Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

“So the area was settled as early as 1850?” Sam asked.

  “Some folks was here then. Not many. Which was why the first owner was able to claim such a big spread. More people showed up later on, harder it got to hold onto all his land. Then the Murphys, who owned it when my folks worked there, came in and bought a piece of it. The Murphys had twelve thousand acres, but that was just some of the original spread.”

  “And the first murder cycle, the one in 1926, that happened while you were living on the ranch? And the Murphys owned it?”

  “That’s right, Sam.”

  “But you don’t remember anything that happened before that, anything that might’ve set someone off, made them mad at the town or the other settlers?” Dean asked.

  “I’ve been tryin’ to,” Baird said. “Come up blank ever’ time.”

  They reached the car and Dean opened his door, let Baird in back. Sam climbed into the front passenger seat. “Why did your mother think the ranch was involved, then?” he asked.

  “I’m not too sure about that neither,” Baird said. “Seems like someone told me a reason, either in ’twenty-six or ’sixty-six, but I’ll be doggoned if I can remember who or what it was.”

  Dean started the Impala and fed it some gas, enjoying the satisfying growl. When everything else was going to hell, it was good to have something he could count on.

  “Sometimes people write histories of those big old ranches,” Sam said. “Even if they’re not published professionally, they’re privately printed. The library might have something like that.”

  “Don’t think so,” Baird said.

  “Why not?”

  “He never finished it.”

  “Who?” Dean asked, his tone abrupt. “Someone started one? What happened to it? Who was it?”

  “His name was Neville Stein,” Baird said. “I remembered it yesterday.”

  “Is he still alive? Would he talk to us?”

  “He won’t talk,” Baird said with certainty.

  “Why not?”

  “I shot him yesterday. That’s when I remembered his name. ’Course, he was already dead—died before the first forty-year, back in nineteen and twenty-three or twenty-four, I think. He was a teacher, and some of the local boys didn’t think much of teachers in those days. His last mistake was asking a cowboy’s sister out on a date. A picnic lunch, I think is what he had in mind. Cowboy shot him in the face. I did the same, yesterday. He won’t be talkin’ to anyone.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Where did he teach?” Sam asked. “Here in town?”

  Baird gazed out the car window as they cruised the quiet streets of Cedar Wells. A couple of times they saw people carrying guns, and had to watch them for a minute or two—long enough to make sure they weren’t flickering and didn’t have any visible fatal wounds—before deciding they were real people and not a threat.

  “No,” Baird said finally, after waiting so long that Sam couldn’t remember for a second what he had asked. “No, he had a little schoolhouse on the ranch itself. There were a dozen of us kids, most times, that needed schoolin’, so they took care of it right there. Too far to come into town for school.”

  “How far out was it?”

  “Oh, no more than six or seven miles, I guess,” Baird said. “But you can cover that a lot faster now than we could when I was young.”

  “But it’s still within the range of the killings,” Sam said. “And the distance from town people can travel.”

  “I think the sheriff said the cutoff was fifteen,” Dean said. “That’s about where the deputy got it.”

  “Yeah, it’s within the town limits of Cedar Wells,” Baird said. “Always had a Cedar Wells mailing address, anyhow.”

  Sam’s mind raced, trying to find another way to unlock the secrets that must have died with Neville Stein. “Did he have any notes, that you know of?” he asked. “If he was planning to write a book, he must have had some notes, right?”

  “Now you mention it, I believe he did,” Baird said. He scratched his temple and blinked his tiny black eyes. “He used to have some journals or something like that, in the schoolhouse, that he always warned us kids away from. Most probably that’s what it was, the things he was keepin’ for his history of the ranch. Sometimes I’d see him talkin’ to some old cowboy or another for hours, writing down things the cowboy’d tell him.” He chuckled. “Lies, like as not.”

  “Maybe they were,” Sam said. “But even so, he’d have to keep the records of those interviews somewhere. Do you know who would’ve ended up with them after he died?”

