Death Comes

by Sue Hallgarth

  “WHAT DO YOU think?” Edith watched Spud carry a tray to where they stood near the fireplace in the dining room. “Will he live?”

  “Oh, Agent Dan’ll live all right. He’ll be up before you know it.” Spud shook his head. “Question is, will he be able to help Tony catch those men and can he help us figure out what is going on? Hope so. The sheriff is useless.”

  “That seems about right,” Willa pulled out a chair and sat down.

  Spud lined up three glasses and began to fill them with lemonade.

  “Do you drive, Spud?” Willa accepted the glass he handed to her.

  “There’s a nonsequitur for you,” Edith said.

  “Never have.” Spud sat down. “Can’t afford a car. You?”

  “No need in New York City. Neither of us drives. We walk most places and occasionally take a taxi or the subway. A car is the last thing we need.”

  “I expect if I had one, I’d be more dangerous than Tony. I’m anything but mechanical.” Spud laughed at his own joke. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was hoping since Tony’s not here you might drive us somewhere.” Willa’s smile became mysterious. Edith thought Willa was probably determined to convince Spud that he could drive after all.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I’ve been thinking about an excursion to, where is it again?” Willa turned to Edith.

  “Red River.”

  “Red River.” Willa turned back to Spud. “I really want to go there. I thought of asking Long John Dunn to take us, but I expect we’d have to wait days for him to find the time. And I thought of John Collier, but he has work to do at the pueblo.”

  Willa paused but Spud didn’t speak. Edith smiled. Willa’s persuasive techniques seemed a bit rusty. At least they weren’t working on Spud.

  “John Dunn does have a lot on his plate, and John Collier is busy with pueblo leaders.”

  “Yes. Well, we also want to visit the Lawrence ranch,” Willa tried another tack. “We had such a pleasant afternoon there last year we’d like to see it again. I’ve forgotten what they call it,” she turned to Edith.

  “Kiowa.”

  “Kiowa,” Willa nodded.

  “I wish I could drive you. A friend of mine, a painter, is taking care of the place.” Spud smiled encouragement despite his refusal. “But why do you want to go to Red River?”

  “Curiosity. It sounds amazingly lawless with all those gambling establishments and houses of ill repute. And Al Capone. Exactly the sort of place that would harbor whoever killed those poor women.”

  “You may be on to something,” Spud agreed. “But Red River strikes me as exactly the sort of place I never want to go. And I’d advise you to stay away from there, too. It’s enough that Agent Dan has been shot. You don’t have to go tempting the fates as well. You already did that once with the hunting camp.”

  “You think there’s a connection between Red River and the murders?” Edith wanted to be sure she was following Spud’s logic.

  “Could be.”

  “What about that man we saw near where the bodies were buried? He had a rifle.”

  “Manby? I’d never put anything past Manby, but two men shot at Agent Dan.”

  “And we know nothing about them except that one has a dark beard,” Willa reminded him.

  “Manby doesn’t have a beard.”

  “We’re jumping pretty far ahead here,” Edith interrupted, placing her empty glass on the table. “We don’t know why those men shot Agent Dan. We don’t even know whether they were at the hunting camp. All we know is that Agent Dan was there and after he left they shot him.”

  “Logic is a hard taskmaster,” Willa sighed.

  “Do you suppose Manby has a bearded friend?” Edith wasn’t ready to give up that line of thought.

  “Don’t believe everything you might imagine,” Spud responded. “We can hope Tony will tell us more before long.”

  “Patience, that’s what you recommend?” Willa’s sigh ended with a smile.

  “Yes. But in the meantime, remember, Mabel knows how to drive.”

  Adam had no trouble pausing for a second cup of coffee. Sunlight still topped the trees and a quick break could only help at this point. He stepped back from his easel.

  The tree filled his canvas just as he intended, tall and hazy and full of motion as if a turbulent wind were about to carry it off. Not that anyone would know it was a tree. It simply appeared to be colors and swirls with the hint of a tree. Now to pull the eye down, to anchor the image. Perhaps something dark, a different shape near the trunk. Nothing distinct, just the suggestion of something, something alive perhaps, something moving and drawing attention to itself, an ephemeral presence near the base of the tree. Adam took a sip of coffee and looked away from his painting. His glance fell on the horse and mule dozing in the corral. Adam put down his cup and reached for his brush.

