Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (25 page)

There was more but it all just kind of looped back around to how he wouldn’t hurt her and how he loved her and how everything changed when she was born. And there was some strange stuff about Mickey Mouse and something that happened on some high place a long time ago and how it was maybe the other Heather’s mother’s fault. Heather English thought Mrs. Lane would do well to stay a very long way away from this guy. The family reunion he had in mind wasn’t likely to end up with everyone living happily ever after.

Heather still had no idea where she was. The corridor looked even spookier now that it was lit only by sporadic lightning flashes. It wouldn’t have surprised her to see one of the Borg from
Star Trek
come marching out of the columns and puzzling machinery, though she would prefer Jean Luc Picard with an away team, armed to the teeth and ready to kick butt to rescue a fan. Or her Dad. He would be looking for her, she knew that, and he was more than just Dad. He was the sheriff, he was the good guy. She hoped he’d come, but she also hoped he wouldn’t because she was afraid that this fellow might be too much. This was real. Good guys didn’t always win.

He reached out and touched her on the arm and scared her so bad she practically wet herself. Until that moment, the need for a bathroom hadn’t occurred to her. She hadn’t used one since the Hutchinson Mall, though, a very long time ago. He leaned over her and put his face close to hers and she thought he was going to do something awful now, rape her or sodomize her or kill her. Her imagination was busily supplying possibilities.

“Mommy’s coming.” he said, and laughed in a way that scared her even more.

***

“Are you there, Doctor?” Mary Ellen Chandler asked the extended silence. In fact, he wasn’t. He’d thrown her a quick apology and run to the office next door to use another line and call the courthouse with what they’d learned.

“Uh, no, I’m sorry, he’s not back yet,” Judy explained.

“I’ve been sitting here thinking, imagining all sorts of terrible things. Won’t you tell me please, is there some possibility our Ellen is involved? Has she maybe done something awful?”

“Well….” Judy wasn’t at all sure how to answer. This woman had raised Ellen Lane as if she were her own. Judy, missing her own daughter, couldn’t imagine how anyone could withhold vital information from a mother. On the other hand, they really didn’t know what was going on or who had done what.

“Yes,” Mary Ellen continued, “I was afraid so. Well, there may be something else I should tell you then.

“The doctors told us some of what they learned about what Sarah, or Ellen if you prefer, went through. The things her brothers did to her. You see, more than a century ago one of our ancestors was said to have been a captive of the Indians for a time. She was little more than a child but she suffered some terrible things from them, maybe because they’d suffered terrible things from Whites. When they brought her back, she had two half-breed children. People blamed her, shunned her, until a rancher named Ketchum took her in and married her though he treated her more like a slave. But that’s another tragedy and no point going into it. What I wanted to tell you was that Elmer loved to tell stories about the things she saw and suffered while she was a captive. He’d go into the most awful, gruesome detail, totally inappropriate for dinner conversation, let alone in front of the children. Something about that must have appealed to Tommy and Peter. You see, that’s what they did with Ellen, play Indian. Not cowboys and Indians, you understand, they twisted it into cruel, diabolical, evil Indian. They called the inappropriate things they did to her counting coup, and they used to tell her, if she didn’t cooperate, they would scalp her. They threatened her with razor blades and cut her a little sometimes. It traumatized her. She never forgot it. We couldn’t even cut her hair for almost a year. Later, we found the most peculiar books around the house with descriptions and sometimes even photographs of scalps and people who’d been scalped.

“I hope that doesn’t mean anything to you. I just thought it could be something you might need to know.”

“Thank you,” Judy said. “It may help. But listen, there’s something really peculiar I have to ask you. Your sister….” There wasn’t anyone there to hear her anymore. Just a dial tone. Mary Ellen Chandler didn’t think she could help them anymore, or anyone else. She had hung up the phone in order to stare at the silent TV and the dance of meaningless images, and to think about the solution that stood, cleaned and oiled and loaded with buck shot, in the closet down the hall.

