City of Saints

by Andrew Hunt

  These were some of the thoughts that raced through my mind as I leaned on that chair, reevaluating my decision. I was on the verge of leaving when a knob clicked and the door of the Tanner house opened. Parley stood in the doorway, handsome as ever and dressed in a cardigan and corduroys. He smiled and arched his eyebrows, as if genuinely happy to see me, and he opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch.

  “Art! Come on in! You’re going to catch your death out in this stuff.”

  He held the door open for me, and I thanked him quietly as I walked past him. I stepped in the entrance hall, with Parley following and gently closing the door. All of the beveled glass windows were freshly shined, every picture on the wall hung perfectly straight, there wasn’t a cobweb in sight in the vaulted ceilings, and fresh pine scent filled the air. Hands in my pockets, looking around, I could not help but wonder how much such a fancy house would set someone back. Nearing a staircase, I took off my Stetson, shook the rain droplets away, and glanced down at my soaking shoes.

  “I can take off my shoes…”

  “Oh, please, Art, don’t bother,” he said. “Come right this way. I’ll get you something to drink.”

  “No thank you.”

  “I insist,” he said, with his handsome grin revealing polished white teeth. “Miriam squeezed some fresh lemonade before she went to her sister Muriel’s. You should try it.”

  “No. I’m not thirsty.”

  I followed him down a carpeted hall, turning right into a sitting room with high windows that looked out at the nearby foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. An ebony grand piano reflected a gleam from outside, and beside it stood a tall harp. I noticed the Tanners owned one of those fancy combination phonograph radios, with a pair of doors opening up to ebony knobs and a glowing dial. Parley gestured to a chair and a davenport. I went for the chair, unzipping and pulling off my coat before I planted my behind on the cushion.

  “So what brings you out here on this rainiest of days, Art?” asked Parley, sitting on a chair facing me.

  I noticed a framed picture of the Mormon temple in Manti sitting on a little round table next to me. I picked it up, and my focus shifted from the gleaming white towers to my smiling reflection in the glass.

  “Manti,” he said, smiling. “It’s where I grew up.”

  I returned the picture to its place. “It’s a lovely temple.”

  “We were married there, Miriam and I,” he said. “It was the second-happiest day of my life. Right behind my daughter being born.”

  His words left me pained. He had lost so much. A daughter. A parent’s worst nightmare is outliving his or her child. It’s not too late to turn around and go, I thought.

  “I just had a few…” A thought crossed my mind. What was Parley Tanner doing home on a Wednesday? One of the city’s busiest lawyers in one of the state’s biggest law firms, home on a Wednesday. It struck me as odd, but not odd enough to make me comment. I didn’t want to make him feel uneasy. “I was wondering if you could help me.”

  His face went long and he blinked at me quizzically. “Help you with what?”

  “I had a few more questions about the Helen Pfalzgraf case I wanted—”

  “Wait. I thought Sheriff Cannon fired you from your job as deputy.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. He did. I still…”

  “So are you working for the police now?”

  Parley’s intense stare began to make me nervous, so I looked out the window, at the rain tapping the pane. “To tell you the truth, I’m self-employed at the moment.”

  “Well, then, I’d say you have no business working on this case. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I found out new information since we last spoke,” I said. “Information I’m sure will clear C. W. Alexander’s name.”

  “Oh? What sort of information?”

  “According to reports from the police and county sheriff’s office, and the testimony of the Pfalzgraf inquest, the last person Helen saw before she was murdered was C. W. Alexander on the night of Friday, February twenty-first.” I cleared my throat, propped my right ankle on my left knee, and forced myself to make eye contact with Parley. “However, I found a Dictaphone interview of Alexander, conducted by journalist Seymour Considine, in which Alexander swears he dropped Helen off at the Pfalzgraf mansion the night of the twenty-first. I confirmed this information with Anna Pfalzgraf, who claims Helen came home drunk and said she was going to come over here to ask for Mrs. Tanner’s forgiveness.”

