Crying Blood - An Alafair Tucker Mystery

by Donis Casey

  She was on her way back to the house. Shaw had come out of the barn with her, intending to watch her make the trip through the barnyard, the truck garden, and the back yard through the darkness, just in case the boy was right and someone, or something, else had accompanied him back from Oktaha and was spying on them right now.

  Alafair balked, loath to leave Shaw on his own in the shadowy barn with his captive. She had urged him to let her wake Kurt, but he had refused. What danger is one chained-up teenaged fake Indian, he had asked?

  “You don’t believe there’s a haint after him?”

  She couldn’t make out his face, but she could hear his snort of disdain. “What do you think?”

  “What about what he said about hearing it call your name?”

  She could see his head turn as he looked away from her. “Hearing things,” he said. “The wind in the trees. Hearing things.”

  “You think he’s crazy?”

  “I reckon that he was told the story of the ghost on that farm and when his brother got killed in an accident he conjured up this tale in order to make sense of it. In the morning Scott will figure out where he belongs and get him back to his folks.”

  “What about the bones you found? Do you suspect they belonged to his brother?”

  “Honey, he said his brother died just a couple of years ago, and Slim has been in the ground for a lot longer than that. I think we’ve got two different things going on here. I doubt if one has anything to do with the other.”

  Alafair’s brows knit. Shaw had always been a realistic and practical man who dealt with things as he found them. But there was something about his reasoning that smacked of avoidance and denial. She opened her mouth to speak, but he beat her to it.

  “You go on back up to the house, Alafair. I’m bunking in the barn. I don’t intend to leave that slippery youngster out here unguarded tonight.”

  “But…”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “Send out some breakfast with Charlie when he comes to milk in the morning.” He gave her a gentle shove in the direction of the house.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Shaw checked the boy’s bonds. He had created a pallet for him out of clean gunny sacks and an old horse blanket over the straw. Alafair had wanted to bring him a quilt. Even though Shaw wasn’t feeling quite as murderous as he had when he first caught Crying Blood, he still wasn’t in the mood to make the troublesome lad too comfortable.

  Without Alafair’s soothing presence, the atmosphere between captor and captive was tense at first. Shaw took Alafair’s vacated seat on the upturned crate, rifle across his knees, and Crying Blood hunkered in the corner of the stall, shifting at intervals to ease his bonds. Shaw had hung one solitary kerosene lantern on a hook near the gate and the two eyed each other silently by its dim light.

  Shaw waited in vain over a long hour for the boy to go to sleep, but he didn’t appear to be so inclined. Shaw was surprised. Young people could generally drop off under practically any circumstance, and he was pretty sure that Crying Blood hadn’t found himself in such comfortable surroundings in some time.

  Shaw himself was tired to the bone and exasperated almost beyond bearing; at his exhausted body, at his unruly imagination and unreasonable fear, and above all at this pesky child.

  “How old are you, young’un?” The sound of Shaw’s voice breaking the silence surprised even himself. Crying Blood raised his head but didn’t reply.

  Shaw persisted. “Fourteen, fifteen? Or more like thirteen, maybe. You look pretty scrawny to be much older.”

  This was an affront that Crying Blood couldn’t tolerate. “I’m fifteen.”

  “Fifteen. I’ve got a son close to your age. He’d make about two of you, though.”

  “I’ll be sixteen come spring. That’s what the Reverend Edmond says, anyway.”

  Aha! Shaw smiled in spite of himself. “Reverend Edmond, you say.”

  The boy grimaced at the realization he’d given himself away.

  “You reckon the Reverend Edmond is wondering where you are?”

  The kid’s bottom lip pushed out into a pout and he looked away.

  Shaw crossed one ankle over his knee and regarded his prisoner for a moment, suddenly feeling much better. He tried another angle. “Well, I hope you enjoyed the barbeque you made out of of my fresh-killed hog, at least.”

  The grey-green eyes widened. “I didn’t eat it. I took that meat for bait. I meant to lure him with it.”

  “The white-haired haint? Your ghost likes meat?”

