October Skies (27 page)

This second half of the shelter was smaller. It was where the trapper once slept. There was a small gap in one wall, a deliberate hole - a window of sorts - that was almost entirely plugged by the snowdrift outside. It allowed enough diffused light in to the dark interior that he could immediately discern what he’d been called in to examine.

‘Oh my God,’ he whispered.

Nailed to the wall with several of the long lumber nails he’d seen on the workbench, was the naked body of Saul Hearst. He was pinned upside down in a parody of the crucifixion posture, his arms splayed, one nail through each wrist, and his feet crossed, a single nail through both of them. From his pelvis to his chest, a knife had been at work. He had been comprehensively gutted, and hung against the wall like a carcass of prime beef in a butcher’s shop. There was surprisingly little blood there, and no sign of the removed organs.

Keats looked at him quizzically.

Ben nodded. ‘Yes, I presume those organs would have to be his.’

For the first time he registered Preston. He was standing with his back against the partition wall and staring at the man, his deep eyes locked in a silent expression of fear. His lips moved soundlessly.

A prayer.

Over and over.

Ben took a reluctant step closer to the cadaver. And as he did so, his eyes registered something written along one of Hearst’s pale thighs. Closer still he realised the words were not written on the skin - they were carved into it . . . letters formed from the small, precise slashes of a sharp blade.

‘You can read it?’ asked Keats.

Ben nodded. He glanced at the left thigh. ‘For all his dirty sins.’

‘Anyone know what the hell that means?’ growled Keats.

Ben shook his head. They both turned to look at Preston. ‘You’re a preacher,’ said Keats, ‘an’ that sounds to me like God talk. Mean anythin’ to you?’

Preston’s eyes flickered off the corpse to look at them. He was about to say something, and then shook his head. ‘No, I have no idea what this could mean.’

Ben studied the intense stillness of Preston’s face, a rigid mask concealing a head full of secrets that clearly he was unprepared to share with them right now.

‘Well, one thing’s for sure,’ grunted Keats, ‘reckon it ain’t them Paiute. Not less they learned ’emselves to read an’ write all of a sudden.’

Preston’s eyes turned back on Hearst’s body. He looked like a condemned man taking the last few steps up a scaffold and catching his very first sight of the hangman’s noose.

The bastard’s holding something back.

Ben was about to ask Preston again what those carved words meant, when they heard raised voices coming from outside the shelter. Keats was the first to react, leading the way as they stumbled clumsily through the cluttered interior up the two deep steps and emerged outside.

McIntyre was striding towards them. ‘We found the others!’ he shouted breathlessly. ‘Through the trees over there,’ he said, pointing past the wooden hanging frames. They made their way there, McIntyre leading them around a thicket of twisted and tangled brambles and presently they stood before a recently dug grave. Poking through last night’s light snowfall could be seen the dark peaty colour of a mound of freshly turned soil. There had apparently been no attempt at concealing it - quite the opposite. The burial mound was topped with a cross; two short lengths of branch crudely lashed together with twine. The entire party of men crowded around the grave, as Preston, Keats and Ben pushed to the front.

‘So where’s the other grave?’ asked Keats.

‘Just one grave,’ said McIntyre. ‘They’re both in it together.’

Ben looked at him. ‘Both?’

McIntyre nodded. ‘Sorry, Ben.’ He pointed to the grave where two holes had already been dug into the freshly turned soil. ‘We had to dig to be sure who was here.’

Ben stepped towards the grave and saw what he recognised as the dark pattern of Mrs Dreyton’s shawl and the pale lace bonnet. Beneath the flowery trim of her bonnet he could see that her face had been slashed, dried blood caked her cheeks and the eyes, nostrils and mouth were plugged with soil.

Another hole had been dug on the other side of the mound and already he could see Sam’s forearm, his white shirt dirty and stained, one of his strong young man’s hands curled up like an old man’s arthritic claw and discoloured a dark brown by death. Ben recognised that as the inevitable pooling of immobile blood beneath the skin.

‘Please cover them over now!’ snapped Preston.

Ben nodded. He’d seen enough too.

McIntyre, using the butt of his rifle as a spade, began pushing the dislodged soil back into the holes.

‘Gentlemen, we also discovered the body of Saul Hearst in the shelter,’ announced Preston, more for the benefit of his men than Keats’s people. ‘There is now, I’m certain, an evil at work in these woods. The misfortune of our wagon, the early snow, the attack of the bear, the dark savages nearby . . . these are agents of the Devil, sent here to test us, to torment us.’

There were murmurs, whispers amongst the men. Ben saw several of them bow their heads in prayer.

‘You must trust me. God has a mission for us, a destiny for us, and the Devil does not like that. He has found us, and now tries his tricks and strategies. We will return to our camp and pray for the Dreytons. Tonight I will talk with God and seek his guidance.’

Preston waved at his men to move out. They turned away from the grave and headed across the clearing towards the shallow slope.

‘What about your man, Saul?’ Ben called out. ‘Don’t you want to bury him?’

Preston turned round. ‘We’ll not return here again. This is an evil place. Do you not feel it? We’re leaving. You’re best coming too.’

‘What about Saul?’

‘Saul is in the same place as Dorothy and Sam now, Lambert - a much better place than this.’ Preston turned back round and led his men up the slope, pushing knee-deep through the snow.

‘I . . . I’m leaving with them,’ said McIntyre. ‘I can feel it too. This is no place to hang around.’ He set off after the others.

Broken Wing nodded and muttered to himself, looking at the thick apron of foliage around the small clearing, then followed McIntyre.

‘What did he say?’ asked Ben.

Keats shook his head. ‘Damned superstitious Indian.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he could feel the white-face spirit watching us from the trees.’

