The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  Cal’s long face remained stony.

  “Try to make deadline. That’d help,” he said, then turned and disappeared back into the backshop.

  Morgan showed the check to Hamilton Tasker, who called up Cal Nussbaum’s accounts on the computer behind his shiny cherrywood desk at the bank. He said nothing as columns of green digits scrolled up the screen.

  “Will this cover the payment?” Morgan asked him after waiting patiently for a few moments.

  Tasker tapped a few more keys, studied the numbers and slowly swiveled in his high-backed leather chair to face Morgan.

  “It looks in order,” he said. Morgan detected a curious note of disappointment in his voice. “Mr. Nussbaum has more than enough to cover his check.”

  “Then our little problem is solved,” Morgan said.

  “Not exactly,” Tasker said. He leaned back in his elegant chair, pulling the cuff of his tailored silk coat over his gold wristwatch.

  “What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”

  “A couple things. Your cash flow has almost evaporated and the next payment will be due in less than a month. I’m worried we’ll be back in the same boat in a few weeks.”

  “We can fix that.”

  Tasker stroked his businesslike black mustache, which contrasted with his silvery, razor-cut hair. He wasn’t yet sixty, but he cultivated his distinguished bearing and for good reason. To the citizens of Winchester, Wyoming, he was money made flesh.

  “Are you aware of the Chamber’s proposed boycott?”

  “I am. We’ll get through it. I grew up here, Ham, and I’m thinking my town is better off with a newspaper that has the guts to tell the truth when it would be easier to lie. Printing the truth was good enough for Old Bell and it’s good enough for me. Will there be anything else?”

  Tasker didn’t look up. He trifled with spreadsheets on his desk.

  “The ‘truth’ is overrated, Mr. Morgan. It seldom pays the bills. And it would be wise to remember that your particular version of the truth isn’t necessarily the only version. We’ll be watching with great interest. Good day.”

  The bank lobby was quiet. Morgan walked past the polished marble row of tellers’ warrens, where a bow-legged cowboy was cashing his Friday paycheck, and through the massive glass doors onto Main Street. The sun had broken through the overcast and streamed down in bright columns. The air was still humid, but it smelled fresh.

  Crystal Sandoval looked worried when Morgan returned to The Bullet.

  “We’ve already gotten a few calls about the boycott,” she said. “Word is getting around fast on the grapevine.”

  “Who called?”

  Crystal’s brown eyes focused somewhere beyond the ceiling fan as she tried to remember.

  “Al, the one-eyed counter guy at the gun shop. Um, let’s see ... Celine at the hairdresser’s, a couple readers, the wife of the new guy at the Kwik Mart ...”

  Morgan got the idea.

  “What are they saying?”

  “They’re wondering what all the fuss is about, not even sure if they should be angry. But that’s good. It’s the ones that don’t call we have to worry about.”

  “If we get any more, send them to me, would you?”

  Crystal nodded and popped her gum.

  “Oh, Jeff, just one message for you.”

  She handed Morgan one of her pink phone slips. Someone named Kate Morning called after four-thirty. She left no message except the long-distance phone number where she could be reached.

  “Another complaint?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Where’s area code four-oh-six?” Morgan asked.

  “Montana, I think.”

  “God help us if they’re mad in Montana, too,” he joked.

  Morgan went back to his desk and called Claire. He’d interrupted her nap, but she was greatly relieved to hear about Cal’s loan. He told her he loved her and let her go back to sleep.

  He checked the local news queue in the Mac and saw that both of his reporters had filed stories before the weekend. A good sign. They were working ahead.

  Kate Morning’s message lay atop the stack of ad invoices and press releases. He checked his watch. It was after five and the rates were lower, so he dialed.

  An older woman with an elegant voice answered.

  “Hello, I’m calling for Kate Morning.”

  “This is she.”

  “Ms. Morning, this is Jeff Morgan at The Bullet in Winchester, Wyoming. I had a message that you called.”

