Crucifixion River

by Marcia Muller

  “And why shouldn’t he be? He’s the only one who has amounted, or will amount, to anything.”

  “Now, Lucretia”-with bite in the words this time-“the way you malign Jared is annoying, to say the least. He may be a bit wild and irresponsible, but he…”

  “A bit wild and irresponsible? A bit!” The teacup rattled in its saucer, spilling hot liquid that Quincannon barely managed to avoid, as she handed him the crockery. “He’s a young scamp and you know it…worse today than when he was a kiting youngster. Up and quit the only decent job he ever held just last week, after less than a month’s honest labor.”

  Quincannon cocked a questioning eyebrow at his employer.

  “It was a clerk’s job downtown, and poorly paid,” Meeker said. “He’s a bright lad and he’ll find a more suitable position one day…”

  “You won’t live long enough to see the day and neither will I.”

  “That’s enough, Lucretia.”

  “Oh, go dance up a rope,” she said, surprising Quincannon if not her husband.

  Meeker performed his puffing-toad imitation and started to say something, but at that moment the door burst open and the wind blew in a young man swathed in a greatcoat, scarf, gloves, and stocking cap. His lean, clean-shaven face-weak-chinned and thin-lipped-was ruddy from the cold. Jared Meeker, in the flesh.

  His parents might have been two sticks of furniture for all he had to say to them. It wasn’t until he opened his coat and yanked off his cap, revealing a mop of ginger-colored hair, that he noticed Quincannon. “Well, a visitor. And a stranger at that.”

  “His name is John Quincannon,” Mrs. Meeker said. “He’s a detective.”

  The last word caused Jared’s eyes to narrow. “A detective? What kind of detective? What’s he doing here?”

  “Your father hired him to investigate the supernatural. Of all things.”

  “…Ah. The ghost, you mean?”

  “Whatever it is we’ve seen these past two nights, yes,” Meeker said.

  Jared relaxed into an indolent posture as he shed his coat. Then he laughed, a thin barking sound like that of an adenoidal seal. “A detective to investigate a ghost. Hah! That’s rich, that is.”

  Quincannon said: “I have had stranger cases, and brought them to a satisfactory conclusion. Are you a believer or a skeptic, lad?”

  “I believe what I see with my own eyes. What about you?”

  “I have an open mind on the subject,” he lied.

  “Well, it’s a real ghost, all right. Likely of a man who died in one of the cars, or in a railway accident. Couldn’t be anything else, no matter what anybody thinks. You may well see it for yourself, if you’re planning to spend the night.”

  “I am.”

  “If it does reappear, you’ll be a believer, too.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Jared grinned and loosed another bark. “A detective. Hah!”

  Alone in the parlor, Quincannon smoked his stubby briar and waited for the hands on his stem-winder to point to 11:30 p.m. The Meekers had all retired to their respective bedrooms in the end cars some time earlier, at his insistence; he preferred to maintain a solitary vigil. He also preferred silence to desultory and pointless conversation. There were ominous rumblings in his digestive tract as well, the result of the bland chicken dish and boiled potatoes and carrots Mrs. Meeker had seen fit to serve for supper.

  The car was no longer overheated, now that the fire in the stove had banked. Cooling, the stove metal made little pinging sounds that punctuated the snicking of wind-flung sand against the car’s windows and sides. As 11:30 p.m. approached, he checked the loads in his Navy Colt. Not that he expected to need the weapon-the Carville ghost seemed to have no malevolent intention, and no one had ever succeeded in plugging a spook in any case-but he had learned long ago to exercise caution in all situations.

  It was time. He holstered the Navy, donned his greatcoat, cap, scarf, and gloves, and slipped out into the night.

  Icy, fog-wet wind and blowing sand buffeted him as he came down off the walkway. The night was not quite black as tar but close to it; he could barely make out the shed and corral nearby. The distant jumble of abandoned cars was invisible except for brief rents in the wall of fog, and then discernible only as faintly lumpish shapes among the dunes.