  “I can’t imagine anyone would have wanted ’em. Most folks thought he was crazier’n a jaybird, even talking to those old cowboys. Much less writing down what they said, or thinkin’ anyone would ever care to read what he wrote.”

  “Then where would they be?” Dean asked. “Had to end up someplace, right?”

  “They’re probably still there.”

  “Still where?” Sam asked.

  “In the schoolhouse.”

  “The schoolhouse is still there?”

  “Sure it is,” Baird said.

  Dean braked the car to a sudden stop and slammed his open palm down on the wheel. “We asked you before if the ranch was still there!”

  “It ain’t,” Baird said. He didn’t look like he even understood that Dean was angry with him, much less what had prompted that anger. “Ranch has been divided and subdivided, made into a housing project and smaller ranch properties and little ranchettes and what have you. But part of the land is still there, and some of the buildings. Schoolhouse was put in a rocky canyon nobody much cared about because there wasn’t no good grazing back there. You don’t build a school on land that has commercial value, do you? Same reason, nobody else has bothered to build on it, so what’s left of the building is still standin’ there. Least, it was last time I went through there. That’s ten, twelve years gone by, now, but I can’t imagine anyone much goes back there.”

  “Can you take us to it?”

  “You’re drivin’, Dean,” Baird said. “And I reckon your eyesight is a lot better’n mine. Why don’t you take us to it?”

  Sam could almost hear the sparks of Dean’s fuse burning. “Because…I…don’t…know…where…it…is.”

  “Well, I can tell you that.”

  “That’s a good idea, Harmon,” Sam said, hoping to intercede before Dean threw Baird into the road and ran over him. “You tell Dean where to drive, and he’ll drive there.”

  “That’s right.” Dean’s voice carried the false cheer that he used to disguise sheer fury. “You tell me where to drive. I’ll drive. Okay?”

  “Sure enough,” Baird said. “Turn left up here at the corner.”

  As it turned out, they couldn’t drive all the way. Paved road led to within a few miles of the old schoolhouse, and then dirt road—which hadn’t been traveled much lately, by the looks of it—got them another mile or so closer. After that they had to travel on foot, cutting across snow-covered fields, climbing barbed-wire fences, all while carrying their weapons.

  Baird directed them toward a rocky ridge. When they reached the ridge, they had to scramble up it at a relatively low point. It looked like Kaibab limestone to Sam, like the upper layer of the Grand Canyon itself. From its peak they looked down at a short drop to a wide valley with another, similar ridge maybe a mile or two away. Both semiparallel ridges ran into the distance, where they grew closer and seemed to funnel the valley floor into a canyon.

  “That there, that leads right to the Grand Canyon after a few miles,” Baird said. “We used to have to make sure the fences out that way was sound because we didn’t want any beeves to get away and fall down the big drop. Some of ’em found pathways down, and that was even worse because then we’d have to go down ourselves and try to herd ’em back up.”

  “But you were just a kid, right?” Dean asked.

  “Sure. Anybody ever tells you kids don’t work on ranches, you can tell ’em what they’re full
of.”

  “And the schoolhouse is around here?” Sam said. He’d been scanning but hadn’t seen anything that looked like a school.

  “This is called School Canyon on the maps. You can’t see it from here, though.” Baird started down the slope again, picking his way among the rocks like a mountain goat.

  His words took a minute to sink in, but when they did, Sam asked, “You said it’s called that on the maps. Does that mean the locals called it something else?”

  “You betchum. We called it Witch’s Canyon.”

  Dean stopped short, crossed his arms over his chest. “And it didn’t occur to you to maybe mention that name before now? Considering what we’re dealing with?”

  Baird shielded his eyes with his right hand, looking back upslope at Dean. “No. No, it sure didn’t. I apologize if that was an oversight, young man, but you didn’t ask me about no witches, and anyhow, it’s just a name, isn’t it? Lot of places around here have names that don’t mean nothing.”

  “But it might mean something,” Sam pointed out. “It’s as solid a lead as anything else we’ve come up with so far. Where’s that school?”

