Prairie Gothic (3 page)

By the time the job was done, Mad Dog was exhausted. You're too old for this, he thought. It wasn't something he liked to admit. In his mid-fifties, Mad Dog could still pass for a decade younger. He jogged, he exercised regularly, and he ate right—except for an addiction to chocolate. There were plenty of men two decades younger who couldn't have done what he was doing for Tommie Irons. Still, that didn't help Mad Dog find the reserves he needed to climb down and return to the road. He sat, for a moment, in the crotch of a tree, behind a massive trunk that blocked a little of the wind that had already turned Tommie Irons into a frozen pendulum, counting its way from now to forever.

What would anthropologists call this, Mad Dog wondered? Was there such a thing as an extended tree burial?

If he hadn't been so cold and exhausted, Mad Dog would have appreciated this view of Tommie's Happy Hunting Grounds. Even in the frozen grip of the harshest winter in a decade, the stream and sloughs were an enchanted place, crisscrossed with game trails, prints, and spore. It was the kind of location Mad Dog would have enjoyed hunting in his youth. No more, though. Killing for sport had lost its appeal. When he hunted these days it was with a camera or binoculars.

A harsher gust nudged him, a reminder he'd better get down before his aging muscles began to stiffen in the cold. It was nearly too late already, but he made it.

Tommie was barely perceptible in the jumble of branches above. When there were leaves, he'd be absolutely invisible.

Mad Dog put his fingers to his lips again. It was time to reclaim Hailey and head for home. He stopped short of whistling. Something, besides the frozen wind, prickled the back of his neck. He was being watched. He moved his eyes and pivoted his head.

It was only Hailey, come up behind him with her usual stealth, an ability that made her seem able to beam herself instantly from place to place. She smiled at him, but only with her eyes since her mouth was filled by a big oval rock.

“Drop it, babe. Let's get out of here. Go back to the house for some coffee and a rawhide chew toy.” He didn't try to take things out of her mouth anymore. There were ways in which wolf hybrids were different than domesticated dogs, even ones like Hailey who adored you. She stepped up beside him, though, and put the rock gently on the snow at his feet. It was a peculiar rock with regular indentations. Mad Dog bent and picked it up and found himself wanting to quote Hamlet's line about poor Yorick. It wasn't a rock. It was a human skull.

***

“Not likely we'll have visitors on a morning like this,” Deffenbach said a little defensively. The young woman they'd found to replace Mrs. Martin at the front desk of the

Sunshine Towers seemed overwhelmed by the possibility she might have to answer a phone or look up a room number. Minimum wage, minimum skills, the sheriff thought.

There was a long hall just off the lobby, offices on one side, a cafeteria on the other. None of it lived up to the reception area's bright promise.

“Our multipurpose room,” Deffenbach explained as they passed.

“We call it the mess hall,” Dorothy said. “Mess is the perfect description for what they serve in there.”

“It is a little bland,” Mrs. Martin admitted, “but wholesome.” There wasn't much of a breakfast crowd and most of those were just nursing cups of coffee.

“How could Mad Dog, or anyone, walk in here in the wee hours of the morning and leave with a dead body?”

“Inside help.” Mrs. Martin shot an accusing glare at the little woman with the red tennies. “We secure the doors every night at nine, then unlock at seven the next morning. They can all be opened from inside so people can't be trapped in case of some emergency, say a fire, but an open door sounds an alarm at the front desk. If he came through a door, we should have known. The windows are supposed to be secured too, but I've found a few that have been jimmied from time to time. This isn't a prison you know.”

“Coulda fooled me,” Dorothy grumbled.

“Were you the one who helped Mad Dog come and go?” The sheriff bent to focus his question on the little senior.

“One of them, but let's talk about that after we see to the baby.”

One of the offices was a nurse's station. A frazzled woman was counting out prescription medicines into labeled cups. “Mrs. Burton's in her room, far as I know,” she said, in answer to Mrs. Martin's query. “Haven't seen her on this level and I haven't managed to do rounds upstairs because I've been persuading one of our ladies she doesn't need a morning-after pill on account of last night's indiscretion.”

“Card games get pretty boring after awhile,” Dorothy muttered again.

