Ax & Spade: A Thriller (Raven Trilogy Book 1)

by Kurt B. Dowdle

  One of the men said, “Shame.”

  The pair started walking toward the house, and when they came into view, Kamp saw them from behind, one taller than the other. The taller man wore a laborer’s clothes and carried a shotgun, while the shorter man wore a suit and a bowler. He carried a pistol. The smaller man found Ownby’s legs and torso and searched the pockets until he found the coin and put it in his own pocket. The taller man disappeared into the wreckage of the house, and the smaller man went around the back.

  Kamp waited a few minutes before crawling out of the carriage. He made his way around the house in time to see the men disappearing into the tree line. Kamp knew that at any moment neighbors would appear and after that the fire brigade. He wanted to be gone before anyone arrived. To step into the rubble of the house would be to shred his already injured feet, but he found that although the explosion had obliterated the front of the house, the back, including the kitchen, was partly intact. Better still, Kamp found a pair of work boots by the back door that fit. He pulled on the boots, went in and grabbed a potato sack lying by the cellar door. All the glass in the kitchen was shattered, covering the wood floor and countertops. He discovered a tin breadbox on the floor and inside it a fresh loaf of sourdough. He put the bread in the sack with ring bologna and jar of apple jelly. He also found a butter knife among the utensils scattered on the kitchen floor. Kamp dusted off the knife and threw it in the sack.

  He picked his way through what was left of the downstairs, looking for the room Ownby would have used as an office. He didn’t find such a room, though under a pile of debris he noticed a cylinder roll top desk tipped over on the floor. He removed the cylinder and gathered all the loose papers and a ledger he found inside. He stuffed it all in the potato sack and made his way back out of the ruined mansion. By the time he reached the stone patio, Kamp heard shouting and the clatter of carriages in the distance. He took the same path he’d seen the two men take minutes before.

  The trail took him through a stand of birch trees and then a meadow. He moved quickly, staying low to the ground. The path itself was narrow but easy to follow, winding across the clearing and then parallel to a small creek. Where the trail crossed the water, he stepped on dry stones and made it to the far side. He saw fresh footprints on the muddy bank. Kamp hadn’t noticed any pain since the explosion, and it hadn’t occurred to him that he may have been injured in the blast. But now his head began to throb at both temples, and his arms started to ache. He sat down at the base of a chestnut tree and opened the potato sack. He tore the loaf of sourdough in two and put one half back in the bag. The other half he slathered with apple jelly and ate, along with most of the ring bologna. When he finished the food, Kamp went to the creek, cupped his hands and gulped the cold, pure water.

  He sat down again with his back against the tree and removed the ledger from the potato sack. He remembered Silas Ownby’s last words to him, that one of his servants may have put the coin under his daughter’s pillow. The timing of the explosion–after Ownby had sent the servants away–made the likelihood even greater, and now he scanned the ledger for names of the people working in the home. By the looks of it, records of the family’s day-to-day business had been meticulously kept by Ownby’s wife, in ink and in a very neat hand. He leafed through the records of the weeks leading up to the day Ownby’s daughter found the coin and noticed that Ownby’s wife had created a daily record that included a list of people working that day. It appeared as if there had been a crew of four servants working in the home six days a week. And the list of four remained the same at least as far back as the start of the ledger, nine months in the past. As such, each day’s list included four names, always in the same order and written the same way:

  B & G: Samuel “Stump” Aemich

  S: Cornelia Ausmus

  M: Veronica “Fanny” Wenner

  B: Ludwig Yost

  Two days before the coin appeared under Jennie Ownby’s pillow, however, a substitution appeared in the list. The name “Mabel Schenker” replaced Veronica “Fanny” Wenner. Two days after that, Wenner’s name was back in the daily list. He searched the ledger to see if Ownby’s wife listed a reason for the change, and in fact she did. On the record of the day before Mabel Schenker’s name appeared, Ownby’s wife wrote that Wenner “fell ill.” Kamp also saw that on the same day Wenner fell ill, Silas Ownby had left home for a business trip. “New York City–4 days.” That meant that Silas Ownby may have never known that a person named Mabel Schenker had worked in his home. She’d arrived after he’d left, and she’d left by the time he returned home.

  Kamp closed the ledger, put it in the sack and stood up. He struggled to get his balance and then got back on the trail. He figured he’d already walked a mile, and so far he hadn’t seen any houses. He reached the base of a large hill and started climbing. As he worked himself up the trail, his mind started to clear, and he reflected on the fate of Silas Ownby. He knew the fire marshal would rule that the boiler accidentally exploded. In turn the coroner would rule the deaths of Ownby and his driver accidental as well. And once that happened, there could be no criminal investigation. Kamp realized that even if he were to investigate, there would be no way to prove that someone caused the boiler to explode. And if he were to interview the men who appeared immediately following the explosion, they would say they were just passing through and upon realizing they couldn’t render assistance, vacated the property. He admitted to himself that he hadn’t seen them commit any crime, apart from stealing the coin from Ownby’s pocket.

