The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volumes 1-4 (139 page)

“I figured.” There was a cross rail between two of the supports, so I walked over and sat on the outside, continuing to look up and down the dusty, dry, and empty street. “James said he saw her out by the road.”

“James says his dead mother makes coffee for him in the morning.”

I looked up at him through a squinted eye and immediately regretted taking off my sunglasses. “There’s that. . . . But just in case this mystery girl does exist, he says he saw her out by the road. Now, where else could she be?”

“Making coffee?” I gave him a longer look. “All right; assuming she does exist, we are assuming that she does not wish to be found?”

I looked to the east and then north at the union hall and the scrub pines and scattered cottonwoods along Beaver Creek. It wasn’t hard to imagine Bailey as the bustling little town it must have been before the disaster. You could almost see the horses tied off to the railings, the draft wagons, and the narrow-gauge locomotive chugging and steaming to a stop at the mine tipple at the end of the street. “Yep. Assuming she exists, she ran off after her friend was killed and dumped alongside the highway.”

He came over and sat on the other end of the railing. “She was not killed in town.”

“No, too much of a chance of being spotted.”

“And away from the highway.”

“Yep.”

He nodded, the wooden-nickel-profile looking off toward the cemetery. “Do you think she witnessed the murder?”

“It would go a long way toward explaining why she’s hiding. ” I watched as a red-tailed hawk was chased by two smaller birds, and wondered how Vic, Cady, and Michael were doing.

The Bear turned back and stared at the side of my face as a slight breeze came up, hotter than the still air. “You know, there is something funny about this town. . . .”

“You mean besides the fact that there are no people?” I could be a smart-ass, too.

“Yes, besides that.”

"What?”

“There is no church.” He glanced up and down the street, perhaps expecting one to appear. “If there was one, it would be up near the cemetery, but there is no foundation, nothing.”

I stood, stepped down, and walked into the street, turning to look up at the old mine. “Did you check the union hall while you were up there?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Henry flipped his legs up on the railing and leaned back against the post. He pulled his ponytail loose from above the adjustable strap of his hat, which he put over his face. “I told you, there are rattlesnakes up there.”

I stared at the embroidered fish on his hat. “Since when are you afraid of rattlesnakes?”

“I am not, but they told me that no one had been up there since Tuyen and you.”

“Oh, right.” I put my sunglasses back on. I noticed he wasn’t moving. “What are you doing, taking a nap?”

“Yes. I assumed it was the only sensible thing to do while you checked the union hall.”

I looked up the street and at the high, razorlike grass leading to the lone building on the hill, past the dark pyramid of the coal tipple—perfect ambush territory for rattlers. “What makes you think I’m gonna go do that?”

The hat remained over his face, muffling his voice. “I knew you would not believe me about the snakes.”

* * *

Rattlesnakes shed in August. Their eyes become cloudy, and they grow uncomfortable, pissed off, and strike out at anything; contrary to popular belief, they do not always rattle before striking.

Part of the trail leading past the cemetery was still visible to the left of the cliffs, with a few rock steps that turned the corners where hard men descended into the ground to bring up soft fuel. I paused at one corner to see if the Cheyenne Nation had moved, and it hadn’t.

Most of the American public had been hoodwinked by the director John Ford in the forties and fifties into believing that the entire West looked exclusively like Monument Valley, where he filmed most of his movies. It was a vista that had become emblematic, and I had to admit that my view of the Hole in the Wall, with its bold crimson palisades and the hazy flux of the horizontal landscape, looked a lot like Monument Valley.

The only tracks were indeed the ones that Tuyen and I had made, but they ended at the cemetery—above that, there were no tracks, no broken grass, nothing to indicate that anyone had been up here in ages. I caught my breath. It was still early, and the heat of the day had yet to push us into triple digits. I didn’t want to be up here in a couple of hours, when the sun reached its zenith and Bailey would feel something like the fifth ring of hell.

The union hall was up and to my right, standing alone like a weathered lighthouse amid the storm toss of the rocks.

