The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  Kate’s hand trembled as she fingered the hand-made silver pendant around her neck, like a shiny rosary. She didn’t speak, but her tired eyes looked frightened.

  “Do you have any idea who would leave you so much money?” Morgan asked.

  “I don’t know who does it. I was told you would have answers for me.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “One who has ghost medicine, ahpaláaxe xáaplia,” Kate said. “Since my husband died last year, I am alone here. Always before, he was here to make me feel safe. Yesterday, when I found the envelope, I was frightened. So I took it to a woman in the tribe who sees with her heart. She looked at it in the Indian way and she told me a white storyteller would answer my questions.”

  Kate’s enigmatic response frustrated Morgan. Clearly, she expected him to reveal some mystery almost as much as he had hoped she would reveal it to him.

  “First, I’m a newspaperman, not a storyteller. Second, even if I were, there are many white storytellers besides me. Third, I don’t believe in crystal balls, the psychic hotline or ghost medicine. And fourth, I have just as many questions as you do, and far fewer answers.”

  Composing herself, Kate turned to Claire.

  “You are going to have a baby?” she asked.

  Suddenly self-conscious, Claire touched her tummy. She wasn’t even three months pregnant, so hadn’t yet begun to show. She looked at her husband, who was clearly amazed.

  “Yes,” she said. “How could you know?”

  “Ahpaláaxe xáaplia. She told me the white storyteller had lost a child, too, but that he would soon have another. She said he would know my anguish. Is it true that you have lost a child?”

  Morgan breathed deeply. He looked at Claire and nodded.

  “She said he would hear the ilaáxe, the ghosts. You have spoken my daughter’s name before today?”

  Morgan nodded again.

  “Then you are the one who’ll speak the answers,” Kate said. Suddenly, her eyes were calm, hopeful.

  “But, Kate, I told you: I don’t know anything about your daughter’s murder,” Morgan said. “Your medicine woman was wrong about that. I’m sorry, but I have no answers.”

  It changed nothing. The spirits had spoken, perhaps from the lofty ceilings above them, and the spirits could not be wrong. Kate smiled patiently.

  “Then I must wait until you do.”

  But there would be no answers without questions, and Morgan had many for Kate Morning.

  She had prepared a lunch for them — a cold pasta salad of wild pheasant, chanterelle mushrooms from Medicine Sand coulee and rotelle noodles — and served it on the sun-porch. While he and Claire helped her set the outdoor table, Kate showed him the willow-cane chair where she’d found the money the morning before.

  “It was right here. No note, no writing.”

  Morgan looked around. He could see at least a mile down the dirt road from Medicine Sand coulee to the Morning ranch. A gravel driveway encircled the house, leading to a horse barn, some empty corrals and a winter woodpile in back. Otherwise, the house was isolated by the emptiness that surrounded it.

  “An intruder would have to walk here in the dark, sneak up onto the porch, drop the envelope and walk out again. Maybe he came in with his headlights off and parked farther down the road where you wouldn’t hear him.”

  Kate’s fat Lab yawned and scratched his ear with a hind paw. He was no longer interested in the visitors.

  “Did you hear the dog bark last night or early this morning?” Morgan asked.

  “That overfed coyote sleeps inside with me. He’s mostly deaf anyway.”

  “Any strange cars or trucks on the road that you recall?”

  “I heard nothing.”

  “Do you have people who come and go? Ranch hands?”

  “I have two men, but they both live in town. Nobody else comes out here, except the pure-gas truck and a few hunters in the fall.”

  They sat down to the pheasant salad lunch, with a pitcher of sweetgrass tea, a plate of warm sourdough bread, and fresh butter. Soon, Claire was feeling much better with food on her stomach. She touched her husband’s hand under the table, as much a gesture of confidence as companionship.

  “How many times have you gotten money like this?” Morgan asked Kate.

  “Ten or eleven years in a row. My people would say it comes from an evil spirit because it is associated with death. I became so frightened by it, I wouldn’t even look at it or touch it. Gabe always gave the envelopes to the Indian school to help children go to college.”

