Prairie Gothic (27 page)

Judah plainly didn't know. “Maybe it's got something to do with bringing Jesus back. That's what Mary was supposed to do, only her baby died. Wasn't the first time it didn't work, only this time Becky seemed so sure.”

“Who killed…” The sheriff had been going to ask about the bones Mad Dog found near the pond. Judah's guilt was elsewhere.

“Wasn't me done Mad Dog's animals. That was Becky. When she gets like that, ain't nothing you can do.”

“How many of you here?” the sheriff asked.

“Simon's in town looking for your brother. I don't know about Becky. That leaves just me and Levi.”

The slush in his mind was melting a little. And the ache in his head was coming back with a vengeance. He needed to know all this stuff, but first he needed to find his girls. And his deputy.

“Where are my daughters?”

Judah looked panicky. “I don't know.” The sheriff instantly knew he was lying. Judah pointed off to the side. “Over there,” he said.

The sheriff looked and couldn't see a thing. Judah turned and ran. The sheriff was about to follow when, improbably, like Peter Pan or maybe Superman, Judah began to fly.

***

“Doctor Jones. I don't understand. What's this?”

Doc looked up from The Times of Buffalo Springs. Mary was holding an envelope, something she'd discovered inside a book entitled
The French Chef
which must have been among the children's books he'd found to keep her occupied.

“Does this have something to do with Mr. Tommie?”

Doc crossed the room to the dusty old sofa on which he'd left her. She handed him the envelope. It was sealed, but there was a symbol on the outside, one of those mirror-image swastikas like the one on the dead baby. He eased down on the cushion beside her.

“Why would you think it has something to do with Mr. Tommie?” He tried to go easy but he badly wanted an answer.

“This.” She pointed at the swastika. “It's like Mr. Tommie's magic ring.”

Doc waited, hardly breathing, letting her tell it without prompting.

“Mr. Tommie was nice to me. He showed me his ring. There was a secret place you pressed and it popped open with a thing shaped like this.”

“Is that why you drew it on the baby?” Doc asked.

“Well,” she hesitated and Doc thought he might have pushed too far. “He said it was supposed to be lucky. And it was secret. I couldn't tell anybody. I thought maybe it would make the baby well again. And, if only Mr. Tommie and I knew about it, that mark would help me find him when he got better. Was I bad? Shouldn't I have done that?”

“No. What you did was fine, Mary. I'm afraid the ring didn't have magic powerful enough to bring your baby back, but there was nothing wrong with trying. Do you have the ring?”

“No. I left it for Mr. Mad Dog and Hailey.”

“Why did Tommie have the magic ring, did he tell you?” He opened the clasp and ran a finger under the envelope's flap.

“For safe keeping. What does that mean?”

There were newspaper clippings in the envelope. Maybe a dozen of them. The first was from a small-town Oklahoma paper. It was yellow and brittle with age. Someone had written the newspaper's name and the date, May 1957, across the top in a neat hand. The headline just below was a grabber.
ABEL HORNBAKER MURDERED
, it declared.
NAZI TREASURE STOLEN
!

Hornbaker. Horn. Baker. It made sense. Among brass instruments, the French Horn was commonly just called the horn. And what was a baker but a chef?
The French Chef
. The Horn Baker. Louis Henry Silverstein had been a clever man, and a cautious one.

“I'm not sure,” Doc muttered, “but I think the guardian of the words is about to help us find out.”

***

Judah was airborne, coming straight at the sheriff and he knew he should shoot the kid. He tried to get the gun back up in time and yank the trigger, no time to squeeze. Only Judah did a somersault in mid-air and landed on his butt, feet splayed, a terrified look on his face directed toward where he'd been going.

Something immense and black had materialized back there. It was plastered with blood and snow. The sheriff had a bad moment in which the thing seemed the stuff of delirium, then it was just a Brahma bull. Just? The thing was enormous. Its horns hadn't been cut and dulled the way any sane rancher should have done. It was coming closer. Coming for him, or maybe for Judah.

Judah screamed. His cry was audible over the wind, then the bull's head slammed into Judah's body and began grinding it into the earth.

“Hey! Heyah!” the sheriff shouted, waving his arms. The beast paid him no attention. It tossed Judah a few feet and charged again.

