A Jensen Family Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  “I hope there was no trouble,” Mariana murmured.

  “Not yet.”

  Sally was losing her patience. She said, “Smoke, you’ve got to tell me what’s wrong.”

  Smoke nodded toward Mariana and said, “Señora Aguilar didn’t tell you?”

  “No. She said something about a land grant—”

  It was rare for Smoke to interrupt Sally when she was talking, but he did so now. “It’s an old Spanish land grant,” he said, “and according to what Aguilar claims, it means this whole valley is his—including the Sugarloaf.”

  Sally drew in a sharp, surprised breath. She looked again at Mariana and asked, “Is this true?”

  The young woman still wore that vacuous smile as she said, “I do not know the details. Sebastian handles all our affairs, including the land we own and where we shall live.”

  “He doesn’t own the Sugarloaf, or anything else around here,” Smoke snapped.

  “That is for the authorities to decide, is it not?”

  Sally saw Smoke bite back the sharp answer that almost escaped from him. Instead, he said, “I bear you no ill will, Doña Mariana, but I’m not going to let your husband get away with this. You can tell him, if you want, that all of you would be better off going back where you came from.”

  She shook her head and said, “We cannot do this, Señor Jensen. Sebastian says this valley will be our home from now on.”

  “I’ll have something to say about—”

  Sally stopped her husband by putting her hand on his arm and saying, “Smoke, I think we should go.”

  He got control of himself again and asked, “Have you finished with your shopping?”

  “Enough. Mr. Goldstein’s clerks have already loaded some things on the buggy. Anything else I need, we can send Pearlie or Cal or one of the other men to get it in a day or two.”

  “All right.” Smoke took her arm and nodded again to Mariana, but he didn’t touch his hat brim this time. “Señora Aguilar.”

  “Señor Jensen.” Mariana beamed sweetly. “And, Sally, if I may you call you that. I will see you again soon.”

  “I reckon you can count on that,” Smoke said as he and Sally left the store.

  CHAPTER 11

  The MacMurphy Sanitarium

  Without being too obvious about it, Doc Monday kept an eye on Bill Williams—or William Malkin, if that was really his name—at supper and then during the evening, when some of the patients sat in the parlor. Many of them weren’t healthy enough to come eat in the dining room or to visit with the other patients, of course.

  Doc believed that his skill at reading other people, honed by countless hours of sitting at a poker table, allowed him to tell what they were thinking. Unless Williams was a better cardplayer than he had ever demonstrated during the games, he was his usual grumpy self, not bothered by anything in particular, just grouchy on general principles.

  Mrs. Bennett stayed in her room and took her supper there, Doc noted. That was probably a good thing. She might not have been able to keep from staring at Williams in horror, and that would have just aggravated the situation.

  As the patients settled down in the parlor, Doc allowed his curiosity to get the better of him. On a table in the corner was a big stack of newspapers that went back several months. Ever since he had seen those letters and the gun with the name Malkin on it, he’d had a nagging feeling in the back of his mind that something was familiar about it. As he walked toward the table, one of the nurses, a friendly young woman named Jessica, stopped him and asked, “Do you need anything, Mr. Monday?”

  “No, I don’t believe so,” Doc said. Then a thought occurred to him. “Oh, wait. Perhaps you can confirm a recollection for me, my dear. How long has Mr. Williams been a patient here?”

  “Mr. Williams?” Jessica frowned. She looked across the room to where Williams was sitting and talking with Hubert Guinn. “Let’s see . . . this is the middle of December, and I believe he was admitted as a patient in August . . . so around four months, I’d say.”

  Doc nodded and said, “I was thinking the same thing, but I wasn’t sure. Thank you, Nurse.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said easily. “Just a little game I play with myself. I try to remember how long everyone has been here. Sometimes I put them in order in my head. You know, just a silly thing to pass the time.”

  She smiled and said, “You’ve been here longer than I have, I know that.”

  “I’ve been here longer than most,” Doc admitted with a rueful smile on his face. “I’m sure Dr. MacMurphy is surprised. He probably expected me to die a long time ago.”

