by Ann Parker
What Gold Buys
A Silver Rush Mystery
Ann Parker
www.AnnParker.com
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Ann Parker
First E-book Edition 2016
ISBN: 9781464206269 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
www.poisonedpenpress.com
[email protected]
Contents
What Gold Buys
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Epilogue
Author’s Note
More from this Author
Contact Us
Dedication
To the readers—
Especially those who waited patiently and encouraged me as I completed this, the next installment of the Silver Rush saga.
This one’s for you.
Acknowledgments
When a book takes this long for a writer to write, it’s almost a guarantee that the acknowledgments will stretch back in time. As someone who is a little fitful when it comes to taking notes (and keeping track of them), I apologize to anyone who has helped me along the path and is left out of this list.
First and foremost, I am grateful to Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald and their staff at Poisoned Pen Press, especially Barbara and Rob for their patience with my long absence from the world of fiction and their encouragement once I “hopped to” and dove into writing this, the fifth in the Silver Rush series.
Further thanks go to my long-standing critique partners, who provided inspiration, comments, and edits: Camille Minichino, Carole Price, Colleen Casey, Janet Finsilver, Penny Warner, Priscilla Royal, and Staci MacLaughlin.
A special tip of the hat goes to Camille—who provided a “write-away guest room,” kept my spirits up as I thrashed, and did a blazing fast and focused beta-read on the draft—and to Colleen, for her above-and-beyond legal sleuthing, digging up and helping me understand the arcane legal precedents, laws, statutes, and summaries for “divorce, à la Colorado 1880.” A tip of the hat goes to Jane Staehle, Bill McConachie, and Mary-Lynne “Persnickety” Pierce Bernald for a close read of the ARC version for errors, hiccups, and oopses.
A special shout-out goes to the Leadville folks who “aided and abetted” my trip to the past, including Lake County Public Library’s Janice Fox, research librarian and historian extraordinaire (who deserves accolades galore) and beta-reader; library director Nancy Schloerke; and staff. You are all amazing! Libraries and librarians rock the world! Many thanks are also due to Marcia Martinek, editor of Leadville’s Herald Democrat. Marcia took me on a tour of the “underbelly” of the newspaper building, which once housed a mortuary. Great fodder for fiction lie within those walls. All of Leadville’s museums are amazing, but this time I want to give a special nod to The House with the Eye Museum and its curator for keeping Leadville’s history alive.
Experts who helped me along the way include Steven and Amy Crane for background into Civil War medicine and weaponry, James Lowry for timely insights into historical undertaking and embalming, and others who wish to remain anonymous—you know who you are! (NOTE: If you supplied expertise and I didn’t list you, forgive me. Send me a note and I’ll rectify as best I can.) Of course, any errors found within these pages are mine.
Thank you, Francoise Alexander, for lending me your melodious name. I love the serendipitous connections between certain elements of this story and your family history. Your inclusion was clearly meant to be!
Finally, there are many others in the writing community I am grateful to—writing is both solitary and a group effort. Thank you, Dani Greer (Yeah! Now finish that book, girl!), the folks of the Colorado Writers and Publishers Facebook group, and the communities of Poisoned Pen Press authors, Women Writing the West, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime.
A wave to the folks at the various cubicle farms (brick and mortar as well as virtual), who made it possible for us to not only keep body and soul together but also pay the mortgage and college tuition. They include S&TR staff, Jeff Sketchley (holding the LDRD whip), and TRE’s Laurie Powers, who as supervisor and a published author herself performed the exquisite balancing act of shoveling plenty of work my way to keep the wolves from the door and then holding back the projects during those intense last few months of finishing the draft.
Last, but never least, my dear family, who, along with my closest friends, must deal with the ups, downs, and sideways of having a writer amongst them. My “core group” Bill, Ian, and Devyn—who cheer me on, cheer me up, and give me hope—as well as the farther-flung Colorado clan of Joel, Kim, Jake, Dave, and Elly, who feed me, house me, and inspire me, as well as Alison back East, Steve out West, and all the McConachie clan. We live but a blink of the eye, and aspire to shed a little light into the corners of our own family history mysteries. Every life has a story, and from that, other stories are created. Love you all!
Epigraph
“Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give,
he killed it and opened it only to find—nothing.”
—Aesop
Map
Chapter One
It was hard to find somewhere close by the crowded silver mining boomtown to practice killing a man, but Antonia was nothing if not determined.
After trudging up hills and skittering down slopes, the dusty smell of broken sage chasing her all the way, she’d arrived at her place—her place—where no one would find
her. Here, Antonia felt safe. She had the targets. She had the gun. She had the rounds. Now, to practice, so that she’d be ready. Ready when the time came.