  “Didn’t you come to expect it every year?” Morgan asked. “If it were me, I’d watch all night. Did you ever try to see who it was?”

  “Sometimes Gabe would take his rifle and hide in the fields to see who came in the night, but he never saw anyone. And I was too frightened to see, like a little girl who hides her eyes when she imagines a ghost by her bed. The shadows know when we are watching. They see us, but we cannot see them.”

  Spirits.

  Ghosts.

  Shadows.

  Morgan knew better. Someone had been making very large payments to both Kate Morning and Neeley Gilmartin for the past decade. He didn’t know why, except that it was related to the murder of Aimee Little Spotted Horse. It might be some bleeding heart who felt sorry for both of them, or it might be the little girl’s killer. It could be reparation or blood money. Either way, it came from someone who still cared deeply about the murder and who had access to large amounts of money, nearly two hundred thousand dollars over the past ten years.

  “Whatever happened to Charlie?” Morgan asked abruptly.

  “After our daughter died, we tried to stay together, but we fell apart,” Kate said. “In ‘Forty-nine, he went to Oklahoma to look for construction work and I came back to Crow Agency. I was a woman on the outside, but still a little girl on the inside. A few years later, when I became a woman on the inside, too, I met Gabe Morning and became his wife. In time, I was happy again.”

  “You’ve done well.”

  “Gabe convinced me to make something of myself. He sent me to school to become a nurse. I worked for many years at the government hospital in town, taking care of the Indian babies. Touching them, it filled an empty place in me.”

  Kate Morning was neither a killer nor a conspirator. His gut told him that much.

  “What do you remember of the time before Aimee died?” Morgan asked her.

  “That was another life. I wouldn’t live it again, but I do not regret living it. Charlie and me, we were foolish children who thought they were in love, but after we found out I was pregnant, the only thing we shared was being scared. We ran away from the reservation. We lived in a shack in the middle of nowhere, barely enough to eat, hardly any money. But Aimee made us a family.”

  “I’m sorry I have to ask this,” Morgan said, “but Charlie was in trouble once for hitting Aimee. He even went to jail for a short time. These things are very hard for families to deal with. Is there any chance ...”

  Kate interrupted him, shaking her head.

  “I know what you are thinking, but it isn’t true. The sheriff believed it, too, for a while. Charlie was a good father, but when he drank, a devil took him. He struck me, and yes, he struck her, but all the pain was inside him. She was so small, so sweet. He feared that he would separate her soul from her body.”

  “How’s that?” Morgan asked.

  “The Crow believe a child’s soul, ilaáxe, is inside the body, but it is not bonded to the flesh until they are grown. You have seen children play? When they are too rough, the soul can be separated from the body. A Crow mother will bring her children inside, then she will again call their names in the yard, in case a soul was knocked loose.”

  “And Charlie feared he might knock Aimee’s soul loose?”

  “In the year before she went away. He hit her so hard she was unconscious for many hours. That night, he fell to his knees under the stars and he called her name ‘til dawn.
A few days later, the sheriff came to arrest him.”

  “Did it ever happen again?” Morgan asked her.

  “There was much anger in Charlie when he drank. He never stopped drinking.”

  “Did he ever stop hitting you and Aimee?”

  Kate Morning shook her head. “But he didn’t kill her. I would have known. A mother would know.”

  Morgan felt Claire tense beside him.

  “Are you certain of that?”

  “We both kissed her as she slept on the morning before we left. We were together all day up north, riding the fence. When we returned and found her gone, he cried all night in my arms. We cried together.”

  Morgan believed her. He didn’t know why, exactly. Being a reporter was a vague science. Truth was, indeed, a matter of perception. Maybe Kate Morning was still hiding a terrible secret. Maybe she knew far more than she was telling. Maybe she watched Charlie do it, or maybe she did it herself.

