Death Comes

by Sue Hallgarth

  Advance Praise for Death Comes

  “They’re back! If you loved On the Rocks, you’ll be thrilled to have this new adventure of Willa and Edith. This time they’re in New Mexico tracking down the unsolved murders of too many women. Sue Hallgarth has done it again: the combination of deep knowledge of the geographic terrain, its history, Cather’s literary preoccupations, and Hallgarth’s feminist sensibility have brought us another suspenseful, terrific read.” — Joan W. Scott, author of Gender and the Politics of History and The Fantasy of Feminist History

  “My new favorite book is Death Comes! It made distant memories real and simpatico. What a delight to see them. And the beautiful Taos you let me walk through. I especially want to thank you for including Spud. He was always there, so it’s nice to have him recognized. I only knew him as an old man who always stopped to listen to a child. You showed me a young man who would become the one I knew and loved.” — Claudia Smith Miller, great-granddaughter of Mabel Dodge Luhan

  “Death Comes is a clever play on the novel that Willa Cather worked on in Taos, New Mexico, in the summers of 1925 and 1926, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Hallgarth has done serious historical and cultural research, cleverly highlighting Willa Cather’s virtues as a strong-willed sleuth…. This is a very good read: as a story of 1920s Taos — including race and class relations, as a portrait of the Mabel Dodge Luhan circle, and, last but not least, as a murder mystery.” — Lois Rudnick, author of Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds

  “Willa Cather is traveling in northern New Mexico while polishing her manuscript Death Comes for the Archbishop when she and her companion Edith Lewis are caught up in the mystery surrounding the deaths of three women near D.H. Lawrence’s ranch. An intriguing story for those of us who always wished we had been there when Mabel Dodge Luhan held court in Taos for luminaries of art and literature.” — Judith Ryan Hendricks, author of Isabel’s Daughter and The Laws of Harmony

  “The second book in Hallgarth’s Willa Cather and Edith Lewis mystery series captures the vivid and compelling landscape of the Taos, NM territorial west. A historical mystery with real people — think Mabel Dodge and Tony Luhan, Long John Dunn, Arthur Manby —and everyday life in the settling west. Compelling and richly imagined by a masterful storyteller. I didn’t want it to end.” — Betty Palmer, Events Coordinator, op.cit.books, Taos, NM

  “Our favorite literary sleuths are back! And this time Willa Cather and Edith Lewis are summering in Taos, New Mexico. Guests of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the amiable pair are planning for nothing more taxing than a month’s worth of writing and painting. Then an unsettling excursion to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch changes everything. Entertaining and edifying, Death Comes is a compelling mystery set in New Mexico, that place Cather described as a ‘landscape one longed for when one was away’.” — Sharon Oard Warner, co-director D.H. Lawrence Ranch and author of Sophie’s House of Cards

  Praise for On the Rocks

  “One of ‘Ten Titles to Pick Up Now’…. A fictionalized glimpse into the partnership between the novelist and her artist companion, who team up to solve a murder on an island in the Bay of Fundy.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “Cather fans will enjoy the atmosphere, and Hallgarth captures the local color well, providing a look at the eccentric island residents, the small-town politics, and the life of the [two] women’s communities.” — American Library Association Booklist

  “This historic, literary mystery is the first of what could be a terrific new series. The setting — on the Canadian island of Grand Manan in 1929 — is captivating and the story engaging. On the Rocks is a real treat!” — Rose City Reader

  “I enjoyed the fun and energy of On the Rocks!” — Lucia Woods Lindley, member of Board of Governors, The Willa Cather Foundation

  “On The Rocks is a riveting addition to historical fiction collections and those with a love for the artistic life.” —The Midwest Book Review

  “Utterly absorbing, compulsively readable. Hallgarth spins her tale with an artistry that allows us to imagine a time and place as compelling as a dream.” — Kathleen Hill, author of Who Occupies This House and Still Waters in Niger

