The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery) (8 page)

I turned the box over and discovered a false bottom that slid away, revealing a space just deep enough to hide a flour sack that held a book-shaped object. I lifted the package and it was as if a jolt of blue flame traveled up my hands and through my arms to pierce my heart. The shock nearly took my breath away.

As I opened the drawstring on the cotton sack, my heart was pounding and my ears were ringing like the new bell on the steeple of the church up on Gospel Hill. I peeked inside and saw a book bound in red Morocco. I pulled the book free of the sack and read the gold lettering, much of which had been worn away, but I could easily read the title from the discolored places where the letters had been:

SYRINX of the SEVEN WORLDS

I turned the book to the spine and there was the name of the author, W. L. Gresham. I opened the book to the title page and the title was repeated, along with a note saying that it was a “metaphysical adventure” and had been published in 1858 in Boston.

“What’s a syrinx?” I asked Doc.

I had an image of a syrinx being impossibly old and possibly Egyptian presiding mysteriously over a desert landscape, like something out of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Doc and Earp were still hunched over the body of Charlie Howart.

“Spell it.”

I did.

“It’s the vocal organ in birds,” he said. “It’s also the pipes the Great God Pan played. It comes from the Greek, meaning ‘tube.’ Why?”

I told him.

“Well, there might be something inside.”

I opened the book, and a hundred images came to me at once. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to keep from uttering a cry. The images were of souls floating in water and souls floating in light and of a great ship that plied ice-strewn waters.

But strongest among the visions was one from the dream where I was in the wilderness in a wedding dress and wading through a trench of blood and bone and steel.

The book was thoroughly, disturbingly haunted.

I snapped the cover shut.

“Come up with anything?” Doc asked.

“I don’t think the book has anything to do with birds,” I said.

“Well, we found something interesting,” Doc said, holding out a railway ticket in my direction. “This was in his vest pocket. It’s a round-trip railway ticket to Canon City, Colorado.”

Wrapped safely in its flour sack, I carried
Syrinx of the Seven Worlds
to the agency. It didn’t seem prudent to leave the book at the Howart residence, considering not only was the book dangerously haunted, but whoever had strung poor Charlie up had probably been looking for it.

I took the book out of its sack and placed it carefully on my desk, drew the shade, and lit the lamp. Then I took a deep breath and opened the book. As before, my hand tingled with something other worldly. First, I went to the last page—it was 307, just as in my dream—then flipped back to the front matter.

When I released the book, I found that the haunting sensations stopped. While touching the book was disturbing, reading it was not. In fact, the reading of the book seemed absolutely neutral. I noted the fact, and returned my attention to the title page.

In addition to the information about the date and place of publication, there was a faded stamp across the bottom of the page:
Property of The Denver City and Auraria Reading Room and Library Association.
A handwritten note on a slip of paper nestled beside the title page indicated the book was due back April 22, 1860.

The book was overdue by more than 18 years.

I turned the page and scanned the Table of Contents, which listed the titles of the book’s seven parts, in this manner:

Each chapter was long, and tracked the progress of this unnamed pilgrim from world to world. It was the kind of story I would normally find intriguing, but the writing was baroque, cryptic, and old-fashioned; it was about as enjoyable as reading a multiplication table but made much less sense. I skipped to the chapter on dreams, thinking I might find some clue to my own sleeping drama, but it was more of the same impenetrable prose. The author, Gresham, was either a genius who was speaking on a plane that was far beyond my comprehension, or he was a lunatic.

Why would this book figure so heavily in my dreams, when I had no obvious connection to the story? The book must be important, to figure so in my dreams, to be kept hidden by Charlie Howart, and to be as haunted as it was.

My only recourse was to ask W. L. Gresham himself.

I paged back to the front, looking for the address of the publisher.

OLD STATEHOUSE PUBLISHING CO.,
924 CONSTITUTION AVE.,
BOSTON, MASS.

I got out a fresh sheet of paper, loaded my pen from the inkwell, and composed a letter to Gresham, in care of the publisher.

