Wild to the Bone (20 page)

“Vera was a pretty girl. Beautiful. She looked very much like you, all that black hair, fine bones, beautiful . . .” She let her voice trail off, then cleared her throat again, sheepishly. “Anyway, one morning, she didn't come down from her room. It was getting late, so I called and called from the bottom of the stairs. No reply. She was a hard worker, Vera, and she never slept past five o'clock. In fact, she often woke me and Dudley up with all her early commotion.”

Loretta stared at Raven, but her eyes were opaque and darting around in their sockets, as though she were seeing not Raven but that morning again in her head.

“Go on,” Raven quietly urged.

Loretta cleared her throat again. She glanced once more at the kitchen door.

There was a thickness in her voice as she continued. “I went up and opened her door with a skeleton key. She wasn't
in
her room. Me and Dudley looked around the place, and I finally found her just out the back door. The poor child had been fetching wood before dawn, for the breakfast fire, when someone hit her with the splitting maul. Split her head right down the middle!”

Loretta's eyes had glazed with tears. Obviously, she'd had feelings for Vera Walking Thunder.

“I'm sorry, Loretta,” Raven said, patting her hand. “Do you know who killed her?”

Loretta shook her head. “Not for certain sure, no.”

“Any
idea
who killed her?”

Again, Loretta glanced at the kitchen door. “Oh, I've got my theories, but I think I'll keep them to myself for now.” She added in a whisper, “Dudley doesn't like me goin' on about it. Such talk is right bad for Spotted Horse.”

Raven took a bite of food, chewed for a time, and then asked, “What makes you think there's a connection between Vera's murder and the stagecoach robberies, Loretta?”

Loretta was resting her chin in her hand, staring thoughtfully down at the table. She nervously tapped the fingers of her other hand on the table. “I'm not sure. Maybe I've spoke out of turn. It's just a feeling I have.”

“Come on, Loretta,” Raven urged, frowning. “This could be important.”

As she'd been speaking, she'd heard the hotel's front door open. Boots thumped and scuffed in the lobby. Loretta stretched her gaze to the lobby and smiled brightly as she rose from her chair. “Gentlemen, welcome,” she intoned, beckoning. “Come in, please, have a seat anywhere you please. I'll be right back with the coffee pot!”

Raven glanced behind her to see three men in shabby trail gear walk into the dining room, doffing their hats and looking around sheepishly. They walked past Raven and sat down at a near table, and then Loretta got busy, serving the men coffee and taking their breakfast orders.

Raven doubted that the woman was too busy with only three customers to continue their discussion, but Loretta made herself scarce after that.

So Raven finished her breakfast, ignoring the lusty glances of the three men, who had the hangdog, hungry look of grub-line riders or out-of-work cowboys, and then finished her coffee, tossing some coins onto the table.

She headed outside as the sun climbed, spreading its buttery light across the town. Heading toward the settlement's heart, Raven considered the murdered Indian girl and wondered how many more secrets she could kick up if she put her mind to it.

And she wondered if such secrets would be more symptoms of the sinister forces at work here in Spotted Horse.

23

T
he wind had picked up
just after Haskell and Dulcy Stoveville started up the trail from the canyon in which Dulcy had tried to perforate Bear's hide with lead.

It hadn't picked up enough that it was moaning and blowing thick waves of eye-stinging dust, but there was enough dust in the air that from forty yards away, the Stoveville ranch looked like an insignificant gray-brown blotch nestled in a broad bowl ringed with low stark brown hills. It appeared little larger than a horseshoe swallowed up by a vast, parched, dun-colored range that in turn was dwarfed by the sky.

As Haskell drew the wagon up to the log portal straddling the trail, at the edge of the ranch yard, he had to squint to make out the faded letters that had been burned into the gray-weathered crossbar: “STOVEVILLE CIRCLE-T.”

To each side of the words, a circle with a T in it was barely visible. The portal listed precariously to the left, as the base of the upright on that side had rotted, and the whole affair squawked and chirped in the wind. It would fall soon, and Bear hoped no one was under it when it did.

The black horse pulling the livery wagon shared the sentiment. The horse balked at going under the crossbar, but finally, shaking the reins against the frightened beast's back, Bear managed to urge the horse through, behind Dulcy's steeldust mare.

The cabin was a story-and-a-half, shake-roofed affair with a narrow front stoop. An iron triangle clanged lightly, sporadically, beneath the stoop's sagging roof. A washtub hung from the front wall, to the left of the Z-frame door.

The Stoveville brand had been burned into a board hanging beneath the porch roof, a sad remnant of the obviously once-high hopes for the forlorn-looking place. To the left of the cabin was a chicken coop with a large pen enclosed in chicken wire, with a ramp leading up into the stable-sized shed. Five or six chickens—Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds—pecked among the feeding troughs and watering tins, the wind rippling their feathers.

