Lessie_Bride of Utah
Page 8
“Yes?”
“No matter what, we can’t let on we suspect anything more than a streak of bad luck. First the rock dropping from a late fall and now a collapse. Horrible accidents. That’s all.”
She stepped onto the landing ahead of him.
“Understand?” he pressed. “No suspicions.”
“Understood.”
“We can’t show our hand too soon. Until we determine who might be damaging operations and killing my men, we cannot let the culprit know we’re suspicious.”
To do so would put Lessie in serious danger.
Chapter Ten
Much later that afternoon, Richard drove the wagon into Big Ezra. Lessie sat beside him on the hard wooden bench, glad the arduous drive over the rough mountain road was behind them.
A company store with painted lettering across the false front stating just that: Company Store. A blacksmith sat back a ways where the heat and fire of the forge wouldn’t put the mercantile at risk. The acrid black smoke from the blacksmith’s chimney hung over the crooked street where rainwater had carved riverbeds and dried into washboards.
Two haphazard streets of square cottages, no more than shanties with rock chimneys, intersected with this nameless main street. Three covered wells interspersed between the dwellings had once been painted white. Another crooked row of small buildings, less than eight-feet square, had no apparent purpose.
Smoke curled from various chimneys in the buildings, fires for heat and cooking. Of course Richard had been right. A deep chill permeated through her coat and many new layers of warmer clothing. The leaves in the mountainous canyon had donned their autumnal colors, and the higher mountain peaks already had a dusting of snow.
The climb from Ogden City to Big Ezra had been a constant pull for the horse team. It seemed they’d gained hundreds of feet of altitude.
The wind shifted, and the stink of sewage identified the communal outhouses. Always good to know where to find the necessaries.
In this environment she was so much more at home than in Richard’s lovely newly built home.
Further up the hill, large wooden buildings must collectively be the colliery— the boxlike entrances to coal mines and their various structures.
Though more than fifty men had died in the mines at this site within the past week, work apparently stopped for no one. Lessie scanned the busy streets, men, women, and children going about their work. Some led mule-drawn rail cars up the steep grade toward the mine entrances. A group of men must have just completed a shift because they trudged toward a long building she supposed to be a bunkhouse, blackened with dirt and coal dust.
She could see the stark difference between the whites of the workers’ eyes against the dusty darkness of their skin.
If she could so easily identify them, they had to know who drove this wagon, had to know their employer Richard Cannon had arrived.
Not one man raised a hand in greeting. No one doffed a cap in respectful acknowledgment.
Instantly, she identified with the men, remembering the two times she’d seen Mr. Bob Brown, owner of the textile mill where she’d spent ten to eighteen hours a day working herself to the point of exhaustion.
Mr. Brown had stormed in that last day, entitlement in his posture, his unwelcome attitude and his harsh words.
She hadn’t wanted to wish him a good day, much less meet his eye.
She’d hated Mr. Bob Brown, just as she could see the hatred in the men’s eyes, in the way they held themselves with a stiffness that reminded her of the helplessness she’d felt in the employ of rich men.
She’d been a disposable commodity. Replaceable. Once worn out, they’d toss her away like so much rubbish and replace her with another strong back and good eyes… until that hireling had given all she had…
Never in all her life, had Lessie felt so torn between two camps. Until Richard Cannon, she’d known where she stood, who her people were.
Now, she wasn’t so sure.
Had one of these men triggered the collapse that had killed forty men?
Fury twisted her features into defiance but Richard’s order to keep their suspicions entirely buried came to mind just in time. Several of the miners watched her with curiosity, had no doubt seen her expression… and that wouldn’t help Richard’s cause.
She locked her attention on her hands, twisted together in the folds of her heavy woolen skirt and wished she’d worn her own dresses, threadbare though they were. She could’ve worn the warmer petticoats and underclothes.
These men would see her new clothing, serviceable though it was, and pass judgment. They’d label her unerringly on the boss’s side, and she supposed she was.
How on earth could she accomplish all Richard needed of her?
Two men came out one of the small shacks, met Richard and Lessie halfway from the wagon.
Richard took the larger of the two men by the hand. “Gibbons, I came soon as I heard. I’m sorry.”
The man called Gibbons was as broad as Richard, as thick through the chest and arms, but stood at least a hand-span shorter. His hair was sparse, a light brown that caught in the wind but hung past his ears when the air settled.
She guessed Gibbons had to be the site foreman, the way Richard treated him with deference. “Maurice Gibbons, meet my wife, Mrs. Cannon.”
“Ma’am.” The foreman shook, his hand swallowing hers. His pale blue eyes seemed oddly flat. A shiver crept up her back, just standing too near the man. She’s stay close to her husband whenever this man was about.
One more introduction to a blond man with a long red beard known only as Skipper. The blond man’s long beard was red and wiry. She noticed with an experienced seamstress’s eye that Skipper’s three-piece suit had been precisely tailored, made of the finest of wools and though dusty and worn shiny at the elbows and knees had once been most expensive. The bowler hat on his head was so caked in mining dust it could have been ancient or new and a body could never judge the difference.