  He slogged into the shelter of the lean-to. The two horses, both blanketed against the cold, stirred and one nickered softly at his passage. He removed his dark lantern from beneath the seat of the rented buggy, lighted it, closed the shutter, and then went to the side wall and probed along it until he found a gap between boards. Another brief tear in the fog permitted him to fix the proper angle for viewing the cars. He dragged over two bales of hay, piled one atop the other, and perched on the makeshift seat. By bending forward slightly, his eyes were on a level with the gap. He settled down to wait.

  He had learned patience in situations such as this, by ruminating on matters of business and pleasure. Sabina occupied his mind for a considerable time. Then he sighed and shifted his thoughts to the other cases currently under investigation. The missing Devereaux heiress should be easy enough to locate; like as not she had gone off for an extended dalliance with one of her swains, since no ransom demand had been received by the family. Sabina needed no help from him in yaffling the pickpocket at the Chutes amusement park. The Wells Fargo robbery was more his type of case, and a challenging one since city bluecoats and rival detective agencies were also on the hunt for the two masked bandits who had escaped with $25,000 in cash. He had to admit that he’d made little enough headway over the past two weeks, but the same was true of his competitors for the reward Wells Fargo was offering.

  Light. A faint shimmery glow through the mist.

  He strained forward, squinting closer to the gap. Gray-black for a few seconds, then the fog lifted somewhat and he spied the eerie radiance again, shifting about behind the windows in one of the cars. More than just a glow-an ectoplasmic shape, an unearthly face.

  He snatched up the dark lantern, hopped off the hay bales, and stepped out around the corner of the lean-to. The thing continued to drift around inside the car, held stationary for a few seconds, moved again. Quincannon was moving himself by then, over into the shadow of the cistern. Beyond there, flattish sand fields stretched for thirty or forty rods on three sides; there was no cover anywhere on its expanse, no quick way to get to the cars, even by circling around, without crossing open space.

  He waited for a thickening of the fog, then stepped out in a low crouch and ran toward the car. He was halfway there when the radiance vanished.

  Immediately he veered to his right, toward the line of dunes behind the cars. But he couldn’t generate any speed; in the wet darkness and loose sand he felt as if he were churning, heavy-legged, through a dream. There were no sounds except for the wind, the distant pound of surf, the rasp of his breathing.

  It was two or three minutes before he reached the foot of the nearest dune. No sooner had he begun to plow upward along its steep side than the wraith-like human shape appeared suddenly at the crest and then bounded away in a rush of shimmery phosphorescence.

  Quincannon shined the lantern in that direction, but the beam wasn’t powerful enough to cut through the wall of fog. Cursing, he leaned forward and dug his free hand into the sand to help propel himself upward. Behind and below him, he heard a shout. A quick glance over his shoulder told him it had come from a man running across the sand field-Barnaby or Jared Meeker, alerted too late to be of any assistance.

  He was a few feet from the crest when a wind-muffled report reached his ears. The ghost shape twitched, seemed to bound forward another step or two, and then suddenly vanished. Two or three heartbeats later, it reappeared, higher up, twisted, and was gone again.

  Quincannon filled his right hand with his Navy Colt as he struggled, panting, to the dune top. When he straightened, he thought he saw another flash of radiance in the far distance. After that, there was nothing to
see but fog and darkness.

  He made his way forward, playing the lantern beam ahead of him. The grassy surface of this dune and the next in line showed no marks of passage. But down near the bottom on the opposite side, the light illuminated a faint, irregular line of tracks that the wind was already beginning to erase.

  It illuminated something else below as he climbed atop the third dune-the dark figure of a man sprawled facedown in the sand.

  Panting sounds reached his ears; a few moments later, Barnaby Meeker hove into view and staggered toward him. Quincannon didn’t wait. He half slid down the sandhill to the motionless figure at the bottom, anchored the lantern so that the beam shone fully on the dark-clothed man, and turned him over. The staring eyes conveyed that he was beyond help. The gaping wound on his chest stated he’d been shot.

  Meeker came sliding down the hill, pulled up, and emitted a cry of anguish. “Jared! Oh, my God, it’s Jared!”