Molly Howart sat in the chair she’d sat in only two days before. She was clutching Western Mutual Life Assurance Company Policy No. 784 in her lap, pleading with eyes that were even more sorrowful than before.

“They are denying the claim,” she said. “Mister Hill says that Charlie’s death was a suicide. Do you believe he took his own life, Miss Wylde?”

“I don’t know, Molly,” I said.

“Not for a minute do I think he committed suicide,” she declared. “Not Charlie. I don’t understand what secret he was guarding, but I know he wouldn’t have chosen that way out.”

“May I get you some tea?” I asked. I’d read somewhere that when confronted with someone in distress, the thing to do was to offer tea.

“It’s bad enough that Charlie is dead,” she said. “But now I am faced with a penniless widowhood.”

“I think a cup of tea might be the thing.”

“There is no one I can turn to,” she said. “My family in Missouri is dead, all of them, and without Charlie I am a woman alone. I will be able to survive well enough for the rest of the summer, but winter will come. Then what will I do, with all of the food gone and no money?”

“No tea, then.”

“What did you determine from the book?”

“Very little, I’m afraid,” I said. “The book is quite haunted, but remains a mystery. Whatever connection it may have to the case remains unclear.”

“Did you find nothing that might exonerate my Charlie?”

I told her how the rope showed signs of having borne weight after it was thrown over the rafter, but I said that the detail in itself was probably insufficient to challenge the insurance company.

“Doctor McCarty is delaying any official determination of the cause of death,” I said. “As county coroner, he needs more evidence to make a ruling. But I’m afraid he’s about exhausted his sources of inquiry.”

Molly looked at her hands, flightless birds in her lap.

My heart slid toward my stomach.

There would be no money from this case, even if I could prove that Charlie Howart did not commit self-slaughter, for how could I take even a dime of a poor widow’s insurance money? Even if she had the means to pay my twenty dollars a week plus expenses—and it might take many days indeed—there was no guarantee I could bring her satisfaction.

There were expenses of my own I had to pay, of course. My half of the rent on the agency here on North Front Street, and my weekly bill for my room at the Dodge House, and my meals and Eddy’s seed, and the chair I sat in, and the paper I had written the publishing company on. Being a consulting detective wasn’t a hobby, as Calder kept reminding me, but a trade. You wouldn’t go to Zimmerman’s hardware down the street and expect him to give you a new Martini and Henry buffalo rifle just because he likes dealing in guns, would you? (Actually, I had no idea if Zimmerman dealt in such rifles, or if the Martini and Henry company made buffalo rifles, but being ignorant of firearms, it was the only type and make of gun I could summon from memory to use as an example.) My point—and here I had to admit I was arguing with myself—was that I deserved to be paid. Why, Doc McCarty wouldn’t treat anyone without asking for—

And that’s where my argument crumbled, because I knew Doc treated everyone, whether they could pay or not. Oh, he would take their money if they could afford it (and he supplemented his income with the drug store next door), but if they couldn’t, he treated them anyway and didn’t make them feel as if they were somehow inferior human beings. What Doc looked at first was need, and in an emergency, there was no time to be pulling out the ledger books.

“Merde,”
I exclaimed.

There had to be a better way to make a living at being a consulting detective, but thinking like that was pulling the ledger book out first. I could figure that out after I helped my client.

“I beg your pardon?” Molly asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

“Did you have an idea?”

“Perhaps,” I said.

I retrieved the ticket that Doc had taken from Charlie Howart’s body and slid it across to her.

“What do you make of this?”

“The railway ticket? I told Doctor McCarty I had no idea why Charlie would have a ticket for Canon City. He never had any business there, as far as I know of.”

“Might I make use of it?”

“Use it how?”

“To go to Canon City and make some inquiries,” I said. “It’s a round-trip ticket, on the Santa Fe with a transfer to the Denver & Rio Grande, and it has some cash value to you. But it might be worth more to pay my passage to Canon City and back. It’s the location of the state prison—which was the territorial prison until just two years ago—and perhaps Charlie’s business had something to do with someone incarcerated there.”

“Then you’ll help me?”

“I can’t promise results,” I said. “But I can promise I will do my best.”

“Do you want my twenty dollars now?”

