by M. K. Wren
“That’s what it was all about, this town.” Delia was coming in through the louvered doors on the other side of the fireplace. She crossed to him, nodding at the rock. “Ruby silver. I guess the proper name is pyrargyrite or proustite.”
“This is silver ore?”
“Yes. That’s what people have been digging for and fighting over in these mountains since the Civil War.”
“It looks harmless enough.” He put the rock back in its place, then noting Delia’s eye straying to the photographs propped on the shelf, he asked, “Your family?”
“Yes. Gets to be quite a gallery at my age. That’s Tom junior, our oldest boy.” She laughed at herself. “Well, hardly a boy. Losing his hair and getting a middle-aged spread. Growing up with rocks and mines rubbed off on him; he studied geology, and now he’s in Washington, D.C., with the U. S. Geological Survey. These are his daughters, Karen and Lisa, and his son, Doug; he’s at Boston University. This is our daughter Kathleen with her husband, Jim Spalding. He runs a farm down on the Snake near Nyssa. This is their son, Peter, and Hugh, my great-grandchild. Now, that’ll make you feel your years. And here’s Kathy and Jim’s daughter, Pam; she teaches fifth grade in Boise. Isn’t she pretty? The image of Clare when she was young.” Delia paused then, looking anxiously toward the door.
When she met Conan’s questioning look, she shrugged and said, “I was just wondering about Clare. I don’t like to go on about my kids if she’s around to hear. It’s…sort of a tender subject with her.”
“Tender? May I ask why?”
Delia gave him an oblique glance. “Well, I suppose you’ll have to ask a lot of questions about things that might otherwise be private. It’s tender because Clare couldn’t have children. She had three miscarriages, and the last one nearly killed her. She always thought it would’ve made a lot of difference if she and Lee had kids. Anyway, this is a more interesting gallery up here.” She looked up at the photographs on the wall above the shelves, most mounted behind glass in narrow, black frames. “Some of these are the only copies left.”
The photographs were all old, all depicting subjects related to Silver City and mining. There were several views of the entire town taken at different periods, chronicling its rise and fall. The oldest was dated 1868.
“Now, this one—” Delia pointed to a photograph showing a group of men posing in four ranks before a wooden building. “This was the crew of the Trade Dollar mine, and this man here in the back row, that’s Big Bill Haywood.”
Conan raised an eyebrow. “Of Wobbly fame?”
“That’s him. Got his start right here in Silver back in the nineties. These are some of the mills. Lord, the noise they made, and we never thought a thing about it. That’s the Ida Elmore, the Potosi, the Morning Star, and this is the Lang-Star mill.”
Conan leaned closer to examine that one. Like the others, it was an immense building, with long, angled sweeps of roof that gave it an oddly contemporary aspect.
“If you look out the window, you can see where it was,” Delia said, going to the double window and lifting one sash. Then, when Conan joined her: “There beyond the church on the hill, that pile of tailings—the mill was right there.” Conan looked out at the mountainous drift of white rock where chaparral and mountain mahogany found a foothold now and tried to imagine the busy, rumbling mill there.
“How far away is it, Delia?”
“Oh, about a quarter of a mile. Used to be a good road up to it.”
There was little between the house and the mine site now except gullied, sagebrush-covered slopes and a few widely separated houses. One, a small frame house with a steep roof, was only a hundred yards away. Conan’s attention was called to it by the new Jeep Cherokee parked beside it.
He asked, “Is that Dex Adler’s house?”
“Yes. I think he keeps it mainly out of sentiment. That was the house he and Irene had when they lived here. Dex lives in Boise now. He’s in real estate.”
“Irene is his wife?”
“Was. She died—oh, I guess it was in forty-two. So much happened that year. The mill went bankrupt, and we lost our youngest boy, Howard. Polio. Nobody seems to remember now about polio, how terrifying it was.”
Conan hesitated, then, “I guess people have too many other terrors to deal with. When did Dex live here?”
“Well, he came in nineteen thirty-five, I think, and moved to Boise in forty-two. He was the bookkeeper for Lang-Star.”