I leaned on the iron railing surrounding the cemetery, then immediately regretted it, the dark metal feeling as if it had been just pulled from the smelter. I thought of Saizarbitoria at the jungle gym back in Powder Junction and smiled. Maybe the Basquo was learning fast, or was it that I was learning more slowly?

I found myself reading the tombstones, the names, and the single date on seventeen of them, and thought about the survivors walking the path next to the graveyard. I wondered if they saw those dead miners who had been trapped in the dark tunnels beneath my boots.

I thought about the two bottles of water in my shooting bag, which I had left back at the truck, and turned the corner. I’d taken only a dozen steps into the high weeds when I heard the rattling sound, the one that makes westerners freeze and wonder why they didn’t wear their high-top leggings.

As Lonnie Little Bird would say, he was a big one, um hmm, yes, it is so; twelve buttons at least and only about ten feet away. Again contrary to popular belief, you can’t judge a rattler by his buttons since they shed and accumulate a new pod three or four times a year. It didn’t matter, he was big, and neither of us was in a mood for counting.

He was curling in an "S” and backing away from me, the majority of his body as big as my forearm. He had backed himself up against one of the rises on the stone steps, and there was nowhere else to go. He coiled himself tighter and flicked a dark tongue at me as the vibrating tail shook beside his rectangular-shaped head.

“Howdy.” I figured now was as good a time as any to test Henry’s theory. He didn’t respond and stayed compacted, the dark eyes shining like black beads. “You haven’t seen anybody come by here lately, have you?” His head dropped a little as I began raising my hand very, very slowly. “That’s what I thought.”

I could go for my sidearm, but the thought of what the .45 round might do after hitting the stone step gave me more than a little pause, so I continued raising my hand till I got it to the brim of my hat.

The buzzworm’s head dropped a little again, and I froze.

It was my fault really, disturbing him as he’d peacefully sunned himself after indulging in a brunch of field mouse or sagebrush lizard. I could have introduced myself as the sheriff and told him about the important case I was working on, but he didn’t seem interested and I was more than beginning to doubt Henry’s theories on interspecies communication.

I chucked my hat in a tight curveball, low and outside; he hit it in the sweet spot, then disappeared into the rocks that stuck out in shelves to my right.

I took the two steps and picked up my hat as a few rocks kicked loose and joined the scree at the bottom. He probably wasn’t alone. “Hey, there’s an Indian asleep in front of the dry-goods store, why don’t you go bite him?”

I looked at the crown of my hat—there was a scuff and stain where the rattler had hit it. I was about due a new hat, anyway. I tugged the battered palm leaf back on my head and continued up the steps with a more wary eye.

* * *

The union hall was a masterful piece of early-twentieth-century architecture, with castellated cornices and a unique second story and balcony. The structure had weathered the century better than the ones below as few people were willing to make the rest of the hike up the hill—that, and the rattlesnakes. There was still glass in the windows and, although the transom above the doorway was cracked, it still shone with the high gloss of old lead. There was a chain padlocked through the door handles, but one end had pulled loose and hung below its match. The damage was old, and there were no marks in the dust that covered everything.

The paneled door rested heavily on the sill, but I lifted it and pushed in and it swung wide with a grating noise from the old hinges. There was an entryway leading to the offices in the back and a stairwell to the right, nothing looking as if it had been disturbed in as far back as the dust remembered. I walked through the empty offices and listened to the soft squeals of the wide-plank floor.

There was a counter to one side, and a bundle of broken chairs huddled in the corner, but there wasn’t much else. The stairs to the second floor were about a quarter of the way down and ascended to the middle of a dance hall. When I got up there, I noticed that there was a doorway to the balcony overlooking the cliffs and the town on one side; on the other was a stage and a doorway that led to the wings.

I walked around the railing and stood in the blinding glow of the four windows where the balcony’s half-paned door captured the floating motes that hung in the still air. It was stifling on the second floor, and I could feel the sweat streaking down between my shoulder blades. I took off my hat, hung it on the butt of my Colt, and ran my fingers through my hair as I took the three steps to the stage.