  Jessica’s eyes widened, and she exclaimed, “Goodness, don’t say things like that, Mr. Monday!”

  “Don’t worry. I plan to be around for a while yet.”

  Still giving him a bit of a worried look, she moved on, and he continued to the table where the newspapers were stacked. Williams had been here at the sanitarium for four months, and the papers were cleared out usually every five or six months. Actually, Doc couldn’t recall the last time any of them had been thrown away. So it was possible that if there was anything in one of them about a man named William Malkin, it was still here.

  Of course, his memory could be playing tricks on him. These days, he no longer trusted it as completely as he once had....

  He got a handful of papers from the bottom of the stack and was about to sit down in a comfortable armchair with them when Banjo bustled up to him and asked, “Are you up for another game of cards, Doc?”

  Doc hated to disappoint his friend, but he shook his head.

  “Not tonight, I don’t think, Banjo,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m rather tired. I thought I’d look at these old papers for a bit and then turn in.”

  Banjo’s face fell. He said, “All right, if you say so.”

  “We’ll play again tomorrow. I give you my word on that.”

  “Sure.” Banjo summoned up a smile. “Don’t you go dyin’ in the middle of the night, before we have a chance to win some of our nickels and dimes back from you.”

  Doc chuckled and said, “That’s definitely not my plan.”

  Banjo wandered off. Doc sat down and checked the dates on the newspapers. He had several from August in the stack and started with them.

  He went through their pages story by story, looking for any mention of someone named Malkin.

  Earlier, he had tried to figure out why the name seemed familiar to him, and the question had vexed him so much, he’d had trouble concentrating on his pirate book, which was called Treasure Island. Stevenson, the author, was a vivid, exciting writer, but Doc had just been too distracted to enjoy the yarn the man had spun.

  Not finding anything in the newspapers, he set them aside and pulled another handful from the stack. They had been pawed through so many times, they weren’t in any real order. He didn’t find any issues from August in this bunch.

  I’ll just have to dig deeper, he told himself.

  Finally, after half an hour or so, in an early August issue of the Rocky Mountain News, something caught his eye. It was the name Malkin, just as he had thought he might find. He spotted it first in a headline.

  What he saw in that headline made Doc sit up straighter and tighten his jaw.

  TRAIN ROBBERY NETS

  MALKIN GANG $50,000.

  As he sat there reading the story, Doc recalled seeing it before, when the newspaper first arrived at the sanitarium. He didn’t remember any of the details, but they came back to him as his eyes followed the densely packed lines of type.

  The holdup had taken place on the night of August 1. Seven desperadoes, led by the notorious outlaw Bill Malkin, had taken over an isolated flag-stop station in western Kansas. They had pistol-whipped and knocked unconscious the station’s night manager, who was the only one there on that rainy evening. Then one of the bandits had donned the stationman’s uniform and raised the flag to stop the westbound that was due through
shortly.

  That train had fifty thousand dollars in the safe in its express car, and it was thought that the Malkin gang had an inside man who worked for either the railroad or the express company, otherwise they wouldn’t have known about the money shipment. Under the circumstances, the engineer shouldn’t have stopped, since it was rather suspicious that the flag would be up on a night like that, out in the middle of nowhere.

  But the presence of a man who apparently was the station manager on the platform must have lulled any suspicions, because he did stop. The fake stationmaster and another of the outlaws stormed into the cab and held their guns on the engineer and the fireman, while the other five concentrated their efforts on getting into the express car. A stick of dynamite blew the door open. The express messenger put up a fight, loosing both barrels of his shotgun at the outlaws, but even though a couple of them suffered minor wounds, the lead that the gang poured into the car riddled the unfortunate messenger until his corpse barely looked human.

  After that, the outlaws opened the safe somehow, without blowing the door off and risking the destruction of the cash the safe held. One of them, a man named Lane Thackery, was known to be an expert safecracker, so the assumption was that he was able to open the door. They took the money, piled onto their horses, which were tied nearby, and vanished into the rainy night.