  “Sue Hallgarth incorporates the spectacular setting of Grand Manan into a mystery set among summer colonies of feminist artists, colorful island types, and suspicious visitors. Cather readers will detect her pronouncements on writing and life, and the island rock itself, a Cather symbol of survival, becomes here a solid contrast to the human foibles that play out on its surface.” — John Murphy, member of Board of Governors, The Willa Cather Foundation

  “On the Rocks is sophisticated and yet has a wonderful innocence. It conveys a convincing sense of the period. The characters are rounded, real. It is funny. It is compelling. It is a good tale.” — Jake Page, author of the Mo Bowdre mystery series

  “Cather aficionados will be especially interested in the author’s new take on Willa Cather’s personal history. The amiable cottage colony on Grand Manan island in the Bay of Fundy, where Edith and Willa built their summer retreat in the 1920s, is lovingly captured in this first book in a sparkling new literary mystery series.” — Nancy Rutland, founder of Bookworks, Albuquerque, NM

  “Love, love, love…. Highly recommended to those who enjoy this historical genre, and to fans of great women authors! I’ll be curious to see if Ms. Hallgarth has this as the start of a series or not. She is an expert on Cather and clearly ‘knows’ her well.” — Beth’s Book-Nook Blog

  “…the strength of the book is in Hallgarth’s ability to paint a scene. Her research about Grand Manan, Cather and Lewis, and the time period are obviously top notch.” —WildmooBooks

  “Nice read with a beautiful portrait of a Canadian island in the 1920s, a strong feminist portrait of Willa Cather and her partner Edith, and a murder mystery to boot! Well-written with some beautifully ‘painted’ scenes and an intriguing insight to the way we all tend to think, wandering from one association to another before we catch ourselves! I’ve never seen that in a book before and thoroughly enjoyed it.” — David Roberts, M.D., author of Practice Makes Perfect: How One Doctor Found the Meaning of Lives

  Death Comes

  Death Comes

  A WILLA CATHER AND

  EDITH LEWIS MYSTERY

  Sue Hallgarth

  ARBOR FARM PRESS

  Albuquerque

  ARBOR FARM PRESS

  P.O. Box 56783, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87187

  arborfarmpress.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Susan A. Hallgarth

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any format whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except by reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Printed by BookMobile, Minneapolis, Minnesota USA bookmobile.com

  Distributed by Itasca Books, Minneapolis, Minnesota USA itascabooks.com

  Cover design by Ann Weinstock

  Interior design, illustration, and typesetting by Sara DeHaan

  Nicolai Fechin, Portrait of Willa Cather, c. 1923–1927, (AC1997.28.1).

  Courtesy of Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

  Hallgarth, Susan A., author.

  Death comes / Sue Hallgarth.

  pages cm—(A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis mystery)

  LCCN 2017933595

  ISBN 978-0-9855200-4-5 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-9855200-5-2 (ebook)

  1. Cather, Willa, 1873–1947—Fiction. 2. Lewis, Edith—Fiction. 3. Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 1879–1962—Fiction. 4. Taos Indians—New Mexico—Fiction. 5. Taos County (N.M.)—Fiction. 6. Detective and mystery fiction. 7. Historical fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Hallgarth, Susan A. Willa Cather and Edith
Lewis mystery.

  PS3608.A54834D43 2017

  813’.6

  QBI17-900036

  For Hilda Raz

  poet, friend, editor extraordinaire

  I

  TAOS JUNCTION, NEW MEXICO, the sign said. WELCOME.

  Nowhere could air clear her senses so quickly. Edith breathed again deeply. The pale blue sky poured into her. And silence. Sunbaked silence. So much silence. It filled her ears and pressed against her skin. And space, forever space. And light and hue.

  No. Hues, Edith corrected herself. Multifarious hues. Glorious hues. Blues, purples, greens, browns. She let her gaze pass beyond the nearby juniper and piñon and the few clapboard buildings clustered near the railroad tracks to cross the high desert plains and come to rest on distant mountains. Taos Mountain, the words sang through her mind, then repeated.

  “Well, here we are,” Willa announced. Edith heard the edge in her voice. “And no one’s here to greet us.”