There was an elevator midway along the hall. It took a long time to arrive, during which the bird woman entertained them with further examples of the Sunshine Towers' many shortcomings. From what he could see, the sheriff agreed with her.

A Mutt-and-Jeff pair of elegantly dressed matrons were on the elevator when it finally arrived. They took one look at the group that was going up, then stepped aside to make room rather than get off.

“Not much excitement around here,” Dorothy said. “We get hungry for it, grab onto most anything.”

Lucille Martin rolled her eyes as the elevator began to ascend. “Perhaps we should explain just who our Dorothy is, Sheriff.”

“Surely he recognizes her?” the Mutt woman wondered.

“Why, those ruby slippers give her away,” her Jeff counterpart replied.

“Yes, visiting from Oz.” Mrs. Martin tapped her skull gently in an indication that Dorothy's might be softer than normal.

“No autographs,” the little woman said. The elevator let them out into a hall with open doors every few feet. Nearly all were occupied with ancient women sitting in chairs that varied from folding to wheeled.

“Kinda reminds you of that street in Amsterdam, doesn't it,” the visitor from Oz observed. “Whores on display. Only these are ladies of the morning, and they aren't selling a substitute for love, they're eager buyers. They'll settle for anything that resembles affection.”

The fifth door to the right of the elevator was closed and empty. Mrs. Martin did the honors without a knock. She swung it open on a cramped room into which a few pieces of ornate furniture had been stuffed.

“We encourage the families to let residents use their own furniture,” Mr. Deffenbach explained. “It helps them feel at home.”

The room felt anything but home-like. Temporary storage, maybe, which, English decided, many families, as well as the management, probably considered it to be.

Alice Burton was sitting in a rocker nearly hidden behind a dresser so out of proportion for the small room that it blocked half of the only window. She didn't look like an Alzheimer's patient. She was clean and well groomed, her hair only lightly peppered with gray. She was wearing corduroys and boots below a hand-knitted sweater with a gold pin. She held a baby swaddled in a thick blanket.

“Let me do this, it'll be easier.” Dorothy ducked past Mrs. Martin.

“The Sheriff's here, Alice. He's come to take this baby back to her rightful mother. You understand why that's got to be.”

Alice Burton did seem to understand. She looked at the bundled form sadly for a moment, then delivered it to Dorothy without complaint.

“You see,” Lucille Martin began, then faltered as the tiny woman began peeling back the blanket. No one would make a doll in quite such a pasty shade of gray.

“Sweet Jesus!” Deffenbach exclaimed.

“Sure don't smell sweet, and there's no indication he'll rise from the dead. I'd guess this ain't him.” Dorothy passed the dead infant to the sheriff's open arms.

***

It was a small skull. Until he reached down and picked it up, Mad Dog let himself hope he was wrong and this wasn't human. When he touched it all doubts vanished. He had one of those moments he couldn't explain. It made him believe in himself again. He was, in fact, a natural born Cheyenne shaman.

What he felt was kinship. He was related to this tiny orb of weathered bone. They were both Cheyenne. He didn't know how he knew, but he was sure.

He held the skull up and looked at it as if he might recognize its features. It didn't work. It remained only vacant bone, but bone that had once been one of his people.

So much for Tommie Irons' uninterrupted journey to the happy hunting grounds. Englishman was going to have to know about this, and once he came to this place, finding Tommie was a virtual certainty. Unless…Mad Dog considered the apparent age of the skull again. Maybe, if this were some prehistoric Cheyenne, he could just replant it.

“Where did you find this, Hailey?”

The wolf didn't make any Lassie-like efforts to lead him where he wanted to go. She just wagged her tail and danced around as if she expected him to toss the skull and involve her in a game of catch. Her games of catch, however, involved darting to within inches of his grasp and then tearing away, holding whatever prize she was currently using to tempt him into trying to catch her. Trying was the key word.

Mad Dog opened one of the big Velcro pouches in his jacket. The skull was small enough to fit inside. Discovering where Hailey had found it shouldn't be hard. He was Cheyenne, after all. Well, one-quarter Cheyenne, or, if Englishman's wife's genealogical researches were correct, more like one-sixteenth, that quarter being broken into equal parts Cheyenne, Sans Arc, Buffalo Soldier, and Mexican cowboy. Not that his heritage was necessary. Backtracking her through the snow in the sloughs should be simple. There would be no other wolf tracks.

