The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  Within ninety days, in midsummer, Judge Biggerstaff agreed with a state psychologist’s finding that the girl was moderately disabled by Down Syndrome, but exhibited no threat to herself, her family or the community. Neither the state’s nor her interests would be served by locking her up in a public asylum, he wrote in his brief order. He denied her father’s attempt to warehouse her and ordered indefinite supervision at the request of her court-appointed guardian ad litem.

  That supervision ended an astounding nine years later, in 1985.

  In that year, Hosanna Pierce turned eighteen ... and the lawyer who’d successfully argued to keep her out of the insane asylum retired. Simeon Fenwick.

  Morgan now understood a small part of the hatred boiling in Malachi Pierce. If he believed Hosanna had been sent by God as his punishment for some mysterious sin — and maybe it was the murder of Aimee Little Spotted Horse — the courts and Simeon Fenwick had ensured she would rise every morning in his house to remind him of it.

  For two hours, Morgan queried the computer with dozens of other relevant keywords, such as “Wormwood,” “Fourth Sign,” “church,” “arson,” even “bomb,” and found nothing remotely related to Malachi Pierce. The digitized paper trail was cold.

  Fenwick would be no help. His lips were sealed as tight as his ass. He wouldn’t even admit his role in Hosanna’s case, and Morgan couldn’t broach the subject without betraying Cassie’s confidence. Still, Morgan had found what he was looking for: Fenwick’s legal connection to Pierce. It just wasn’t all he’d hoped for, and it solved no mysteries.

  It was an ironic legacy for a lawyer who’d had no children of his own, but Morgan had never been able to divine the spark that burned inside most attorneys he’d known. For the moment, he was happy that Fenwick had stood up for Hosanna Pierce, who might still be moldering in the state asylum without his help. No matter what daily wretchedness she might endure at Wormwood Camp, Morgan was certain her life was better than if she were shut away and forgotten in a mental institution.

  Aimee Little Spotted Horse, for one, hadn’t been so lucky. Morgan looked at her photograph and traced his finger across her smile. In the end, nobody took her side, nobody stepped between her and death. Somebody should have been there for her, somebody ...

  “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered.

  Morgan stood up so quickly his chair fell over. He glanced at his watch. It was almost five. He went to the phone table in the front hallway and fanned through Winchester’s thin phone book, then hurriedly dialed a number.

  It rang several times. Finally, a woman answered.

  “ICU, please,” he told her.

  A nurse picked up.

  “This is Jefferson Morgan. I’m calling about a patient, Neeley Gilmartin. Can I get an update on his condition?”

  “Are you family?” the nurse quizzed him.

  “No, but I am ... shit, I don’t know what I am, I just need to know if he’s okay.”

  He heard the nurse shuffling papers on the other end of the line. After a painfully long time, she came back.

  “The doctor will have to contact you, Mr. Jefferson. We can’t release any information.”

  “My name is Morgan. Jefferson Morgan. Is the doctor there?”

  “She’s been paged. If you’ll give me your number, I’ll have her call as soon as she can.”

  Morgan gave her his phone number and hung up. Then he found Cassie Gainsforth’s home number. A man answered. It was the Rev. Gainsforth.

  “Hello, is Cassie there?”

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Jeff Morgan with The Bullet.”

  “Good Lord, we’re sorry to hear about your paper. We’re praying for you, Jeff.”

  “Thanks, I need all the help I can get. But we’ll be back better than ever. Really. Anyway, I just had a quick question for Cassie.”

  “Of course. Here she is.”

  Cassie got on the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Cassie, this is Jeff Morgan. I really hate to call you at home, but I need your help with a file.”

  “No problem, Jeff. Come in tomorrow and we’ll dig it out.”

  “No, Cassie. It’s urgent. I need to see something right away. I don’t know what I’ll find, but I need to know tonight.”

  “Are you sure you don’t already have access to it?” she asked. He knew she was referring to the disks she’d made for him.

  “No, it’s older than that. Can you help?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Cassie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cassie, they think Old Bell was killed in the fire. He meant a lot to me, and I know he meant a lot to you. Now I need your help to find out who killed him.”

  Morgan waited a long time before she spoke again.

  “Later tonight,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Meet me at the back door of the courthouse at nine. Don’t park nearby.”

  He agreed and they hung up.

  As Morgan put the receiver back in its cradle, the phone rang, startling him. It was Dr. Snyder at the hospital.

  “Mr. Gilmartin has stabilized, but he’s still borderline,” she said in a serious tone. “He’s asked for you.”

  “He’s awake?”

  “From time to time. He’s in severe pain and when he’s conscious, he’s in a kind of stupor.”

  “Have you taken off the restraints?”

  “Yes, he’s unstrapped. But it might not be long that he’s conversant. Could be minutes. You might want to get down here pretty quick. He’s drifting in and out.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Morgan promised. He was out the front door before the doctor heard the dial tone.

  He had backed his Escort into the sloped driveway so he could push-start it, if he had to. He turned the key. When the car convulsed and gasped, he rolled it down the concrete drive into the street, put it in gear and popped the clutch. The engine grabbed and sputtered, but it kept running.