  “Follow me,” Baird said. He started down the slope again. Sam followed. After another moment’s petulance, so did Dean.

  The canyon floor was mostly tall yellow grass poking up through the snow. Frequent boulders jutted up from the floor, a few scrubby junipers among them. They trudged down the canyon, and finally Sam could see what Baird had insisted all along was there. Almost up against the wall of the ridge they had crossed was what remained of a log structure, its roof caved in, its log walls partially collapsed. Logs stuck out at odd angles. Forget about structural integrity—the place looked like it would fall apart completely if a visiting sparrow flapped its wings too hard.

  “That’s a school?” Sam asked.

  “It was in better shape when I went there.”

  “Hard to believe,” Dean said.

  If Baird caught the cutting sarcasm, he ignored it. He approached the ramshackle building, at once anxious and somehow reverent. Sam had the impression that the place had meant a lot to him, once upon a time. It probably hurt to see it in this condition. If it had been within the national park boundaries, it might have been preserved as a historical monument, but instead it had been ignored, left to the not so tender mercies of wind and weather.

  There might have once been a door in the doorway, Sam thought, but if so, it was long gone. The building stood open to the elements. The beam over the doorway had collapsed, so instead of being seven feet tall, the opening slanted down at a forty-degree angle, and even Harmon Baird had to stoop to go inside. He didn’t hesitate, though. Sam fished a penlight from his coat pocket, clicked it on, and followed him in, with Dean close behind carrying his own flashlight.

  Inside, it looked more like a home for rodents and bats than a place of learning for humans. The floor was covered with dirt and animal feces and vegetation that had been blown through the open doorway, some of which had taken root amidst the ancient benches and desks. Webs clotted the upper reaches, some hanging low enough that Sam had to dodge them or brush them away with his arms. The air was thick with the stink of ammonia and the earthy, fecund aroma of manure.

  “Looks like summer vacation lasted a little too long,” Dean said.

  “I don’t think anyone’s used the place since I was young,” Baird said. “The Murphys started dividing up the ranch in the early thirties, after the park started drawing people to the area and the demand for real estate started to grow.”

  “It’s almost too bad no one took the furnishings out,” Sam said. “They could have been preserved in a museum or something.”

  “Been plenty of schools abandoned over the years, I expect,” Baird said. “Some things can’t be hung on to, just got to be left to rot.”

  “I suppose that’s true. Do you have any idea where your teacher would have stored his records?”

  Baird stood still, looking at the place in the dim light filtering through the door and the openings in the walls and roof. “Mr. Stein, he had him a big old chest made of cedar wood,” he said after a while. “Used to keep schoolbooks and those old journals of his in it, and just about any other treasure he needed to keep safe. Had a big padlock on it, and he kept the key on him all the time.”

  “Where was the chest?” Dean asked.

  “Front of the room, behind his whatchacallit. Lectern. I remember starin’ at it, day after day, sometimes wonderin’ what marvels he had inside, sometimes wishin’ I could hide in there myself.”

  Sam couldn’t quite determine the room’s original layout. “Where was the front?”

  Baird pointed immediately to the worst area in the room, where the roof had completely fallen in. It looked like part of the canyon that the schoolroom had been built around. “That’s the front. Right there.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “I guess we start digging,” Dean said. “Wish I brought a hazmat suit.” He turned off his flashlight and shoved it back into his pocket. There was enough ambient light for manual labor, if not for reading some long-dead schoolteacher’s notebooks. He hoped they didn’t unearth any dens of rats in that mess, though. He hated rats.

  Hated them a lot.

  Sam put his light away, too, and soon they were shoveling through the accumulated debris of the decades, digging their hands into cold mud, decomposed branches, animal dung, and probably the corpses of small creatures of various kinds. They’d need to sterilize their hands after this or risk all sorts of unpleasant consequences.

  The task was disgusting, but before long they had unearthed a large wooden chest that had to be the one Baird described. Its hinges and hasp were rusted through but still visible. Dean kicked at the old lock, still fastened in place, and it crumbled to dust. “You really think anything in here is gonna be legible?”