Smith spoke. So did Wesson. The bull didn't seem to care. It was busy savaging the broken figure through which one of its horns now penetrated.

The sheriff stepped sideways, avoiding the flailing body and the horns that ravaged it. He moved in close, just behind the beast's front shoulder. He pulled the trigger again and again and still the thing refused to go down.

Finally it paused, turned a burning eye the sheriff's way. He aimed at the eye. He pulled the trigger one last time. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

The bull turned then, and trotted off into the storm. Judah flopped on its horns. He seemed to be waving farewell, a dead Captain Ahab on a great anti-white whale. And then they were gone. Only the bloody snow remained as evidence that this had been anything more than vivid imagination or too many blows to the head.

***

Judy struggled from under the wraith's scraggly hair and tattered clothing. Her assailant was a mere wisp of a thing. No weight to her. Old and frail, she decided. And, as the other woman, the one she'd met earlier at the Towers, claimed, no threat to a healthy person such as herself.

“My daughters?” Judy got her feet back under her. The old woman with the red tennis shoes helped pull the strange one away, but not before she uttered another baffling pronouncement.

“And children learn to walk on frozen toes.”

“I don't understand,” Judy said. “What does she mean.”

“Outside, would be my guess,” red shoes replied. “She's not as crazy as she seems. She only speaks with other people's words now, but she knows what she's saying. Her quotes usually mean something.”

Judy turned to the window. It was shrouded with hurtling crystals. “Outside?”

“As frozen as charity.”

Who was the hag, Judy wondered? Could she be right? Could her daughters have been here, safe and warm, then left? They weren't foolish enough to do something like that. Surely this woman must be as mad as she looked.

“No,” Judy said. “They'd stay here, where it's safe.”

“There's your mistake,” red shoes corrected. “Hasn't been safe here since Tommie took ill. Maybe not even then.”

“Where should I look?” Judy didn't trust the fantastic creature who had assaulted her, and wasn't sure about her companion. But she was desperate. She needed a place to start.

The wild woman crumpled at Judy's feet. It was as if she hadn't enough strength to go on. Only then she popped back up holding the gun Judy had left on the floor, and it was pointed straight at Judy's heart.

“I have a gub!” she said. Judy recognized the line this time. It was from a Woody Allen movie about a bank robber whose handwritten note to the teller was illegible. She'd found it hilarious when she saw it. Right now, it wasn't funny at all.

“Whoops!” her companion said. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there's still harm in her after all.”

***

Doc moved the Buick all of three feet before imbedding it in the drift that had formed on its south side. Between that, and the ones sneaking into the parking lot from the evergreens that were part of Klausen's landscaping, he suspected it was trapped for the duration.

“Mary, we're going to have to walk.”

She smiled. “I don't mind.” It was all a grand adventure for her. She hadn't seen much of the county in her lifetime. Even the storm-swept streets of destitute Buffalo Springs must seem the height of urban tourism. She didn't understand how painful walking into that wind would be, nor how far those six blocks would seem. But he didn't have a choice. The sheriff had to know about this stuff in the envelope.

Abel Hornbaker had been murdered in Oklahoma more than forty years ago. His sons and a nephew and niece were accused of the crime. Some of their names rang bells, loud ones—Zeke Hornbaker, and Tommie and Becky Irons.

Abel Hornbaker was a successful businessman of German ancestry. A widower, he lived with his three sons (Ezekiel, Obadiah, and Malachi), a sister's children (Thomas and Rebekah), and a succession of housekeepers. He was involved in the German-American Bund in St. Louis before the Second World War. When he moved to Oklahoma to escape the hard feelings his pro-Nazi sympathies had raised in Missouri, he'd brought, some said, the organization's secret treasure.

Actually, he'd been a dealer in treasures. He bought and marketed odd collectibles. Religious artifacts were his specialty.

Nobody knew what kind of treasure he might have had. They were just certain there was one. He lived well. Visitors to the opulent Hornbaker residence recalled seeing a locked iron chest. It was memorable, they said, for its swastika-shaped keyhole. Hornbaker's friends had thought it a joke, but they'd never seen what was inside. It had seemed mysterious but not especially important, until he was murdered and it disappeared.