Richard touched his fingers to her back but spoke to his men. “I’m headed to pay my respects at the site where ten men died from the rock dropping late, gentlemen. I want you with us.”
Within the half-hour, Richard set out with Skipper and Gibbons leading the way toward the mine entrance. There, the tunnel had collapsed during the night, killing the forty men inside.
He held Lessie’s hand as they pressed uphill. She breathed heavily, unused to the altitude and exertion.
He needed to see the mouth of that cavern, grieve the loss of so many good men. He doubted the responsible party died with the others.
Anger churned in his gut but he focused on the guilt and grief. He couldn’t allow Gibbons or Skipper to recognize anything else.
Not half a mile away from the mine, Richard noticed buzzards circling ahead. Looked like the scavengers found a downed deer or perhaps an antelope, not far from the trail.
“Smell that?” Gibbons asked.
“Whooo-eeee. That stinks.” Skipper covered his nose with a hankie that couldn’t smell much better from the looks of it. “Nasty.”
The wind shifted and Richard caught the unpleasant smell of death and decay. A quick glance at Lessie told him she had, too.
Another twenty feet up the trail and Skipper said, “Boss? I got a bad feelin’ about this. I’m just gonna go have a look-see.”
“Over a deer? Stick with me, Skipper. We’re burning daylight.”
“That don’t smell like animal to me.” He rubbed his nose with the dirty handkerchief, his voice distorted a bit by his refusal to allow air to pass through his nose. “You ever smelled a dead man before?”
Instantly, Richard thought of the forty men reported killed in the mine collapse, just ahead. The rubble, Gibbons had said, was so thick and deep, there hadn’t been any reason to risk more lives by digging the bodies out.
The men would remain interred in the mine.
Surely a dead body within the rubble wouldn’t stink out here…?
Richard glanced at Lessie.
“Go on,” she urged. “I’m right behind you.”
“You don’t need to see this.”
“Never said I intended to look.”
“It’s only going to smell worse the closer we go.”
She raised a single brow. “I lived in tenements. An elderly woman died in a room down the hall, and I’m ashamed to say it took us four or five days to notice.”
He grimaced. The other men had disappeared from sight, hidden by a brilliant scrub oak wearing the autumnal colors and a dip in the terrain. Looked like they skirted a large evergreen.
Lessie searched his face. “You want me to lead?”
“I most certainly do not.” Richard gripped her hand but made sure she was behind him as they followed the smell. He held her hand against the small of his back, another way to try and protect her from the undesirable view.
Richard came upon the pair standing over a dead man. His stomach pitched at the offensive odor.
The corpse had swelled, the flesh taking on a ghastly color. Flies worried all about the body, buzzing, clinging to skin and clothes and the air in thick clouds.
He recognized nothing about the man. “Is he one of ours?”
Skipper pinched his hankie tight about his nose but spoke anyway. “Herman Trengove. I wondered where he’d gotten off to.”
Gibbons folded his arms. “What do you mean? When did you see him last?”
“Couple days ago, I ‘spect.” Skipper paused. “Him bein’ on the opposite shift means I don’t see him every day.”
“Looks like he took a fist to the nose,” Gibbons observed. “Probably dropped in one punch.”
Richard watched the foreman and shift supervisor. Had either of these men known about Trengove’s death before now?
If so, neither gave themselves away.
Richard made himself eye the corpse methodically. Dark brown splattered from his nose, but no hint of injuries elsewhere. The man sprawled in an unnatural position on the earth, as if a puppet master has cut his strings and he’d fallen, boneless.
As best he could tell beneath the swarm of flies, no split lip. No blood on his knuckles. So no prolonged fistfight, then. “His name is Trengove? What job did he do?”
“Worked day shift. Team Three.”
A mucker, then. Clearing the fallen rock after the blasting team drilled and set the charges the evening before.
Skipper served as shift manager on nights. Three day teams, three night teams, each with a team leader. One shift manager on days, Edgar Kerry. One shift manager on nights, Skipper. And Maurice Gibbons, foreman of the whole lot.
Looked like Richard needed to have a conversation with Edgar Kerry… and find out who currently lead Team Three on days.
In his gut, he knew the incident at the mine and this man found a good distance away from said mine were somehow connected.
That meant murder.
Had Herman Trengove overheard something he wasn’t supposed to know? Or seen something he shouldn’t have?
Was it possible Trengove had been involved in somehow staging the late fall incident, maybe his team had been involved, part of them died but he hadn’t?
Connected— but how?
Richard turned to the foreman. “Was this fellow married? Who’s his next of kin?”
“No wife or children, least not that we know of.” Gibbons scratched a forefinger along the bristle of his beard. “But his brother died that morning when the rock fell late.”
Richard glanced up, found Lessie watching him from squarely at his side. He’d have thought she’d hide at his back and avoid the gruesome scene. He hoped the other two men couldn’t read his wife as easily as he could… because to her, something didn’t sit right.
Truth be told, it didn’t feel right to him, either.
