Territory (43 page)

He thumbed the watch open.
JHH from WBSE.
He shivered and closed the cover, and realized he’d forgotten to check the time. He put the watch back on the nightstand.

Kate sat on the bed and watched him while he sipped the coffee, which made him nervous. But she kept silent until he had enough inside him to feel as if life was worth living.

“We’ve got to leave, Doc,” she said.

“Don’t start in on me when I’ve just woken up.”

“I talk to you when I can get you to listen. You can’t stay here. Didn’t last night tell you anything?”

Last night. Last night was July Fourth, and the ball. At the intermission, he and Wyatt had talked on the porch, and Wyatt had convinced him not to go to Colorado, and then he’d had an attack, probably from the moist air—

That wasn’t how it happened. He wasn’t sure of the truth, but he knew that wasn’t it. All he remembered for sure was being afraid of Wyatt, in a way that he was afraid of no other man living or dead.

“I can’t travel like this,” he snapped. As he said it, it echoed something from last night.

“The hell you can’t. If we light out now, you won’t
be
like this. Doc, I don’t stand in your way. Most times you choose Hell over Heaven, and I back your play whatever it is.”

“Good. Don’t stop now.”

“This is no choice of yours! This is Wyatt’s doing!”

“Neither he nor you can tell me how to live my life.” But he shivered as he said it. It wasn’t true, was it?

Kate leaned forward and grabbed his wrists. A little coffee slopped over the edge of the cup and onto the bedsheet. “You know better, God damn it! And you’re going to admit it. Wyatt Earp is a black magician.”

Doc threw the cup. It missed Kate’s head by several inches and smashed against the wall. Coffee stained the wallpaper. “If you talk any more gypsy claptrap, I will pack you off to Colorado by yourself.”

“He’s doing some kind of hoodoo on you. He has been for years. He turns it on everyone who comes near. My God, if I can see it, why can’t you?”

He could. He’d been watching Wyatt do strange things for years, averting censure and bullets, getting knowledge he couldn’t have through natural means.

“Doc, my daddy was a medical man. I’m not an ignorant hick like Virgil’s woman, reading cards and tea leaves. But I know what I’ve seen.”

He’d seen Wyatt walk through gunfire in Dodge City and never get a scratch. He’d seen him find Luther King at Redfield’s ranch, using something that was neither sight nor hearing. He’d ridden with Wyatt afterward on what was supposed to be a search for Leonard, Head, and Crane. It had followed four hundred miles of river and mountain range all the way to Tucson, the Mexican border, and back, an irregular figure eight that enclosed every watershed and road of service to Tombstone.

“He can do things. Unnatural things. I don’t know anything to call it but witchcraft.”

Again and again he had seen the truth, and refused to admit what he’d seen. Magic was for ignorant men and gamblers. Magic didn’t rule an educated man. Magic couldn’t make a man do what he didn’t want to do, or make him stand by a friend who was prepared to betray him. Of all people, John Ringo had warned him about Wyatt, and he’d pretended even to himself that he had no idea what Ringo was talking about.

“But we can get clear of it. I know we can, if we just leave now.”

Now Doc remembered last night clearly. And he knew that remembering and clarity didn’t make one bit of difference. He was in Wyatt’s power.

He studied the coffee spot on the sheet. “You go along, then. I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“No! My God, Doc—” Kate jumped up and paced halfway across the room. Then she stopped, and turned, and the pain in her face was terrible. “Are you saying we’re through?”

There was a hurt in his chest that shamed the paltry hurt of the tuberculosis at the sight of her, wicked and devious and secretive, too honest not to meet the question head-on. “I will never be through with you,” he whispered.

She stood straight-shouldered before him, her hands clenched in her skirts. “I won’t let Wyatt have you. Not without a fight. I’m warning you, Doc.”

She walked out of the room and slammed the door.

So—he had, unknowing, indentured himself to Wyatt. He couldn’t recall doing it. In fact, he had suspected it was the other way around.