  At the hospital, the receptionist at the front desk directed him to the intensive care unit, a suite of four rooms in the rural hospital’s west wing. Past two pairs of swinging doors, Dr. Gail Snyder met him at the nurses’ station and led him into one of the chaste cubicles where Neeley Gilmartin balanced unsteadily between life and death.

  Gilmartin seemed even smaller now. Against the pure white pillow, his withered head looked like a rotting fruit under a transparent green oxygen mask. His eyes were closed, but Morgan could see his eyelids fluttering slightly, as if Gilmartin wanted to be awake, to cuss him for not being here, for not fulfilling his last request.

  “Can he talk?” Morgan asked Dr. Snyder.

  “Not too much.”

  Gilmartin’s eyes opened slightly, then rolled back in their sockets until all Morgan could see was their undersides, which were not white but chicken-fat yellow. He raised his right arm toward his face, but it moved only a few inches and fell lifelessly across his chest. Beneath the mask, Morgan saw Gilmartin’s lips moving.

  “He’s trying to talk,” Morgan said. “Can you take off the mask for a second?”

  Dr. Snyder removed Gilmartin’s oxygen mask and Morgan leaned close. The old man smelled of decay, his breath like rotten meat.

  “I’m here, Neeley,” Morgan said.

  The old man opened his eyes and tried to keep them focused on Morgan, but they floated behind their lids like bubbles on a drug-induced tide. He pursed his cracked lips in a dry circle, but nothing came out except his putrid breath.

  “I don’t understand,” Morgan said, leaning closer.

  Gilmartin strained.

  “Ho ... home,” he said, his voice choked to a raspy hiss. His body shook with a convulsive cough as he used up what little air remained in his cancer-choked lungs.

  Morgan looked beseechingly at the doctor for an answer, but she just as quickly looked away, shaking her head.

  “You can’t go home right now,” Morgan said. “You have to get
better. Then I’ll take you home.”

  Gilmartin turned his face to the far wall, then rolled it back again in contempt. With death at hand, he was still fighting for something he could hardly remember. Freedom.

  “I’m sorry, Neeley,” Morgan said. “They won’t let you go home yet.”

  The old man turned his head away and raised his feeble right hand. Its bony middle finger was extended defiantly at Morgan.

  “I’ll keep my promise,” Morgan told him. “Do you hear me, Neeley? I’ll keep my promise.”

  Gilmartin didn’t respond. Morgan waited for a long time, hoping for forgiveness, but Gilmartin had lapsed again into unconsciousness. The doctor replaced his mask and led Morgan back into the hallway. They waited for the door to close behind them.

  “How long?” he asked her.

  “Two or three days max. We’ve got him heavily medicated right now, for pain. The cancer has spread, but it isn’t in his brain, so as long as he’s conscious, he should be more or less communicative.”

  “Will you let him go home with me to die?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “He doesn’t want to die here. I promised I wouldn’t let him die in a hospital.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Morgan. Under the circumstances, I can’t authorize his release.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “No family, no real home, no indication he’d get professional care. The paramedics told me he was living in a pig sty.”

  “It was a shit-hole, but to him, it was freedom. He spent most of his life under the control of other people and he doesn’t want to die boxed in. He can stay with me until he goes. I’ll hire somebody to help. I don’t care. I’m the only family he’s got. Please don’t do this to him.”

  The doctor stood firm.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “Is there anyone else I can talk to?”

  Dr. Snyder’s face turned an angry red.

  “So you want to go over my head?”

  “If I have to.”

  “It won’t make any difference, you know.”

  Morgan erupted.

  “You don’t give a shit for that man in there. To you, he’s a dead man right now. And as long as you keep him here, he might as well be dead.”

  “I resent that,” Dr. Snyder said.

  “Well, I’m sorry about that,” Morgan said sarcastically. “Sorry all to hell. But you don’t know anything about him that you don’t get from a test tube or a machine.”

  “That’s not fair. Our first job here is to prolong a life. I can’t compromise that, and I can’t allow him to be put in more pain than he’s already suffering.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t know his pain.”

  “No, I don’t. But maybe you don’t either.”

  “How do you want to die, Doctor Snyder? Did you ever ask yourself that? Do you want it to be on your terms or somebody else’s?”

  Dr. Snyder raised her hands in surrender, shaking her head.

  “Chief of staff. John Garner. He can overrule me.”

  She made a note on Gilmartin’s chart and shoved it angrily in a steel cubicle on the nursing desk. She didn’t look up.

  “Where can I find him?” Morgan asked.

  She delivered her answer to Morgan’s question as she retreated down the hall, never bothering to turn around.

  “Oh, somewhere on the Middle Fork of the Powder River, I think. He’s one helluva fly-fisherman. He should be back here next week. I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

  Neeley Gilmartin would be dead before that and she knew it.

  Defeated, Morgan went home. He called Claire in Winnetka and she begged him to let her come home in a few days so she could help him rebuild The Bullet. He promised to think about it and urged her to get some rest.