  Edith turned. The train had long since disappeared, its familiar bell and whistle gone with the chug and hiss of its engine. They were alone on the platform, their baggage stacked nearby.

  Willa was shaking her skirts to free them of soot. Then she squared her shoulders and followed Edith’s example, taking a deep breath. “Well,” she finally pronounced, the air sighing from her lungs, “what does it matter? We’re here, that’s what matters.” A grin flickered. She looked more herself. Willa often smiled with her eyes, blue and teasing, before dimples creased her cheeks.

  That was happening now. Edith placed her hand on Willa’s arm. “Let’s try the waiting room.”

  Taos Junction, New Mexico

  “Well, now, you’ll be Miss Cather and Miss Lewis?” The high-pitched drawl came from a long face peering around the door and into the station’s waiting room. The face was tanned and deeply creased, with steel-blue eyes and a bushy grey mustache that almost entirely obscured the stub of an unlit cigar. A long, thin body quickly followed and the face broke into a grin.

  “Long John Dunn.” Willa rose and strode across the waiting area to shake his hand. “Delighted to see you again.”

  “Yep,” John Dunn nodded. The way he said it, yep contained at least three syllables. “Drove the two of you up from Alcalde and after your visit put you on the train right here bound for Denver and parts east.”

  “How good of you to remember,” Edith found her hand swallowed in John Dunn’s grip.

  “Couldn’t forget. It was just a year ago July, same time as now. Anyway, remember the two of you from ten years back. You stayed at the Columbian and rode my horses.” Long John reached for their luggage.

  “You have a very good memory, Mr. Dunn.”

  “Yep. Where you going this time, the Columbian or the Luhans?”

  “Luhans, the pink adobe,” Edith’s grin grew as broad as Willa’s. “We loved it there last year.”

  “Nice little house, quiet place, much better than a hotel.”

  John Dunn continued to make conversation while Edith gathered up their few small items from the waiting-room bench, sure that John Dunn had already loaded their trunks from the platform. “Been out here long this summer?”

  “Since the end of May,” Edith answered, “just drifting around from Lamy to Gallup.”

  “What a hell of place that is,” Willa interjected with a sputter. “Why on earth anyone ever decided to sell liquor to the Navajos, I’ll never understand. They’re such nice people without it.”

  “We had a wonderful day trip to Zuni,” Edith interrupted, “and a thrilling ride into Canyon de Chelly.”

  John Dunn whistled in admiration, “Long, hard pack trip from Gallup to Chelly.”

  “But it was well worth it. The wranglers were good and the canyon … well, the cliff dwellings, the river … there’s just so much beauty. And history. And the Navajo. Still so much life happening among those ancient places.”

  “Edith, you’re positively gushing.” Willa’s humor restored, she turned to John Dunn with a change of subject. “You being a gambling man, I’ll bet we made better time getting there than you did getting here this morning, it took you so long.”

  “Yep, somewhat like that,” John Dunn grinned around his cigar. “Sand bogs slowed me down. The road is bad today.”

  With a small bag under each arm and another in each hand, John Dunn propped the station door open with a well-worn boot heel. “After you, ladies.”

  The grind of changing gears drew Willa’s attention first. She pointed to the edge of an arroyo a few miles ahead. Then Edith saw it, too, a pencil-thin line jutting vertically down the sky.

  “Is that a man?” Willa shaded her eyes.

  “Looks like,” John Dunn replied.

  “How can that be,” Edith heard the wonder in her own voice. The pencil-thin line, stark against its pale blue surround, dangled from a barren cottonwood. The line and the limb that held it were black. Neither looked quite like what it was. Shadow, Edith thought. It must be all a matter of shadow.

  “What happened?” Willa demanded of Long John.

  “Hanged, I guess.”

  “But who would hang him,” Edith caught her breath, “and then leave him?’

  John Dunn turned his head to look at the two of them, no longer so comfortably settled in the back seat. “Vigilantes,” he grinned and turned his eyes back to the sandy tracks ahead. “Devil of a road,” he growled between sentences. “Bothered some folks, I guess. Maybe stole some cattle or a horse or something.”