  The larger of the two would be dark, a bay perhaps, the mule darker still. Adam stirred the colors on his pallet, the image of horse and mule filling his mind. The horse in front but only by a shoulder. The mule close, offering to pass but not. One would not lead the other. They would be paired beneath the tree, a team. Adam touched his brush to the canvas. The image continued to shape itself, growing taller and accommodating riders, one male, the other female. The male, bareback with a loose rein, would let his mount take charge, alert but careful in the wind. His partner would cling to her saddle with determination and, in Adam’s mind, an air of grave serenity. Despite the wind in his tree, this would be no runaway but a stately procession. Just for fun, he picked up a smaller brush and added in a hint of blue atop the mule. It didn’t matter that no one could tell that the blue adorned a rider or that the rider was Maria.

  Adam stepped back and picked up his coffee, cold now but still good. Tension had slipped from his shoulders, his forehead relaxed. He liked what he saw. It was the idea he had been waiting for. He and Maria could ride out together if they were brave and careful. The fact that he had never ridden bareback gave him pause, and he was sure Maria had never been on the back of a mule, saddle or no. But it could work. At least he had ridden Smokey and he knew enough about horses to think after the long ride up from Los Gallos Smokey would carry him quietly. He just didn’t know about the mule or Maria. But they could practice this afternoon and, if all went well, leave tomorrow or the next day. All they had to do in between was live through another night or two at the most.

  Spud put his feet on the hassock in his little office and leaned back, still smiling from his conversation with Willa and Edith. Willa had almost shouted “Of course, Mabel drives!” before Willa and Edith rose in unison and ran off to find Mabel. Spud wondered how Mabel would react. And if she agreed to drive, where would she take them?

  Mabel had been to the ranch often. That would be no chore. After all, it was Mabel who gave the ranch to Lawrence. And Lawrence, who hated to be indebted to anyone, least of all Mabel, paid her back by giving her the original manuscript for Sons and Lovers. Tempestuous relationship, that one, a constant tug-of-war. Of course Lawrence did owe Mabel. She brought him and Frieda to New Mexico and made it possible for them to stay. Spud guessed that at least for Lawrence, Sons and Lovers evened the odds enough to allow them to remain friends. Mabel might even enjoy seeing the ranch again, Spud reasoned. It would give her an excuse to write to Lawrence.

  But Red River? As far as Spud knew, Mabel had been there only once. Spud heard about it from Andrew Dasburg, who omitted no detail. Andrew and Mabel often went off together during their early days in Taos, when Mabel was falling in love with Tony and Andrew with collecting retablos. Andrew was one of Mabel’s closest friends, and Mabel was using every excuse to stay away from home and her husband at the time, the painter Maurice Sterne, her one serious fling into the art world. Once divorced from Maurice and comfortable with Tony, Mabel didn’t care so much about excursions with Andrew, but by then the two of them had visited just about every village in the area.

&nb
sp; Red River didn’t offer much in the way of Mexican folk art, but Andrew said Mabel wanted to see outlaws and prostitutes in the raw so off they went on a bright sunny morning to Red River and Elizabethtown, both close enough to Taos to make it a day trip. As soon as they arrived they realized morning was the wrong time of day. In one saloon they did encounter several men too drunk to leave but found no prostitutes. In another they saw two men huddled together in a corner snoring and one woman seated in a single ray of sunlight near the door, cradling her cup of morning coffee. She was neatly dressed, almost prim Mabel said later, and engrossed in the papers spread before her. Ledgers. She was the proprietor.

  “Pull one up,” she offered and they did, sitting gingerly on chairs across the table from her. “Name’s May,” she nodded. When they said yes to coffee, she signaled someone in the back and pulled her papers together. “Sorry about the mess. Busy night. Had one cowboy go flying over the bar. Broke twelve bottles of whiskey. Expensive rye whiskey,” she emphasized with raised eyebrows. “Well, that’s business,” she sat back and sighed before either of them could respond. “Still,” she smiled at Mabel, “beats teaching.”

