miners to strike, Lou. He wants to get all the silver out of there he can and then run out on us. Maybe if we don’t dig that silver for him, he’ll think things over. We got to stick together, Lou. We got to strike.”
The semicircle of miners in dusty, soiled work clothes raised busted hands in solidarity. They wore the kind of dirt that didn’t come off. Some of them looked like raccoons, the weariness and mine dust encircling their deep-set eyes. The rich people who own mines are the most ruthless bosses since the heyday of slave owners. Over in Pennsylvania and down in Kentucky they had five-year-olds working the mines for ten cents a day. The little ones could wiggle into the most dangerous places of all. Never mind that they missed school, developed black lung by ages eight and nine, and were frequently crushed to death in those wiggle places they were sent into. Satan was happy, as were his rich followers.
“If we go on strike,” said the man on the floor, grabbing on to a chair and pulling himself up, “then we all starve. Better that a few of us work and share whatever food and oil we can afford to buy.”
There was as much sorrow as anger in these men. They had wives and kids to support. There couldn’t be anything worse than watching the ones you love starve and go sick on you. It cut your manliness right down the middle.
The mine whistle.
The clarion call to keep the rich richer.
They trudged off. The man who’d been knocked down joined them. The one who’d hit him clapped him on the back. “We ought not to be fightin’ each other, Lou. Don’t you see that’s what they want us to do?”
Lunch pails banged against legs. Heavy work shoes tromped the floor. They filed through the door then as a unit, throwaway men laden with grief and fear.
Unions were slowly taking hold in the West. The battles were brutal. The rich hired Pinkertons and thugs of all stripes to penetrate groups of workers and report back everything they learned. In Wyoming, twelve railroad workers had been cut down in a gun battle with hired goons. The workers probably would have stood a better chance if they’d had weapons.
I sat there for a time finishing up my coffee. I was now the only customer. The owner with the bloody nose came over.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get hit.” He still pressed a rag to his nose.
“I try to avoid that whenever I can.”
“You can afford to be a wiseacre. You don’t got this bloody nose.”
I decided he might be a good source of information. “There a convent around here?”
“You mean for Sisters and things?”
“Yeah, for Sisters and things.”
“Well, I guess then we’d be talking up in the hills. It ain’t exactly a convent. It’s more like a refuge. They help run the little hospital here and teach at the school for Catholics but they stay at the place up in the hills. Them Sisters did all the work themselves, too.”
I wrote down the instructions he gave me.
The nose started bleeding in earnest again. “I wonder if I broke something. I kinda agree with them boys. I mean, mine owners are real bastards. I came out here from Pennsylvania. They worked my old man to death and half the time he had to fight to get his wages. The pricks. He died coughin’ blood up so bad we had to keep a bucket by his bed.”
Then he waved me off. He went away to do something about his geyser.
A sweet warm afternoon was a good time for a ride in the foothills. Maybe the nuns would make a better man of me. A lot of people had tried.
T
he convent was a half mile out of town, built of logs and perched on a hill surrounded by pines. Below it stretched the farmland that the Sisters and their helpers tended in the warm months. Behind the convent I could see a white barn, a small corral for the horses, and a separate area for six dairy cows.
Not too long ago this would all have been timberland. But whoever had homesteaded it—and it might well have been nuns—would have had to fight and conquer the land as they would any other foe. Cabins would have been built first, then outbuildings. Crops would have been planted right away. Wells would have been dug soon, too. I hadn’t seen any water nearby.
There was a tranquility in that place that I let myself enjoy. It was as if the cabin and its land were within some kind of protective bubble. The air was sweeter, somehow. One time in the war I’d holed up in a monastery. I’d been wounded in the leg. The two monks who’d resided there had been killed in a crossfire. I’d patched myself up as well as I could and then set to eating anything I could find that didn’t need fire. Why invite the enemy in? I apparently hadn’t done a great job working on myself. An infection set in and I sweated a
day and a half through delirium. But when I woke up it was odd—although I didn’t have much strength, I felt a peace I don’t think I’d ever known, not even as a boy. I hid out there another two days until I was sure I could travel well and fight if I had to. The trouble was that as soon as I left the monastery that feeling of serenity left me. I was then just one more grizzled soldier cast out of paradise.
I could hear the nuns praying inside. The whipping wind probably stifled my knock.
I’d been expecting a nun in a religious habit of some kind. This was a willowy middle-aged woman in a seaman’s sweater and a pair of dungarees cinched with a very female belt. Her good Irish looks were just beginning to fade along with the chestnut color of her hair.
“Morning, may I help you?”
“Sister, is it?”
“Sister Jane, yes.”
I introduced myself.
“How may I help you, Mr. Ford?”
“Do you know anything about a woman named Molly and her Uncle Bob?”
She turned back to the three women seated at a long table beneath a huge wooden crucifix. “It’s about Molly.” To me, “They’ve been staying here a while. Is there some trouble?”
“Well, right now she’s in jail, I’m afraid.”