  The stationmaster died from the blows to his head, but not before regaining consciousness long enough to identify Bill Malkin and his gang as the perpetrators of the robbery and killings.

  Doc’s heart was beating faster by the time he finished reading the story. Was it possible that “Bill Williams” was really Bill Malkin, the outlaw? Who would ever think to look for a train robber in a sanitarium?

  Sensing that there was still more to the story, Doc returned to the newspapers and searched through them until he found an issue from several days after the one that had the story of the train holdup.

  That one contained a story about how a posse of railroad detectives and deputy U.S. marshals had caught up to the Malkin gang at a road ranch frequented by owlhoots just over the border in eastern Colorado. A fierce gun battle between the two groups had left five of the outlaws dead. The other two, the leader Bill Malkin and his subordinate Lane Thackery, had gotten away.

  The posse had failed to recover the stolen fifty thousand dollars.

  Doc thought furiously. Had anyone else become a patient at the sanitarium about the same time as Williams? Was it possible that the outlaw Thackery was hiding out here, too?

  After a moment of searching his memory, Doc knew that wasn’t the case. No one else had shown up around that time. And as far as Doc could recall, the only patients admitted since Williams had all been women. Wherever Lane Thackery was, it wasn’t the MacMurphy Sanitarium.

  But that still left “Bill Williams.” Poor Mrs. Bennett, no matter how frightened she was, had no idea just how close she might have come to death. If Williams was Malkin, and if Malkin suspected that his masquerade had been compromised, there was no telling what he might do in order to conceal his secret. He had a hangman’s noose waiting for him if he was caught, so probably there were no lengths he wouldn’t go to.

  Thank goodness, thought Doc, that Malkin had no idea he had been in his room and had seen the gun and the letters.

  * * *

  Doc spent a while pondering his next move. He couldn’t very well march up to Williams and demand to know if he was really Bill Malkin, the outlaw and murderer. And if he told Dr. MacMurphy what he suspected, there was a good chance the doctor would believe the whole thing was just some flight of fancy. MacMurphy was a good man, kind and caring to his patients, but he was stolid and almost completely lacking in imagination, bless his heart.

  No, thought Doc, his best course of action might be to write a letter to the railroad. They had detectives to investigate such cases, and if they showed up here and started poking into Bill Williams’s past, Doc was confident they would uncover the truth.

  Best of all, he could write that letter without arousing any suspicion on Williams’s part. Williams wouldn’t even know about it.

  During the evening, Williams played checkers with Banjo and Hubert, the three of them alternating, with one man sitting out each game. Williams seemed to be in a pretty good mood, for him. It boggled Doc’s mind that the man sitting on the other side of the parlor, playing checkers with those two old men, was really a train robber and murderer.

  And yet, looking at Williams’s hard-featured face and his deepset eyes, Doc had no trouble believing it....

  Tiredness crept up on Doc, as it always did. When he tried to stand up from the armchair so he could return to his room and go to bed, he had to push hard with both arms to lift himself to his feet. His legs just didn’t want to support him very well. The muscles were too stiff. When he finally made it upright and turned his head, something in his neck crackled loudly. It sounded loud to him, anyway.

  No one had ever said that getting old was easy, he reminded himself.

  Back in his room, he put on his nightshirt and considered trying to read some more of Mr. Stevenson’s book. With everything he had discovered this evening, though, he knew he would be even less able to concentrate on fiction. Figuring he might as well try to go to sleep, he blew out the lamp and crawled into bed.

  He dozed off surprisingly easily. Weariness won out over racing thoughts for a change. As he lay there in the dark, he slipped deeper into sleep.

  So he never heard the faint click as his door opened, had no idea anyone was in his room until big, strong hands closed hard around his neck, a heavy weight leaned over and into him, and a voice rasped in a harsh whisper, “You should’ve kept your nose outta my business, you damned old fool. Now you’ve got to die.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Denver

  Preacher’s mind could hardly credit what Adelaide DuBois had just told him. Surely he hadn’t heard her correctly. He asked her, “Did you just say that your own grandson is tryin’ to kill you?”