  Andrew recited their whole conversation, all about how difficult it was for women to earn their own way in the world. “Easier in the west,” May claimed. “Don’t get stuck in factories or schoolrooms, and husbands are ripe for the picking. Don’t have to worry about lawmen, either. They just fit right in.”

  Andrew had felt increasingly naïve but Mabel was right with May, egging her on. They could have been back in New York City listening to the union organizers and suffragettes who just six years before had won the right to vote. Madame May didn’t care about the vote and she didn’t want a husband. She wanted to earn her own money and be her own person. When Mabel asked if the women she employed felt the same way, May responded, “They will.”

  That was pretty much that. No dance-hall girls, no gambling men, no gunplay. They were disappointed. But before they left May told Andrew to come back on his own. “New girls all the time. Someone to suit you for sure.” Andrew wondered what she meant by “new all the time” and now Spud did, too.

  Three riders came in fast from the open fields behind Los Gallos. It took Spud a few minutes to reach the kitchen door where Amelia was already speaking with the riders in rapid Spanish. Spud caught several words but not enough to understand until Amelia translated for him.

  The posse had tracked two horses up the mountain on trails heading toward Red River. A third horse joined them, but the trackers lost the hoof prints on hard ground. When the dogs picked them up again, the two riders who shot Agent Dan had apparently split and gone in different directions, one with the new third rider, the other on his own. The posse split up to follow both. The three posse members with Tony and the dogs continued heading toward Red River. The other posse members followed the tracks heading toward Taos. But when they reached a road near Arroyo Seco, those tracks simply disappeared in the mix of others. Since none of the posse members had any idea what their quarry looked like, they decided to go back to Los Gallos to see if Agent Dan could give them a description.

  Amelia asked Spud what to do. She didn’t think Agent Dan would be able to tell them anything, but Spud said he would go with her to Agent Dan’s room and, guessing the posse members spoke Spanish and their native Tewa but very little English, he asked Amelia to translate for everyone. They found Agent Dan sitting on the edge of his bed.

  Agent Dan told them all he knew. One man rode a bay, the other a sorrel. He thought both horses were shod. The bay, tall and stout, might have a blaze. The sorrel, on the thin side, had no markings that he saw. The rider on the bay had a dark beard, not long but longer than stubble. Both were wearing gun belts and chaps. That much Agent Dan had been able to see, but he had only a hazy impression of anything above the bearded man’s waist and nothing at all about the rider on the sorrel. That man never dismounted.

  Agent Dan wasn’t even sure which of the two shot him. Could have been either one. The man with the beard wasn’t carrying a rifle when he got down to make sure Agent Dan was dead. All Agent Dan could remember was that the man’s boots were black and badly scuffed. But that description was no help, Agent Dan acknowledged, because it would fit just about anyone around Taos.

  When the posse members left, they took another dog with them, hoping it could pick up the scent of the single horse and separate it out from the mix of prints in the road. Slim chance, Spud thought, returning with Amelia to the kitchen.

  News of the third rider surprised them. Not even Agent Dan knew what to make of that. He’d never expected to watch for armed men on horseback around Taos, he said. He thought he would be identifying cars or trucks used to transport the victims of an international human trafficking ring.

  “What on earth is going on in this Godforsaken place?” he asked. When neither Spud nor Amelia answered, he shut his eyes and insisted they had to get him back on his feet. He had work to do. When nobody moved to help him, he shrugged, put his head on the pillow, and promptly fell asleep.

  “Tomorrow,” Amelia whispered, “tomorrow he will be strong. You will see.”

  “Tomorrow. Let’s go tomorrow,” Mabel promised Willa and Edith. “As soon as we know Tony’s all right.”

  “Surely he will be.” Edith wanted to be cheerful. Spud had joined them in Mabel’s bedroom to fill them in on news from the posse and ease their fears. Mabel was especially relieved. Tony was still in charge and Spud assured her the posse would have little real trouble tracking those men, even if they were now dispersed.