  After they hung up, he dialed Bell Cockins’ number again, as if the old man might answer the phone and prove them all wrong. It was like a bad dream. The old man couldn’t be dead. To Morgan, he was immortal.

  He let the phone ring twenty or thirty times, unanswered.

  Time had lost its rhythm. Soon, the sun was going down and the empty house was a melancholy place. Morgan sat for a while on the porch, then walked downtown. Halogen floodlights illuminated the wreckage of The Bullet as workers dismantled the confusion of twisted metal and charred lumber, heaving it into dump trucks to be buried without ceremony at the county landfill. The yellow police tape fluttered in the evening breeze. Only the press was left standing, brazenly defiant against the setting sun.

  Morgan picked up a brick and felt the weight of it. He mourned the loss of the old newspapers stored upstairs, all the machinery of community journalism, the place itself. He remembered what Old Bell told him: A newspaper is printed here. But no more.

  Like The Bullet itself, Old Bell was gone. Morgan couldn’t separate the two and, in the end, neither could fate. They died together.

  Morgan tossed the scorched brick back onto the rubble.

  In a few minutes, it would be nine o’clock.

  “This better be good,” Cassie Gainsforth whispered as she let Morgan in the back door where the district court bailiff generally brought prisoners from the jail. Her hair was pulled back under a long-billed aviator’s cap. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her jeans hugged her long legs.

  The dark, empty hallways of the courthouse reflected every sound. Morgan heard his shoes squeak on the polished floors.

  Cassie’s office was already unlocked but the lights were off. Inside the massive records vault, she closed the door behind them and turned on just one of the fluorescent overheads near the center of the room. The dim air was close, uncooled, as the light hummed and flickered.

  “Damn janitors only replace these things when they go black,” she complained. “Okay, so what do you need?”

  “I want to see a file on Charlie Little Spotted Horse. A domestic abuse in 1947.”

  Cassie pulled out one of the ancient file drawers and flipped through the index cards. She stopped and studied one. “Didn’t call it domestic abuse back then. Case number four-seven-dash-six-oh-one. Assault with a deadly weapon. Should be over there on the wall, about halfway up.”

  Morgan scanned the ratty manila folders, in chronological order with their tabs all color-coded by the type of case, until he found Case No. 47-601: the State of Wyoming vs. Charles Little Spotted Horse.

  Morgan took down the folder and fanned the court papers across a wooden table.

  According to the sheriff’s affidavit, Charlie came home drunk and demanded that his wife give him money from the craft items she sold in town. When she refused, he hit her with a skillet, opening a bloody gash in her scalp. Eight-year-old Aimee rushed to help her mother and was also knocked unconscious when her father beat her with a broken broom handle. His choice of weapons elevated his crime to assault with a deadly weapon, a felony.

  The crime would have gone unreported if one of Jack Madigan’s ranch hands hadn’t been camped nearby. He rode back to the big house the next day. Madigan himself called Deuce Kerrigan, who arrested Charlie three days later.

  After three weeks in the Perry County Jail awaiting trial, Charlie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in stir. But after only a month, Jack Madigan himself asked Judge Darby Hand to release Charlie into his custody, with a lengthy probation. Morgan knew that without Madigan’s intercession, the court would have shown no mercy to a drunken Indian who nearly beat his family to death.

  “What are you looking for?” Cassie asked him.

  “I’m not sure,” Morgan replied. “Anything and nothing.”

  He leafed through the sentencing order, hand-copied probation reports, even a contrite letter from Charlie himself, swearing off the booze that poisoned his mind and promising never to touch his child in anger again.

  The last document in the file was a carbon copy of the judge’s order releasing Aimee Little Spotted Horse from a court-supervised guardianship. It was hand-stamped, 2 Augus
t 1948, a year after the crime.

  “What’s this?” Morgan asked as he read the single sheet of carbon-smudged notice. Cassie read over his shoulder.

  “It’s the end of the little girl’s guardianship,” she said. “You don’t see many of those in these old files.”

  “Why?”

  “You kidding? Fifty years ago, we weren’t as enlightened about such things.”

  “Child abuse?”

  “The laws weren’t so sophisticated in Wyoming back in those days. Most domestic violence was considered a private thing. Even when there was an arrest, family violence didn’t get the kind of attention we give it today.”

  “So why would a judge appoint a guardian in this case?”

  “I don’t know for sure. If the judge were convinced there was an extraordinary reason to ensure the safety of the child, he might.”

  “Why this case, do you think?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. But it would take a pretty passionate argument. It would be awfully rare, from what I hear about old Darby Hand. The girls in the office say he raised a hand to his wife from time to time.”

  “Where would the original be?”

  “The girl’s parents would have been served with it. It should have been delivered the same day this copy went into the file.”

  “By whom?”

  “It was a civil paper, like a subpoena. The sheriff, most likely.”

  Morgan looked around the stacks of files, some dating back nearly a hundred years.

  “Would there be another file in this case?”

  “What kind of file?”

  “I don’t know. A guardian file or something?”

  Cassie looked closer at the judge’s order dissolving Aimee’s guardianship.

  “Yeah, there’s a separate case number here, but it’s probably sealed, like a juvenile case.”