  “Yeah, he likes the smell of meat a’cookin’. The only time I’ve ever been able to glimpse him is when there’s meat over the fire.”

  Shaw’s improved mood evaporated. “You’ve seen him?”

  “I have. Just a glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, like. I could see that white hair in the moonlight. He only comes out at night, you see. That’s what Ira told me. That’s ’cause he’s a spirit. He still likes the smell of meat, though.”

  Shaw shook his head, fighting his rising annoyance. For an instant he had thought the boy’s tale was more than fantasy. Still, Crying Blood was talking, after a fashion. Shaw made an effort to sound reasonable. “Well, if this white-haired fellow is already dead, how are you aiming to kill him?”

  Crying Blood sat up, eager. “I went to see an owalu over by Eufaula. He looked in the fire and saw a man whose breath had left his body but his flesh had forgot that it was dead. He told me that until this flesh was back beneath the ground where it belongs, the world is out of balance. So if he’s naught but flesh, I expect I can just shoot him.” The boy shifted awkwardly and maneuvered his bound hands enough to retrieve a pigskin pouch from the pocket of his britches. “He told me not never to go to sleep without I burn some of this.”

  Shaw took the pouch and opened the drawstring top with two fingers. Before he even looked inside, he could tell by the redolent aroma that it was full of cedar wood shavings. He didn’t ask what it was for. Everyone knew that cedar smoke repelled ghosts. “I reckon you’d better keep this, then.” He stretched forward and put the bag back into the boy’s hand. “Before you sleep we’ll throw a pinch in the lantern. Why did this ghost-man get the idea to kill your brother and you?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Maybe it was because we trespassed on his haunting place. Or maybe something happened long ago.” Crying Blood’s gaze wandered off. “We had a mama once. Ira told me she give us away to keep us safe. Maybe it’s something to do with that. Ira says I was too little, but I wasn’t. Sometimes I think I remember her face. It’s like a dream in my mind.”

  Shaw listened quietly, trying to maintain his skepticism but feeling himself being drawn into Crying Blood’s tale. Boys. He knew from bitter experience how easily a young man could buy into a myth to explain a world that made no sense to him. He nearly suggested that together he and Crying Blood could do some investigation and discover what really happened to Ira, but he stopped himself. He had sons of his own to raise.

  “You got any other kinfolks?” he asked. “Somebody is probably wondering where you are.”

  Crying Blood slouched back into the straw and shrugged. “Naw, not as I know of.” His expression was ironic. “The Reverend Edmond, he taught me to be a Christian and tried to cure me of wickedness. I wanted mighty hard to be good, but I reckon it just never did take.”

  The lad was blinking with fatigue now, and Shaw threw the horse blanket over him. “Never mind, then. You can tell the rest of your story to the sheriff in the morning.”

  Crying Blood curled up in his little nest and pulled the blanket up to his chin. One greenish eye regarded Shaw sleepily.

  “I’m sorry I hurt your dog, Mister,” he murmured. “I like them dogs.”

  Shaw stood up and turned down the wick in the lantern hanging on its hook by the stall gate. “Just go to sleep.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Shaw sat on the crate with his rifle over his knees, struggling to stay awake, for over an ho
ur, or two hours. He lost track of time. He withdrew his watch from his coat pocket and peered at it in the dim glow of the lantern. It was close to midnight. He was going to be useless in the morning. He decided to give himself another hour then wake Kurt to relieve him. Just for something to do, he briefly considered filling the feed boxes for the cows and the pregnant mares who were housed in the barn. He could hear their occasional snuffing and shifting in their stalls. But he decided against doing the chore ahead of schedule lest he discombobulate the animals. He stood and walked up and down the broad, open expanse of the barn for a few minutes, then sat back down on his crate.

  It didn’t take but a few minutes for him to begin to doze, drifting between wake and sleep, and then dream. He dreamed he was chasing the haint through the woods, mixing up both hunts in his mind. He could smell the damp leaf litter, see the wisps of fog entangling the boles of the trees, his legs. He heard the hound baying, the snap of the dry tree branches as he plunged past. He felt the cold press of the rifle on his neck and his hand twitched and tingled as he relived the smash of his fist against his foe’s jaw, his hand closing around the rifle barrel before he jerked it away from his captor and flung it to the ground.

