Rangers

by Chloe Garner

  Samantha sat down next to him at the table.

  “I could help, if you’d let me,” she said. He angled the computer screen a bit further away from her.

  “No offense.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “Sure. No offense. You don’t want me to find anything out about your mysterious Simon. I get that. Is your internet browser that covert, though?”

  He rubbed his eyes and looked around for the coffee cup he had lost an hour back.

  “I’m sorry. I’m tired.”

  “And I expect you might be missing things. At least talk to me.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. Right. We checked death records, such as they were. We’ve looked for any local myths that turn up online about missing hunters or trappers. Where the hell did my coffee go?”

  She picked it up from behind his laptop screen and handed it to him.

  “Want it warmed up?” she asked. He nodded weakly.

  She went and poured the cup into the sink and brought him a new cup. He burnt his tongue taking two big swallows, then set it down where he could see it.

  “We’ve looked for evidence of serial killers, anyone who wiped out their family or participated in a genocide of some kind. We looked for executions, but I can’t imagine anyone being executed close enough to that pass for him to get stuck there.”

  He drank more of his coffee and sat back in his chair.

  “We’re only talking about two-hundred years of history, but anything more than a hundred twenty years ago would have been before anyone was even paying attention.”

  Samantha nodded, thinking.

  “What did he look like, when you saw him?” she asked.

  “Sketchy old geezer,” Sam answered. “Why, what did you see?”

  “Right up until Jason shot him, he was wearing a knee-length coat, like one a gentleman would wear to the opera. Did you at least hear the violin?”

  “That’s how we found you.”

  She nodded.

  “Anyway, how he looked after Jason shot him - how you saw him - is that how he would have actually looked?”

  “Nix can disguise their forms, but I expect that’s what he actually looked like.

  “What was he wearing?” she asked. Sam nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said, closing his eyes. “Button up shirt, like one of the old kind ones, with a bandana. Working gloves. Pants…” he said.

  “Manufactured or hand-made?”

  “Manufactured, I think… but the old, heavy cloth they used.” he said.

  Samantha nodded.

  “That rules out the French trappers, then, I guess. And soldiers.”

  He nodded.

  “Old. They were old clothes.”

  Samantha nodded.

  “So that gives you a time window, kind of. After the French, before, what denim?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t know enough about clothes to even make a guess.

  “What else do we know about him?”

  “He died thinking he was evil,” Sam said.

  “How evil?”

  “The only way to die convinced you’re that evil is to have killed people. Probably a bunch of them.”

  Samantha laughed.

  “Can we just bring back one of them to kill him?”

  Sam looked at her hard.

  “If we knew where the graves were or who they were.”

  “Seriously? I was kidding.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Huh.”

  He started typing on his computer.

  “If I can figure out when people around here might have dressed like that…” he said. She nodded, leaning forward to watch him work.

  “So you think he died in the park,” she said. He nodded, scanning an article.

  “What would he have been doing there?” she asked.

  “They didn’t really get poaching under control until the thirties,” Sam said. “I’d make him as a trapper or a poacher.”

  “They still do bounties?” Samantha asked. He looked at her and frowned. “For bringing in pelts. We used to joke that a coyote was still worth two bucks, growing up.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they kept lists of them or something.”

  Jason let himself into the room.

  “How is the brain trust doing?” he asked.

  “She’s good at this,” Sam said, looking for whether or not Wyoming had offered bounties in the early nineteen hundreds and whether that would result in a list of people who had collected them.

  “No kidding,” Jason said, unimpressed, as he threw himself onto a bed and picked up the beer bottle sitting on his nightstand. “We going to get back out there by tonight?”

  Sam sighed.

  “I don’t know. Everything else has turned up dry,” he said. His e-mail beeped and he switched over to check it. He blew air through pursed lips and nodded.

  “Simon’s got it,” he said. “Guy’s a freaking genius. He found an old church record somewhere for burials and cross-referenced it with old outstanding warrants. Tom Bridger had a warrant out east for killing a guy in a bar fight. His wife was buried here in 1876. There’s no burial record for him.”

  “Sounds like a longshot to me,” Jason said. Sam nodded.

  “There’s a little more, but not much. They basically had the wild west here until the army took over in 1886. Tom Bridger has affidavits in Carbon County, Montana that he filed to get bounties for wolf and coyote pelts,” he said, looking up at Samantha. “We were on the right track. I just don’t know that I would have checked Montana. Anyway, he was hunting and trapping around here, his wife died here, and the warrant for him in Ohio was issued in 1868.”

  “So some brawler comes west looking to get away from a warrant and sets up shop in a national park,” Jason started.

  “Only it wasn’t a park yet. He would have been making an honest living until 1872,” Sam added.

  “Whatever, so he’s here, killing stuff, being a mountain man, and the government comes and tells him he can’t do that here any more, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Only he keeps doing it, because who’s going to stop him? Push comes to shove, he knocks out a few guys who maybe only wanted to have a nice conversation, he’s more determined to keep his little corner of the world…”

  “Eighteen years is about right for him to have been living in that area. Maybe killing people the whole time, who knows?”

