Crazy Woman Creek (26 page)

Oh don’t be a silly goose.
Babies are born into the world every day and they all get here the same way. What is, is what is. Men don’t think about that when they see a woman who’s expecting.

Do they?

Luke shook his head and drew himself up straighter, as if he sensed her perturbation and needed to emphasize his seriousness. “No ma’am. I don’t mean to poke fun. I was just thinking about specifics, that’s all.”

He crossed his arms and leaned against the counter, his tall frame looming over her, making her feel small and conspicuous. So he was big and manly and represented the law. So what? In that moment Lenora reminded herself that she was a ranch woman, a homesteader. She might have to work at it, but she wouldn’t be intimidated by this man or any other. Truly, things—and she—had changed since James disappeared. She pulled her back up a little straighter.

“Such as?”

“You ever pulled a stuck calf, Mrs. Rose?”

Lenora grimaced at the thought. She was embarrassed to be speaking of such indelicacies with a man. Birthing calves was ... disgusting. James’ purview, not hers. “Of course not. That’s what ranch hands are for.”

“Do you know how to treat steer infected with blackleg?”

Blackleg? She knew it was a cow disease, but what she knew beyond that wouldn’t cover the tip of her pearl-encrusted hatpin.

“It’s a bovine ailment. One employs the services of a veterinarian for such afflictions.”

“What’s the best feed to produce a good milker?”

“Deputy Davies,” said Lenora, sidestepping the issue
, her feathers ruffled, “no rancher alone, not even a man, is capable of doing all those things and knowing all those things. Ranchers depend on the experience and knowledge of others.”

Luke remained silent, allowing her words to hang in the air, indicting her. Finally he spoke. “Maybe that was Mr. Morehouse’s conclusion too.”

Lenora looked stricken. She had debated herself into a corner. Now how to get out of it? “If Mr. Morehouse thinks I can’t run my ranch alone, then he should have done his job and lent me the money to hire the expertise I need to succeed.”

“Mr. Morehouse doesn’t work for you, no matter what he says about wanting to help. He works for Wells Fargo. His job is to look out after the bank’s business. Your job is to look out after yours.”

“Which is exactly why I need a loan.”

“Borrowing money isn’t always the answer. Debt is an attractive trap.”

“It would only be for a short time.”

“Another trap. Everyone thinks tomorrow will be rosier.”

Lenora sighed a deep sigh of frustration. “Too many naysayers in this town,” she said. “You sound like Mr. Morehouse. I’ll bet men don’t have to jump over all these fences when they need a loan.” Her voice dripped with petulance.

“Maybe not, but a door that shuts in your face isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it forces you to take another, better road. You just don’t know it’s better till you arrive at where you’re supposed to be.”

Lenora only nodded, her eyes cast down to the floor. Suddenly the tips of Luke’s fingers were brushing her shoulder, gentle and kind. Startled by his forwardness, she looked up and their eyes met. At once she was bathed in a warm feeling of intimate affection. Something very good stirred deep within her. Something exciting.

“It could even be providential,” he said.

His fingers had barely touched her, but it was long enough to set Lenora’s heart fluttering and make her breathing rapid and shallow. He had touched her, and there was no denying that his touch, however light and brief, thrilled her.

His touch and kind words had fanned another flame inside her heart. Since she had stepped out of Mr. Morehouse’s office, a hopeful thought more wispy than smoke from a match had floated silently up the back of her mind, and now Luke’s words
were like a breath of oxygen to that near-dying ember. Perhaps, just perhaps, some good would come from the bank’s refusal to lend her money. Perhaps her circumstances were not beyond redemption. Things were not always as they seemed. In science class years earlier Lenora had picked up an ugly gray rock covered with wart-like bumps, a homely specimen in a world of precious stones and pretty gems. But when her instructor arranged to have it cut in half, on the inside was the most beautiful fractal of glittering lavender crystals she had ever seen. Perhaps, if she were patient, the end of her current predicament would prove to be as delightful as the inside of that humble geode.

But for now she had to figure out the best way to deal with the warty bumps.

“Yes, it could be, Deputy Davies.” For only the second time since she had walked into Aeschelman’s, she smiled at him.