  He awoke with a start. The boy’s rifle. He had forgotten all about it. As far as he knew it was still lying in a pile of wet leaves in the woods behind the house. Had Alafair picked it up? Kurt? He didn’t remember.

  He wiped the sleep from his eyes and stood up, removing the lantern from its hook and leaning over to check his captive. The boy was sound asleep, dug down into the blanket and gunny sacks like a nesting pup.

  Shaw closed the stall gate, dropped the lock and secured it with a padlock. He took the lantern with him when he left the barn and walked through the dark barnyard, around the tool shed to Kurt’s room. He didn’t bother to knock before he went in.

  The furnishings of Kurt’s little apartment consisted of two squeaky cast-iron cots with straw mattresses, a rickety table and two equally rickety chairs, a flat-topped iron Franklin stove with two burners, a gun rack over the door, a wooden shelf and half a dozen pegs on the wall to serve for a closet.

  The shutters on the single glassless window were closed and barred. The room was dark as a cow’s insides. Shaw propped his rifle at the foot of the empty cot by the door and picked his way across the room by lamplight. Kurt was sprawled out in his long johns, lying on his stomach, cradling his head on his arms. Shaw had to shake him.

  He rolled over, squinting, but instantly awake. “Yes, sir?” His blue eyes looked colorless in the yellow light of the lantern.

  “Reckon you can take a turn watching our prisoner? I can’t keep my eyes open.” Shaw sat down on one of the chairs as Kurt rolled out of bed and pulled his trousers on over his union suit.

  Shaw felt himself sagging with fatigue. His knees were aching, his hand hurt, his eyes felt gritty. He was having trouble concentrating. Kurt, on the other hand, seemed perfectly refreshed and full of energy after his few hours of sleep. Shaw was suddenly struck with envy for the big, healthy German. He almost laughed aloud at himself. He had already had his turn at being twenty-five and immortal.

  “Say,” Shaw began, as Kurt sat down to pull on his boots, “did you pick up the rifle with the three red stripes, the one I wrested from the kid out in the woods?”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry, I did not think of it. You wish I am fetching it?” Kurt’s English was much improved since he had first come to work here, but sometimes Shaw had to ponder a moment before he understood exactly what Kurt meant.

  “You know, that’s probably a good idea. I don’t care to leave a loaded weapon unattended. Do you think you can find your way back there in the dark?”

  “I think yes, sir.”

  Shaw fished the flashlight out of his coat pocket. “Take this. I put in a new battery, so it’ll work good as long as you don’t leave it on too long and use up the juice. And take your shotgun with you.”

  Kurt was dressed by now. Shaw waited patiently as he grabbed his hat and coat off the tree by the door, took his shotgun off the rack, retrieved a couple of shells from a drawer in his bedside table and slipped them into his coat pocket. They walked together for a little way down the path before Shaw turned toward the barn, and Kurt went his own way toward the woods.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was four-thirty in the morning, still cold and black as the dark side of the moon, when Sally brought Peter the news about Red Allen.

  “Leroy’s in the kitchen,” she began. “Red Allen is gone.”

  There was no heat in the bedroom, but the chill was forgotten as Peter tried to process what his wife had just said. “What do you mean, gone?” He knew it was a stupid thing to ask even as he said it.

  Sally was standing in the bedroom door with coal tongs in her hand. She had been firing up the stove for breakfast when their grandson and part-time stableboy Leroy had burst into her kitchen with the news. She didn’t have to bother with an answer when Leroy himself loomed up at her shoulder, his face red and his black hair sticking up every which way. “I went to feed him and his stall is empty, Gramp!” The teenager’s words tumbled all over one another in his excitement. “Somebody took him! The stall gate was closed and Red Allen’s rope halter ain’t on its hook!”

  Peter hustled Sally and Leroy before him into the parlor where he flung himself into a chair and pulled on his boots. “Did you look for him, Leroy? Are there tracks?”