  Quincannon cast his gaze back along the dunes. The line of irregular footprints led straight to where Jared Meeker lay. There were no others in the vicinity except for those made by Quincannon and Barnaby Meeker.

  At dawn Quincannon helped his distraught employer hitch up his wagon. There were no telephones in Carville; Meeker would have to drive to the nearest one to summon the city police and coroner. Young Jared’s body had been carried to his bedroom car, and Mrs. Meeker had held a vigil there most of the night. Despite her disparaging comments about her son, she had been inconsolable when she learned of his death. And she’d made no bones about blaming Quincannon for what had happened, screaming at him: “What kind of detective are you, allowing my poor boy to be murdered right before your eyes?”

  For his part, Quincannon was in a dark humor. As unjust as Mrs. Meeker’s tirade had been, Jared Meeker had been murdered more or less before his eyes. He couldn’t have foreseen what would happen, of course, but the shooting was a potential blow to his reputation. If he failed to find out who was responsible, and why, the confounded newspapers would have a field day at his expense.

  One thing was certain, and the apparent evidence to the contrary be damned: Jared Meeker had not been mortally wounded by a malevolent spirit from the Other Side. Spooks do not carry guns, nor can ectoplasm aim and fire one with deadly accuracy in foggy darkness.

  When Meeker had gone on his way, Quincannon embarked on his first order of business-a talk with Artemus Crabb. Crabb had failed to put in an appearance at any time during last night’s bizarre happenings, which may or may not have an innocent explanation. The fog was still present this morning, but the wind had died down and visibility was good. The dunes lay like a desert wasteland all around him as he trudged down the left fork to Crabb’s car.

  Knuckles on the rough-hewn door produced no response, neither did a brace of shouts. Not home at this hour? Quincannon used his fist on the door, and raised his call of Crabb’s name to a tolerable bellow. This produced results. Crabb was home, and had apparently been asleep. He jerked the door open, wearing a pair of loose-fitting long johns, and glared at Quincannon out of sleep-puffed eyes.

  “You,” he said. “What the devil’s the idea, waking me up this early?”

  Quincannon said bluntly: “One of your neighbors was murdered last night.”

  “What? What’s that? Who was murdered?”

  “Jared Meeker. From all appearances, he was done in by the Carville ghost.”

  Crabb recoiled a step, his eyes popping wide. “The hell you say. The…ghost? Last night?”

  “On the prowl again, the same as before. You didn’t see it?”

  “Not me. Once was enough. I don’t want nothing to do with spooks. I bolted my door, shuttered all the windows, and went to bed with a weapon close to hand.”

  “Heard nothing, either, I take it?”

  “Just the wind. Where’d it happen?”

  “On the dunes beyond the abandoned cars.”

  “I don’t get it,” Crabb said. “How can a damned ghost shoot a man?”

  “A ghost can’t. A man did.”

  “What man? Who’d want to kill the Meeker kid?”

  Quincannon smiled wolfishly. “Who, indeed?”

  He left Crabb in the doorway and made his way past the jumble of abandoned cars, around behind the line of dunes where he’d last seen the white radiance. A careful search of the wind-smoothed sand along their backsides turned up nothing. Opposite where he had found Jared Meeker was another high-topped dune; he climbed it and inspected the sparse vegetation that grew along the crest.

  Ah, just as he’d suspected. Some of the grass stalks had broken ends and a patch of gorse was gouged and mashed flat. This was where the assassin had lain to fire the fatal shot-and a marksman he was, to have been so accurate on a night like the last.

  Quincannon searched behind the dune. Here and there, in places sheltered from the wind, were footprints leading to and from the abandoned cars. Then he began to range outward in the opposite direction, zigzagging back and forth among the sandhills. Gulls wheeled overhead, shrieking, as he drew nearer to the beach. The Pacific was calmer this morning, the waves breaking more quietly over the white sand.

  For more than an hour he continued his hunt. He found nothing among the dunes. The long inner sweep of the beach was littered with all manner of flotsam cast up during storms and high winds-shells, bottles, tins, driftwood large and small, birds and sea creatures alive and dead. Last night’s wind had been blowing from the southeast; he ranged farther to the north, his sharp eyes scanning left and right.