  But if Kate Morning concealed such a terrible secret, why would she risk it by coming forward now? She could have remained silent and forever anonymous to Morgan, but she didn’t. She was alone and lonely, crying all night by the fire, afraid of ghosts.

  “Kate, was there anyone besides Neeley Gilmartin who might have done this? Anyone who was angry with you or Charlie, or who knew Aimee was alone? Anybody who meant harm to your family?”

  “Only him. They say he was a gambler and a drunkard who hated Charlie, that he made terrible threats. She was my baby, so innocent. And he confessed that he killed her. I believe he spoke the truth. His death comes too late and too easy. My heart is not heavy for him.”

  She was resolute, without forgiveness. No jury’s verdict was so lasting as a mother’s conviction. Neeley Gilmartin never had a jury, but Kate Morning’s judgment was far more harsh. To her, Gilmartin had only one dimension: Evil.

  “What became of Charlie after he left for Oklahoma?”

  “I hear he was killed,” Kate said. “I saw his brother in town one day and he told me that Charlie had been drunk and got hit by a train near a town called Pawhuska, and he was buried there in an Indian cemetery. I remember that was the year Kennedy was shot, because I was very sad for both of them for a long time. But I was happy that Charlie would see Aimee and tell her that we looked for her. I wanted her to know, because she might have thought we did not miss her. She might have thought we did not call for her.”

  Morgan glanced at Claire. Her eyes were filled with tears. They all sat silently, washed by a warm breeze that blew like a memory over each of them. They shared the loss of a child, an irrational loss none of them understood.

  But time was an imperfect glass that distorted what it could not reflect. Some memories were too dark and too deep to catch the light. Morgan felt he was chasing old ghosts through a warped mirror.

  Morgan thought about the weed-covered grave atop the lonely hill on the Sun-Seven Ranch.

  “We’ve been to Aimee’s grave in the Madigans’ cemetery,” he said to Kate. “There were flowers. Have you been there recently?”

  Kate’s hand floated momentarily above the white linen tablecloth, then caressed it delicately.

  “It’s too sad for me. Her spirit is not there anyway. Do you visit your child’s grave?”

  Beneath the table, Morgan reached for Claire’s hand. They held tightly to each other.

  “No,” Morgan said. “He wasn’t buried. He was cremated.”

  Kate nodded knowingly, comforting them.

  “Perhaps they are caring for each other,” she said.

  It was late.

  The afternoon sun was lowering upon the red bluffs around Kate Morning’s little valley. It was three hours back to Winchester and Morgan was eager to get back on the road. While Claire helped Kate clear the lunch plates from the table, Morgan asked directions to the bathroom.

  As he passed down a dark hallway toward the back of the house, he saw a fading photograph of two children on the wall. The old image had tapered to brown, blanched by sunlight that streamed through a window at the end of the hall.

  In it, the children sat on the running board of an old Ford coupe, although the car was probably brand-new at the time the photograph was taken.

  The little girl had wide, familiar eyes. She wore a fetching white dress that was too small and unlaced leather boots that were too big. Her thick, black hair was cut like Dutch boy’s, her bangs trimmed straight across her forehead, framing her cherubic little face like a dark halo. Her smile was shy but beguiling.

  A tiny oval locket hung over the frilly collar of her dress, a well-worn piece of little-girl jewelry that looked as if it were pulled from its usual hiding place around her neck to lend an air of elegance to the photograph. And in her small hand, she held three small, daisy-like flowers, their long stems drooping.

  The tow-headed boy wore suspenders, a starched white shirt and dungarees and scuffed go-to-meeting shoes. A mutinous cowlick defied the butchwax in his hair, and his toothy grin was guileless.

  “Wasn’t she pretty?” Kate said.

  She startled Morgan. He’d been studying the photo so intently, he hadn’t seen her come up beside him in the narrow hall.

  “Is this Aimee?” he asked.

  “Yes. She was eight then. She had never made a photograph before. She wanted to be pretty.”