  Adelaide nodded and said, “That’s right.” A tiny tear trickled from the corner of her eye and trickled down her weathered cheek.

  “I didn’t know you and ol’ Polecat had any young’uns, let alone grandkids.”

  “We had two children,” she said. “A boy and a girl. The girl, I’m sad to say, didn’t survive childhood. She died of a fever when she was six years old.”

  “Sorry,” Preacher murmured.

  “The boy grew to be a fine young man, though. His name was Phillip. He married and had a son of his own. They named him George. Then Phillip and his wife both passed away at a fairly young age, too, so Pierre and I were left to raise George for a few years, until he was grown. I always believed that he . . . he was devoted to us, as he was to his own parents.” Adelaide sighed. “But money has a way of changing things, doesn’t it?”

  “Money?” Preacher repeated.

  “Pierre did well working for the fur company, and then later, when that business was no longer successful, he was involved in several other ventures that proved lucrative. He left me . . . financially comfortable. . . when he died.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that, I guess. This grandson of yours, George, I reckon he’s got his eye on that money?”

  Adelaide lowered her eyes to the table, as if embarrassed, and said, “After he left our home, I’m afraid he forgot everything we tried to teach him. He began drinking and gambling and associating with all sorts of unsavory people. Pierre passed away during this time, as well. I’ve always suspected that he worried himself to death over George. I . . . I think if he had still been alive, he could have taken George in hand and straightened him out. I tried, Lord knows I tried my best, but I just never seemed able to get through to him.”

  “I could have a good long talk with the youngster,” Preacher offered.

  Adelaide shook her head and said, “I’m afraid it’s gone too far for that. George came to me a few months ago and asked for money. He didn’t even
make any pretense about intending to pay it back. He wanted me to just give it to him outright. He said he needs it very badly. And then he said . . . he said he intends to get it, one way or another.”

  She closed her eyes as a shudder ran through her.

  “Why, that dang young scoundrel!” Preacher said. “I’ll do more’n have a talk with him. I’ll give him a good hard kick in the hindquarters, and if that don’t do the trick—”

  Adelaide caught hold of Preacher’s hand and squeezed it again.

  “No, no, I don’t want him hurt,” she said quickly. “No matter what else happens, he’s still my grandson.”

  Preacher reined in the anger he felt and asked her, “What was that about him tryin’ to kill you?”

  “After that conversation when it seemed like he was trying to threaten me, I made him leave the house.”

  “Dang right. You still live in St. Louis?”

  “Yes. Not in the little cabin where you visited us all those years ago. I doubt if it’s even still standing. We moved to a better place while Pierre was still working for the fur company.” Adelaide took a deep breath and then went on, “I was upset by that confrontation—of course, anyone would have been—but I didn’t really believe that George would ever try to harm me. The idea of the threat being real just . . . just never occurred to me. But then, a few days later, as I was walking along the street, a wagon team nearly ran over me. I barely got out of the way in time.”

  Preacher stared at her.

  “You ain’t sayin’ the fella drivin’ the wagon was your grandson, George?”

  “No,” Adelaide replied with a shake of her head. “At least I don’t believe so. To be honest, I never really got a good look at the man. He just whipped the team and kept going. He never even slowed down.”

  Preacher rubbed the bristles on his chin and frowned in thought for a moment, then said, “You know, some fellas drive like a bat outta hell. That’s just the way they are.” “That’s what I thought, too . . . at first. But then there was another close call . . . I was shopping when a heavy crate fell from a second-story window and nearly landed on me as I passed by . . . Just another accident, one might call it. And then . . . and then . . .” She had to take another deep, shuddery breath. “Someone took a shot at me. I was inside the house, near a window, and the glass shattered suddenly and I felt something go past my head. It struck the wall opposite the window. The constable came and dug it out and said that it was a rifle ball.”