“So, he was here at the time of Lee’s murder. Delia, why is he so opposed to an investigation?”
She rested her hands on the sill, frowning. “Oh, I guess he thinks the past is best left alone. Besides, that was an unhappy time for him. Maybe he just doesn’t want to be reminded of it. By the way, that next house—the one with the porch across the front—that was Clare and Lee’s.”
The house she pointed out was a short distance from Adler’s and on the same level on the hillside. Delia added, “Clare moved in with us after Lee disappeared, but it was ten years before Tom and I could talk her into selling the house. She kept waiting for Lee to come home. In fact, she still—” Delia broke off suddenly, and a moment later Conan understood why. Clare came into the room carrying a tray with glasses and a pitcher of iced tea. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat tied under her chin with a pink sash, and her full skirt fluttered as she swept in, smiling, and put the tray down on a table by the couch.
“I thought you might like some more tea. Oh, dear, it is so warm today. More like August than June.”
Delia went to the tray and began filling the glasses. “Thank you, Clare. Well, just remember, the sun’s good for the garden. Tea, Conan?”
“Yes, thanks.” He crossed to her to take the glass, then when Clare sank into one of the armchairs, making ineffectual fanning motions with one hand, and Delia seated herself on the couch, he went to the other armchair. There was a brief, uncomfortable silence in which the only sound was the tinkling of ice in their glasses.
Then Clare, smiling brightly, asked, “What’s your sign, Mr. Flagg?”
He lowered his glass, frowning. “My…sign?”
“I’m a Leo. A child of the sun. Slow to anger, but even slower to forgive. What’s your birth date?”
“June fifth.”
“Gemini. The sign of duality. But Leos and Geminis are usually attuned. Or is that Leos and Aries?” She frowned over that, then with a negligent shrug, “My birthday is July twenty-sixth. I’ll be…” A short laugh that was almost a giggle. “Well, that would be telling. July twenty-sixth is our anniversary, too. A summer wedding. It seemed like everything was in bloom—the wild roses and lilacs. Oh, I hope Lee doesn’t forget this year.…”
Conan was startled, wondering if he had heard her correctly, and Delia took a deep breath, then reached out for Clare’s hand. “Lee can’t remember, Clare. You know that.”
“What?” Two lines between her eyebrows deepened as she looked at Delia, then her chin came up and she laughed. “Don’t worry about Lee. He’ll come back. He always has.”
“No, he won’t come back.” Delia’s tone was still gentle. “Lee is…he’s passed on, Clare. You know that.”
Clare hesitated, then replied with a hint of petulance, “Of course I remember. I just meant…well, it doesn’t matter.”
The room was occupied by another silence, far longer than the last, and again it was Clare who broke it. “Well, I suppose I should be on my way.”
Delia looked at her with a faint frown. “Are you going out? I’m glad you put on your hat. The sun can be so bad up here in the mountains.”
“I thought I’d find some dandelion greens. I saw some yesterday on Florida.” She rose and put her glass on the tray. “And there was some miner’s lettuce down on Jordan Creek below the cemetery. My basket—where did I put my basket?”
“You probably left it in the kitchen, dear.”
“Oh, yes. Well, it was so nice to meet you, Mr. Flagg. Are you staying for supper?”
For a moment Conan was at a loss, then he managed a smile. “Yes, I’ll be staying for supper.”
“How nice. Well, I must be going.”
Delia called after her, “Don’t stay too late. Do you have your watch?” But Clare was already out the door. Delia sighed and turned to Conan. Finally, as if she were answering a question, she said, “Clare’s always been a little flighty and vague, but when Lee ran off—I mean, when it seemed like he’d run off with Amanda Count, I think it was too much for her. She’s never been the same.”
Conan sipped at his tea, black and sweet, and he didn’t find it difficult to imagine Clare in the wake of that disaster. It seemed to cling to her, an unseen shadow, even now. “She was very much in love with Lee, apparently.”
“Yes, from the moment they met. She was only nineteen. They were married that same year.”
“Was her love reciprocated?”