Luke looked at her warmly and then glanced toward the area of the mercantile where Mr. Aeschelman was occupied pulling sewing notions from yellow cardboard boxes. Luke lowered his voice. “Are you sure there is nothing I can do to help?”

“Do you know how to get someone declared dead? I mean, legally dead? Mr. Morehouse told me that if I can get a death certificate for James, then our ranch passes to me. Without that piece of paper the government will declare the ranch abandoned—by James I mean—and they will take the land away from me.”

“I know how to get a death certificate. And I know about homestead law. But it never occurred to me that you would want to petition for legal declaration.” Luke’s faced took on an unmerited somberness.

“Until now I would have thought that too. But it’s only a formality. If James comes back after the property transfers to me, it would be just as much his as mine.”

“I see.”

“I have only eight weeks, Deputy Davies,” said Lenora, becoming animated, almost pleading. “James has been missing four months. The law allows a man to be away from his homestead only six months before he jeopardizes his ownership rights.”

“I am aware of how the Act reads.”

“Can you help me?”

Luke glanced again at Mr. Aeschelman before responding. “I’d be pleased to help you, ma’am” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “But that’s just another reason why you should give me your husband’s full name. I’ll need it to petition the judge.”

“Oh,” said Lenora, looking startled, “of course. James is actually his middle name. He was named for his grandfather, Sterling James Rose.”

#

Luke’s face revealed nothing and he said nothing, just nodded slightly to show that he had heard. But bells were clanging a five-alarm fire in his mind. As if he needed to reassure himself that it was still there, he pushed a hand to the bottom of his pant pocket to touch the expensive gold pocket watch that had been turned over to the sheriff’s office just this morning. A child had found it on the steps of Johnson Ebenezer Christian Church. Luke ran his index finger over the lavishly scrolled engraving that embellished its cover, felt the spring-loaded finial at its base, and balled the heavy chain into the palm of his hand. With an uncomfortable mixture of guilt and apprehension, he remembered the owner’s initials that had been memorialized in large ornate letters in the center of the flowing scrollwork:

S
R
J

James Rose’s pocket watch seemed bigger and harder than it had been when Luke entered Aeschelman’s to wait for Mrs. Rose. As he walked along Main Street’s boardwalk it slapped against his thigh uncomfortably with every step, a tactile testimony that a man was missing and the lawman responsible to find him was keeping quiet about evidence that could possibly lead to his whereabouts.

Why hadn’t he pulled the watch out of his pocket and showed it to Mrs. Rose at Aeschelman’s? After he heard the dead man’s full
name from his grieving widow’s enticing lips, there was no doubt in Luke’s mind that Mrs. Nolan’s account—shared with Luke in confidence—of the events that had taken place at the Rose ranch the night the man had disappeared had been accurate. The feckless Mr. Rose, to refrain from venting his spleen on his beloved wife and assisted by her unusually good pitching arm, had ridden away carrying on his person this very pocket watch. Somehow the man had managed to abandon his tied-up horse at North-East Creek and lose his time piece on the church steps not far from the edge of town, miles from where he tied his horse. If the child had found a skull or one of the cadaver’s bones, Luke would have ascribed the distance between the two finds to the foraging of carnivorous animals, which are known to scatter bones. But no wild animal Luke could think of would take such an interest in a gold pocket watch. And he couldn’t figure out why the watch hadn’t been found before this. There were no flower boxes or any other movable objects on the church steps behind which it could have dropped. Someone must have found the watch elsewhere and laid it on the steps with intent. Someone wanted it to be found.

But all that didn’t explain Luke’s omission. He had intentionally kept his mouth shut about the pocket watch. Would Mrs. Rose’s identification of the watch have led to the discovery of her husband’s whereabouts? Maybe, though Luke figured that was unlikely. Even if she had claimed it
to be her husband’s, what happened four months ago on the banks of a swift-moving creek on a black and stormy night was done, and her claims about the watch one way or another wouldn’t alter those events.