***

The Buffalo Springs Co-op Elevator was constructed in 1928, near the end of the community’s first and only economic boom. There were nearly five thousand citizens in Buffalo Springs then. Every year since, there were fewer.

Kansas elevators are like fingerprints, no two are alike, though to the untrained eye they can seem pretty similar. They range from the old wood and metal bin type to the modern concrete tower, of which Buffalo Springs Co-op was an early example. Concrete bins may be square, round, or a variety of angular shapes optimized by the octagon. They may consist of from two bins to hundreds, with some municipal storage facilities extending more than half a mile in length.

Depending on the productivity of the soil, local elevators with two to twenty bins are usually found along railroad lines every four to fifteen miles. Buffalo Springs was flanked by four smaller elevators within a ten-mile radius. These were no more than six-bin structures. Around two of them, a small collection of homes and a filling station had sprouted. The other pair were simply lonely sentinels at otherwise insignificant crossroads serviced by rail.

Municipalities tend to have larger elevators, and it was with this hope in mind that the beast of Buffalo Springs was built. It was 408 feet in length, 48 feet wide, and 90 feet high at the roof, or 110 feet at the roof of the head house. It was a monolith, formed by one continuous pour of concrete that took almost two weeks and involved 250 workers. It contained 36 circular bins, 17 star bins and 35 outer bins, so that only one empty space between the work floor and the distributing floor was unavailable to store grain. That space contained the preferred routes for humans to travel to the head house and the distributing floor. The fastest, if not necessarily the safest, was by way of a belt elevator with steps and hand holds that rotated over a pulley in the head house and was driven by an electric motor on the work floor. On an adjacent wall there was a runged ladder, positioned in case of a power failure or failure of the mechanism. There was also a circular metal staircase in that unused bin, the safest route, but a slow and tiring one.

The fourth and last way to and from the top was an exterior fire escape at the east end of the structure. Its infinity of metal rungs was encircled by a metal cage making it unlikely that anyone could slip and fall more than a few feet without catching on something, but even at a time other than in the middle of a ferocious thunderstorm, it was hardly an attractive course. It had a rusty, weakened look to it and no one had been inclined to test its structural integrity in decades.

The sheriff chose to ride the belt. The machinery that drove it was on. That meant she had probably ridden it herself. It would take him forever to climb the ladder or the stairs and the ladder didn’t have a safety cage. It was there in case the belt failed and there were places, about every ten feet, where you could transfer over to the relative safety of the spiral staircase.

Riding the belt had about as much appeal to the sheriff as a proctological exam, but a pair of lunatics could be fighting to death over his daughter up there. He caught a loop, found a place for his feet, and held on tight.

Even the belt took forever. Riding nearly a hundred feet in pitch darkness made him doubt that the belt was moving, though it continued to sway and vibrate. That tiny square of flickering light far above didn’t seem to get any nearer. He listened for the sound of hard breathing that she must surely be making if she had taken the ladder or the stairs and heard nothing, nothing but his own hard breathing, caused only by tension, and above that, the almost constant rumble of approaching thunder.

The sheriff had planned to step off onto the ladder and climb onto the stairs a little below the delivery floor so that he could arrive a bit less precipitously than the belt would bring him, but he found he just couldn’t make himself let go of the loop and trust his weight to a rung hanging somewhere out there in the darkness that he couldn’t even see. While he was still trying to convince himself to take the risk, he arrived. That tiny square suddenly expanded and surrounded him. He had the option of bailing out onto the delivery floor or going on up to the head house where he would either get off or follow the belt over its uppermost pulley and, if he could hold on and reverse himself without falling, begin the long, long journey back down.