  “She was pretty.”

  “She made them wait while she put on the dress. It was the only dress she owned. She was buried in it.”

  Morgan put his finger on the little boy in the picture.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Her best friend, Bobby,” Kate said. “She always said she would marry him, like all little girls dream, you know. On this day he came to visit with his father in their big, fancy car and she ran inside to put on her dress so they could make this picture. She was so shy.”

  “May I borrow this?” Morgan asked Kate. “I have wondered what she looked like. I’d like to make a copy of it and send it right back. I promise to take good care of it.”

  Kate hesitated, then took the dusty frame off the wall. She placed it in Morgan’s hands delicately, as if she were handing him the wing of a butterfly.

  “It’s the only one I have of my sweet baby. Bobby’s father gave it to me after she went away.”

  “That was very kind. I’ll take very good care of it,” he said, studying the picture in his hands even more closely. “Did you know the boy’s family very well?”

  Kate smiled, one of those smiles that made Morgan think he hadn’t heard something she said.

  “Of course,” she said. “Mr. Madigan was always very good to us.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The snow was not deep, but enough had fallen that two sets of small footprints could easily be seen in the blue moonlight. They led deeper into the dark trees, into the deadfall.

  It was bitter cold. The runner’s labored breath was frigid and thick, and his throat burned. Sweat trickled down his back like ice water. The air was reluctant, almost too thin to breathe. Frost crystals sparkled all around him, suspended like tiny stars in an airless infinity.

  But he followed the footprints deeper into the trees, ghosts shrouded in hoarfrost. Their paths were parallel, never crossing as they meandered through the dark woodland. The air grew more shallow, until the runner’s lungs ached.

  Suddenly the forest surrendered to an immense meadow, where a luminous white mansion rose from the snow. The footprints led to it, up its wide steps and through the front door. The runner followed, though now his legs were too heavy to run.

  The door was locked. The windows were dark and crusted with ice. He scraped away the rime and looked inside. Numb moonlight fell on the cold hardwood floor of an empty room.

  Then he heard children’s laughter, somewhere inside the house, a different room. He dragged his leaden legs to another window, where he scratched the ice with his bare fingers.

  He heard the young voices, but all he saw were two black shapes in the center of the h
igh-ceilinged room. Then, he was inside, through the icy glass, standing before the two shapes, which he now recognized: Two tiny coffins atop draped funeral biers, blue in the cold glow of the moon.

  The runner lifted the heavy lid on the first coffin. There was his son, tubes and needles still dangling from him. But his face was sunny and supple, the way it had been before he got sick. The runner was not frightened, for he had not seen his son in a very long time, and when the boy smiled, he knew he had never died. It was all a mistake, the dying.

  Then the runner opened the second coffin.

  A white dress, lace frills at the collar, was wrapped around a homunculus, a glowing, bleeding mass of water-logged flesh. It squirmed on a block of ice, brown river water seeping from it and freezing in screaming tendrils.

  A tiny hand rose from the gelatinous mess and reached for him.

  The runner couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t run. He turned to his son, but the coffin contained only a pile of ashes. A deep, painful sob filled the burning void in his chest, and the last air rushed from him.

  Somewhere, another child laughed.

  Jefferson Morgan’s clock radio clicked, but there was no music, just empty electric air.

  The sun wasn’t up. It was four-thirty in the morning. The FM station over in Blackwater, thirty miles away, didn’t sign on until five on Monday mornings, later if the morning dee-jay was hungover. Of the four far-flung stations whose signals were potent enough to reach Winchester, it was the only one that played old rock, the music Morgan never really outgrew. It was also the only one without hourly livestock reports.

  Morgan silenced the radio’s breathy hum, then dressed in the dark, still haunted by his dream. He’d lost most of the weekend visiting Kate Morning in Montana and helping Claire move junk out of the workshed where she envisioned a painting studio. He’d intended to go to the office for a few hours late Sunday night, but fell asleep after dinner. Too much wine.