Delia hesitated, then shook her head. “No. Oh, at first they were regular lovebirds, but Lee always had a wandering eye, and the older he got, the more it wandered. Poor Clare, she always blamed herself for that, because she couldn’t have children. She thought she’d failed Lee. Lord, the misery people put themselves through.”‘
“Do you have a picture of Lee?”
She nodded, then crossed to the bookshelves. Conan followed her, waiting as she picked out one of the albums, an old one bound in embossed leather. She turned a few pages, then, “Here. That’s Clare and Lee at their wedding.”
Conan studied the faded sepia print, and at first his attention was fixed entirely on Clare, as lovely as a princess should be in a lace-veiled gown, yet sweetly vulnerable, a combination against which few men would be proof. Her new husband didn’t seem to be, at least not then. His proud smile was that of a man who had achieved ultimate happiness. Yet was there something to be read in the dark, hooded eyes that hinted of future moral failure? Probably not, viewed objectively. All Conan could read in this image, objectively, was that Leland Langtry had been at least ten years older than his bride and stood a head taller, his hair was dark and curly, his face undeniably handsome, and there was power in his wide shoulders and big hands.
Delia said with a sigh, “Lee was a charmer, I’ll give him that.” Then she put the album away and turned to one of the photographs on the shelf, reaching out to wipe nonexistent dust off the frame. “This is Tom. It was taken in forty-nine, the last proper portrait he ever submitted to.”
Tom Starbuck’s reluctance to face the camera was evident in the tight set of his mouth, but he seemed to be trying to make the best of it. His was a bony face that age made distinguished; his hair was light, perhaps gray, his eyes webbed in deep lines. On Starbuck, it seemed appropriate to call them laugh lines rather than crow’s feet.
There was another photograph next to Starbuck’s: a boy about ten years old with one arm around a large dog of indeterminate breed. At the bottom of the picture were the words, “Howie and Baron—1941.” Conan didn’t ask about that one, and Delia turned to the rolltop desk and opened one of the drawers, the tense resolve in her mouth reminding Conan of the portrait of her husband.
“Here’s something you should see,” she said.
The object she handed him was a hunting knife. The blade, pocked with rust, was six inches long and an inch wide at the guard. The haft was of elk horn, and on one side was a small metal plate engraved with the initials T.S.
Conan looked at Delia and she said, “Yes, that’s the murder weapon. Sheriff Newbolt gave it to me after the inquest. It was Tom’s, and he thought I should have it.”
Conan nodded and returned the knife to her. “What can you tell me about it?”
She put it in the drawer and closed it. “Tom’s father gave it to him when he was a boy. It had sentimental value for him, that’s all; Tom wasn’t a hunter. Conan, he used it for a letter opener, and he always kept it on his desk at the Lang-Star office. That’s something the sheriff and the coroner’s jury just seemed to ignore. That knife had been on his desk in plain sight for years. Anybody who walked into his office could’ve taken it or used it.”
“To kill Lee, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Delia, I only have an outline of the story. I’ll talk to the sheriff, but I’d like to hear your side first.”
She smiled wryly. “Well, Andy Newbolt and I aren’t squared off so there’s really any sides to this thing. It’s just that I can’t agree with the way he added things up. Why don’t we take a walk? I can show you around Silver while I tell you the story—the way I added it up.”
Chapter 3
Delia left the front door unlocked, and Conan smiled at that. He hoped the time would never come when sightseers flocked to Silver City in such numbers that she would have to learn to lock her doors against the larcenous or vandalizing minority.
She paused on the top step of the porch, shielding her eyes against the westering sun. “That’s Florida Mountain,” she said, pointing to the mountain that loomed in the northwest. Its gentle slopes, gray-green with sage and chaparral between dark swaths of fir and bright green aspen, were broken by gigantic granite mounts and dotted with tailings. “And over there is Potosi Peak,” she continued, indicating a slightly less imposing mountain to the southwest. “War Eagle’s behind us, of course.”
“Asa Starbuck picked a prime lot for the view.”
“So he did, but I suspect it was just so he could keep an eye on what everybody else in town was up to.”