A log barn with an
adobe
-brick side shed and a corral faced the cabin on its right. Three horses milled inside the corral, trotting friskily over to the front gate when they saw Dulcy and the steeldust enter the yard. The mare whinnied a greeting at the three in the corral, and a tricolor paint responded in kind, shaking its head and stomping its front hooves, its brown mane blowing in the wind.

The wind kicked up dust and the smell of horse and chicken shit and swirled it along with several tumbleweeds and bits of paper trash and a few rusty tins blown off a trash heap. The wind didn't appear to bother Dulcy overmuch. She hipped around in her saddle and, holding her hat down on her head, yelled, “Drive around back! Pop and Mama are buried behind the privy. That's where we'll plant Danny. I'll fetch some shovels!”

With that, she turned forward as the mare approached the thin trapezoid of shade leaning out from the barn.

Haskell had stopped the wagon in the middle of the yard, near the windmill that was the centerpiece of the dusty, worn-out place, its blades spinning. He looked around cautiously, trying to make sure that no one was bearing down on him with a rifle. His suspicions about the possibility of Miss Stoveville being part of the gang robbing the stagecoaches hadn't been assuaged by seeing how well she worked a Winchester carbine.

He could see no obvious signs of a bushwhack. They appeared to be alone here. Just the same, he'd keep his eyes and ears skinned, and he wouldn't let the pretty, tough, rifle-handy Miss Stoveville out of his sight.

He whipped the black around behind the cabin and the privy next to it. On the other side of a dry wash sheathed in thin willows and cottonwoods that were being thrashed by the wind, a shelf of barren land rose. Haskell spied two wooden crosses sprouting amid the rocks and prickly pear of the rise. It was a sad, barren stretch of ground, but then, none of eastern Wyoming looked any better.

It was as good a place as any to plant young Danny.

Bear put the black on across the wash and up a ragged two-track trail to the top of the shelf. As he did, he saw two large, dark shapes sitting in a lightning-topped and blackened pine tree about fifty yards off to the right, at the east edge of the shelf. Another bird—a buzzard, it appeared—winged up from below to sit on another spindly branch and stare toward Haskell and his grisly cargo.

“What the hell?” Bear grumbled as he stopped the wagon to the right of the graves, scowling toward the carrion eaters. “What do you fellas do, just sit over there waitin' to be fed?”

Hoof thuds rose behind him. He jerked with a start and reached for the Winchester that he'd laid across the seat beside him. He glanced over his shoulder.

Dulcy was riding up the side of the shelf. For a moment, Haskell thought she was wielding a rifle, but then, as she approached, frowning at him skeptically, he saw she was holding two shovels tucked under her left arm.

Sheepishly, Haskell set the rifle back on the seat and jumped down from the wagon.

“Kinda jumpy, aren't ya?” Dulcy said, tossing both shovels down at his feet and then leaping off the mare's back.

She ground-reined her horse and picked up one of the shovels, giving him another skeptical glance. Ignoring the look, Haskell retrieved the second shovel. The girl looked around and then heeled the blade of her spade into the ground near the two other mounds, saying, “I reckon this is as good a place as another.”

Haskell heeled his own shovel into the ground and began prying up the flinty, gray soil and tossing it to his left, where the girl had tossed her own first shovelful. As they worked, the wind blowing their hair and nibbling their hat brims, blowing the mare's tail up under its belly from behind, Haskell glanced curiously at Dulcy, and then he said, trying to sound casual, “I sure am sorry about shootin' your brother, Miss Dulcy. I sure wish I hadn't had to do that.”

“Yeah, well, you did, and there's no use cryin' over it,” she said, grunting as she pulled up another gravelly shovelful of dirt and tossed it aside.

He glanced at the other four graves. “You're awfully young to have lost your whole family,” he said. “To have to live out here all by yourself.”

She looked at him from beneath her brows, which were one shade darker blond than her hair. “We're not gonna start sobbing to that old tune again, are we?”

“All right, all right.”

“Best get him planted before the storm hits. I can smell rain in this wind, not that we don't need it. If I don't get him in the ground today, he's gonna start gettin' ripe. We had to hold off on plantin' Pop on account of a rainstorm, a real gully washer, and he started swellin' up like a tick and smellin' like an old deer carcass some coyote left in a draw.”

“Christ!” Bear was genuinely astonished.

She blinked. “What?”

Haskell chuckled and continued shoveling. “Nothin'.”

After a time, because she didn't seem too distraught to talk about her brother, he gently asked, “So what do you think Danny was doing at that stage relay station, Miss Dulcy?”