  “So we think that Tom Bridger was around the area in the late 1800’s and we know that someone in that area was evil enough to form a Nix, but there’s nothing to prove it was him,” Jason said. Samantha sat up in her chair.

  “How old would he have been when he died?” she asked. Sam shook his head.

  “I doubt we’ll find a birth certificate for him,” he said.

  “How old was his wife, when she died?” Samantha asked. Sam checked.

  “She would have been fifty-three,” he said. She nodded.

  “And her husband died about ten years later, if he died eighteen years after they came to the park. He look like he might have been in his sixties to you?” she asked.

  “Maybe after a lot of hard living,” Jason commented from the bed, downing the last of his beer. “Still a lot of guesswork.”

  “Figuring out who a ghost is is hard,” Samantha said. Jason was staring at the ceiling.

  “Told you.”

  “Normally we have local records to work with, but this,” Sam said, pushing his computer away, “this is impossible.”

  “Eighteen years,” Samantha said slowly, closing her eyes to do the math. “If he left Ohio in 1868… carry the one…” She grinned. “That’s this year,” she said. She looked over at Jason, who sat up.

  “That sounds like a link,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”

  <><><>

  They didn’t get back to the valley until dusk. Samantha kept looking back at Sam, concerned. He hadn’t slept at all in the last three days, and
she kept waiting for him to wander off or just break.

  “Are you okay?” she asked again. He nodded.

  “Fine. I slept a little in the car both ways. Stop asking.”

  Jason looked over from where he was crouching, watching a mist roll in across the valley.

  “He’s fine.”

  “How are we going to find him?” Samantha asked.

  “You ever hear of a Nix rose?” Jason asked. She shook her head.

  “It’s a kind of water lily,” Sam said, joining them. He was loading his shotgun.

  “You generally only see them in Northern Europe, but we have friends who cultivate that kind of stuff,” Jason said.

  “And you just happen to have one?” Samantha asked.

  “I’ve got an entire apothecary in the back of the Cruiser,” Jason said, pulling a vial out of his pocket.

  “You can hold on to this one. It’s the push side.”

  “Hmm?” she asked as he started down the valley.

  “There are two preparations,” Sam told her. “Push and pull. Nix roses have power over a Nix, but what power depends on what you do with them.”

  They made it to the shore of the river much more quickly, over solid ground, then followed it downstream.

  “Dark enough, you think?” Jason asked, looking up at the darkening sky. The fog was rolling in thicker.

  “I’d wait to solid dark,” Sam said.

  “Gonna be hell to get out of here if anything goes wrong,” Jason said. Sam shrugged.

  “May be the last crack we get at it,” he said.

  They stood for another twenty minutes, waiting for the last light to drain out of the sky. Jason looked at Samantha.

  “Anything goes bad, you stay close to Sam,” he said. She pulled the iron rod and stiletto out of their hiding places and nodded at him. He grinned. Nodded at Sam, who nodded back. One, two, three.

  Samantha checked the ground around them, taking a step away from a root sticking out of the soft earth, then lifted her gaze to watch Jason. He walked all the way to the river bank and, kneeling, unzipped his bag and gingerly took out a package wrapped in tissue. There were words, but Samantha couldn’t hear them.

  “It’s an offering, spoken in German,” Sam murmured. As Jason stood, the Nix appeared in front of him and picked up the lily to smell it. He looked at Jason and grinned with broken teeth, sweeping an arm that Samantha expected would go through him, but Jason went flying over the river bank down into the dark water. Sam ran forward, taking aim with the shotgun, but Tom was gone. Jason stood up in the calf-deep water and cursed loudly. The apparition appeared behind him and wrapped an arm around Jason’s neck. Jason’s mouth opened and closed as he tried to draw air. Tom put a foot into the back of Jason’s knee and knocked him down roughly, then twisted him to one side, pushing his head into the water. Jason’s arms swung, but passed through the Nix’ arms and legs without meeting any resistance.

  “Tom!” Sam called. The man looked up and glared, pushing Jason harder underwater. “I name you. I know you. You are Tom Bridger.”

  Jason came up sputtering.

  “Come on, Sam!” he yelled, struggling to his feet and thrashing his way back over to the bank. “Naming a ghost is supposed to be the easiest kill ever, as long as you’ve got the right name.”

  “I was preoccupied trying to shoot him,” Sam said. “He could have just broken you.”

  “He drowns people, Sam. You had all the time in the world.” Jason turned to Samantha. “And where were you?”

  “I didn’t know the incantation,” she said.

  “Tom Bridger. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Tom. Bridger.” He shook his arms, flinging water everywhere. “I’m going to be wet all night, now. And it’s cold out here.” He shook a finger in Sam’s face. “And there are no girls.”

  Samantha looked back at the river and gasped softly. The dried water lily was just a little way down stream, bobbing in the current as it wove its way around the rocks, eventually disappearing in the moonlight and the mist.

  “Come on, Sam,” Jason said. “Both of you. You’re building me a fire.”

  <><><>

  They stopped in Wisconsin at a motel belonging to a retired Ranger who went by Swift. He had never married, and after he had retired, he had made enough money playing cards to buy a little roadside motel that, if Sam’s guess was any good, had more Ranger occupants than paying ones, any given month.