Weyland grinned nervously. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I might join them.’

Keats snorted and spat. ‘Might as well. Ain’t nothing we can do for ’em now.’ He headed off after the others, leaving Ben alone.

Ben turned to look back at the grave. ‘I’m so sorry, Sam. I would have taken you with me come the spring. You, your mother and Emily.’

He turned to leave and then stopped and turned back round. ‘I’ll take care of Emily for you. She’ll come with me. I promise you that.’

 

Shepherd watched the soccer match with feigned interest, smiling, clapping and cheering at all the right moments - as far as he could tell. The young boys playing on the pitch before him in no more than flimsy nylon shirts and shorts looked under-equipped and too willowy to his eye to be playing a proper sport. A strong gust of wind would carry them all away like a bundle of red and blue twigs.

He preferred a good wholesome all-American sport like football, where sheer brute willpower, strength of heart and tactical guile normally won the day, unlike this peculiar game that seemed to turn on the mere lucky bounce of a round ball.

He sighed.

A sign of the times.

It seemed just about every boy and girl wanted to play this imported game these days. No doubt because it looked like an easy sport to play and master, unlike football.

The referee blew his whistle at some minor infraction.

The Mayor leaned towards him. ‘Offside,’ he muttered. Shepherd nodded politely, none the wiser, as he watched the young boys waiting for play to resume, all of them gasping clouds into the cool winter air. It was a heartless grey day with a wintry bite on the breeze. A light mist veiled the edge of the sports field, but the strong turnout of parents and church friends on this distinctly autumnal Sunday afternoon spoke of a strong local community.

Good Christian people, all of them, he thought with a smile, despite liking this ridiculous game.

Duncan, his campaign manager, had briefed him that the statistics team was reporting strong grassroots support here in this part of Colorado, almost as strong as it was in Utah. The people here liked what they’d already seen of him on the main cable stations, and the prominent coverage he was beginning to get on FOX. Perhaps even more encouraging was the fact that not many of them were members of the Mormon faith. His appeal was beginning to hit a wider vein.

‘That’s incredibly important,’ Duncan had said. ‘Thirteen million Americans, all members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, are votes in the bank for you come polling day. But that isn’t enough. We’ve got just over eighteen months of campaigning to broaden your support beyond the Mormon community into the soft conservative Christian Right.’

Shepherd clapped along with the rest of the assembled parents at a narrowly saved shot at the goal.

It was a big task for an independent to try and pull off. However, it seemed both of the other parties - up to their necks in sleaze and allegations of corruption and nasty, dirty backbiting between their leading candidates - were doing most of the hard work for him.

Of course, if things continued on their current trajectory, sometime soon the Democrats and the Republicans were both going to realise they were leaking votes to him and would start working hard, perhaps even together, to dish the dirt on him.

They were going to come up empty-handed.

William Shepherd wasn’t distracted by bubbly blonde interns, or lithe young call boys; his hands had never wandered where they weren’t wanted. Nor had he ever felt the need to roll a joint or snort a line of coke, defraud a pension fund, buy shares with inside information, bribe a court official or involve himself in any spurious land deals. They could dig all they liked; they were going to find no skeletons in his cupboard. No foul-smelling crap was going to stick to him.

His old-fashioned message gave him the air of some character out of a Norman Rockwell painting, made him sound like someone from another century, but that was just fine. The politically correct liberal media might wince at his unfashionable values and the rabid right-wing radio jocks might scoff at his naive aphorisms, but his voice was hitting all the right notes with an ever-growing audience of frightened Americans. Their world was sliding towards increasing instability; a weakened dollar, punitive interest rates, a plummeting jobs market . . . a simple and reassuring message that promised redemption was all they were after; a message delivered by someone who didn’t reek of bullshit.

The large crowd of eager parents and local civil dignitaries around him in the stalls cheered jubilantly as the ball flew into the back of one of the nets. Shepherd nodded, applauded and smiled, his mind elsewhere.

There was something, though, something that he’d never confided to Duncan. Shepherd smiled. If Duncan only knew . . . if his campaign supporters only knew . . . they’d run a mile. His sights were set somewhat higher than the Oval Office.

It’s out there somewhere . . . in the Sierras.

He could see it in his dreams, buried somewhere in the deep woods, perhaps in a secure travel chest; seasons changing above it like the seconds on a ticking clock, years, decades drifting by, and there it sat, waiting to be found.

Shepherd had tried and failed. As a younger man with a lot more time on his hands there had been quite a few hikes taken into those mountains, going on whatever hunch was driving him at the time, listening to the inner whisper of divine guidance. But, there was a lot of wilderness to cover out amongst those wooded mountains. It wasn’t like trying to locate a downed plane - at least something like that left a noticeable impact and burn scarring. The Preston party’s camp would now, he surmised, be little more than barely detectable humps on the forest floor.

He sighed.

Somewhere out there.

And now, it seemed, like Bilbo Baggins ill-deservedly happening across a certain ring, there was one Julian Cooke who had stumbled across the place where they lay buried. He knew it would happen one day; a hiker, a party of drunken hunters, a bunch of teens goofing around in tents . . .

Something of a conundrum, this man Cooke: someone he needed badly, and at the same time someone he needed like a bullet in the head. It seemed from his email traffic that this Cooke could lead him directly to the place where Preston’s people had vanished. Which made him someone he very much wanted to sit down and talk with. On the other hand, this British guy was talking to other people now. If he kept doing that, talking to many more people, he could become something of a liability. The collection of meetings he’d been holding with his media buddies over in London wasn’t good news. He suspected that none of them would probe any deeper than an intriguing survival story set during the days of the old west. But there was always the possibility that someone might be clever enough . . . intuitive enough, to join together some very obscure dots.