The Shotgun Arcana Page 10

  “I love you, Harry,” Ringo said, panting. “I missed you.”

  “I love you too,” Harry said, trying to catch his breath. The words were true, but it was still an alien feeling to him to hear them come out of his mouth. “I feel very lost right now, like every step could be a mistake that ends me, ends everything.”

  “It’s going to be okay, Harry,” Ringo said, kissing him, deeply. “It’s going to be all right, as long as we’re together.”

  Harry froze for a second, the words from his dream echoing in the present. Something old and savage and hungry was coming, maybe already here. Its silent, terrible roar bleeding over into his dreams.

  Ringo felt him tense and pulled him closer. “Let it go, Harry,” he said. “I have you. Let it be till tomorrow.”

  Their mouths, their bodies, their hearts became one. They devoured each other, worshiped each other, and healed each other. They collapsed exhausted on the parlor floor, holding one another tight. And for the first time in memory, Harry Pratt slept a deep and, mercifully, dreamless sleep.

  The Moon (Reversed)

  Sheriff Jon Highfather, newly returned from Louisiana, leaned back in his chair and rested his boots on his desk, his hand folded across his chest. He had arrived home to Golgotha this morning and was trying to untangle the events of last night.

  “Okay, now this weird goat-eating thing, you were chasing it across the roof and it was…”

  “Ugly,” Jim said, looking at Mutt. The Indian nodded, looking straight at the sheriff.

  “Make-yer-eyes-itch ugly,” Mutt said.

  Jon slid his feet to the floor and leaned forward, elbows on his desk. He was a lanky, handsome man with sandy hair. The only feature that marred his good looks was the trio of rope burns that looped around his neck. Jon usually covered the scars with a kerchief, but their existence was well known and part of the reason many thought Golgotha was protected by a dead man.

  “And this critter is the reason I have a baby goat, eating the blankets in the clink,” Highfather said, nodding toward the goat kid, who was contentedly munching on the mattress in one of the jail’s cells.

  “Billy,” Jim said. “His name is Billy, Sheriff.”

  “Can we keep him?” Mutt said.

  Highfather sighed. “Can I go back to Creole zombies trying to kill me, please?”

  The iron door groaned, opened, and Clay Turlough entered, carrying a large leather bag.

  “Good to see you, Clay,” Highfather said. “How are you?”

  “Jon,” Clay nodded. “Jim, Mutt.” He paused and watched the goat eating the fabric with gusto. “Whose goat is that destroying your jail cell?”

  “Technically, it’s Harry’s,” Mutt said with a wide smile.

  “I see,” Clay said, blandly. He sat the leather bag on the floor next to Highfather’s desk, opened it and removed an odd, lamp-like apparatus. He pushed aside papers and a few books from Highfather’s desk to set the device flat and even on the surface. Jon grinned and moved to get out of Clay’s way.

  “Make yourself at home, Clay,” Highfather said. “Thanks for helping us on this.”

  The device had a wide, rounded column and above it, almost like a lampshade, was a ring of wide barrel-like protrusions of differing lengths, pointing in all directions. The barrels seemed to be made of metal with glass lenses. The whole contraption reminded Highfather of a magic lantern—a device that could produce images off glass slides, projected onto a screen. He had seen one in a playhouse in Philadelphia shortly after the war.

  “What is that thing, Clay?” Mutt asked.

  “This is my occuscope,” Clay said. He opened a door in the column to reveal a glass cylinder full of amber liquid and eyeballs. Highfather blinked and Mutt leaned in to the sheriff, smiling.

  “I told you I wasn’t joshing,” Mutt whispered. Clay continued his explanation, unperturbed.

  “I got some very good images from the occustereograph in the alley last night and I harvested the eyeballs that provided the best visual representations of the event.…”

  “You mean, ‘murder,’ Mr. Turlough,” Jim said.

  “Yes, yes, Jim,” Clay said, nodding as he raised the inner chamber of the column and struck a match to ignite the projector’s lamp-like wick. “Murder, as you say, and quite a clever one at that. As I was saying, the eyeballs that held the best images are combined here and once I adjust the focus … Jonathan, Mutt, could you please see to the windows?”