In college he’d had curious experiences: a lamp burning in his room when he was sure he’d snuffed it; a sudden comprehension of a stranger’s intentions; dreams that seemed to come true. When his consumption was diagnosed, he decided the curious experiences were the product of fever.

He’d met Wyatt in Texas. He’d had an aura of self-reliance and a relentless focus that Doc liked. Wyatt urged him to come to Dodge City. “I expect they can use a dentist,” he’d said. “I’m damned sure they need another faro dealer.”

The proposal stuck in Doc’s head and grew. In light of his present knowledge he was fairly sure it had been a baited hook, touched with a bit of hoodoo to see if Doc could be led. At the time it had seemed like the most normal thing in the world that he should be obsessed with the promise of Dodge City. Still, he didn’t think Wyatt had laid claim to him in Texas.

As soon as he and Kate arrived in Dodge he felt stronger. Remission, it was called, when the disease huddled under its rock and waited, and that, too, seemed natural. Dodge was a roaring town, and Doc liked to be at the center of the noise. So did Wyatt. Did it happen in Dodge? While Doc thought he
was making the only close friend of his adult life, was that friend clasping invisible fetters on him?

When Wyatt got wind of Tombstone, he whistled up his brothers and started packing. It had been then that Doc began to feel less than well, to think the cowtown dust was doing him a mischief. He’d convinced Kate of it, anyway, and she’d fancied the sound of the booming new camp.

But by the time they reached Arizona Territory, Kate and Wyatt were eyeing each other like cocks before a fight. In Globe, Doc hit a streak at the tables he hated to walk away from, and Kate suggested they stay in town and let the Earps go on.

He was certainly bound by the time they reached Globe. When Wyatt heard Doc and Kate were staying, his face went dark as a rain cloud. But his voice was easy when he said, “You’ll see—Tombstone’s the biggest thing you ever had a finger in. I’ll make you rich, Doc. You come down when you’ve had enough.”

Doc, God help him, had thought Wyatt was referring to Kate.

Globe was a disaster. The cards turned sour, and his strength began to fail. One afternoon as he lay in bed sweating and aching, his breath burning in his lungs, Kate burst into tears. It was the first time he’d seen her cry. “Hell with this,” he told her. “Let’s go to Tombstone.”

As soon as he’d arrived, as soon as he shook Wyatt’s hand, he knew he was better. The oddest notion sprang into his head and wouldn’t be banished: that by some uncanny means he was borrowing Wyatt’s strength. He’d felt guilty, but it didn’t seem to do Wyatt any harm. So he’d called it fancy, laughed it off, and forgotten the whole business as much as he could.

Now he wondered if Kate had suspected the true state of affairs all along, and if that was what her tears had been for.

Doc pillowed his forehead on his raised knees and tried not to think about anything.

“Well,” Harry said, even before the door of the
Nugget
office closed behind him, “I was right about Holliday.”

Mildred jumped, inwardly if not visibly. She’d been thinking about Holliday, at least as he related to Wyatt Earp and Jesse Fox, almost to the exclusion of anything else. Did Harry know what had happened on July Fourth? Did he have any better understanding of it than she did?

“You were right?” she said, floundering.

Richard Rule looked up from her copy. “About the Benson stage holdup?”

Harry sat on the edge of his desk and looked smug. “Kate Elder, Mrs. Holliday by courtesy, just swore out an affidavit that Doc Holliday was one of the men who attempted the robbery.”

Rule’s “Huh!” and Mildred’s outraged “What?” overlapped perfectly.

Harry shook his head at Mildred. “I know, you never believed it. But you have to believe it now.”

“Harry, you’re the one who told me to trust my instincts. And right now they’re saying that mule won’t pull.” The image of Kate Holliday hovering fearful over her husband on the settee, and turning on Earp … What was it she’d said to him?

“What motive would she have for swearing to it, if it weren’t true?” Rule asked.

“Why would she swear to it if it
is
true? Something’s not right here.”

Harry shrugged, irritated. “I’m writing it the way the sheriff tells it. If you’ve got a better source than Behan, you go ahead and use it.” Rule got out of Harry’s chair and Harry took it over, swinging around to face the typewriter.