There was an old upright piano, which was pushed against the back wall with the bench tucked underneath. I flipped the dust-laden keyboard cover up and touched a chipped F. It was flat but resonated through the silence, raising the thought of ghostly dance steps where there had been no dancers for almost a century.

I thought about the story Lucian had told me that Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had told him and that the sheriff before that had told him. The double murder had occurred on December 31, 1900—New Year’s Eve, just a few seconds after midnight, to be exact. There had been a big dance to celebrate the incoming year, and I guess Maxfield Holinshed hadn’t liked the unidentified woman who was kissing his father to welcome in 1901, so he pulled a gun right there on the dance floor and shot and killed them both. He was hung in the street below just over two weeks later. Lucian said he still had young Max’s journal that recorded the two weeks that had intervened and that someday he’d let me see it, just to raise my hair.

I pulled the bench out, placed my hat on top of the piano, and sat in front of the yellowed-white and grayed-black keys. I tinkered out a one-fingered version of the old cavalry favorite, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

It was horrible, and any ghosts that might’ve been in the place I had certainly driven out. Most of the soundboard was dead, what was left was remarkably out of tune, and I had a feeling that there was more than one mouse nest inside the ignored instrument.

I could always go get my friend the rattlesnake and put him to work.

I plinked away, trying to find the live portion of the board, and thought about Ho Thi Paquet, and how abandoned her body looked alongside the highway tunnel; about Tran Van Tuyen, and the look on his face when I had questioned him at the cemetery; and, finally, about Mai Kim. I thought about the photo in the lining of the purse, about who I had been in Vietnam, and the way Virgil White Buffalo watched the children on the playground across the street from the jail.

Even in the heat of the midday, I could feel the ghosts crowding in around me, their hands on my shoulders, their feet tapping to the nonexistent beat. I felt a cold wave pass over my back, which made me shiver in the hundred degrees, and I stopped playing. The palpable feeling of company was as oppressive as the heat, and I knew someone was watching me.

I placed a hand on the piano bench and turned.

Nothing.

The windows were hazed with the dust of full daylight, the diffused glow stretching across the whitewashed floor like identities. I sat still and listened.

Nothing.

I watched and waited for the motes to swirl in time with the long-dead ghosts of Maxfield Holinshed, his father Horace, and the mysterious woman who had set their lives in desperate motion, but they didn’t. The dust hung there, almost motionless. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw movement, but every time I looked, there was nothing. I laughed at myself and wondered if maybe the rattlesnake had made me jumpy, or if I was just getting scary in my middle age. I stood up and closed the piano, scooted the bench back underneath it, and thought about Cady in the ballroom of the VA, where there was no music, but there was.

I walked to the edge of the stage, considered what my two-hundred-and-now-forty-pound frame might do to the hundred-year-old floor up here and then to the one downstairs when I crashed through this one, and crossed to the doorway and took the steps down.

On the way back into town, Henry told me that the Dunnigans’ turquoise and white Ford had pulled in at the top of the cut-off leading to Bailey but then had backed out and continued up the road. “Probably looking to get lucky.”

I peered at him from above the shooting guard of my sunglasses while I radioed Saizarbitoria to check in on Tuyen. He sounded only mildly disgruntled that he had been watching the green Land Rover outside the Hole in the Wall Motel for the last hour and a half.

Static. “He’s probably taking a nap; I wish I was.”

I keyed the mic. “We’re on our way into town, and he’s supposed to have lunch with us.”

Static. “You want me to get him?”

“No, just meet us at the bar.”

Static. “Roger that; out.”

I looked at Henry again as we drove the winding road back toward Powder Junction. “I don’t think my staff is completely happy with me.” He shrugged as I keyed the mic again. “Base, this is unit one.” I didn’t wait for a response; instead I sang, “I gotta gal and Ruby is her name. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby baby / She don’t love me but I love her just the same. . . .”

Static. “I told you to stop that.”