***

Benteen County, Kansas lay smack in the middle of the Bible belt. Fundamentalist Christians were common. Those with liberal interpretations of the holy book—Episcopalians, say—tended to be viewed with suspicion. Non-Christians, like born-again-Cheyenne Mad Dog, were considered aberrations. They were suffered because this was a free nation, tolerant of other views, so long as they were insignificant enough to be crushed the moment they threatened. You couldn't drive out of Buffalo Springs' city limits without encountering a pro-life billboard. Many citizens might send contributions in support of Planned Parenthood, but they didn't mention it over a cup of coffee at Bertha's Cafe, especially not when steak knives were part of the place settings.

The sheriff accepted the sad little bundle with a doubly heavy heart. He mourned this small innocent, whose life had ended almost before it began, and he mourned for the community as well. Buffalo Springs wouldn't rest until someone paid for this. God help the mother, he thought, unless there proved to be a simple explanation for how her child came to be here instead of up the street at Klausen's Funeral Parlor.

“Two dead bodies?” the sheriff inquired of Mr. Deffenbach and Mrs. Martin. “One that should be here and isn't, and one that shouldn't be and is? Your security is worse than you imagined.”

“I'll get you the name and address of the man on the front desk last night,” Mrs. Martin offered, shifting blame. Deffenbach just directed his horrified stare at the infant and trailed along as they headed back toward the elevator.

“I'll need Doc Jones over here right away. Then I'll want that name, and a chat with anybody else who knows anything about this.”

The women of the morning quietly watched them pass. Dorothy of the ruby tennies trailed along, silent now, looking faintly ashamed of the way she'd behaved.

Mrs. Martin hurried ahead to punch for the elevator. Surprisingly, it opened almost immediately.

“Freeze!” a voice shouted from inside. Everyone did pretty much the opposite. A .357 magnum poked cautiously into the hall. “Which of you is the phantom snowballer? Fess up.”

“Wynn?” The sheriff's voice hovered somewhere between outrage and astonishment. “Put that gun away!”

Before the deputy could obey, the door hissed shut. Wynn frantically pulled his hand back inside. His hand made it, but the .357 stayed behind.

***

Hailey hadn't chosen her path with Mad Dog's convenience in mind. Still, he hadn't been up in the cottonwoods long enough for her to have ranged far. He went around the thick stands of undergrowth that she'd cut through. Her path was easy to pick up again on the other side. She'd come from downstream of the dam that held Tommie Irons' pond.

Sometime over the years, the pond had filled to overflowing. Gradually, it must have built its own spillway. The soaked earth suffered years of freezing and baking. The spillway eroded its way toward the pond. Recently, a fresh chunk of earth had tumbled into the stream. That's where the footprints led and, when Mad Dog clambered up onto the side of the dam to examine the icy avalanche from above, he saw more bones protruding, both from the wall of earth that remained and in the debris that had fallen.

Tommie Irons' dam really was a burial mound. Mad Dog suddenly remembered that Tommie had been specific about where he wanted his own bones placed—at the other end of the dam, about as far as you could get from where these were.

Mad Dog dropped to his belly and leaned over the edge. Hailey sat by his side, proudly sharing her find. The bones had taken on the texture of the earth that held them. Mixed with bits of ice and snow, they were hard to make out. One thing was immediately clear, though. Most were far too large to go with the skull Hailey had brought him.

There was something else down there among the earth and bones. It was a splash of color that didn't belong in a January Kansas landscape. Mad Dog reached and brushed at it. It came loose and he snagged it with his gloved hand before it could fall into the breach.

It was plastic, a battered ID card. Mad Dog could barely make it out without his reading glasses. There was a picture and part of the name that faded away toward the end.
HORNB
was all that remained.

The picture was of a young man with dark hair and smiling lips. It could be an old shot of County Supervisor Ezekiel Hornbaker, only this face had a broad, flat nose that appeared to have encountered a determined fist. Mad Dog was sure Supervisor Hornbaker's nose had never looked like this.