Three cherished glass bottles stood side by side on tree stumps in the clearing. Antonia knew them all. One was a soda bottle she’d pulled out of the trash behind Schmidt and Aldinger’s soda water manufacturing on East Chestnut Street. One was a cracked whiskey flask given to her by Mr. Jackson from the Silver Queen Saloon. The last was her mother’s tonic bottle snitched from under the bed.
One, two, three. Like soldiers lined up on the firing line.
Or maybe like her maman’s clients, who came to the one-room shack with the sign FUTURES AND FORTUNES TOLD nailed to the eaves, hoping for a glimpse of a brighter tomorrow. The first ones to arrive each day were the women, many of them hungover, misused, abused, who crept out of their tiny shanties or out the back doors of the bigger brothels when the sun was high. Clutching pennies, they often came in twos or threes. They crowded around her mother, the fortuneteller, squeezing young Antonia back into the corner behind the curtain that hid the single bed she shared with her maman. They all wanted the well-worn cards or tea leaves to yield up promises of future husbands—tall, handsome, but most important, rich. Men who would love them and never leave them.
Later, when dusk fell and candles were lit, the men showed up. Most had clothes bleached colorless from endless prospecting, or powdered red from hard-rock mining, and faces gnarled and creased as old pieces of wood. The men never asked about love. What they wanted was for maman to take their hands, first left, then right, trace the lines across their callused palms, measure the fleshy hills and valleys across the span, calculate the shape of their fingers, and from this swear to them that they’d make it rich, if not today, then tomorrow, or maybe next week, but no later.
They all waited calmly enough, but weren’t so calm when maman didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.
Antonia’s fingers curled tight around the pistol. She clicked the cylinder from chamber to chamber, timing the small snap, snap, to the distant pounding of the stamp mills. Mind inward, she thought about the mysterious Mr. Brown and her mother.
Antonia had never met Mr. Brown. In fact, if it weren’t for the hard reality of the gun, she’d have doubted his existence.
When Antonia and maman had lived in Denver, Mr. Brown had been a regular client. While Antonia was learning her sums at school, he’d slip into the hotel where they lived to have his fortune told. When maman talked to Antonia about his visits, her eyes would shine and the small lines between her straight dark eyebrows would smooth out. And she always smiled. “He’s kind, Antonia, always polite, wears a top hat and fine clothes. A beautiful voice—he comes from over the sea, same as we did. Ah, but you were so young, a baby, you would not remember before we came to America. He listens and takes care of us. You know he pays for us to stay here, in this nice hotel? Someday, I believe, we will be a family. How can it be otherwise? He wants to meet you, soon. Then, you will see what I say is true.”
Antonia didn’t want to meet Mr. Brown. She and her mother were already a family. They didn’t need a stranger in a top hat. They had each other. But Antonia couldn’t say this to maman’s shining face. She could only swallow hard and nod, hoping that, Mr. Brown or no Mr. Brown, they could stay in Denver forever so she could keep going to school.
But it was not to be.
In fact, it was Mr. Brown who sent them to Leadville. He made them leave Denver. Her mother said Mr. Brown had provided the gun for protection until he could join them, just as he’d provided the train tickets to Leadville, and the money for staying in the hotel until he could come for them. The hotel had been expensive, and so had the food. It wasn’t long before the money was gone and no more came. After that, all they had left of Mr. Brown was the gun, a carpetbag of his clothes, kept under the bed, and her mother’s unshaken belief that he would come for them…someday.
When Antonia had pressed her mother, maman had only caressed the gold and silver engraving on the revolver and gently touched the initials WPB carved into the ivory grips. “Why would he gift us with such a powerful means of protection, and so valuable, if he was not going to follow? Besides, I have seen it. I have seen you, ma fille, in a blue dress, so pretty, so rich, stepping from the train, and the men bowing to you like a queen. It will be so, because of Mr. Brown.”
Antonia couldn’t stand it when her mother said, “I have seen it.” She always said the words as if there was nothing more to say, as if those were the final words, words that sealed the future. She hated her mother’s faith in her second sight. That faith never wavered, even as they starved and lived in filth and even when the men hit her maman when she said things they didn’t like and when some of the women shunned her—she’s a witch, she’s a fake, she’s a Gypsy.
