The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (7 page)

Trace pulled his mind out of its grim spiral and into a beautiful spring morning—birds singing, air rich with moisture and freshly turned earth. Damp green-and-black fields lay out on either side of the road.

They were riding south to Judd Herschel’s farmstead in Carondelet. This was the fifth day of their contract to cut and cord the timber from Herschel’s woodlot. It was make-work, but at least it was something.

“Nothin,” Trace said. “Work. Did Jameson say if he’d heard back from the Baptist?”

“You ast me that already, and no he didn’t. You sent him a note, right?”

“I wrote to him.” Kingsley was the Baptist’s name: leader of a group of missionaries who had the idea to move to Butte, Montana, and straighten out all the godless folk in the wilderness, because apparently there weren’t enough around here to merit the effort. Montana was about the last of the Promised Lands not yet accessible by rail, though those who could afford it rode out to St. Joseph or Ogden, and outfitted there. The Baptists must be very poor or very devout to be undertaking the whole trip by wagon, and Jameson estimated it was both; Kingsley had been keen to hear that Jacob Tracy, trail guide, was a former seminarian.

“He told Jameson he’d get back to me this week.” Trace hated when people dangled a lure for work and then never followed through on it.

“Well, we’re gonna be another week clearin this lot, in any case,” Boz said. “And we still got that money from what’s-her-name. That’s enough to pull up for the season and head out to Wyoming. You oughtta wire that horse-breeder you keep talkin about—”

“Miller.”

“Yeah. See if he’ll have you back.”

Trace grunted. “I’m too old to be playin cowboy.”

“Speak for yourself, young’un.” Boz had a good five years on Trace. “Sides, you start askin around, you’d get on as foreman somewhere, easy.”

That was probably true, and Trace knew it. But he found himself dragging his feet, just the same. He’d been working for Miller nine years ago when he’d met Dorothea, and he didn’t relish the idea of going back to Wyoming and seeing how much things had changed … or not.

The limestone wall along the road gave way to split-rail fence at the edge of Judd Herschel’s property. It was a prosperous-looking spread: two-story clapboard house, a wide wrap-around porch, and a fashionable turret at one corner. Herschel owned and rented out several properties in this part of town; he had been instrumental in getting Carondelet annexed to St. Louis and was now well poised to take advantage of the new city services. He’d already sold off one parcel of land to be used for the new Jewish cemetery.

For the past five days, Trace and Boz had arrived to find Herschel already at work in the barn, usually with one of his daughters, Anna or Leah, helping with the milking or feeding the chickens. But this morning they could hear the cow lowing to be milked, and the chickens were still shut up in their coop.

With a worried exchange of glances, the men hastened their horses’ pace, rounding the side of the house to the yard. It was hard to say what caught the eye first—the kitchen door standing open, or the trampled and roughed-up look of the yard, which Mrs. Herschel always kept so neat and swept. There were dark splotches on the stone steps leading into the house.

Boz didn’t say a word, just dismounted and marched over to the door. Trace followed, pausing to loop the horses’ reins around the post. They were already huffing and laying their ears back, disturbed by the smell of death. Trace could feel it, too, an afterimage of violence permeating the air like swamp gas, and though he steeled himself before he stepped up on the back stoop, a vicious miasma rolled out of the house and grabbed him by the throat, almost knocking him down.

He choked, gagging, grabbing the doorframe for balance, and saw Boz stop a few paces into the kitchen and turn back. He’d been alert to Trace’s every twitch since Sikeston, and now he looked spooked. “What is it? You all right?”

Trace nodded, breathing deeper as the stench loosened its grip on him. It was acrid and vile, like burning hair, but the aftertaste it left on his tongue was metallic.

“Is there somethin
in
here?” Boz demanded.

“No. I think there was, but it’s gone.” Trace edged past his partner in the narrow kitchen, walking lightly, feeling the house listening back at him. The stove was cold. A greasy pan containing a few popcorn hulls sat on top. A jar lay near the doorway into the living room, spilling paprika across the threshold and onto the rug. Small footprints tracked through the red powder.