So why not show her the watch? If her identification of it would make no difference to the investigation and couldn’t change what had happened to her husband to cause him to go missing, why not show
it to her? He should show her the watch. He would show her the watch. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it right now. It was wrong to procrastinate. He knew it. But James Rose was easier to deal with as a dead man, out of sight though not out of mind. If Luke had pulled that watch out of his pocket for her to identify, he would have seen a look of shock and then grief in those beautiful green eyes, then the tears would stream, resurrecting what Luke had observed at the start of the search and rattled him now when he thought of it: a heart-jerking display of Mrs. Rose’s enduring affection for her dead husband. But by all accounts James Rose wasn’t the saint she thought he was, and thank God she seemed to be pulling out of her abysmal grief. Better for her, thought Luke, if he left things the way they were. No, resurrecting James Rose and all the emotions the irksome man stirred up in his widow wasn’t convenient for anyone right now.

Nevertheless Luke promised himself that when the time was right in the investigation, he
would question Mrs. Rose about the pocket watch. But right now he had no idea when that would be.

Sheriff Morris was sitting at his desk reading a sophisticate―a magazine of interest to only men―when a click of the door handle signaled a visitor. Hurriedly he shut the publication, pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, stashed the magazine at the back of it, and neatly shut it, taking care not to slam.

His deputy stepped over the threshold looking disturbed.
Luke noticed the hasty movements of his boss but was too distracted to contemplate them.

“Howdy,” said Sheriff Morris.

Luke uncharacteristically saluted a silent hello with a jerk of two fingers, shut the door, took off his hat, walked to his desk, and hung up his jacket on the coat rack behind it. But instead of sitting down or walking to the wood stove to start the day’s second pot of coffee as he usually did at this hour, he walked to the sheriff’s desk and stopped, pulled the pocket watch from his pocket, and dangled it in the sheriff’s face.

“It’s his, isn’t it?” said Luke.

“Let me see that,” said the sheriff, sitting up straight and reaching for the chain.

Luke released his hold on the chain as the sheriff took the time piece into his large hand. Sheriff Morris turned it over several times, looking at every part. His eyes rested on the monogram

“S-R-J? Whose is this?”

“Sterling James Rose,” said Luke, slowly and evenly. Saying the name aloud made him light headed. “I need coffee,” he said, heading toward the wood stove, his stomach growling. He had forgotten to ask Mrs. Byrne, the boardinghouse owner, to pack him a sandwich. “Any fresh?”

“There will be when you make some,” said the sheriff, his eyes still on the time piece. “How’d you get Rose’s pocket watch?” Sheriff Morris pulled on the finial and the cover popped open, but only partially because something had gunked up the hinge. A spattering of dust, like dry earth, sprinkled onto his desk.

“Town kid brought it in this morning. Said he found it on the front steps of the church.”

“What kid?” Sheriff Morris pulled a clean white handkerchief from his pants pocket, snapped it open with a flick of his wrist, and began wiping the dirt from the hinge. Red-brown dust transferred to his hanky

“Dunn’s kid. You know, Octavius. Owns the tobacco shop down the way.” Luke stopped talking a moment while he poured water noisily from a covered bucket into the coffee pot. “Octavius came with him. Dragged him in here by his collar while you were having lunch at the Occidental. Made the kid hand it over. Felt sorry for the boy. He only gave it up because of his pa.”

“Can’t say I blame him. He’s not the only one around Buffalo who coveted whatever it was Rose had.”

Luke felt a pang of guilt strike his core as sharp as a bee sting. “Then it is his?” He turned back toward Sheriff Morris and contemplated the pocket watch anew, trying to picture the ghostly Mr. Rose riding off into the night, the gleaming watch tucked into his breast pocket. The picture came easily, as did the picture of the handsome but exhausted Morgan tied to a tree near North-East Creek, wild eyed and dying of thirst. After that, there was only a black hole of mystery in his Luke’s mind. Night after night for four months as he had lain in bed, waiting for sleep—when he wasn’t contemplating the many charms of Mrs. Rose—he’d stood at the precipice of that black canyon, peering into the bottomless darkness, searching for a clue. James Rose had fallen into a black pit, and every time Luke searched for him, he fell into a black pit as well. After a minute he turned back to the stove and drew a match to light the fire. For a few seconds a burst of acrid sulfur salted the air. He bent down
and put the match to a pile of tinder in the fire box. Soon a thin wisp of smoke was twirling upward and the small fire began to crackle.