by D. J. Butler
Michael’s eyes widened. “The stone? Uh, I don’t know, stones don’t usually smell like anything.”
“Sure they do,” Hiram said. “You know what sulfur smells like. You’re just not used to sniffing rocks. But I thought…look, you’re the Popular Science reader here…doesn’t uranium have something to do with decay?”
Michael laughed. “Yeah, but not like that, Pap. It’s the decay of isotopes. Look, it’s like electrons and stuff.”
Hiram chuckled, feeling foolish. “One of us needs to get the sheriff, and I think it should be you.”
Michael hung the woman’s hat back on its peg. “You feeling a spell coming on?”
Hiram shook his head. “Take the revolver, in case the killer is still out there. When you get to the truck, take a moment and reload. Keep the gun next to you. Drive into town and tell the sheriff what we saw. Tell him I’ll be here watching the body to make sure nothing is disturbed.”
“And if he asks me questions about, for instance, the knife?”
“Answer them. We’re not guilty.”
“And if he asks me questions about, for instance, the ghost?”
Hiram smiled ruefully. “Tell him the truth. Tell him some people think your pap has a special talent with ghosts, and apparently Mr. Preece was one of them. I expect if the sheriff has his eyes open, he’ll already know we came into town to do a bit of dowsing.”
“It’s not illegal.”
“It’s not. Just…not as common as it used to be. But mostly, let the sheriff know that Mr. Preece has been killed, and then come back here and get me.”
Michael nodded. “But I’m not leaving until you pick up that shotgun and check to make sure it’s loaded. That crazy bastard might try to jump me in the darkness, but he might come back here and attack you, too.”
Hiram didn’t admonish his son for cursing. The man who’d beat him did indeed seem like a crazy bastard.
Chapter Nine
Hiram held the shotgun and stood in the dark study, watching out the window toward his campsite. He felt on edge and fearful, chanting Psalms and praying for Michael’s safety, until he saw the headlights of the Double-A snap on. When the truck rolled onto the road that led back into Moab, he took a deep breath and wiped sweat from his brow.
The cabin had two external doors, and they were both locked. Lloyd Preece’s corpse was covered, though no doubt there were flies creeping under the sheet on the ground. Corruption was born into the human species, and the sheet was really just a way of whiting the sepulcher, or being polite to the dead. And also, it was less unsettling to sit in the same room as a corpse with its throat slashed when the corpse was covered.
The murder, Hiram reminded himself, was not his business. Grand County had a sheriff. Lloyd Preece had kin, and this was their affair. Michael would bring the sheriff, Hiram and Michael would give their statements as witnesses, and then they would be done. They could leave.
But no. He had yet to give Jimmy Udall peace.
But Hiram didn’t want the attention that being close to a murder investigation would bring. He preferred to be completely invisible to the public and to the authorities. Invisibility was freedom. Invisibility was peace.
If he had known a hex or a prayer that would reveal the killer, Hiram would have used it anyway, alone in the cabin, and nudged the sheriff in the right direction. Hiram knew charms for investigating crimes—Grandma Hettie had taught him that that was one of the traditional tasks of the cunning man or woman, going back to medieval England, when the king’s officers might not always be accessible, or might not be friendly—but those charms required labor. Divination by clay balls or sieve and shears, for instance, could identify the guilty among a set of suspects, but the cunning man first had to find the suspects, and the divination would only work if the guilty party was included.
The Eye of Abraham was another charm used to solve crimes. It caused a guilty person to weep, but you had to lead the criminal into the presence of the written Eye, which meant that you had to figure out who the criminal was on your own, and then the Eye confirmed your conclusion. And the corpse of a murder victim, Grandma Hettie had sworn, would start to bleed again in the presence of its killer, but did that still hold true with a body that had been emptied of blood and stuffed, as human bodies were treated these days? And if it did, what mortician in Grand County would let Hiram Woolley lead a procession of murder suspects through the funeral home to test it? A frog’s tongue on a person’s breastbone would compel him to tell the truth, but you had to find the criminal and put the tongue on his chest to get a confession.