  The woman paused a few seconds before she spoke. Her voice had a faint, sweet cadence, foreign but familiar.

  “Thank you for calling, Mr. Morgan. Please forgive this call, which might seem strange to you. I’m not sure how you can help me, but if you can, it will be clear.”

  “I’ll try. What exactly is the problem?”

  “I’d like to speak to you in person, if I may. Would that be possible?”

  Morgan didn’t relish the idea of a long drive.

  “That depends. Where are you?”

  “Hardin, Montana. Only a few hours from Winchester.”

  Western roads were long and empty, and distances were not measured in miles, but in time. By Western standards, a few hours wasn’t far. Hardin was a small town on the edge of Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation, a gas stop on the way to Billings, but it was well out of his coverage area.

  Morgan wanted to know more before he embarked on a cross-country goose chase. What passed for dramatic news in the minds of his callers was often no more than minor social gossip. He couldn’t justify making a six-hour round-trip for a three-graph story about a craft bazaar or a tea society fund-raiser.

  “Can you give me some general idea what we’d talk about, Ms. Morning? I’m sure you understand ...”

  She paused longer than before.

  “Maybe you won’t understand. I just need to know if you are the one.”

  “The one what?” Morgan asked.

  “The one who can help me.”

  “I can try, Ms. Morning, but I’m afraid you have to be a little more specific.”

  The connection hummed and Morgan strained to hear. Then she spoke, almost too softly for him to understand.

  “My daughter was Aimee Little Spotted Horse.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Just across the Montana state line, where the tall grass prairie begins to fold into the badlands, Claire vomited beside the highway. The caustic smell of oil and browned grass on the sun-seared shoulder only made it worse for her.

  Morgan rummaged in the Escort’s glove box and found a fast-food wet-nap for his wife. She wiped her mouth as she rested her head against the open car door.

  “Are you going to be okay? It’s still a couple hours to Hardin. We can turn back, if you want,” he said.

  “It’ll pass,” she said without looking up. “Just be ready to pull over again. Fast.”

  An eighteen-wheel cattle truck hurtled past, going at least eighty. It sucked the air down the road with it, and the vacuum of its passing seemed to lift the compact Escort off the ground. A split-second later, a furious surge of dust and twigs enveloped them, then the nauseating aroma of hot cow shit.

  Claire leaned out the door and vomited again.

  While Claire was freshening up in the restroom, Morgan asked the Hardin Conoco’s teen-aged Indian attendant how to find Kate Morning’s house. The boy wore a long braid, a greasy green Boston Celtics cap, and wrap-around Oakley sunglasses that shimmered iridescently in the Saturday morning sunlight, like oil on the surface of a pond. The name “Ernie” was embroidered in script over his breast pocket.

  “You mean the Morning ranch?” Ernie asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” Morgan said, a little confused. “I’m looking for Kate Morning. An older lady. Lives here in town. That’s all I know.”

  The boy chuckled.

  “Yeah, that’s her, only she don’t live here in town. Nice lady. The Morning Ranch is the biggest spread in th
e county, and she lives out there all by herself since Gabe died. Comes into town sometimes, but her hired men mostly run errands for her. You know her?”

  In his mind, Morgan replayed the voice on the other end of the line. Somehow, he had imagined he’d find Kate Morning, once a runaway Indian girl who’d given birth to her child in a squalid homesteader’s shack, living in less dignified circumstances. Now, he was a little ashamed to find out she’d apparently become a woman of considerable substance.

  “Okay, then, is the Morning ranch hard to find?”

  The Indian boy sauntered a few loose-jointed steps toward the road, his baggy jeans barely hitched to his thin hips. He pointed the way as far as he could see down Hardin’s Main Street.

  “No problem. You go down this road all the way through town, past the dump ‘til the road turns to dirt. You keep on it all the way to the Medicine Sand coulee, but don’t cross the water there. Follow the red bluff ‘til you cross over the old wood bridge and the road forks. Don’t matter which way you go, you end up at the same place. A big gray rock house. That’s the Morning place. No problem.”