  KAMP KEPT MARCHING the trail up the hill. He swung his arms at his sides and found they didn’t hurt. He picked up the scent of burning wood on the breeze, and looking down through the trees, he caught sight of a small log cabin with wisps of smoke curling from the chimney. Two horses stood tied to a post next to the cabin. He began moving down the trail. When he’d gotten halfway down, Kamp removed the pistol from his belt and set the potato sack on the ground. He jogged the rest of the way down the trail, and when he reached the tree line that bordered the property, he crouched low and hustled to a window at the back of the building.

  Kamp heard footsteps on the wood floor inside the cabin. He looked in through the window and saw the two men packing bags and tying up bedrolls. He studied their faces and didn’t recognize either one. The shorter man wore eyeglasses with octagonal wire frames, and the larger man wore a scarf tied around his neck. Kamp also saw a bedsheet covering a large object inside the main room of the cabin. The shorter man doused the fire in the fireplace, and then both men went out the front door. Kamp knew that if he made a break for the woods, they’d see him. He sat with his back against the cabin and tried to slow his breathing. The men walked to their horses, and he heard one of the men climb into the saddle.

  One of the men said, “I want to make sure the back door is locked.”

  “Hurry up.”

  Kamp didn’t wait to be discovered. He sprang to his feet and pointed the pistol. When the man rounded the corner, Kamp saw it was the shorter of the two. The man saw Kamp and the gun and said, “Son of a bitch.”

  The man on horseback couldn’t see them, as he was on the opposite side of the house. He called, “Something wrong?”

  In a low voice Kamp said, “Tell him to leave. Tell him you’ll be along in a minute.”

  The man yelled, “Help!”

  As he said it, the man reached for the pistol at his waist. Kamp fired his last round, hitting the man square between the eyes. The man fell backward to the ground, clutching his face with both hands, blood pulsing between his fingers. Kamp ran to the other side of the cabin and saw the man on horseback already at the road and disappearing at a full gallop. He went back to the first man and picked up the pistol lying next to him. He tucked it in his belt.

  Kamp said, “What’s your name?

  “Can’t speak.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “I’m dying!”

  He stared at the man and wait
ed.

  Between gasps the man said, “My name is Otto…Vor…dem…gent…schen…felde.”

  “Slow down. Breathe.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Slow it down. You’re going to pass out otherwise. Otto, who was that other guy? What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. They never tell me.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “Okay, who do you work for?”

  “I’m a chemist.” He gasped for breath. “At Native Iron.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  “A manager.”

  “Stop lying. And sit up.”

  The man let out a loud wail and writhed on the ground. “They’ll be back soon. For both of us.”

  “Listen, Otto, this is your last chance to die with a clear conscience. Who do you work for?” Kamp cocked the Pepperbox pistol.

  “The man who runs Native Iron. Joseph Moore. But he takes orders from someone else.”

  “Moore ordered you to do the things you did.”

  “What?”

  “You’re the one who rigged the explosion in the mine in order to kill Roy Kunkle. And Silas Ownby’s house. You’re the chemist. You set it all up.”

  “I did.” He let his head fall back on the ground.

  Kamp could see that the man wasn’t going to die. The bullet had struck the bridge of his eyeglasses, slowing it down so that the slug lodged in his face with part of it still showing. Apart from a broken nose and the bleeding, he was probably fine.

  “Lie here, and don’t move. I’ll get bandages. Give me the key to the cabin.”

  The man fished in his pocket and handed him a skeleton key.

  Kamp said, “No explosion this time.”

  The man shook his head, and Kamp went in through the front door. Once inside, he saw two one-pound gunpowder tins on the floor, both empty. He pulled the sheet off the object he’d seen through the window. It was made of wood with brass wheels and gears. Kamp had never seen such a contraption. He took a closer look and saw that it was a press of some kind, a coin press. He ran back out the door, and by the time he reached the backyard, the man had gotten to his feet and had started shambling toward the woods. Kamp pulled the pistol from his belt and fired into the air. The man stopped.

  He said, “Here’s the deal, Otto. You can come with me, or you can make a run for it, and I’ll shoot you.”

  The man said, “You don’t understand. We’re dead either way.”

  “In that case start running.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE CHEMIST DECIDED not to run, choosing instead to let Kamp treat his wounds. Kamp removed the bullet with his thumb and forefinger. He tore the bedsheet into strips and packed one of them into the hole in the chemist’s face. Since the wound was directly between the man’s eyes, he had to wrap the dressing so that it blocked the chemist’s vision.

  Kamp said, “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  He guided the man back up the trail he’d followed to get there and found the sack he’d dropped on the ground. Together, they made their way to Silas Ownby’s property. By the time they reached the wreckage of the mansion, only one fire wagon remained, with two firemen dousing the last of the embers. Kamp recognized them by face but not by name.

  He approached the two men and gave a wave. “Evening, gentlemen.”

  The first fireman said, “Evening. Wie gehts?”

  “Oh, it goes. Yourself?”

  “Yah, it goes.” The fireman tipped his helmet back on his forehead and gestured to the ruined house, “Jeezis crackers, what a schlamassel.”

  The second fireman looked at the chemist and said, “Who’s this?”

  Kamp said, “Otto Vordemgentschenfelde.”