  “Forgiveness? Forgiveness for what?”

  I braced myself with a deep breath. “Helen wanted Miriam’s forgiveness for the affair she had with you, which began when she was a stenographer in your office. She wanted forgiveness for telling your daughter, Elizabeth, that she should go see Dr. Wooley for an abortion. Oh, and Helen was pregnant. She told Anna she was pregnant with your baby. She planned to keep the baby and raise it alone. She wanted Miriam to forgive her for that, too. That’s a lot to ask forgiveness for.”

  Parley laughed, a little too uproariously for my comfort, and slapped his knee for good measure. “Do you actually believe all of these fairy tales of Helen’s?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” I said, shrugging. “Although I have to say, your love letters to Helen tend to uphold this version of events.”

  That grin disappeared, but fast. “L-love letters? What do you mean?”

  “The ones I got from C. W. Alexander. The ones you apparently missed when you paid a visit to his cabin in Park City.”

  “Mr. Oveson, that is a vile accusation, and a completely false one. I had nothing whatsoever to do with Alexander’s death, if that’s what you’re driving at. I’d like you to leave my house. Now.”

  “Before I go, I want you to tell me what happened the night Helen Pfalzgraf was murdered. She came over here. I want to know exactly what she did, what she said.”

  “Why are you doing this, Art? Why won’t you let go? You know something? I liked you. I really liked you. I thought you were a fine young man, with a good head on your shoulders, destined to do good things in the world. Now it turns out you’re a dog with a bone. You seize onto something and you won’t let up. What business is this of yours? Why do you pursue it so relentlessly?”

  A metallic click behind my head—the familiar sound of a revolver hammer being pulled back. I felt the cold sting of steel against the back of my neck. A mirror on the other side of the room let me know the man with the gun was Floyd Samuelson. The thought of lunging for him and wresting the gun from his hand crossed my mind, but it wouldn’t have worked. He stood at an angle that gave him the perfect opportunity to blow my brains out if I made a move. He knew it and I knew it. So I kept still.

  “Get up, Art, with your arms raised where I can see them.”

  I did as Floyd ordered, rising slowly, arms up, turning around to get a look at him. He kept his gun trained on me with nary a tremble, glowering at me the entire time. I glimpsed fresh gauze wrapped around his left hand, where he’d been shot. In my peripheral vision, I noticed what at first appeared to be a giant glass hornet with a long metal stinger. Parley plunged the syringe into my neck, and I involuntarily yelped. Whatever had been inside of it now surged into me, right below my ear, and I was immediately struck by waves of dizziness.

  The room started spinning; the ceiling ended up below me, the floor above me, and I thought the Wasatch Mountains outside would fall off the earth, along with everything else. I plunged to the floor, and my Stetson fell off my head and found a spot on the carpet next to me. I moved into the fetal position and threw up all over the rug. Parley squatted near me, his head tilted sideways, as if he had come to hear my last words.

  “If anything happens to me,” I whispered, wiping vomit off my chin. “The letters…”

  “My, my, you’re looking a little peaked, Art,” said Parley. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “What was in … Did you … Poison?”

  “No,” said Parley. “It’s an extrastrong ver
sion of choral hydrate. It’s a sedative. You’ll be out for a while. I injected quite a bit of it.”

  By now, I was paralyzed and flat on my stomach. My face was pressed against a Persian rug, and my Stetson sat a few inches away, its brim covered with vomit. How I hated the thought of having to buy a new one. I closed my eyes because I couldn’t take all the spinning and nausea. I’d never been this miserable in my life. Part of me wanted to die right now, get it all over with. Someone had moved up close to me, I could sense that much. I opened my eyes enough to see a blurry Floyd. The cold steel from his gun pressed against my face gave me the chills, and I found it impossible to suppress a shudder.

  “Dang shame,” he said, his voice ringing, as though he were speaking into a metal garbage can. “Every time you came poking around, Art, it twisted me up a little inside.”