He dived between a pair of semicircular safety railings and rolled under a delivery tube, muscles tensed for a blow or a bullet, eyes searching wildly for some sign of his daughter or the loony twosome. Nothing. Just a short corridor to the east end of the elevator, rows of cloudy windows that hinted at the ferocity of the storm just beyond but providing no more than a translucent view of flashes that seemed to come from every direction including down.

The machinery under the head house blocked his view of the delivery floor to the west, but this end seemed clear of killers, kidnappers, and kidnappees. As he maneuvered around the belt and the stairs he spent a bad moment wondering if she might have sent him up here as part of some elaborate hoax, started the belt running to the top for no other reason than to convince him that she’d come here, when, in fact, she was bound for some other place instead.

He found them, then, just beyond the head house. Two figures, facing each other, motionless, poised in tense postures from which deadly strikes might be launched, but safely out of each other’s reach. The sheriff recognized the dull gleam of his service revolver in her hand. Her husband stood just beyond, looming over another figure that appeared to lie on the grain delivery belt. There was something bright in his hand too, poised threateningly near the form that the sheriff was sure was his Heather.

The sheriff brought the 9 mm up, sighted on the farther figure, confident he could bring the man down and still have time to get the woman, in case she should prove to be a threat to his daughter as well. He even began to squeeze before it occurred to him that part of the translucence from the explosive light show beyond the windows was dust, the grain dust that hung in the air from the recent transfer of grain out of these bins to make room for this year’s harvest. It reminded him of why the place had all those windows. When men were working here, they opened them so the wind could carry that dust away. The dust was a danger, and not just to allergy sufferers. The stuff was as hazardous as a natural gas leak. All it took was a spark, like the one a 9 mm might produce when its hammer fell on a percussion cap and exploded the powder behind a lead projectile. Pull that trigger, the sheriff suddenly realized, and he and his daughter might be dead long before he had a chance to see whether he’d hit what he aimed at.

***

The cemetery was, just as he’d been told, a small, sad place with little evidence it was even there. A few old hardwood trees that wouldn’t normally stand in the middle of a field were about the only outward indication. When Professor Bowen left his car he’d discovered a few other hints. Here and there an ancient marker lay, or occasionally even stood, weathered far beyond his ability to read its inscription. There was a broken cross atop a pile of boulders, large rock cobbles that someone had brought up from one of the Kansaw’s tributaries. Someone had labored long and hard to etch a message in the stone at the top. “Here they found freedom,” it proclaimed. And hardships beyond counting, Professor Bowen knew, but hardships they would have thought worth bearing as the price for that other cherished institution.

The sky had gone ominously black and threatening in the southwest as Neil Bowen made his way back to his car and, for a reason he couldn’t explain to himself, set out south. He wanted to see their country, this homeland they’d briefly shared with the Indians and the pioneers before those hardships drove them elsewhere. It was flat land, gently sloping down to the wood-lined creeks that meandered through green-gold wheat fields toward that increasingly angry looking horizon. Finally, Neil Bowen had decided he needed to turn back, but the urge to explore, to see more of what he had not seen still compelled him. He turned west. He should intersect the blacktop that ran north and south through the edge of Buffalo Springs by going that direction. Within a few miles, he was beginning to regret his choice. That mountainous range of clouds was advancing at a troubling rate, flashing warning signals along an immense stretch of horizon. He had to put on his lights long before sunset was due and he could see that a great brown wave of dust was rushing his way like some memento of dirty-thirties Kansas. He was starting to get concerned about actually finding that blacktop when he found the girl instead.

She was a lanky teenager with short dark hair. She was wearing jeans and a cotton blouse. She looked as scared and lost as he was beginning to feel. There weren’t any farm houses close by and even though he wasn’t too thrilled at the idea of how a black man offering a ride to a young White girl might look to the locals—especially after his earlier encounter with Wynn—he couldn’t go past and leave her to face the storm alone and unprotected. He slowed as he pulled alongside her and rolled down his window just as the first blast of wind and dust rocked the car and nearly knocked her off her feet.