“No, Mrs. Howart. Keep your money.”

Molly started to cry.

“Please, don’t.”

She pulled a kerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes.

“I can’t help it,” she said.

“Doesn’t some tea sound good right now?”

She shook her head.

There was a knock at the agency door. Through the window, I could see Wyatt Earp slouching in the door frame, a cigarette smoldering beneath his mustache.

I asked Molly to excuse me.

“I’m sorry, Marshal Earp,” I said, after opening the door a crack. “As you might notice, I am quite occupied with a client. Perhaps you could come back at a more convenient time.”

“Sorry, Ophie.”

“Only my closest friends are allowed to call me Ophie,” I said. “We may never reach that level of familiarity, so I suggest you not become too fond of using the diminutive of my name.”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

“Just call me Miss Wylde.”

Earp nodded, and removed his hat.

“Miss Wylde,” he said. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I have paper for you.”

“Paper? I don’t understand.”

“Paper,” he said. “An official document.”

“A warrant?”

“Something like that.”

“For my arrest?”

“Actually a subpoena,” he said. “You are hereby compelled to appear at Federal District Court at Denver in the matter of the people versus Eureka Smith.”

He handed me a tri-folded sheet of paper with my name on the outside.

“The spirit photographer case?”

“Don’t know anything about it,” Earp said. “My job is just to serve the paper.”

“When?” I asked.

“It’s right there,” he said, pointing to the paper. “Ten in the morning, Thursday, June 27.”

“That’s two days away. What if I can’t make it?”

“That’s a subpoena,” Earp said. “It’s a command from the court to appear.”

“But that’s Colorado,” I protested. “Surely a court in Colorado can’t force me to appear.”

“It’s a federal court,” Earp said. “State lines don’t matter.”

“What if I can’t afford the travel?”

“You’ll have to take that up with the court—in person.”

“This is outrageous.”

“Outrageous or not, you must appear.”

“What if I don’t?”

“You would be held in contempt of court. You could be fined, or they could send somebody like me to arrest you.”

“Fils de salope,”
I muttered.

“It is enough to make one cuss,” Earp said. “Good day, Miss Wylde.”

“I have a ticket,” I say.

Death reached across the desk and took the pass from my hand. He gave it a quick examination with his expressionless black eyes and promptly returned it.

“How unfortunate for you,” Death says. “This is a ticket to Colorado, something you’ve carried over from your waking life.”

“All I can read are numbers,” I say. “The letters are a jumble to me.”

“It is of no use to you here,” he says. “Our line doesn’t make the run to Canon City, at least not yet.”

I frown.

“That was a joke,” he says.

“Death isn’t funny.”

“So I’ve been told,” he says.

“What can you tell me about a book by a lunatic named Gresham,” I say.

“More questions. Truly?”

He would have raised his eyebrows if he’d had any.

“The book is titled . . .”

“I know the title of the book,” Death says. “But this is not a question that I am allowed to answer.”

“So there is some connection.”

“It would violate home office rules for me to tell you whether there was a connection or not,” Death says. “This is something that you must work out for yourself, for only you can decide if there is a connection.”

“So, if I asked you what the meaning of life is . . .”

“The answer would be the same. You must work it out for yourself, while entertaining the possibility that there is no meaning at all.”

“That would suggest that the only real meaning is in the rigor you bring to the question. Many people would be tempted to say that life is what you make it, or that you make your own meaning, but that’s too easy. You could come up with something silly like saying puppies and sunsets are the meaning of life.”

Death stares impassively at me.

“You think I could have a few minutes to talk directly with Charlie Howart back there in the baggage car? If you would be kind enough to call your widdershins away from his coffin for just a few minutes so I could have a word, it might prove terribly useful to the case I’m working on up there, in my waking life.”

Death folds his robed arms.

“Go look for the temporary pass,” he says. “If you don’t find it, you will be trapped on this train forever in your dreams. There’s only one way out, and that’s to step off at the end of the line—in which case your waking life ceases as well. The other option is to stay aboard and eventually go mad. And I’m not sure but that I wouldn’t go mad as well for having to suffer your questions.”