A twinge of emotion he couldn’t identify flitted over her features, but she firmed her jaw and apparently didn’t want to give voice to her observations, at least not in front of Gibbons and Skipper.
Richard determined to ask her about it, the first moment they were alone.
He scanned the area, looking for any clues of what might have happened. A man didn’t break his nose all by his lonesome, not bad enough to die instantly. He gestured to the others to back away.
He took his time to visually scour the area.
And came up with absolutely nothing.
No dropped belongings. No scraps of fabric torn from the murderer’s pant leg.
No footprints.
Just a corpse that until the last couple of days had been a living, breathing man earning wages from Cannon Mining.
Richard had as great an aversion to touching a dead body as the next man, but considering something might be in the victim’s pockets— a clue of some sort, he couldn’t turn squeamish now.
Without an explanation, he ignored the mess of flies and methodically checked every pocket on the dead man’s coat, vest, and trousers.
“What you lookin’ for, Boss?” Skipper leaned closer for a better look.
“Don’t know. Maybe a photograph of his girl, if he has one.”
“Huh.”
In Trengove’s back pocket, Richard hit pay dirt. A letter, folded in half. Without opening it he stuffed it into his own pocket. He’d read it later, in private. Maybe it contained something he could work with. Meanwhile, no sense letting men he didn’t trust in on the details.
Ten dollars. Assorted coins. A knife. Personal effects he’d hold onto just in case the letter revealed living relatives. Done with the gruesome task, Richard stuffed the balance of Trengove’s treasures into his own back pocket with the letter and turned to Gibbons.
“Send two men to dig a grave at the company cemetery.”
“Yes, Boss. I’m on it.”
“Skipper, give them a head start then send two more men with a sheet and a stretcher to carry Trengove up to the graveyard. I want him in the ground before dark.”
The men turned to go, but he called them back. “My wife and I are going to pay our respects at the disaster site. We’ll meet you at the cemetery.”
Chapter Eleven
Richard had settled on the camp office for safe place to sleep instead of his canvas tent. Not only was the canyon wind too cold, but with too many angry expressions on the workers’ faces and the memory of Trengove’s body too fresh in his mind, he needed a safe place to bed down. He couldn’t adequately protect Lessie in a tent where the wind would prevent him from hearing danger approach.
So he’d lit the oil lamp on the telegraph desk, pushed the two single chairs into the corner of the small room, no more than eight-feet-square.
Richard had set up a pallet on the floorboards. Quilts, pillows, and blankets. Still the floor beneath was hard but the room was warm from the fire he’d lit in the small potbellied stove.
The desk became their headboard and the opposite wall their footboard.
The location office was in use mostly during daylight hours, so come morning, they’d have to roll up the bedding and put it back in the wagon, but that would keep the varmints out.
Though the burial, keeping his eyes open around the miners and listening to snatches of conversations as he and Lessie walked through the camp, he’d itched to know the contents of the letter found in Trengove’s pocket.
Lessie had already removed her boots and slipped into the make-shift bed fully clothed. He didn’t blame her. The window had no curtains to block prying eyes and even with the stove heating the space, the night had grown cold.
Golden lamplight filled danced on Lessie’s features. Richard climbed in beside her and pulled her close. Just for a quick snuggle. “I’ve waited all day for a minute alone with you.”
“You haven’t let go of my hand for hours.” She yaw
ned. “I’m not complaining. I like holding hands.”
That first meeting, in Union Station, he noted how the twins held hands, linked elbows, almost always touched one another. “My reasons for holding hands might not be romantic, but I kept you safe, didn’t I?”
“Yes.” She snuggled a little closer. “You kept me safe.”
“My reasons for wanting time alone with you aren’t very romantic, either. You saw something near Trengove’s body, didn’t you? The look on your face has had me guessing ever since.”
Her dark brows drew together. “What look?”
He spoke softly, just in case someone lurked outside, anxious to overhear. He couldn’t be too careful. “I’m checking the scene for clues, anything out of place— seeing nothing at all, but you have an expression that sure looked like you’d noticed something important. I couldn’t ask you, not with Skipper and Gibbons right there.”
“I don’t remember. I honestly don’t know.”
Disappointment seeped in… not unlike the cold mountain wind finding its way through the chinks in the single-room building. “It doesn’t matter.”
They still did have something to work with— the letter Trengove had carried in his pocket. A dirt-smudged envelope, folded in half, address within the fold.
Interest sparked. Finally, a chance to read the contents, maybe learn something about the man who’d apparently died from a blow to the face.
He pressed a quick kiss to Lessie’s forehead then eased his arm out from beneath her head.
“I like using your arm for a pillow.” She lost no time finding one of the feather pillows he’d brought and snuggling deep.
He rolled over just enough to reach his back pocket and pulled the folded envelope free.
“I forgot all about that letter.” Lessie surprised him, sitting upright and losing all signs of sleepiness. “Read it to me.”
With their backs to the window, Richard examined the smudged envelope. If anybody peeked in the window, all they’d see was Lessie’s and Adam’s backsides, fully clothed. If they kept their voices down, no peeping Tom would even know they bent over the letter found on Trengove’s body.