Then the rumors started. Diamonds, some said, stolen from the Jews, though how Jewish diamonds would have come into the possession of prewar German-Americans wasn't addressed. When his body was found, bludgeoned to death, no one was surprised that the chest was missing too.

The collection of newspaper articles told a complex tale. There'd been hints of an incestuous relationship between Hornbaker and his niece, Becky, and suggestions of hanky-panky with the Cheyenne woman who'd been his live-in caretaker. At first, people thought the rumors of Nazi treasure had lured a professional burglar and things must have gone wrong when Hornbaker caught him in the act. Only a witness turned up. Someone who claimed to have seen two of the boys, soaked in blood and in possession of the iron chest. A cache of bloody clothes was found, along with the fire iron that had been the murder weapon. Three of the kids were arrested. Tommie Irons and Obadiah Hornbaker got away.

Becky wasn't held long. She'd been at a dance with hundreds of witnesses. Her husband Zeke was there as well, though he'd left long enough to have been involved. Eventually, the state took Zeke and Malachi to trial on first-degree murder charges. In a Perry Mason moment, the Cheyenne housekeeper exonerated Zeke. She was having his baby and they'd been in the process of conceiving it when Abel was killed. Then Malachi broke on the stand and admitted killing his father. There were doubts about his confession, though, since he claimed Becky was his accomplice and she clearly couldn't have been. The state never learned for certain who was. Malachi got the death penalty. Ezekiel got life as an accessory. Obadiah was never found. Becky came back to Kansas. Tommie followed, and cleared himself with the local sheriff. Someone else's fingerprints were on the murder weapon.

Doc wasn't sure what it all meant. Louis Henry Silverstein, Guardian of the Words, must not have been sure either, but he'd been looking into it. Apparently, he'd been worried someone might discover his research. Why else hide the envelope in a cook book among children's literature on the reserve cart?

The appearance of Ezekiel Hornbaker at the Irons farm, accompanied by a Cheyenne girl enroute to Wounded Knee, had obviously intrigued the newspaperman. And one of those old articles had talked about a ring being stolen from Abel Hornbaker's finger. With it, actually, since the ring hadn't slipped off easily. It was evidently Mary's magic ring.

Englishman needed to know all this. Maybe Mad Dog, too. And Doc felt the need to ponder it, sort through all the possible Hornbakers and Ironses and work out who the guy with the broken nose was in the ID Mad Dog had found, and in the picture in the old
Times
.

There were three other interesting documents in the envelope, and no explanation how they'd gotten there. One was a list of the items Abel Hornbaker had been offering for sale. His suggested prices were phenomenal, but no more so than the items themselves. Doc had only thumbed through a few pages, but Abel Hornbaker claimed to be able to deliver pieces of the true cross, the authentic bones of saints, an original letter written by Saul of Tarsus, and an autographed presentation copy of
Mein Kampf
. Authenticity was guaranteed. Verification of provenance would be supplied to the successful bidder.

It was hard to believe, harder still considering the contents of a letter on Abel Hornbaker's stationery. Above his signature was a statement declaring his satisfaction with one order, and a request for additional stock. The merchandise referred to was scalps. Hornbaker acknowledged receiving two wavy brunettes, one Negro, and four with long, straight, black hair. He requested half a dozen blonds, and a dozen in a miscellaneous assortment of other racial types. The letter was addressed to a taxidermist in Kansas City. The scalp of Estevan the Moor (the first “European” to visit the mythic cities of Cibola) included on Hornbaker's list was more likely a scrap of buffalo hide or the like.

Finally, there was an inquiry from a collector in Argentina. As someone who claimed to trace his descent from Mary Magdalen, its author was willing to pay Hornbaker's price. But before parting with a million dollars, he wished to send his own expert to verify authenticity. The letter was dated 1956, when one million dollars was a far more staggering sum than it was today. It made Doc especially curious about what had been for sale.

Outside the Buick, the wind was worse than he'd imagined. Mary had the resilience of the young, but neither of them was up to six blocks into the face of intolerable fury. Doc explored the offerings in the used car lot down the street. He had the keys to the office, and, therefore, to all the vehicles on the lot. He had permission to borrow any of them whenever he wanted as well, thanks to a long past-due loan to “Honest But Ugly Fred,” the proprietor. Fred had lots of light pickups and several sedans, and not a four-wheel drive among them. Doc and Mary pushed on.