The living room looked like an abattoir. Boz swore softly as they stood in the doorway, eyeing the soaked and sticky rug, the slings and drips on the walls and ceiling. A fireplace poker, matted with blood and hair, lay beside the door to the yard, and it was clear by the marks on the floor that a body had been dragged that way.

They followed the marks out the back, to Mrs. Herschel’s garden. The well was back there, and as they got closer Trace could see the cover was off and there were bloody streaks smeared over the old bricks. A long-handled ax lay dropped across the path like a warning sign.

“Oh Jesus,” Trace said, quickening his step despite the fact that he had absolutely no desire to look down that hole. He said it again when he realized that the small turd-looking things scattered around the base of the well were a man’s amputated fingers.

Boz looked first and then turned away with a low, almost ironic sound, the back of his hand rubbing hard across his mouth.

The womens’ skirts had ballooned up in the bloody water, making it look as if Herschel himself lay on a feather bed dyed turkey-red. He might’ve been resting comfortably except for the gash that had bashed in his nose and cheek, obliterating one eye and leaving the other to gaze sightlessly up at the sky.

*   *   *

“A
ND WHY DID
you call on the Herschels this morning?” the detective asked, for what Trace guessed to be the fifth time.

“We were comin to cut timber,” Trace said yet again, rubbing a hand over his face. The shock had long since worn off and he just felt tired and queasy. “Herschel hired us to clear that woodlot.”

It was almost noon. The clear morning had given way to a sullen, overcast day that seemed occasionally to spit from the clouds upon the scene below. A score or more of people roamed the yard—policemen, neighbors, sightseers. Trace had no idea how word had spread so far, so fast. The police had arrived before he and Boz could decide if one of them should stay while the other went for help.

Apparently they had not been the first to discover the bodies. Anna Herschel, the younger daughter, had somehow escaped the slaughter, and stumbled a mile down the road to the Lombards’ door, where she’d been found, bloody and hysterical, at sunup. Lombard and his son had come to the farm and seen the carnage more than an hour before Trace and Boz were due to arrive.

Nevertheless, it had looked bad that they were mounting up when the police arrived. They were detained and questioned several times over, but what was worse, in a way, was having to watch Mrs. Herschel’s yard and pretty house get trampled by bored, drunken patrolmen and smug sightseers in fine hats and morning suits, who began to arrive in buggies not long after the police.

The detective in charge, whose name was Whistler, at least appeared to have a brain in his head. He was unassuming in appearance—medium-sized and balding, with sparse mutton-chops the same bleached color as his skin—but he had a dead-eye gaze that missed nothing. Trace had twice seen the detective snap his fingers at a patrolman and get him to run off some tourist who was trying to pocket a souvenir from the house or yard.

“Had you any other dealings with Herschel?” Whistler said to Trace, as they stood in the living room, and the detective’s broad, blunt fingers glided over a half-played game of checkers, not quite touching anything, almost as if he were divining messages from the game board. “Did you rent property from him?”

“No and no,” Trace said. “Me and my partner rent a room up on Bell Street.”

“And how many days have you worked for Herschel?”

“The last five, excepting Saturday and Sunday.”

“Anybody else who can vouch for that? Any other folks around here you’ve worked for? How’d you get this job?”

So Trace explained, yet again, how John Jameson allowed folks who frequented his store to post bills for labor, and how they occasionally bartered work with him in exchange for keeping their horses at his livery, and on and on. The only thing Trace couldn’t describe was how they’d gotten the job with Herschel, because Boz had arranged that on his own.

“Detective?” one of the patrolmen called to Whistler, and the latter excused himself, but not before telling Trace to stick around.

Trace was not likely to go anywhere for a while, since Boz had been press-ganged into helping with the winch over the well. He went out into the yard again, noticing as he went that two more wagons had joined the circus: glossy black hearses with tasteful gold letters that read
ROTH FUNERAL HOME
. He had the morbid thought that Judd Herschel was going to be one of the first inhabitants of that new cemetery he’d sold to the city.

He rounded the corner of the house in time to see Mrs. Herschel hauled up out of the well, dripping wet and dangling from the hook that had caught under her arm and neck. Her head was thrown back, her stringing hair partially covering the gaping wound at her throat. There was so little blood left in her that the flesh was white as a trout’s, though her hair and skirts were stained from the saturated water.