They walked past the crab apples and down the rocky slope that passed as a road. Finally, Delia began: “About the murder—Lord, I keep thinking of it as the robbery still. Anyway, it happened on the night of September twenty-second. Lee was leaving on a business trip to Seattle the next day. He handled the selling and dealing end of the business; he was good with people. Tom tended to the mines and mill.”
“So, this planned trip wasn’t unusual?”
“No, but what Lee had planned for it was. The next day was payday at the mill, so there was a lot of cash in the safe: about ten thousand dollars, which was a small fortune in those days. Lee decided to make it payday for himself.”
Conan paused to choose his words. “There’s no doubt that he planned to steal the payroll?”
“No. For one thing, that business trip—it was all a lie. Sheriff Kenny called the people Lee was supposed to see in Seattle, and they weren’t expecting him. And that night Lee packed his suitcases and put them in his car—all set for the trip, he said—then told Clare he was going up to the office to make sure the payroll was ready for the next day. Lee never had anything to do with that. Dex Adler took care of all the bookkeeping, including the payrolls. Lee had no business there at all that night, except his own. And he drove his car up when it was just a short walk. Besides all that, when Dex went up to the office later that night, he found the front door unlocked and the safe open. And the money gone, of course. Only Lee and Tom had keys to that door or knew the safe combination. Nobody else could’ve opened either one of them.”
“There were no signs of forced entry?”
“No. The sheriff looked for that.”
The battleship-gray walls of the schoolhouse rose on their right now, a massive block of a building two stories high with a bell cupola perched astride the ridgepole. Conan looked up at the windows with their board shutters, as Delia commented, “That old school is eight years older than I am and in better shape. The Owyhee Cattlemen’s Association owns it and keeps it up. They let Lettie Burbage have the second floor for her museum. By the way, Lettie was working for Lang-Star at the time of the murder. She was Tom’s secretary. Had been since her husband died in thirty-seven. This is Morning Star Street we’re coming to. Over there on the other side of Jordan Creek, that queer looking pile—you see, it’s five stories high at the back—well, that’s the Idaho Hotel.”
It took a stretch of the imagination to accept that huge agglomeration of board walls and odd pitches of roof as the same building he’d seen from the
front on his arrival in Silver. Then he turned, distracted by voices, and saw a man and woman—tourists, obviously—lounging on the schoolhouse porch ignoring two shrieking boys, who were killing each other with invisible six-guns.
“Well, speak of the devil.” Delia stopped, but not out of any interest in the tourists. From the south along Morning Star Street, a wiry little woman in red slacks and flamboyantly flowered blouse was approaching briskly, a pair of glasses, leashed by a chain around her neck, bouncing against her bosom. “That’s Lettie,” Delia explained.
If Lettie Burbage seemed younger than Delia at a distance, it was only because her precisely curled hair was so dark, but as she came nearer, that was revealed to be a cosmetic subterfuge. “Just like a little jaybird,” Delia said under her breath, and the comparison was apt. Lettie walked with her head thrust forward, arms bent at the elbow, and hands raised as if they were constantly ready for something. Her narrow face was dominated by a sharp nose under which her chin receded steeply.
“Afternoon, Delia.” Delia was ten paces away when Lettie made that greeting, and it seemed she might pass them without stopping, but Delia waited confidently, smiling, and when Lettie reached them, she halted and put on her glasses to examine Conan.
Delia asked, “How are you, Lettie?”
But Lettie had no time for amenities. “This must be Mr. Flagg.”
“So it is,” Delia agreed. “Lettie, I’d like you to meet Conan Flagg. Conan, this is Mrs. Letitia Burbage.”
Lettie’s thin eyebrows came up, pushing the lines in her forehead into parallel arches. “Letitia? Oh, Delia, it’s been a long time since I heard that. Well, Mr. Flagg, so you’re here to look into Lee’s murder?” She only gave him time to nod, then: “Good. If you ask me, there’s more to it than the sheriff—” The sound of imitation gunfire distracted her to the school. “Damn brats. Well, I got customers, so I better tend to ’em. But, Mr. Flagg, you come around and see me. There’s a thing or two I could tell you, that’s for sure.” And with that, she marched up to the school, a ring of keys jangling in her hand.