  “How far are we talking here?”

  Ernie smiled. His grin was full of crooked teeth.

  “All the way,” he said.

  Morgan paid for his gas and bought a 7-Up at the pop machine outside for Claire. She emerged from the restroom looking refreshed.

  “Is it far?” she asked.

  “It’s all the way,” he said.

  “What?”

  “All the way.”

  “Is that far?” Claire asked.

  “Nope,” Morgan answered playfully. “There’s only two ways to go and they both end up at the same place. Just go all the way. No problem.”

  Claire’s sense of humor was returning, and so was her color.

  “Well, at least we won’t get lost,” she said.

  To Morgan’s surprise, the Indian boy’s directions were impeccable. The paved road gave way to gravel, then to two rain-splashed ribbons of bare dirt a mile outside the town. At Medicine Sand coulee, some Indian children plunged into the cool reddish-green water from a tire lashed to an overhanging cottonwood branch. The road followed the base of brilliant red bluffs, carved by the ancient river and sanded smooth by the rain of millennia. Another mile, they came to a bridge of weathered timbers that lamented their passing with a low groan. A hundred yards beyond, where the bluffs parted, the muddy dirt road split in separate directions into the shallow valley, and neither looked more nor less inviting than the other.

  “Right or left?” Morgan asked Claire.

  “What did the boy say?”

  “He said they both end up at the same place.”

  “A circle,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The road is a circle. It doesn’t matter which way you go, you’ll eventually end up at the same spot. Many Indians saw circles as symbolic of life and the cycles around them.”

  Claire might have grown up in an affluent suburb of Chicago, but she was in her element where art intersected with history. Morgan grew up in a cattle town on the high plains and knew every ranch was a patchwork of pastures stitched together by roads forged more by convenience than culture.

  They took the westerly fork, along the red bluffs. The road bounded irrigated fields of alfalfa like thick slabs of jade wrapped in rusty velvet.

  “Up there,” Claire said, pointing ahead.

  A magnificent gray mansion rose before them, splendidly out of character with its surroundings. Morgan, once a reluctant student of architecture, recognized the style as Georgian Revival, a cross between an English country house and an American colonial estate popular around the turn of the century.

  The house had three stories. No fewer than four stone chimneys sprouted from its tiled gambrel roof. Graceful, snow-white columns supported porticos on the front and western side. As they drew nearer, Morgan saw it was a stonemason’s masterpiece: The massive granite blocks in the manse’s stone walls were shaped by hand, and the elegant quoins were fashioned of gray marble. Sweet honeysuckle vines scaled the stones toward the sky, reaching past the Palladian windows of the second floor.

  A large black Labrador retriever, white-muzzled and heavy in the belly, barked unenthusiastically from the ivory-columned porch as the muddy Escort rolled to a stop in front of the house. Before its engine had quit sputtering and fuming, a woman came out the front door and shushed the big dog, which happily abandoned his tiresome grunting but kept his black eyes on the visitors.

  The tall woman on the porch was dressed in a long denim skirt and plain white blouse, with an ornate silver and turquoise necklace tucked under her collar. Her long hair was the color of ash in a hearth, and it was pulled back with a simple blue ribbon.

  Kate Morning, once Catherine Little Spotted Horse, was now in her early seventies, but she had a courtly bearing. Her chestnut-colored skin was smooth and translucent, her cheekbones as stately as the red bluffs that surrounded her little valley. A certain sadness reflected in her eyes, as if she’d been crying not just all night, but for many years. Still, Morgan found her strikingly beautiful.

  “Welcome,” Kate said, extending her hand to him. It was the same exotic voice he’d heard on the phone. “You must be Jeff Morgan. I am pleased you could come on such short notice.”

  Morgan shook her hand. It was graceful but strong.