She hated it most when her mother talked about her own, Antonia’s, future as if it was sealed and done, and there was nothing she could do about it. So, when one of the men, smelly and dirty, had come into their one-room shack while Antonia was there, and said, “Such a purty girl you got there, got such purty hair, all growed up, I’ll bet, and eyes jest like your’n,” and grabbed Antonia’s long black hair with one dirty hand while he’d tried to grab the top of her dress with the other, she’d kicked him. Maman had leaped up, screaming, and the candle on the table had leaped as well, almost toppling to the dirt floor. The sudden tallow flare had flashed on the knife in her mother’s hand.
And Antonia ran.
Pushed her way through the startled men waiting outside the shack and kept going, into the warren of shanties and cribs that clustered hodge-podge in the State Street alley. She kept running even when she heard her mother’s screams change in pitch and volume. Later, when she crept back and saw her mother, face beginning to bruise and swell, Antonia burned with guilt for not running back to the shanty and beating the dirty man with her fists. Her mother had not scolded, but hugged her. “What could you have done, little girl that you are? You were right to run from danger. The other men, they came in and beat him, then took him away.”
Always the men, that was who Antonia’s mother turned to for help. Well, it would be different now.
That terrible night, while her mother slept deep under the spell of something from a bottle, Antonia had slid the worn carpetbag out from under the bed. Her mother didn’t stir when Antonia extracted the shears and chopped off her own long, dark hair. Nor did she stir when Antonia dug deeper into the bag and pulled out Mr. Brown’s togs.
Antonia could hear her mother’s voice in her head as she undid the buttons and set them on the small table in the dark: “He gave us his money, his clothes, his gun. He will come. I have seen it.” Her mother’s voice ceased when Antonia ripped off her own bedraggled sweat-stained dress, and donned Mr. Brown’s clothes: three shirts, no collars or cuffs, two pairs of trousers, one pair of suspenders, a belt she had to wrap twice around her waist, and a thick gray wool jacket, warm, soft, long enough to be a coat. She rolled the sleeves and trousers up, but the pant cuffs still dragged in the dust. Later that night, she stole a hat and boots from a drunk passed out behind the Silver Queen.
Or maybe he was dead?
Antonia didn’t know or care.
He was a small man, but she still had to stuff the toes of the boots with paper and rags. There were always dead or dead drunk fellows in Stillborn and Tiger alleys, behind the saloons, dance halls, and houses. And, if you were sneaky and fast—she was both—you could snitch a pair of gloves, a copper penny, even a pocket watch, if you were careful.
She’d traded the pocket watch for a cap and a nickel from one of the newsboys, Ace, that little thief, who really should have paid her more. She’d taught him a lesson, though, by going to the newspaperman he worked for and getting herself hired as a newsie. Still, being a newsie didn’t pay as well as emptying the spittoons at the State Street saloons, so she did both,
and swept up the floors too, if asked. That was always good for finding coins in the sawdust, dropped and overlooked. Antonia wanted to buy a carpet for maman to cover the shanty’s bare floor. And then, someday, she’d buy them both train tickets back to Denver, and buy a nice house, too, and they wouldn’t need Mr. Brown or anyone, because they’d have each other.
A bird screeched from a tree, shattering her daydream. Antonia shook her head. She hadn’t taken this precious time, when she could have been hanging around the newspaper office with the other newsies, or selling newspapers at the train station, or tipping buckets of spit into the alley behind the Silver Queen, to go off woolgathering about the future. Nope. She was here to practice on how best to kill a man with one shot.
She brought up the gun, sighting on the first bottle. The initials on the grip pushed against her palms: WPB. “Worthless Pisspot Brown,” she whispered. “You ruined our lives. You made us leave Denver—for nothing. If you ever show up, I will kill you.”
Sighting carefully, deliberately, from one bottle to the next, Antonia cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger, three times. One by one, the bottles exploded in a rain of sparkling glass.
Chapter Two
Inez Stannert paused in the process of disembarking from the passenger car at Leadville’s Denver & Rio Grande station, one gloved hand gripping the hold bar, one foot planted on the step, and surveyed the scene. A tide of people poured out of the depot toward the train, pushing and jostling against a river of arrivals who pushed in the other direction.
Beyond them, the haze from coal- and wood-fired commerce blanketed the town. The miasma thickened to the east, shrouding the mining district that covered the rolling terrain below the Mosquito Range. A faint smell of new-hewn timber, still seeping from the station hastily erected the previous month, tickled her nose and mixed with the dust churned up from rutted thoroughfares by thousands of wheels, boots, and hooves. The noise of the train station rang in her ears—the sighs and clanks of the engine at rest, the rumble of carts full and empty rolling this way and that, passengers shouting to be heard above the racket, and the laughter of “well met!” greetings.