  Sam shrugged. “Won’t know until we look.” He opened the trunk’s lid. Dean found his light again and shined it inside.

  On top, there was indeed a layer of paper that had gone to pulp. As soon as his fingers touched it, it disintegrated. But underneath, as if that layer had protected the important stuff, were school records, with each student’s name neatly handwritten on the outside. Under that were the journals Baird had described, leather-bound and still mostly intact, although insects had nibbled at the edges. Dean lifted one out gingerly and turned its brittle, yellowed pages. The same neat handwriting filled the pages.

  “This has got to be the journals,” he said.

  “Looks like it to me,” Baird said.

  “There must be twenty of them,” Sam said. “He must have collected a lot of oral histories.”

  “A lot of lies,” Baird reminded them.

  “But with some truth mixed in, we hope.”

  “No promises.”

  “We going to read them right here?” Dean asked. Reading wasn’t his favorite activity by any means, and he had found that people in the past often used way more words than they had to. And funny handwriting.

  “If we try to transport them, we run the risk that they’ll fall apart,” Sam said. “Besides, given the urgency—”

  “Then I guess we read them right here. Better get started.” Dean sat down in the muck, figuring it was already too late to salvage any of the clothes he was wearing. The books all looked alike from the outside, so he didn’t see how to choose where to begin.

  It didn’t take long for him to decide that he’d started with the wrong book. He was immediately immersed in some old ranch hand’s account of a particularly dry summer, with grass dying, fires burning up what hadn’t died, and cattle starving. Unpleasant reading, but nothing that struck him as even remotely supernatural. And the old-fashioned handwriting, while precisely formed, was in ink that had purpled on the yellow paper, hard to read even with a flashlight clutched in his left hand.

  He skimmed the pages, looking for any mention of a witch or any event that might have led to antagonism against the town. Th
ere were plenty of small slights—trips into town for supplies that ended in a fight, or someone feeling they’d been overcharged for merchandise, that kind of thing. Dean had learned not to underestimate how petty people could be, but he didn’t get the sense that anyone would have launched an ongoing murder cycle because of such minor disagreements.

  He reached the end of that first book and picked up another. Sam was turning pages just as quickly as he had. Baird sat with a book open on his lap but his gaze wandering around the room, as if in his mind’s eye he was seeing all the children he had gone to school with in this little room. Dean wondered if the old guy understood the stakes here. Then again, he had armed himself and faced potential danger in order to help out the residents of a town to which he didn’t feel any genuine attachment anymore. In the long run, Dean guessed, no one had done more than Harmon Baird to try to stop the killings from happening again.

  Still, he felt the minutes ticking by as if each one carved a notch in his arm.

  When Dean was on his third book, he heard Sam issue a low whistle. “What?” Dean asked.

  “I might have something here,” Sam said. “Hang on.” He read further, tracing his finger along underneath the lines in the book. Dean ignored his own book and watched his younger brother’s face cloud over as he read.

  After another few minutes Sam stopped and looked up from the pages. “I think this is it. Harmon, do you remember ever hearing about a woman named Elizabeth Claire Marbrough?”

  “The Marbrough family owned the ranch before the Murphys,” Baird said, snapping his fingers. “Couldn’t remember that name, for the life of me.”

  “But what about the woman? Does that name ring a bell?”

  “Not specifically,” Baird said. “Jens Marbrough, I think he was the first owner. My people, they worked for him for at least a generation before I was born, then my folks stayed on when he sold out to the Murphys.”

  “Who is this Marbrough lady?” Dean asked, wanting Sam to get to the point.

  “According to this account, given by one of the young women who worked as a maid and laundress on the ranch, Elizabeth Claire Marbrough was a witch,” Sam said. “She came here from back East someplace, and there were stories about her before she even got here. Once she was here, though, the stories got worse. This woman, Mary Beth Gibson, said she once saw Elizabeth turn a horse that had thrown her grandson into a lizard.”