And, again, the murder was not Hiram’s business.
Was the ghost of Jimmy Udall even his business? Hiram quickly decided that it was. Jimmy himself was suffering, had been killed in some strange and unresolved way, and needed Hiram’s help. Jimmy’s parents, too, were people who were in no position to get help from any other sources. Widows and orphans and the poor, this was Hiram’s mission, and he didn’t need to get back to the farm with any urgency.
He felt a little uneasy to be investigating a ghost with Michael. A few months earlier, Michael had been ignorant of the fact that Hiram was a cunning man at all, and now he was taking turns with the Mosaical Rod. Was the transition too fast?
Michael was becoming a kind of apprentice to his father. All things considered, though, Hiram would rather that Michael’s first hexes involved healing chapped udders on cattle or helping a goat that had eaten barbed wire and ulcerated its stomach than dealing with the unquiet dead.
Or a murder.
Were the ghost and the murder connected? Hiram stretched out in a leather chair behind a desk in the darkened study, able to see the corpse in the other room and the front door from where he sat, and laid the shotgun down. He saw no obvious connections, other than geographical proximity. Lloyd Preece had expressed interest in the ghost—but it had been seen near his land, and Hiram had personally observed that Preece was a generous man who liked to help the poor.
A bit like Hiram himself, though with much more money.
Hiram remembered Preece’s joke about wanting to be seen to be rich. There was probably truth to that, but a man could take the sting out of his own pride by acknowledging it and laughing at it. The two best targets for laughter in this world were a man’s own self and the Devil—mocking one’s own vanity was a jab at both of them.
A mirror hung on the wall of the study. It was large, maybe five feet tall and three wide, its frame was heavy, and it hung from two thick iron nails. Hiram stood and examined himself in the mirror—he looked gaunt, unshaven, and tired. The mirror’s glass was cracked right across Hiram’s face, thrusting the image of his head, from the eyes up, a couple of inches to one side.
Hiram chuckled at his own vanity.
And the human-looking bitemarks on Jimmy Udall’s ghostly form?
Turning, he saw Lloyd Preece’s corpse, stretched out full-length beneath his improvised shroud. And who would have wanted to kill Preece? He was a good man, generous, and unlikely to inspire the rage or jealousy or hatred that would drive someone to murder him.
Envy, perhaps. Preece was wealthy. Only a wealthy man could fork over forty dollars without batting an eye, for the sake of a neighbor. Or a hundred dollars, to jobless men on the road. Wealth could inspire envy.
Or perhaps, the way Preece had acquired his wealth had led him to make enemies. Preece was a rancher. Had he stolen land, or water rights? Had he rustled another man’s cattle? The wall behind Preece’s desk was entirely covered by a built-in bookcase, with swinging glass doors, which kept dust off the books. Hiram opened the doors one at a time to see what information Preece cherished: scriptures, and a few commentaries on them; land surveys; genealogies; ledgers full of ranching data that Hiram had a hard time deciphering when he flipped through the pages; the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published just a few years before the war; a thorough collection of almanacs. Hiram thumbed through several of the alm
anacs. He understood the weather predictions well enough, and appreciated the agricultural tips, and didn’t mind the advertisements. The star data was mostly over his head—it was a part of Grandma Hettie’s lore he’d never mastered. Preece had a shelf full of diaries, the kind with the dates pre-printed in them, that you bought at a drugstore. Hiram felt embarrassed and guilty, but he looked through a couple of the volumes and saw nothing obvious; Preece’s entries were lists of things done, either on the ranch or in his calling in the bishopric. Many dates were simply blank; a few were circled.
On one of the shelves, he found the statue Michael had referred to. It was indeed queer: a single head, with three faces, looking away from the sculpture’s center. Hiram picked up the sculpture; it was of heavy stone, and the carving was crisp and beautiful. This was a work of art, something Lloyd would have paid good money for. The faces represented no one Hiram could identify, but seemed to be a child, a youth, and a man. Probably the same person, in three stages of life.
It wasn’t a likeness of Lloyd Preece, though, and it looked so fantastic, it probably wasn’t an image of any of Lloyd’s kin. Just art, then.