Let it go,
she ordered herself. The alternative was to face the difference between what she’d seen and what she believed. Unless this had nothing to do with the Fourth of July. Or Mrs. Holliday had a more sensible reason for what had happened that night than Jesse Fox had.

Mildred picked up her purse. “I’ll see if I do,” she said to Harry, and left the office.

She’d been angry at Fox since the ball. Anger had replaced confusion and panic while she was still in the tea room: at first just enough to get her up and moving, but more as she gathered her wits.

Fox had found out, somehow, about M. E. Benjamin’s stories of ghosts and prophecies and wicked uncles. He was pretending to believe in them, in order to make a fool of Mildred, to laugh at her later. Weren’t the ranks of the Theosophists swollen with hysterical lady authors? Did Fox think she scurried along at the skirt hems of mediums and crystal-gazers?

That was the thought that had kept her from sleeping the night of the ball. But in the time since, she’d had to admit that she’d clutched at anger to drive away fear.

She turned left at Fremont. The sinking sun glared in under the lid of the low clouds. She lifted her skirts to cross the muddy street and frowned at two miners who’d been waiting for a sight of her ankles. They flushed and pretended to be interested in something over her head. The mud made angry sucking sounds each time she pulled her boot heels free of it.

Holliday was boarding at Fly’s. It wasn’t likely his wife was still there, unless
he’d been taken into custody. Still, when she saw the slender, energetic figure of Mrs. Fly sweeping the stoop, she stopped.

Mrs. Fly straightened and wiped her hair back. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Benjamin! Isn’t this dratted mud the last straw? And neither the dogs nor the boarders’ll wipe their feet.” But she sounded cheerful anyway. “Won’t you come in?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t stay. I just wanted to know if Mrs. Holliday is still here.”

Mrs. Fly rolled her eyes. “I’d hate to think what we’d do if she were. When they’re quarreling, the Devil himself wouldn’t stay in the next room.”

“Dr. and Mrs. Holliday are quarreling?” Mildred asked innocently.

“You didn’t hear? She got drunk and sicced Behan on her man. Holliday was in jail for all of fifteen minutes before Wyatt Earp and his gambling friends bailed him out.”

“I don’t suppose they could stay in the same house after that. Do you know where she went?”

Mrs. Fly cocked her head like a sparrow. “Heavens, Mrs. Benjamin, why would you want to find Mrs. Holliday?”

Some instinct told Mildred not to associate this with the
Nugget.
“I found a piece of jewelry she lost at the ball.”

That satisfied Mrs. Fly, at least temporarily. “She packed her things off to the Cosmopolitan Hotel. You can leave a note for her there, anyway.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And, Mrs. Benjamin, have you given thought to joining the Literary Society?”

“It sounds a treat,” Mildred said. “But I don’t seem to have a spare moment lately. Maybe when I’m moved into a new place.”

“The little house on the corner?”

“If he’ll come down on the price.”

Mrs. Fly beamed. “Mr. Fly’s been softening him up. We’re set on having you for a neighbor.”

“Tell your husband I appreciate the flanking maneuver. Good evening, Mrs. Fly.”

As she headed back toward Allen Street, Mildred thought of the Earp women reading to each other as they sewed. She’d lay money nobody meant to invite them to join the Literary Society. For a few strides, she was angry with Mrs. Fly. But the fault didn’t lie there, not really.

The Cosmopolitan Hotel and its whole block had stood just west of the fire; it lifted its elegant façade over the north side of Allen Street untouched.
The balcony over the sidewalk was edged with potted orange trees, which were thriving in the summer rains.

She stopped at the iron scraper by the entrance and got as much mud off her boots as she could. People passed in and out as she did. Half the downtown burned flat, she reflected, and Tombstone barely slowed to take a breath. The stages brought passengers every day, and most of them stayed.

She went through the hotel lobby, looking for Kate Holliday. There were three men in various upholstered chairs reading newspapers, and a lady at a writing desk making use of the hotel’s pen and paper. Guests came down the stairs, headed for the Maison Doré restaurant. Mrs. Holliday wasn’t among them.