“Molly is in jail?”
“And I’m afraid that’s not the worst of it. Somebody murdered Uncle Bob.”
“Good Lord.” She was obviously shaken. The other nuns had heard, too. She stood back so I could come inside.
One half of the long room was as neatly organized as a military barracks. Two sets of bunk beds, a kitchen
area, a tall bookcase packed with books, and three long poles suspended by wire from the ceiling that sufficed as a closet.
In the center of the cabin was a grotto of sorts. The enormous crucifix, a wooden kneeler, a framed painting of the Virgin standing atop a globe, and a small incense dish, the smell of the stuff sweet on the air.
The table was the sort used for picnics, with benches on both sides. I was introduced to the three other nuns, each dressed in street clothes, and handed a cup of steaming coffee. I sat on a stool at the far end of the table.
All of the women looked sensible and capable. No fluttery butterflies here. On the other hand, they’d kept themselves female. I’d seen mountain women who looked as burly and tough as their menfolk.
Tin plates and tin cups sat in front of everybody. I’d been given a green glass cup. Visitors only, I suspected.
They looked at me politely but with the kind of fearful curiosity you see on the faces of people who are hearing terrible news.
“How did this happen to Uncle Bob? He was such a vulnerable old man.”
While I gave them the particulars, Sister Jane’s eyes filled with tears.
“And why is Molly in jail? She didn’t kill her uncle.”
I explained that Molly wasn’t being cooperative and Terhurne had chosen to hold her in jail.
“Right now, I’m trying to find out something about Molly’s background. Did either she or her uncle tell you much about themselves?”
“Just that they were going to be rich and build us a convent that would put all other convents to shame.” This from the white-haired nun. She smiled and not
without fondness. “That was from Uncle Bob, of course. He was quite the dreamer.”
“Did he say how he planned to get rich?”
“One night,” said the red-haired nun, “he told me that there was a man who was going to help him get rich.”
“Did he say who the man was?”
Sister Jane said, “Grieves was a name he mentioned.”
“How about Molly? Did she ever say they were going to be rich?”
“Oh, yes, and we were all going to live in a fairy-story world. She really believed that, I think. Both that such a world existed and that she’d live in it one day.” She laughed. “Uncle Bob, on the other hand, was more practical, his dreams I mean. They were both going to build us a fine big convent but while Molly was off living in her fairytale world, he was going to go to ‘Frisco’ as he called it and have himself a good time.”
A nun who looked to be part-Mexican said: “He always said that he was too polite to tell us exactly what a ‘good time’ meant. Though he did say he’d be goin’ to confession a lot.”
“But you can’t remember anything he said about how he was coming into all this money?”
The white-haired nun said, “He was always very vague about that, even when he was drinking.”
“I take it he drank a lot?”
“Not as much as he wanted to—”
“Once or twice when Molly let him have some whiskey from this flask she kept from him—”
“It didn’t take much for him to get very merry—”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, Mr. Ford, about men who drink a lot. They can drink a long time but it doesn’t actually take very much to get them drunk.”
This was a freewheeling moment when everybody was pitching in thoughts and it ended when Sister Jane said: “He just kept saying Grieves and another man were going to make him rich. But he’d never tell us who the other man was. He kept it a real big secret. It was kind of cute, the way he made such a big deal out of it.” She paused. “This was when he wasn’t telling other kinds of stories about taking us to Europe and fixing up our school and telling us how he was personal friends with all kinds of important people. He always talked so big and most of the time it was a lot of fun. But every once in a while Molly couldn’t take it anymore. Then she’d smile and say, ‘Oh, c’mon, Uncle Bob, that’s just another one of your whoppers.’ And he could tell some big ones.”
“According to him,” the red-haired nun said, “he’d pretty much fought the Indian wars all by himself. And he’d been asked by President Lincoln to be his personal bodyguard for a time.”
“He knew we knew it was all bosh,” said the white-haired nun. “But that’s what made it fun for us and for him. He was actually just a tent performer who had very bad bones. He said that he’d made his living for a long time doing a little dancing and singing a few songs and then telling what he called his life story. He claimed to have saved a lot of people in his time.”
Sister Jane said, “One story had him saving Molly from a burning orphanage. And another story had him saving her from going over a falls after her father suffered a heart attack and died in the canoe.”
“And don’t forget when he saved her from the bear,” said the red-headed nun.
They were like gleeful young girls. A visitor had come and so they had an excuse to please him and themselves.
“So, you see, Mr. Ford, you can pretty much take your pick. A burning orphanage, a canoe going over the falls, or a bear about to attack a girl.” Sister Jane touched long fingers to her cheek. “I suppose we sound cruel to you, Mr. Ford, as if we’re making fun of him. But we all loved nights around the convent listening to his tales.”
“He was the most fun we’ve had in years,” said the white-haired nun. “And Molly was a saint. She put in as many hours around here as we did.”
“Where did they sleep?”
“There used to be six of us. There’s a small shed with a stove in it. Room for four more. Meals and everything else they took up here.”