  “By tomorrow Tony will have captured them, don’t you think?” Willa picked up on Edith’s cheer. “I have complete faith. We’ll know a lot more when they do catch them and then we won’t have to worry about where we go.”

  “I’m not worried, not worried at all,” Mabel said.

  After Spud went back to his office, Mabel rose from her favorite writing place, her four-poster bed, to join them on one of the lounge chairs arranged in front of her fireplace. “I’m sure Tony is fine and we will be perfectly safe whether they’ve caught up with those awful men or not. But they might not catch them today. Those men don’t want to be found.”

  “Yes,” Willa agreed, “but we should be perfectly safe in Red River anyway, don’t you think?”

  “Probably safe. We’ll know more when we hear from Tony. But I think we should go to the ranch instead. Spud said the men Tony is tracking seem to be heading toward Red River. Can’t imagine why. That town is about as un-dangerous as any place can be. Beautiful but boring.”

  “Beautiful?” Edith asked.

  “Boring?” Willa’s face expressed surprise.

  “Beautiful, yes, with the river and glorious aspens and ponderosas. Promoters are starting to rent out abandoned miners’ cabins and calling the place a ‘mountain playground.’ Maybe it is at night, but nothing happens there during the day except a little fishing. Last year when Andrew and I drove up there, we wound up drinking coffee and chatting with Madame May. The Madame part makes her sound exotic, but she’s just a woman taking care of business. Her profession may be a little on the wild side, but she wasn’t. She seemed completely practical and down-to-earth. She didn’t even wear a fancy dress.”

  “What about other women? There should be a lot of women.” Edith tried to visualize all that Red River had to offer.

  Mabel shook her head. “Probably sleeping.”

  “Well, yes,” Willa agreed. “But there are a lot of women in Red River, aren’t there?”

  “We need to know what they look like. Whether they look like the three who were murdered.”

  “Mexican, you mean?” Mabel shook her head again. “We weren’t looking for anything in particular that day and no one was around. Just Madame May, who is definitely not Mexican, and a couple of drunken men asleep on the floor.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Edith nodded. “Red River would tell us nothing.”

  “Though Madame M
ay might.” Willa’s smile lingered.

  “I don’t think so. She’s not the sort to tell you anything you really want to know.”

  XII

  CONVERSATION IN THE main house became tense as the afternoon wore into evening. No one had heard another word from any member of the posse and Mabel had become increasingly apprehensive. With the sun still high there was plenty of light and would be for several more hours so no one expected the posse to give up their search. But Mabel was disappointed Tony hadn’t managed a speedy capture or at least to send more news. Both segments of the posse were by now well beyond the limits of legal pueblo jurisdiction.

  “Tony should never have gotten involved in this,” Mabel declared. “He knows nothing about criminals and guns. If his posse does reach Red River they’re likely to be the ones who get killed and no one will be the wiser. Red River may be boring in daylight but it has always been dangerous for Taos Indians off pueblo lands. For armed Indians chasing white men into the den of notorious gringos, well, think about it. It’s time for Tony to let the sheriff handle things.”

  Those had been Mabel’s final words before Willa and Edith retired to the pink adobe to dress for dinner where their speculation about Red River turned less sanguine.

  “The sheriff,” Willa scoffed in the privacy of their own room. “What Mabel actually means is that it’s time to give up the chase. Nothing will be done. Nothing at all. Those women are dead and their killer or killers will go free.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Edith agreed. A vision of the lone corpse they had found invaded her mind, the disheveled body half buried in rocks and sand. Edith felt her own body tense. If only they could do something, anything, to help catch the killers. She took a deep breath and forced her attention back to the present and Willa’s mirrored image.

  Scowling, Willa jerked a brush through her auburn hair until the strands fairly sizzled with static electricity. Soon, Edith knew, Willa would arrange her hair loosely at the base of her neck and once again appear tidy, serious, and wise. Amused in spite of what they had been talking about, Edith watched Willa’s reflection in the full-length mirror that tilted on its own legs. It often chose its own angle and like a fun-house mirror caught the person standing before it in absurd reflections. Now Willa’s head appeared enormous and her hands flared large with each stroke of the brush.