  Highfather and Mutt closed the heavy interior wooden shudders and the jail was plunged into deep darkness. Shadows jumped and shivered in the tiny flame of Clay’s match. The wide cloth wick ignited and Clay shook the match to snuff it. He slid the column on the device back into place with a metallic click, hiding the flame. The room was pitch black for a moment, then Clay twisted several knobs, like adjusting a microscope, and suddenly the alleyway of the Dove’s Roost and the horribly mutilated body of Sweet Molly were all around them. On every wall, every surface. Unlike a regular photograph, the eyeballs seemed to capture details to a depth where it felt as if you were there, as if it were happening right now. It was unnerving and miraculous all at the same time.

  “Clay…,” Highfather said, shaking his head in wonder.

  “White man’s magic,” Mutt said, and whistled. “Could make a king’s ransom on this, Clay. They’d line up down the street to see a picture show like this.”

  “Would they?” Clay said, clearly having never considered the prospect of making money off his invention. “I’ve cogitated building a circular room to provide a better immersive experience. The proper chemical hallucinogens would also enhance the verisimilitude considerably, of course. Perhaps dispersed via a nebulizer-like medium.”

  Highfather tried to bring Clay out of his musings and back to the present. The effort was background noise to Jim. The odd amber-colored light of the device played across Jim’s face. Any other time he would have been amazed and delighted at Clay’s wondrous achievement, but now all he could see was the dead woman and the things this unknown beast had done to her.

  Again, Jim saw Lottie, his little sister. Saw her bleeding from a bullet wound he’d inflicted in his mad race to avenge his father’s murder. Molly may have had a brother somewhere, a family. He hated the thought of them ever seeing her like this, as the killer had left her. Jim swallowed hard and turned in his chair, away from Molly’s ghastly surgical grin to Clay.

  “Mr. Turlough,” Jim said, ice in his voice. “Sorry to interrupt, but did you find anything that will help us catch him, sir?”

  Clay, Jon and Mutt all grew silent.

  “I have made some observations on the subject, yes, Jim,” Clay said.

  “Molly,” Jim said. “She ain’t no subject, sir. Her name was Molly James.”

  Clay looked at Jim, the tufts of his wild hair like smoke in the bright lantern light. He nodded. “Yes, of course, Jim,” Clay said. “I think I have.”

  “Well, let’s have it, Clay,” Highfather said. Clay walked away from the occuscope. He began to pace the room as if he were teaching a class, the murder scene painting him at every angle as he walked.

  “I am certainly no lawman,” Clay began. “However, I must confess a certain fanaticism for the romance of the adventures of the late Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional investigator, C. Auguste Dupin. I read and reread ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ many times, and ‘The Purloined Letter’ is one of my favorite pieces of fiction. I had the privilege of meeting Poe in Richmond, Virginia, before his death and assisting him with a most delicate and macabre matter. The man was brilliant.”

  The sheriff and his deputies remained silent, even as Mutt gave Highfather a questioning glance. Clay continued, as he paced.

  “The basis of Dupin’s method of investigating a crime,” Clay said, “was a process Poe called ‘ratiocination.’ In short, it is the use of intellect along with imagination to build the commission of the crime in one’s mind, to even attempt to think as the criminal thinks.
Dupin was such a master at this as to be considered a mind reader.”

  “This is ‘in short’?” Mutt whispered to Highfather.

  “I have not fully had time to assemble all the particulars of the crime in my head,” Clay said, as matter-of-fact as if he were discussing chores in the stable. “However, I have made some observations that may be of help in catching the villain.”

  Clay walked over to the part of the projection that showed the strands of the girl’s insides nailed to the rickety fences.

  “I took the liberty of examining the scene today in full daylight,” Clay said. “These divots on the fence where he missed the nail with the hammer and a closer examination of the nails themselves turned up some interesting bits of data. One: The murderer had planned out what he was going to do to the girl in some detail, including bringing the proper materials and figuring out a way to mask his labors.”