  “Mrs. Morning, this is my wife, Claire,” he said. The two women shook hands, too.

  “You must call me Kate or I will feel very old. Being old is not as bad as feeling old,” Kate said. “Come now. I have tea for you inside. My own recipe.”

  The fat dog sprawled dispassionately on the porch’s top step and let them pass.

  Behind its remarkable walls, the house was incongruously bleak. Plaster flaked from some of the walls and dust-encrusted cobwebs hung in the corners of the high, dark ceilings. The bare wooden floor was warped and water-stained. The few scattered antique furnishings weren’t arranged in any apparent harmony. Old photographs in oval frames, a few mounted mule deer and elk heads, and unused gas lamps were hung almost randomly on the massive walls, but Morgan saw no mirrors.

  So much dust stirred in the air, a ray of sunlight from a clerestory window high on the western wall appeared to be a sparkling liquid swirling in a transparent cylinder. The whole place reeked of burning grass, decay and neglect.

  Despite the promise of the house’s majestic facade, it was empty and dying inside.

  A mist of dust floated around Morgan and his wife as they sat together on a threadbare loveseat. It faced a stone fireplace as tall as a man. Wisps of smoke rose from a thick layer of cooling cedar embers and charred sprigs of sage. A knitted afghan was thrown over the arm of an ancient rocking chair beside the hearth. Morgan imagined Kate had stayed up most of the night in front of her fire, alone and cold.

  She served her tea made from huckleberries, sweetgrass and wild honey. An old Crow recipe, she told them. Chips of ice chimed in the tall glasses. Despite his addictive taste for it, Morgan thought better of asking for sugar.

  “This is a wonderful house, Kate,” Morgan remarked politely, sipping the fragrant tea.

  Kate Morning looked up at her high, smoke-darkened ceilings. Her dulcet voice drifted upward and was nearly lost among whatever spirits moved in the emptiness above.

  “It belonged to my late husband Gabe’s family for almost one hundred years. His grandfather — John Morning was his name — struck gold in the Dakotas and settled this land. To build the house, he had all the stones shipped on the train from his boyhood hometown in Indiana.”

  “Was Gabe your second husband?” Morgan asked.

  Kate’s gaze shifted to the smoke curling in the fireplace.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “He was a good man, very generous. He had a big heart, but it was weak. He died last year.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Morgan said.

  “Perhaps it is the only reason you are here,�
�� Kate said.

  Morgan was puzzled.

  “Why’s that?”

  Kate Morning pulled a thick white envelope from a hidden pocket in her skirt and handed it to Morgan. It bore no marks and was still sealed.

  “Open it,” she instructed him.

  Morgan used his finger like a letter opener, tearing a ragged opening across the top of the envelope. Claire looked over his shoulder with wide eyes.

  “Jesus, there’s easily more than ten thousand dollars here,” Morgan said. He searched Kate’s face for some sign of its meaning, but she just looked away. “What’s this about?”

  “It was left in a chair on the porch yesterday morning,” Kate said. “Same as all the other times.”

  “Other times?”

  “Many times. Always that same terrible day.”

  Just like Gilmartin, Morgan thought. That day ...

  “The anniversary of your daughter’s death,” Morgan said bluntly.

  Kate was surprised.

  “So you know?” she asked.

  “I don’t know where the money comes from or why. But I know someone else who has been getting money like this on the very same day for the past ten years. It’s obviously not a coincidence, Kate.”

  “Who else?” she asked.

  Morgan measured his words carefully.

  “The man who went to prison for ... for Aimee’s death,” he said. “He is still alive, but he is dying. He doesn’t know where the money comes from either.”

  “He’s in prison, isn’t he?”

  “No, Kate. He’s out of prison now, but you have nothing to fear. He is very sick. He will die soon.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “He came to me,” Morgan said. “He claims he didn’t commit the crime and he wants someone to prove it before he goes. He doesn’t want to die with your daughter’s murder in his heart.”