  “Elliott,” Swift said as they got out of the car, shaking hands with Jason and nodding toward Sam. “Come on in.” He brought them into the office.

  “Who is Elliott?” Samantha whispered to Sam.

  “Us,” Sam said, grinning. “We’re the Elliotts.”

  “Oh.”

  Samantha paid for her room. Sift hadn’t wanted to charge her, but she insisted she was just another customer.

  “You boys want dinner?” he asked when he handed Jason the key to their room. “I’ve got some venison steaks in the freezer I’m planning to grill up.”

  “That’d be great,” Jason said. Swift rubbed his hands together.

  “I’ll be out behind the building at seven. There’s a picnic table where I usually eat when I’m grilling. Be hungry.”

  “Thanks, man,” Jason said. Sam nodded.

  Samantha stood outside of her room and held up a finger at Jason.

  “Can I trust you to not take off while I sneak a nap?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t abandon you in the middle of Wisconsin,” Jason said. “Even I’m not that evil.”

  “You did leave her by herself in the middle of nowhere at Yellowstone,” Sam said.

  “You left her just as much as I did,” Jason said.

  “Does that make it any better?” Samantha asked. Sam grinned.

  “Yeah, does it?”

  Jason grunted, opening the door to the next room over.

  “Sleep. I’m taking you to New York. I don’t need to ditch you, when I know I’m going to get rid of you, soon, anyway.”

  Sam slept hard, and got up groggy when Jason told him it was time to eat. He followed his brother and sat at the picnic bench, smelling roasting meat and night air for a while before he started paying attention to what was going on. Samantha was sitting next to him, her chin resting on her folded arms.

  “How come none of the Seekers know about it?” Jason asked. Sam frowned. What had he missed?

  “We don’t really have newspapers that put stuff online like that around here,” Swift said. Sam rubbed his eyes.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Welcome back,” Jason said. “Swift says there’s a pond north of here full of water women.”

  “How do you know?” Sam asked.

  “Hunters going out, not coming back. They say they hear singing, sometimes.”

  “And why haven’t you taken care of it?” Jason asked.

  “I just heard about it last week,” Swift said. “Couplea buddies of mine out hunting, swapping stories. I did some checking, and there have been a few guys that haven’t checked in in a while.”

  “And why haven’t you…” Jason started again.

  “Oh, you know hunters. Worse gossips than women. I just found out yesterday that a guy from a little town maybe twenty five miles north of here didn’t come home for his son’s birthday. Sometimes the out of town guys just don’t check in before they head home. Sometimes the locals stay out longer than their friends were expecting. But to miss your kid’s birthday party…” Swift shrugged, turning a steak over, “that sounds like a guy who’s gone missing.”

  “People go missing around here before?” Jason asked.

  “Oh, you know, there are accidents sometimes. We work outside a lot. Sometimes stuff happens. Sometimes people just don’t come home. Maybe one guy every couple of years. I hadn’t heard about the singing before, though.” He grinned. “Anyway, you called saying you were coming through, and I figured… hey, why come out of retirement when a couple of young guys could go make t
hem angry instead?”

  “And all we get out of it is a steak dinner,” Jason said. Swift grinned again, tossing steaks onto a plate and bringing it over.

  “But it’s fresh,” he said. “Killed him myself last week. Best you’ll get anywhere.”

  “Uh huh,” Jason said. “Better be.”

  Sam rubbed his face and looked over at Samantha. She smiled.

  “I’m not worried about getting to New York any time soon,” she said, grabbing a fork and knife. “Tell me about water women.”

  <><><>

  They left Samantha at the hotel when they went up to the lake the next day. A gravel road got to within about ten miles of the spot Swift had told them about, and they walked the rest of the way as the sun approached its peak.

  “At least it’s nice out,” Sam said. Jason nodded.

  “Still no girls,” he observed.

  “You’ll live,” Sam said.

  “Eh,” Jason answered as they came into view of a large pond. Lake would have been too generous, Sam thought. They found a downed tree and sat down against it, facing the water.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Jason said. Sam snorted.

  “Yup. We showed up. Obviously they should be singing already.”

  “Would speed things up,” Jason said. Sam pulled out the bag of sandwiches Swift had given him and handed one to Jason.

  “At least there’s that,” Jason said, tearing into it. The space was pretty, Sam thought. Thick pine forest surrounded the unpretentious bit of water, and a huge, spreading willow tree sat at the bottom of the lake where a tiny stream seeped off into the woods. The air smelled of life and the sounds were of water and trees and birds. He wove his fingers behind his head and leaned back against the tree and crossed his legs.

  “This isn’t a bad way to spend a day,” Sam said. “Even if there’s nothing out here.”

  Jason shrugged, handing him the plastic bag that the sandwich had been in. Sam stuffed it back in the paper bag and wadded it up, putting it in his shoulder bag.

  “I guess not. Dude. When did Swift get so domestic?”

  Sam snorted.

  “He’s a hunter, Jason. They know how to spend a day in the woods.”

  Jason shifted lower, taking off his jacket and stuffing it under his head and throwing an arm across his eyes.