  “No, Gramp. As soon as I saw the stall was empty I come a’running to get you.”

  Sally managed to light a lantern and shove it into Peter’s hand before he and the boy ran out the back door. Peter held the lamp at arm’s length and followed at the best pace he could manage as his grandson tore across the yard and down the path to the stables.

  Leroy was dancing with impatience in front of the empty stall when Peter finally puffed in behind him.

  “Look, Gramp, he’s gone!”

  The expression that crossed Peter’s face when he saw the empty stall caused the boy to swallow his words. Peter’s complexion had gone puce in the lamplight. But when he spoke he sounded perfectly reasonable. “Leroy, saddle up Tiger, there, and ride to the Sheriff’s office. Roust up Scott or Trent or whoever’s on duty and get ’em out here.”

  “Yessir.” Leroy moved smartly to do as he was told.

  Peter had no doubt what had happened. He should have known that Doolan wasn’t about to take no for an answer. He swore under his breath. When he was soldiering out West, horse-thieves got hanged. He was still staring at the empty stall and longing for the days of rough justice when Leroy reappeared at the stable door, leading Tiger by the reins.

  “What are you dallying for, lad?” Peter barked.

  “You’d best come see this.” He dropped the reins and beckoned for Peter to follow him outside.

  Sweet Jesus, Peter thought as he followed the boy around to the small corral at the side of the building. If Doolan has harmed that horse I will kill him with my bare hands.

  The lantern light glinted off an ivory mane as they neared the fence and Peter’s breath caught. Red Allen was standing with his head over the rail, nodding with contentment and looking quite satisfied with himself. Peter stopped in his tracks and laughed a laugh that was more like a sob of relief.

  Leroy took the lantern from his grandfather’s hand and stretched over the fence to illuminate the horse’s nether regions. “Look, Gramp. This stallion has been at a mare.”

  ***

  The horizon was just turning from black to grey when Leroy came back to the house to let Sally know what was happening. The young man sat down at the table and Sally put a plate full of fried eggs and syrup-covered biscuits in front of him.

  “Is the horse all right, sugar?” she asked.

  “Yes’m. I’ve washed him down and stabled him and fed him. He’s none the worse for wear.”

  “How’s Grandpapa?”

  “Fit to be tied. He found some tracks. Now he’s sure
that somebody brought a mare in on the sly last night then took Red Allen out to her in the corral. He’s gone to fetch the sheriff himself.” Leroy reddened. “Gran, I didn’t know Grandpapa was acquainted with such language.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The big double barn doors were closed and locked, but as Shaw approached he could hear the animals lowing, whinnying, bumping and knocking against their stalls. Perplexed, he opened the door to the smaller side entrance and was immediately struck with the smell—a gamey, dark, animal smell. A bear, a lion? No, he knew those scents. There was no mistaking the iron tang of blood, though.

  He caught his breath and chambered a round in his rifle before he slipped in.

  He could see from ten yards out that the bar across the gate of Crying Blood’s prison stall had been splintered and the hasp, padlock still affixed, was hanging askew. He quickened his pace as he moved across the floor.

  Dang it, he knew he should never have left that slippery son of a gun unguarded. The question of how the boy had managed to break the lock on the outside niggled the back of his mind, but he fully expected to find the stall empty when he threw open the door and stepped inside.

  Crying Blood lay on his back, the horse blanket thrown to one side, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. He wasn’t seeing anything, though. A crude wooden lance thrust through his heart had pinned his body to the ground and sent his soul to heaven.

  Shaw staggered back like he had been kicked in the chest, almost dropping the lantern. He must have cried out, for a minute later, as he stood just outside the open gate gasping in shock, Kurt appeared at at run, stuffing a shell into the breach of his shotgun.

  “Was ist los?” He skidded to a stop, alarmed at the look of horror on Shaw’s face. Shaw gestured toward the broken gate, still too breathless to speak. Kurt took the lantern and peered into the stall.

  He jerked his head out. “Lieber Gott!”