  No, Edith thought, that sort of thing only happens in Zane Grey. Whoever did that should have taken the body down. Should at least have attempted some sort of burial. Like the shallow grave they stumbled on last summer, really just a hollowed trough that monsoon rains had revealed a few feet below the trail. No vigilante justice for that death, but at least an attempt at burial. An unsuccessful attempt. Edith felt herself wince and saw again the woman’s body in her shallow grave, limbs askew, brown skin ripped open at the neck and just below the ribcage on her left side, clothes and hair matted with dirt and a red so dark it looked black.

  “No,” Edith interrupted her own thoughts. “People,” she began, “people wouldn’t,” but John Dunn was still talking.

  “Just need a stout rope to correct a wrong out here. Done it myself any number of times.”

  “But this is 1926.” Willa’s protest came as if from a long distance.

  “Yes, ma’am, it is.” John Dunn stared straight ahead. “And this is Northern New Mexico.”

  Within seconds John Dunn’s shoulders begin to jerk up and down. A muffled guffaw followed and he turned again to look at them. “And, yes, ma’am, I am pulling your legs. All four of them,” his laugh grew. “We fill bags with straw and hang them out here like that just to scare the tourists.”

  “What tourists?” Willa wanted to know. “Koshare Tours don’t come all the way up here, do they?”

  John Dunn shook his head, his laughter spent. “No, no,” he agreed. “But that Erna Fergusson and Ethel Hickey, they sold their Koshare Tours to Fred Harvey at La Fonda. He’s calling it Indian Detours for the de-tourists. Ha.”

  Neither Willa nor Edith smiled. John Dunn turned his attention back to the road and worked the gearshift to pull them through a patch of soft sand. Then he said, “De-tourists could be coming this way any time now. Heard someone say they saw a De-tour car heading for Red River, of all places. No stopping progress, they say.” He glanced again at his passengers and rolled his cigar from one side of his mustache to the other before adding, “Anyway, can’t scare you, I know.”

  “No. Can’t scare us,” Willa repeated and settled back firmly into her side of the seat.

  No, we aren’t to be frightened by the false image of a hanging corpse, Edith found herself thinking, her eyes again seeking the distant mountains. That’s not what they felt. Not now and not when they discovered the body last summer. Outrage. Shock. Disgust. And finally sadness, an overwhelming sadness and sense of helple
ssness in the face of such brutality, at the woman’s body splayed half-naked in sand and rock. And no one seemed surprised. No one even seemed to care. After they had raced their horses the several miles to the sheriff’s office and breathlessly told him of their discovery, he took his time returning with them to the site. When he got there, he didn’t even bend down, just prodded the woman’s body with his toe. “Mexican,” he said, turning away, “probably served her right.”

  Right? Right! Willa had been incredulous. They had been incredulous. And stunned by the lack of justice. No, stunned by the sheriff’s disinterest in justice where that woman was concerned. During the next weeks of their stay he never bothered to discover her name and made very little effort to find out who killed her. She certainly had not died of natural causes.

  And now this joke. John Dunn was a nice enough fellow, Edith knew, but his joke showed such a casual concern for life, for living things. Death as a way to settle disputes. Vigilante justice should be called what it is, violence and laziness and intellectual dishonesty, Edith settled the matter for herself.

  This summer, she made a silent promise, this summer we must find out what happened to that poor woman. We must make sure that whoever did that to her is introduced to real, rigorous, honest justice. That’s what Americans do. Well, Edith caught herself, that’s what Americans must try to do now.

  Having just come from Canyon de Chelly, Edith was reminded that only sixty years earlier, the army had ordered Kit Carson to round up the last of the Navajos and send them on their “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo where they starved and many, many died before they were allowed to return. No, Americans have not always been a just people. And so it is imperative, Edith told herself, to insist on justice as soon as they were again settled in the pink adobe. Edith had a good two weeks before she had to take the train to New York and return to her job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Willa had even longer, perhaps a month, to work on her manuscript before heading for Denver and a visit with her brother’s family.