  That’s when the burlap bag came over my head, pulled down in abrupt and rough jerks. The coarse fabric rubbed my face and neck and irritated my skin. A clinking buckle was my only warning of a belt being looped around my neck. The leather tightened to the point where I struggled to breathe, and that’s when I blacked out.

  Twenty-eight

  I died once before, during the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918.

  I still have memories of the day I died.

  I lay unconscious in bed, buried under levels of linen and wool covers. I couldn’t see anything in the blackness, but I could hear people’s voices and sense their presences.

  Mom wept. Her sobbing funneled into my ears. Voices filled the room.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Oveson. Your son is dead.”

  Footsteps surrounded me. When did the others arrive? Maybe an hour later. Maybe a day later. I couldn’t be sure. Why can’t I open my eyes? Why can’t I leap out of bed and tell them I’m still alive?

  “My Art, my dear, sweet Art,” Mom said, between breaths. “My angel is gone.”

  “Let’s lift him,” said a man’s voice, which I think belonged to Old Man Loftus, who ran Loftus Mortuary. “You get the ankles, I’ll get the shoulder.”

  I felt my shoulders and ankles being lifted, but my buttocks refused to rise with them. “Someone help us. Lift his lower back.”

  I was no longer in bed. Three men were moving me. Their hands carried me from my soft bed to a much harder resting place.

  “He fits in the casket.”

  “It’s nice. Not too expensive, either.”

  “We can all chip in for it.”

  “It’s good for Art, Mom. Heck, he almost looks comfy in there.”

  * * *

  My eyes opened suddenly. The coarse fabric still covered my head, but I could see through the fibers it was dark around me.

  “Don’t go all the way to the road we use to get to the cabin,” said Parley Tanner’s voice. “Turn on one of these dirt roads coming up. Try this next one.”

  Handcuffs dug into my wrists, so much so that my fingers tingled with numbness. Rope bound my ankles and knees together. The only thing I could be certain of was that my captors had placed me in the backseat of a car. I squirmed and wiggled with a faint hope of breaking free, but my plan went nowhere. They had done a good job of securing me.

  I lost all sense of time during the journey. How long had we been on the road? An hour? Two hours? Three? Thoughts swirled like a kaleidoscope, mostly filled with dread. Would I ever see my children again? Or feel Clara’s arms around me? Or set foot in my home once more? Intense fear—nausea, trembling, thoughts of death—almost got the best of me.

  Eventually, the car slowed, accompanied by brakes whining. The driver let the car idle in park, got out, and slammed the door. A moment later, the door to my left was flung open, and a pair of hands dragged me out of my seat by my arms. The air outside was extremely cold, and I felt the chill of it on my throat. I wormed upright, but a pair of hands shoved my back, toppling me to the earth. I landed in snow, and the next thing I felt was the rope loosening on my legs, then the handcuffs were unlocked. Within a minute I was untied, and the blood rushed to my hands and feet again.

  “Off with the bag, Art,” said Floyd.

  I removed the burlap from my head and tossed it into the snow. Liberating as it seemed at first, I soon discovered I didn’t feel much better with it off. The night sky swirled with clouds, and the automobile’s headlamps illuminated snowy mountain woods, dense with pine trees. A freezing wind blew, agitating shrubs and branches. Floyd, aiming a gun at me, handed me an old digging shovel with a splintery handle and rusty blade.

  “Go to work,” he said. “Over there, in the light. Where I can see you.”

  He shoved me down an embankment with his free hand, and I hit a snowbank, slamming my face against the shovel blade. I licked blood off my lip and stood in the car’s headlamp beams. I faced Floyd, shielding my eyes from the brightness, and when my sight adjusted, I detected his silhouette in the snowing darkness, next to the car.

  “Start digging!”

  “What am I digging exactly?”