Sister Jane said, “Do you think any of this had to do with Uncle Bob’s murder?”
“That’s the part I’m not sure of. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
An alarm clock opened up with enough clamor to wake up every living thing within a quarter-mile radius of the place.
“Our meal time is over,” Sister Jane explained.
“We give ourselves exactly twenty-two minutes, the full thirty minutes for supper.” The white-haired woman dabbed at her mouth with her white cloth napkin. “It’s easy to forget we’re nuns sometimes out here on our own. So we stick to a very regimented life.”
“Sister Jane thinks she’s a drill sergeant,” said the red-haired one.
The other two nodded in agreement.
“Imagine how they talk about me when I’m out of the room,” Sister Jane said. Then: “We all had our little fun at Uncle Bob’s expense. But now let’s bow our heads and pray for him. And that Molly gets out of jail right away.”
I thought that was the prayer.
I was wrong. Prayer meant prayers plural. Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. My wife had been Catholic. These were familiar sounds.
A few minutes after the prayers were finished, the nuns headed to the hooks next to the door where their coats were hung. They shrugged into them and we all went outside.
“Since they were staying here, Sister Jane, I suppose they left some things behind.”
“The shed is right around back. You can see for yourself.” I noticed her blue eyes gleaming. “I’m never as strong as I need to be. It’s just so sad, the two of them. She can still turn her life around. And Bob was a good man. I suspect he lived most of his life outside the law, as they say. But deep down I think there was a decent man there. If you saw him with animals, you’d know what I mean. They loved him.”
She caught my smile.
“I don’t suppose that means anything to you but I’ve found that animals have a pretty good sense of human beings. They seem to know the kind ones and go to them. And they shy away from the mean ones. Not always but often enough that they’re pretty reliable about who’s a good person and who’s not.”
We had walked around back of the house. What she had referred to as a “shed” was a replica of their log cabin, only half as large. “We try to keep it up. There are always people needing somewhere to sleep.”
“And eat.”
One of the nuns had mounted a horse and was riding toward timber; another was working on a wagon that had been turned on its side, something wrong with its axle apparently; and the third nun was busy setting up wood to be chopped into firewood.
She put out her hand. We shook.
“We’ll be praying for you. We don’t believe in execution but we do believe that murderers should be in prison for life.”
Then she set off for the small barn that housed the livestock.
The interior of the cabin was smartly set up. A clean oilcloth covered the floor, the walls were lined with newspapers that had been glazed to be more attractive. A kitchen area, two comfortable-looking beds with heavy red quilts, and potted plants set here and there. A lot of frontier people would have considered this shed a pretty enviable place.
Molly and Uncle Bob had moved in. On the counter in the kitchen area were a few framed photographs of the two of them taken a few years earlier. Molly looked to be about fifteen, Uncle Bob looked pretty much the same. There were a couple of Molly’s report cards from the sixth grade with straight A’s. On the back of one a teacher who signed herself Nadine Pentecost commended the young girl for “poise, charm and general intelligence. She is especially endowed with a passion for theatrical readings, which she gifted us with many times.”
Uncle Bob had a collection of odds and ends that spoke to a life of travel and pleasure. Stubs attesting to his visits to amusement parks, baseball stadiums, and various museums, musicales, and tent show performances everywhere. He’d obviously spent some time in the East because he had brochures depicting beautiful young singers across a span of years. I thought of what Sister Jane had said about animals recognizing good souls.
Molly’s bed was easy to spot. A large doll with a tiara
sat atop her pillow. The tiara was missing most of its sparkle.
Because there was no dresser or bureau of drawers, I looked in the other place people choose to put their valuables. I leaned down and felt around underneath her bed and found a wooden box.
I opened the lid. Newspaper clippings, magazine articles, ribbons won as prizes, locks of hair, odds and ends of cheap jewelry—a jumble of memories, all of them seeming to be innocent until—
Four books for small children. Each of them with drawings of beautiful princesses and knights and castles in the air. They were cheap books and badly illustrated. That made me feel sorry for Molly. She should have had better editions. But even those crudely drawn books were enough to inspire her. That was where Molly really lived. She was such a young woman of parts—violent enough to put a razor to my throat, innocent enough to dote on fairy tales, strong enough to tell the law she wouldn’t cooperate.
I thought about buying her a gift. She’d be in need of something sweet and unexpected after all that had happened. Of course, I was also hoping that my little gift might start her to talking, too.
Back in town, I rode my horse to the livery and then started off to the newspaper. I barely got out of the barn the livery used before the owner, a swarthy man with a massive head and dark eyes that never looked pleased with anything they saw, said: “I hear you been askin’ about Grieves.”
I turned around. Of course.
“Yes, I have. Do you know him?”
“I don’t. But my daughter does. She stayed out half the night at a party in town here and when she got home, you can bet I tanned her hide good.”
This sounded sloppy even for Grieves. Being with a young girl was a pretty bad problem to have, especially in a strange town.