Hiram set the statue down and left the study. In the cabin’s main room, he was struck by a sudden observation and stopped. The walls were covered with the signs of hunting: a deer’s head, an elk’s, several long guns, maps, hunting jackets. But the room didn’t contain a single picture of Lloyd Preece with a trophy, or in hunting gear, or holding a fish.
Odd, for a man who participated in the hunt, and who was aware enough of himself to joke about his own vanity. But maybe choosing not to put himself in the images of the hunt was a way to keep that vanity in check?
Hiram wandered into the man’s bedroom; even in the weak light coming from the main room, he could see that the bedroom was tidy and cheerful. A dresser stood in the corner, and on top of it rested a vase containing flowers that were just beginning to wilt—a sign of a woman’s presence? Had his loneliness led Lloyd Preece to trespass across some woman’s marriage vows, inciting an angry husband? But Hiram was a widower, and that fact hadn’t led him to—
an image of Diana Artemis’s hips as she turned and limped away from him flashed into Hiram’s mind. He blinked hard and cleared his throat, trying to force his unruly thoughts back into their ordained track.
A man could put flowers in his bedroom without doing it for the sake of a woman.
And what about the man who had burst from the door and attacked Hiram? He was a likely candidate to have committed the murder. He might be Davison Rock, who seemed to be unbalanced, by drink if not by derangement of the mind or soul. Had he and Preece quarreled over mineral rights? Perhaps Rock wished to collect uranium on the rancher’s land, and Preece had said no—was there enough wealth in uranium to lead a man to kill?
It seemed unlikely, though Howard Balsley had said his wealth hadn’t come from his park ranger job. Where did it come from then? And if Rock were sufficiently deranged, perhaps the financial aspect of it wouldn’t matter. Perhaps being denied was cause enough. He had seemed pretty worked up about the secret history of the world that was printed in the rocks.
There was another insane man living in the wilderness. The preacher. Hiram closed his eyes, trying to remember exactly what he’d heard, but all that came into mind were images of the widow’s curves, so he opened them again.
Something about the end of the world. And preaching in a dugout up in the canyons. Hiram hadn’t seen any church marked on his map, but the map wasn’t especially detailed, and the kind of church that was located in a cave—if that was literally true—probably wouldn’t be on anyone’s map.
Well, the sheriff would know about both these men, no doubt. And it was the sheriff’s business, after all, not Hiram’s.
What about the fact that the murder weapon seemed to be Preece’s strange dagger? And that Bishop Gudmundson had a similar knife? What was the meaning of that weapon, and did it connect the two men in some way that would lead one to kill the other?
The dagger looked vaguely Masonic. Hiram was not a Freemason; like his lack of grimoires and arcane languages, his unfamiliarity with Freemasonry sometimes bothered him. Perhaps a network of brothers would be an aid to him, especially if those brothers included men who had lore like his own. Perhaps membership in a lodge would give Hiram access to the kind of books he didn’t own, but wanted. Perhaps in his current situation, it would shed light on this untimely death.
In any case, no one had ever put Hiram’s name forward for enrollment in a lodge, and it didn’t seem likely that it was about to happen now.
Also, Preece and Gudmundson had been very much at ease with each other the day before. And they were in the same bishopric, which could only mean that when Gudmundson had been called to be bishop, he had asked Preece to be his counselor. Those were callings that were yoked together, involving long hours of intimate cooperation in serving the congregation—such as moving Ernie and Bobette Smothers, for instance. You didn’t invite a man you hated to be your counselor, you invited a man you trusted, a man you thought to be competent.
Hiram shook his head. None of this was his concern.
Nor was it Michael’s problem. He and Michael would lay the ghost of Jimmy Udall to rest and go home.
Was Michael right to worry? Would he and Hiram end up being accused of this murder? Or of the murder of Jimmy Udall?
It wouldn’t happen, Hiram decided. They’d stick around town and try to help the Udalls, but once he told the sheriff what he knew, Lloyd Preece’s death was out of his hands.