  Some 200 rods from where he had emerged onto the beach, he found what he was looking for. Or rather, the wreckage of what he was looking for, caught and tangled around the bare limb of a tree branch.

  He extricated it carefully, examined it, and tucked it inside his coat. After which, whistling a temperance tune off-key, he retraced his path along the beach, through the dunes, and back to the Meekers’ home.

  The car that had been Jared Meeker’s bedroom was the northernmost of the four. The curtains had been drawn over the windows; he went to the door, knocked discreetly, received no response. Mrs. Meeker, as he’d hoped, had given up her vigil and gone to one of the other cars. He tried the latch, found it unlocked, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him.

  The dead man lay on his bed, covered by a blanket provided by his mother. The rest of the room contained a stove, a few pieces of mismatched furniture, a steamer trunk, a framed Wild West show poster depicting a cowboy riding a wildly bucking bronco, and little else. Quincannon searched the dresser drawers first, then the steamer trunk. Several items of interest were tucked inside the latter-hand tools, a ball of twine, a jar of oil-based paint, a board with four ten-penny nails driven through it, and two lead sinkers that matched in size and shape the one he’d found yesterday in the abandoned car.

  He left the items where they lay and was closing the trunk’s lid when the door opened and Mrs. Meeker entered. She emitted a startled gasp when she saw him. “Mister Quincannon! How dare you come in here without permission?”

  “My apologies. But it was necessary.”

  “Necessary? Prowling through my dead son’s possessions?”

  “To the conclusion of my investigation.”

  “…Are you saying you know who murdered Jared?”

  Before he could respond, a hailing shout came from outside. Barnaby Meeker had returned. And not alone. With him were the city coroner in a morgue wagon, and a plainclothes homicide detective named Hiram Dooley in a police hack driven by a bluecoat.

  Dooley was middle-aged, portly, sported a thick brushy mustache, and had a complexion the exact hue of cooked beets. Stretched across his bulging middle was a gold watch chain adorned with an elk’s tooth the size of a golf ball. His first words to Quincannon were: “I’ve heard of you, laddybuck. You and that female partner of yours.”

  “Only in the most glowing terms, no doubt.”

  “Hah. Just because you’ve counted yourselves lucky on a few case
s doesn’t mark you high in my book. I don’t like fly cops.”

  And I don’t like pompous, empty-headed civil servants, Quincannon thought, but he only smiled and said: “Perhaps I’ll count myself lucky, as you put it, on this case as well.”

  “Yeah? We’ll see about that.”

  That we will, Inspector. And sooner than you think.

  Meeker had already given Dooley an account of last night’s events, but the homicide dick demanded another from Quincannon. He scoffed at what he called “this spook hokum” and seemed skeptical, if not openly suspicious, of Quincannon’s rôle in the matter. Quincannon bore his browbeating with good-natured equanimity. He could have told Dooley then and there what he had deduced, but the man’s manner irritated him and he took a certain amount of pleasure in watching him blunder and bluster about Jared’s bedroom and the scene of the murder, overlooking clues and asking the wrong questions. While the two policemen were examining the abandoned cars, Quincannon took Barnaby Meeker aside and asked him a pair of seemingly innocuous questions. The answers he received were the ones he had expected.

  As Dooley and the bluecoat emerged, Artemus Crabb came striding over from the direction of his car. Crabb seemed more at ease this time, his face reflecting curiosity rather than hostility or concern. He barely glanced at Quincannon, his attention focused on the law dogs.

  “And who would you be?” Dooley demanded.

  “Crabb’s my name. I live over yonder.”

  Dooley introduced himself. “I been told you didn’t see anything of what happened out here last night.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t. Seen the spook lights the night before and once is enough for me. I spent last night locked up inside my car.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Quincannon said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You spent part of the night lying in wait on one of the dunes, with a cocked revolver in your hand.”

  “What the devil would I do that for?”

  “To lay the Carville ghost, once and for all.”