“I reckon you'd know better than I would,” she said cheekily. “Since you were there, and you're the one, so you claim, he shot at.”

Haskell stopped and leaned on his shovel. “Miss Dulcy, do you really think I'd kill your brother in cold blood and then rent a wagon in town to haul him all the way out here so you could plant him proper?”

Dulcy also stopped shoveling. “Oh, don't get your neck in a hump. No, I don't think that. I reckon I believe it how you told it, because . . .” She let her voice trail off teasingly, holding her shovel across her thighs and staring down the bench toward the ranch yard.

Haskell didn't want to push too hard, but he couldn't help himself. “Because . . .”

“Ah, hell, I reckon since you're a stranger around here, I can tell you. As long as you promise not to tell anyone.”

“I promise.”

Dulcy glanced at the wagon. The wind had nibbled part of the blanket away from the boy's body, revealing a suntanned cheek and one half-open eye. “I hadn't seen my brother in a month of Sundays, Mr. Haskell.”

“Bear.”

“I think Danny had come to no good, Bear. He got bored and lonely around here, livin' with just his sister and her chickens and horses, without much money comin' in. He left here a few months back, only stopped in from time to time, mostly to fill his grub sack. He wouldn't tell me so I'd know for sure, but I think he started runnin' with a bad bunch.”

“How bad a bunch?”

“I don't know. I never seen 'em.”

“Could they be the bunch that's been robbin' Shirley's stage line, Miss Dulcy?”

She looked at him gravely, the wind tossing her hair around her cheeks. One lock pasted itself against her left eye, and she lifted her hand to tuck it up under her hat. “Yeah, I think they might be.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because one time not too long ago, Danny came home with one other man, older than him, a man by the name of Dewey Griggs. Griggs once had a ranch out west of here, but rustlers drove him out. It was pretty common knowledge he took to ridin' the owlhoot trail after that himself. Griggs had been wounded, not bad but bad enough to need sewin' up, and Danny knew if I'm good at anything, it's sewing up wounds. You get enough of 'em out on a ranch, and sometimes you gotta make do yourself.”

“And you think this Griggs is part of the gang?”

“I wouldn't know for sure. He's a tight-lipped, flat-eyed son of a bitch. Ugly scars on his face from a run-in with a barbed-wire fence when he was a boy. But if there's a gang around here robbin' stagecoaches, you can bet Griggs is part of it.” Dulcy stared somberly toward the wagon. “I'm just glad Mama and Pop aren't around to see what become of Danny. He was a gentle boy, once. A good, kind, caring kid. We didn't fight like most sisters and brothers.” She shook her head, pressing her lips together. “I reckon this place just got to him, though. It gets to everybody, sooner or later.”

“Hasn't gotten to you so far, though,” Haskell said, trying not to sound probing but glancing up at her as he resumed digging.

She stared at him, and there was a sparkle in her green eyes. “You think maybe I'm one o' them gals leadin' up the gang, do you, Bear?”

“I wouldn't know, Dulcy.” Haskell tossed the dirt aside and stopped digging to return her look. “Are you?”

She held his gaze, that devilish sparkle remaining in her eyes. “I reckon that's for me to know and for you to find out.” She paused, canted her head slightly. “Who are you, a lawman?”

“Nope, just driftin' through.”

“Mighty curious for a drifter.”

“A drifter can be curious. Sometimes that's about all a drifter has is his curiosity.”

She grinned. “You're a lawman, ain't ya? Come on!”

“I ain't no lawman.”

“If you tell me, I'll make it worth your while.”

Haskell looked at her again, shocked. “And how might that be, Miss Dulcy?”

“You'll see.” She continued digging, holding his gaze with an alluring one of her own. Just then, thunder rumbled in the west, and she glanced behind her at the large, dark cloud mass that the wind was shepherding toward them. “In the meantime, we'd best get Danny in the ground before the storm hits.”

She let her eyes flick across Bear's chest and down past his belly to his crotch. Then she hooked her boot over the shovel and rammed the blade into the earth once more.

Haskell felt heavy in the loins as he resumed digging. One of the buzzards gave a raucous, warbling call and swooped over them, its massive wings making a whooshing sound. The bird banked, flew back over the wagon, and then dropped down behind the tree in which it had been perched. It appeared to have a bloody scrap of something caught on its colorless beak.

The other carrion eaters also gave raucous cries, took off from their shuddering branches, and winged down to where the first one had dropped over the side of the shelf.

“Wonder what in hell they got over there,” Haskell muttered, staring after the birds as he worked.

“If there's anything this country still feeds,” Dulcy said, grunting as she stabbed the soil again, “it's buzzards.”