* * *
Michael made sure the revolver was set to an empty chamber before he started driving; he didn’t want it to go off when the truck bounced over one of the potholes pitting the road, or when Michael reached down to check that the weapon was still beside him on the seat. Michael felt pride in the fact that his pap hadn’t reminded him to do that, and more pride in the fact that he had remembered to do it himself. He should probably get a gun, too.
Pap would hem and haw and drag his feet, and Michael ultimately wouldn’t do anything that his pap was really opposed to, but in the end, Hiram wouldn’t stop him. In part because they were often in the wilderness, and a gun was a useful tool. Usually to warn off bears or to hunt, but once in a while, because some maniac out there lay in the darkness, looking to commit murder.
This was not Michael’s first experience with a nighttime killer. Frankly, his misadventure in February had been much more frightening, since it had involved some kind of pit demon or fallen angel, or both—Michael had never quite understood the boundaries separating those categories, and Hiram was either unable or unwilling to explain. The demon had killed multiple people, several right in front of Michael’s eyes.
Michael had had bad dreams for a few weeks after that, and he had been surly with his father. Fortunately, Hiram Woolley was a patient man, able to take his son’s sharp tongue and reply, in due time, with love.
Michael loved his pap. So he was proud that he was practicing good firearm safety as he pushed the Model AA Ford down the canyon toward Moab as fast as it would go.
The drive into town took maybe half an hour, though Michael’s racing thoughts made it seem longer. The first sign of town was the faint glow of lights as Michael turned left between two high walls enclosing a narrow canyon, and into a broader valley. Then Michael was soon passing the first streetlights and buildings.
Lights were still on in the houses, but most of the businesses were dark. As he entered Moab itself, it occurred to Michael that he wasn’t really sure where to go. The sheriff would have an office, but it might not even be in Moab, since the sheriff was the chief law enforcement officer for the county. Maybe the sheriff’s office would be in Green River, or Floy.
The businesses still open were dance halls, saloons, and hotels. A hotel seemed like the place where he’d excite the least resistance and attention, so Michael pulled over at the Maxwell House Hotel, parking the Double-A on a dirt side s
treet. As he stepped from the car, Michael smelled the Colorado River.
Men in suits and cowboy hats stood in the hotel’s lobby, drinking liquor from shot glasses and congratulating each other on the success of their businesses. As Michael opened the door, several turned to look at him, as if they were expecting someone. When they saw who he was, their expressions fell.
Michael ignored them and pushed forward to the hotel front desk. A young man with a caramel complexion and one front tooth missing from a polite and charming smile wishing Michael good evening and asked whether he had a reservation.
“More of a camper, myself.” Michael knew he shouldn’t be joking, not with a dead man only recently murdered. However, he couldn’t help himself. He felt strangely calm. Or was that shock? “That’s Pap’s preference, you understand. As soon as my ship comes in, I plan to live in nice hotels exclusively.”
The clerk continued to smile. “Are you the new telegraph boy, then?”
Michael laughed and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “With an urgent message about stock prices for the Rotary Club here? Buy railroad shares! Sell beef! No, I need to talk to the sheriff.”
The clerk’s smile collapsed into a neutral expression. “He’s not here. These are ranchers, mostly.”
“Oh, yeah.” Michael turned and looked at the men. He spotted Erasmus Green and Banjo Johansson, drinking with men he didn’t recognize. No sign of Howard Balsley. Lloyd Preece had said something about being about to find him at the hotel. Too bad he hadn’t left just a few minutes earlier; he might be here enjoying a little liquor right now, and hearing from Hiram and Michael about the dead kid.
No, he had to think of him as Jimmy Udall.
Michael was slowly coming around to accepting the possibility of ghosts. The idea he was communicating with someone’s spirit would be exciting, if true. Yet, he wasn’t entirely convinced that only a ghost could be responsible for the behavior of the lantern flame he’d seen the night before, but he was totally certain that his pap wasn’t trying to trick him. Hiram Woolley believed in the ghost, so Michael thought he could, too. After all, he’d seen a demon before, so what was so challenging about think there might be ghosts in the world, too?