  “How’s that?” Highfather said. “I know this alley and he’s not more than fifteen feet from the Roost’s side door and not more than twenty-five or thirty feet from the front porch. Even drunk and horny as a bull, someone on that porch should have heard all that banging of the hammer.”

  “I found fibers embedded in the divots and tangled in the nails,” Clay said.

  “Fibers?” Jim said.

  “Threads,” Clay responded, “strands of cloth. I think our killer wrapped the head of the hammer in cloth to muffle its noise.”

  “What good does thread do in helping us track him, Clay?” Mutt said.

  “I examined the threads and they were brownish gray and there were some black threads. The material was poor quality and coarse.”

  Highfather snapped his fingers. “A blanket,” he said. “An army blanket. A Union army blanket. They have a black stripe and they are that color exactly.”

  “Very good, Jonathan.” Clay nodded. “I examined some of the materials we have here in Golgotha and came to a similar conclusion.”

  “Well, hell, Clay,” Mutt said. “That don’t exactly narrow it down, army blankets are all over the place, and lots of folks got them.”

  “True,” Clay said. “But few will have one cut up to cover a hammer and fewer still will be originally from back east, so that will help narrow it down.”

  “How can you know that he’s from back east?” Jim asked.

  “The military commissioned the Mission and Pacific Mills of San Francisco to create new blankets for the troops stationed out west,” Clay said. “This was not a California blanket. It came with its owner from back east.”

  “You think he’s a soldier?” Highfather said.

  Clay shook his head. “No,” he said. “He has too fine a shoe. He’s a gentleman. Plus I’d wager most soldiers know their way around a hammer and nail. I’d make inquiries to Mr. Benham, the cobbler, and see if he recalls making or repairing shoes of that size and with similar wear on the sole as the prints we discovered in the alley. You can compare them to the drawings I took of the print details.”

  Jim looked at Mutt. The Indian shook his head. “That is a scary noggin, Clay,” Mutt said. “Glad you don’t have any desire to be murdering anyone. We’d never catch you.”

  Clay scratched his head. “The man who did this is disgusting, Mutt. To have this kind of imagination and use it for … this. Pathetic.”

  “It’s like magic, like a fortune-teller, all this” Jim said.

  “Nonsense, m’boy,” Clay said. “It’s rational thought. Trumps superstition every day of the week.”

  “Anything else, Clay?” Highfather asked.

  “The nails,” Clay said. “He bought them at Bick’s company store up on Argent. Auggie’s store has never carried this fashion of nail. Our local blacksmith, Wayland Smith, didn’t make these nails. Bick’s store has ones just like it in stock presently.

  “The girl had some dust on her,” Clay continued. “Most likely from rock. May have been up near the mines or her killer was. The stars, the moon or numerology may play a part in his madness. He despises women, I’d wager he’ll strike at Dutch gals—prostitutes—again, but in a pinch, any woman will do for him. No woman in Golgotha is safe until he’s caught. Oh, and Jonathan … he’s not going to stop, not until he’s ready to, or has completed whatever ghastly work he is about, or you catch him, or kill him.”

  “Why?” Highfather asked.

  “Because he knows he’s smart enough to keep getting away with it and crazy enough to want to keep the game going with you, with the forces of order. Because if it was me, I’d keep going too.”

  The iron door creaked and blinding light flooded the jail. Everyone who had been in the darkness groaned. A figure swaggered into the dark room, his shadow, cast from the doorway, blotting out much of the washed-out crime scene on the walls.

  “Why in damnation are you people sitting about in the dark?” Dr. Francis Tumblety bellowed. “Queerer than a Virginia fence, I declare!”

  “Oh!” Highfather said. “Come on in, doc. Shut the door, will you. Clay was just showing us something.”

  Tumblety slammed the door with a crash and the darkness swallowed the room again. “Ah, yes,” Tumblety said, “Mr. Turlough and his mechanical amusements. How droll. Surely, Jonathan, you are not relying on children’s toys now to aid you in your endeavors?”

  Tumblety was the closest thing Golgotha had to a doctor, though his credentials were questionable at best. He had coal black hair and a large drooping horseshoe-style mustache. His eyes reminded Highfather of coal someone had spit on, in both color and content.