  “Hurt in the explosion?”

  “Not exactly. Say, would you fellas mind giving us a lift back to town?”

  “Why, sure.”

  Kamp helped the chemist climb into the wagon, and then he hauled himself in as well and lay down amidst the hoses with the gun barrel pointed at his fellow passenger. The fire wagon rocked to and fro along the rutted road up South Mountain. The firefighters talked about the day they’d had and how they wished for it to end, and the chemist crouched on his side, cradling his face. Kamp lay on his back and took in a long, cold breath and then exhaled a cloud of steam. He watched the starry host appear in the clear night sky, one tiny, silver emblem after the other. He felt the wagon crest the mountain, and he sat up so that he could look down at the glow of fires at Native Iron. A few more lines of the poem he’d been remembering when Daniel Knecht first flashed into view came back to him now. But most of it still wouldn’t come to him, and he began to feel drowsy. The chemist had stopped moving, but Kamp made himself stay awake anyway.

  When they reached the bottom of Wyandotte Hill, Kamp said, “Can you take us to the hospital?”

  Half an hour later he unloaded the chemist from the wagon, tipped his hat to the firemen and rapped his knuckles on the front door of the hospital. The nurse who’d had him thrown out weeks before appeared at the window next to the door.

  She slid the window open and said, “Who’s there?”

  “Evening.”

  She hissed, “Oh, for the love o’ Pete. It’s after midnight. Come back tomorrow.”

  “I have an injured man with me. See for yourself.”

  He heard the lock turning, and then the front door creaked open. The nurse held a candle, and Kamp walked the chemist into the light. Blood had seeped from the hole in his face and through the bandages giving him the look of a mummified Cyclops.

  Kamp said, “Some men are going to come looking for him. You need to find a safe place for him, safer than the place you put Druckenmiller.”

  “Sir, you cannot come here making strange demands in the middle of—”

  “Don’t let anyone know where he is. Not even the police. And you probably want to have someone take a look at his face. He’s been shot. I’ll be back tomorrow to pick him up.” And he stepped back into the darkness.

  THE EARLY SPRING MOONLIGHT lit Kamp’s way through the streets of the sleeping town, and he felt a profound calm settle over his world. He had passed through fatigue, the intensity of the day having long since drained out of him. His mind went quiet until all he could hear, all that existed, was the crunching of his boots on the road and the solemn notes of a great horned owl. He let his soul drift. He let it drift fathoms below the surface of the earth and then back to ground level and up and out into the sky. He traveled beyond calamities and collisions, explosions, broken bones, lost limbs, flashing gun barrels, beyond motives and malice, beyond the cosmos and beyond change itself. Along the way he saw all the phantoms he’d been chasing, the man irredeemable, the father unknown, the boy lost and gone. He saw each crime in sharp detail, the urge that incited it and the lust that led to its consummation. He saw Shaw’s face as well as his daughter’s, radiating, blazing out from their own light. He traveled to the beginning of the present and in it, the end. He intuited that this phenomenon could be attributed in part or entirely to the injuries to his head. He might not have been like this before. Kamp couldn’t remember.

  He let his soul float back into his body until he heard his footfalls on the earth and felt the breath in his chest. He began thinking about his investigation again, and he knew he could prove nearly everything. He had truth, physical evidence such as the coin. And he had documents outlining the business dealings among the conspirators. He had witnesses like Anton “Duny” Kunkle and Nyx Bauer as well as a confession from the chemist. He knew he lacked two pieces of information, the list of the members of the Order and the identity of the man who killed Jonas and Rachel Bauer. He believed he knew how to find each one.

  But what he understood most clearly was that no matter how well he put it all together, neither the preponderance of the evidence nor the coherence of his fact patterns would make any of it mean anything. The powers that be would never
use what he’d learned to hold the perpetrators to account. In that sense Daniel Knecht’s death had merely been a sacrifice of sorts, an expiation for past, present and future sins. And since the sacrifice had been made and made in a most dramatic fashion, and the gods appeased thereby, no one else had to pay. At least for a while.

  Not that it mattered to Kamp. He knew he would pursue all matters to their logical conclusion, in this case the completion of his investigation. He knew the forces arrayed against him would also seek his destruction. The slaughter would continue unabated, but in all their attempts to stop him, he knew they would fail.

  HE MADE IT BACK before dawn to the place where his house had been. He went into the slaughterhouse and lay down so that his body blocked the door. Kamp felt a warm buzzing in his knees and fell asleep immediately. When he awoke, morning rays slanted in wherever they could, through knotholes in the boards and narrow gaps in the roof. He rolled over onto his side and saw his cache of county records in the spot where he’d left it. He opened the bag and began riffling through birth certificates, searching for the name Mabel Schenker. Not there. He switched to looking through marriage licenses and found a license from three years prior for a man named Rudolf Schenker and a woman named Mabel Arndt. Arndt. He switched back to birth certificates and discovered one for Mabel Arndt as well as one for her brother, Hugh Arndt. George Richter’s hired man. The fact that a woman who worked in Silas Ownby’s home was the sister of a man who participated in the hanging of Daniel Knecht proved nothing, but it seemed a vital link.