“Get her down!” one of the men snapped, and two of them reached to catch the body and the line from which it hung. Together they wrestled the sodden corpse over the lip of the well and lowered her to the ground. The small crowd of spectators shuffled and clucked amongst themselves.

Trace looked away. His gaze lit on Herschel’s corpse, now laid out on a stretcher and covered with a sheet. The sight of those black boots protruding from beneath the shroud called to mind other visions, equally awful: rows of uniformed boys waiting for burial; his own father’s boots, extending across the threshold of the house, where the cholera had dropped him.

Trace gave himself a shake. He dropped to one knee in the grass, crossed himself, and peeled the sheet back.

The wound to Herschel’s face was clean from the water, and though Trace saw more than he wanted to of the bones in the man’s head, it didn’t look deep enough to have killed him. Knocked him senseless, maybe, and then he’d drowned. The angle of the wound was odd—near-horizontal, suggesting the ax had been swung at waist-level. Which meant Herschel had been kneeling, or maybe clinging to the edge of the well, trying to claw his way out … which would explain why his fingers were chopped off.

Trace glanced over his shoulder. Nobody was paying him the slightest attention, so he reached out and pressed on the chest of the corpse. Water surged out of the mouth and the nose wounds, along with a swarm of black, tadpole-looking animalcules.

“Shit!” Trace startled back, then leaned closer. They weren’t tadpoles. They evaporated as he watched. He wiped one of the oily-looking black things from Herschel’s cheek.

A ghastly sensation washed over him, the instant paralysis of nightmare. For a second his vision was gray, cloudy, and then he was looking out through an unfamiliar pair of eyes, feeling strange hands grasping a cudgel, beating something red and mewling—voices of women screaming and strange, maniacal laughter heaving his own chest—then the tables were turned and someone was beating
him,
the laughter had left him and he was only terrified—bloody hands scrabbled for purchase on slick stone, and the ax swung at his face—

A hand landed on his shoulder. Trace fell backwards on his butt in the grass, his throat raw, and realized he had been screaming. Boz was gripping him by both shoulders and people were staring.

“You’re all right,” Boz was saying, his voice tight with anxiety. “You’re all right, Trace, it ain’t real—”

“I’m all right.” Trace repeated hoarsely. His heart was hammering, but the vision was as fragile as a dream and receding quickly. “It’s over, it’s done.”

“Cripes, you scared me,” Boz muttered, and hauled him to his feet. Trace clung to Boz’s arm a moment longer, head bowed as if he were overcome with grief. Better to be thought unmanly than crazed.

“What’d you see there, friend?” said a nasal voice from a few feet away. “Was it the killer?” A dapper redheaded dude in a plaid suit stood just out of reach, pencil and notepad in hand, peering at Trace with a keen and knowing air.

“What’s it to you?” Boz said.

The dude glanced at Boz and touched his hat with the stub of pencil. “Rex Reynolds,
St. Louis Times.
I heard the new chief of detectives had a medium on his payroll—are you it?”

“No,” Trace said, brushing off his pants.

“You’re Jacob Tracy, right? This your partner?” Reynolds jerked his chin at Boz. “You friends with the whole family or just the old man?”

“We just worked for them,” Trace said, yet again. “We came up here to cut timber.”

“I gotcha, I understand. How well did you know Miss Anna? You hear of any trouble between her and her folks, might prompt her to take after ’em with an ax?”

“Are you kiddin me?” Trace said, and rounded on Detective Whistler, who was striding toward them. “You ain’t sayin Miss Anna did this?”

“That’s none of your concern,” said Whistler, and turned his dead-eye gaze on Reynolds. “I told you I didn’t want you at my crime scenes anymore.”

“Didn’t know it was your crime scene, did I?” Reynolds said. “But since I’m here, Detective, can you confirm you’re holding Miss Anna Herschel at Four Courts? And you don’t have any other suspects at this time?”

“Get off this property before I have you removed,” Whistler said. He cast a ruminating eye over Trace and Boz. “You two can go, too. Stay in town where I can find you.”

Reynolds sucked his teeth as Whistler walked away. “Always makes you feel welcome.” He turned back to Trace. “So how long you been communing with the Spirits?”