  “Your burial spot,” he said. “I hope you like it out here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  A muzzle flash burst, then a piercing pop rang in my ears. The bullet clipped a rock near me. I started digging. I dug and dug, sending clumps of snow to a growing mound. Another man’s silhouette appeared next to Floyd’s, and I recognized the shoes as Parley’s. The lights aimed at my eyes prevented me from seeing their faces.

  “How’s he doing?” asked Parley.

  “He’s digging.”

  “Hurry, Art. We don’t wish to stay out here all night.”

  I spent several minutes scooping snow until I reached soil. Then I went to work pushing the shovel blade into hard ground—still frozen in parts—and scooping heavy piles of earth into the snow.

  “I can help you,” I said. “I know people in—”

  Floyd snapped, “Shut up and keep digging!”

  I thrust the shovel into the ground, pressing it deeper with the heel of my shoe. “You know, Floyd, I get why you killed Wooley,” I said, pouring my shovelful of dirt to the side. “He’s responsible for Elizabeth’s death.”

  “Pay him no mind,” said Parley.

  “All you wanted was to protect your aunt and uncle,” I said, ramming shovel into soil. “They loved you like you were their own son. They saved you from your father—”

  He leaped into the shallow trench, shoved me into the dirt, and aimed his pistol at my head. I closed my eyes. I thought I was a dead man. “I ought to shoot you now, you dirty dog!”

  “Come back, son,” said Parley, leaning forward and hooking his hand around Floyd’s elbow. “Let him finish what he’s doing. Don’t let him get to you.”

  I opened my eyes to see the gun in my face and the rage in Floyd’s eyes. He exhaled steam through clenched teeth, and his chest rose and fell rapidly. I swear I noticed his index finger twitch on the trigger.

  “I can understand why you killed Wooley,” I said, still lying on the ground. “If he’d done that to my daughter or my sister, I’d have killed the man, too. Especially if I knew he was going to butcher other people’s daughters and sisters.”

  The muzzle flash almost blinded me, and the crack of the pistol hurt my ears. The bullet popped a mud geyser a few inches away from my left hand. Floyd aimed the gun at my chest, and I had no doubt he was ready to use it.

  “Get up and start digging, Art, or I won’t let you finish.”

  Floyd stepped up to the surface, so he stood next to Parley again, and he kept his gun on me the entire time. I stood, picked up my shovel, and resumed digging. “I can’t imagine how awful your Aunt Miriam would’ve felt if Helen had a chance to tell her all those things—”

  Parley cut me off. “Floyd didn’t kill Helen. It’s true she came over to the house that Friday night. In fact, Floyd gave her a ride. Miriam happened to be gone. Staying with her sister. I had the house to myself. Imagine my surprise when Helen showed up, demanding that I give her the telephone number where Miriam cou
ld be reached. Helen raised a ruckus. I thought she was going to wake up the entire neighborhood. She said she needed to ask Miriam to forgive her. For her affair with me. For giving bad advice to Elizabeth. For being pregnant with my baby. That night she pushed me to the breaking point. I saw that piece of ore sticking out of her purse and I grabbed hold of it and I…”

  His voice trailed off as he watched snow falling in the headlamp beams, and he seemed overwhelmed by his own emotions. “This is the first time I’ve said any of this out loud. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit inside the car for a moment. Floyd, you can take care of this.”

  I kept digging. Out the corner of my eye, I watched Parley climb inside the car. The door closed, and things were quiet for a while. Until I broke the silence. “So you didn’t have anything to do with Helen—”

  “Shut up and dig or the next bullet goes in your head, Art.”

  More digging. I said, “I don’t have any hard feelings.”

  “That’s big of you,” he said. “Dig faster.”

  “The Tanners are like parents to you. I can see why—”

  “Shut up!”

  I stopped digging and looked up at him, shielding my eyes from the light. “I have a son like you do,” I said. “He turns two in August.”

  “I said shut up!”

  “He’ll wonder why I’m not home. Imagine Bert sitting by the front door, waiting, wondering when—”