  He wore a large, frayed and smelly black military-style bang-up with numerous medals and commendations pinned to it. Highfather had tried a few times to discuss the good doctor’s military service and how the odd mishmash of service ribbons from so many different services, nations and, in the case of the War Between the States, sides, all came to be on the doctor’s chest. Tumblety blustered and thundered through such conversations with little information and much noise.

  The doctor took a chair from the wall and dragged it over to sit beside Jim. He placed a filthy-looking hand on Jim’s knee.

  “There’s a good fella, Jim. When you going to come see old Dr. Tumblety for a checkup? A strapping lad your age, in the flower of his golden youth, needs to make sure everything is in proper order, yes?”

  Mutt leaned across Jim and glared at Tumblety. “You take that hand off that boy’s knee right now, doc, or all your equipment is gonna be broke.”

  Tumblety sputtered and began to redden in anger. Highfather tried to head it off as quickly as he could.

  “So, Doctor, you had a chance to take a gander at the girl’s body yet?”

  “I most certainly have not!” Tumblety said. “Why you saw fit to summon a common horse groomer to the scene of the whore’s demise instead of a learned man of letters is beyond me, Jonathan. Why you leave your boy, that savagerous, dirt-worshiping half-breed, in charge of making decisions while you are indisposed is also a mystery to me.”

  “Hey!” Jim said, standing. “Nobody talks that way about Mutt!”

  “Jim,” Highfather said. “Sit down, and hush.” Jim did, but his cheeks and ears were flushed with anger.

  “You see,” Tumblety said. “The savage is a poor influence on this callow youth.”

  Highfather walked around to the front of his desk and put his hand on Clay’s shoulder while Clay was opening windows, deactivating and packing up his invention.

  “Much obliged, Clay. If you think of anything else that might help, I’d like to hear it.”

  “I’m still trying to figure out how he got her there,” Clay said. “I checked on the other side of that fence and there are wagon tracks back there, right up to the fence. I think he came and went by way of a wagon and I don’t think he initially grabbed her in the alley. I think he grabbed her, restrained her and then took her by wagon to the alley to finish his work.”

  “Why the alley?” Jim asked. “It was so close to people.”

  “Exa
ctly, Jim” Clay said. “To show us his craft. I made sketches of the wear on the wagon wheels, Jon. Hopefully we can locate the owner of the conveyance.”

  “I concur with Turlough’s findings in that respect,” Tumblety said. “However, I, too, examined the scene and I surmise that it is much more likely that it was a group of individuals instead of single man.”

  “But we got only one set of prints in the alley,” Jim said.

  “Exactly,” Tumblety said. “One man aided by his fellows into the alleyway to dispose of the slag’s body and then helped back over the fence from the bed of the wagon.”

  “That is plausible,” Clay said. “There’s nothing to dismiss it and it clears up a few bits of confusion. I think the doctor may be on to something there.”

  “So we got a crew of killers, not jist one?” Mutt said. “I don’t care for it.”

  “Me either,” Jim said. “Everything Mr. Turlough said about how this crazy sumbitch is, he sounds like he’s too stuck on himself to have help. Thinks he’s a huckleberry above a persimmon, y’ask me.”

  “Well, there you go,” Tumblety said with a rough guffaw. “The ignorant half-breed and the doe-eyed child think they’ve solved the crime. I don’t envy you your job, Jonathan. I shall be in touch with my results of the examination of the whore’s body. Turlough, be a good fellow and deliver it over to me before you get back to shoveling manure.”

  Tumblety departed without a backward glance.

  “I miss him already,” Mutt said.

  Clay finished packing up his equipment. He headed toward the door with his bag.

  “Few more tests I’d like to run on the girl if you don’t mind, Jon,” Clay said. “After the good doctor there gets ahold of her, she’ll look more like a Thanksgiving turkey than a body.”

  “Take your time, Clay,” Highfather said. “And thanks again. You did good. I may have to read this Poe fellow myself.”

  Clay departed and Highfather sat down again behind his desk and exhaled with a whoosh.