The Legend of Annie Murphy

by Frank Peretti

  Jay nodded slowly, thinking along with her. “You might be onto something.”

  She looked up the street toward the Crackerby Boardinghouse. “I don’t know if I want to go in there again.”

  “We have to. Come on.”

  A century later, in the early evening, Dr. Cooper and Mac sat by the tent on cemetery hill. Mac was just ending a conversation with his secretary on his cellular phone.

  “Thanks, Alice. Good information. The pieces are fitting together now.” He closed the phone and put it in his backpack.

  Mac had repeated the new information to Dr. Cooper as quickly as he had gotten it from Alice, and now Dr. Cooper asked without looking up, “Can you see the sheriff?”

  Mac glanced toward the town. “He’s still walking around down there, stewing about something.”

  “I think he’s stewing about the carvings we found. They were obviously a surprise to him—and he didn’t seem too happy about what they were saying.”

  Mac nodded. “If we have the carvings in the right order the story’s pretty clear.”

  “So let’s go over it again.” Dr. Cooper rubbed his eyes as he tried to clear his thoughts. “I suppose Annie began with the carving of herself and Cyrus overlooking the site of their cabin.”

  “Portraying a happy couple with great dreams for the future.”

  “And then we found the next scene from where the roof of the mercantile used to be: the death of Cyrus. I’m sure the kids discovered the same thing.”

  Mac nodded in agreement. “And I recall the sheriff getting pretty nervous about that one.”

  “That must be why he had such a hard time finding where his own jail used to be,” Dr. Cooper said.

  “But you were right. Annie carved the judge from her cell in the jail.”

  “And herself from the judge’s bench in the courthouse: the judge’s point of view. We can credit Lila with leading us to that.”

  Mac scratched his chin as he considered, “So the carvings of Annie in jail and the judge with his bag of money go together as a pair, seen from opposing locations.”

  “Meaning we stand a good chance of finding another pair—once we check the view from the boardinghouse.” Dr. Cooper shot a glance down the hill at the lone, dark figure lurking among the ruins. “I think it’s the one carving he won’t want us to find.”

  Mac was somber. “We have to find it, Jake. It would confirm the information we got from Alice and bring all the pieces together for sure. Things could get dangerous around here. You didn’t bring your gun, did you?”

  Dr. Cooper shrugged. “I was on vacation.”

  Mac nodded. “What about the sheriff’s gun?”

  “I still have it hidden in the tent.”

  “Good.”

  “But we don’t have much time, Mac.”

  “No. Even less than I’d hoped. It all ends tonight—or never. The big question is, how?”

  “Let’s confirm what we know, and then . . .” Dr.

  Cooper’s voice trailed off. “And then we’ll just have to flow with history, I guess.” He rose from his place and quickly piled some bedrolls and camping gear against an old, weathered tombstone. “Okay, all set.”

  Mac rose. “Let’s go.”

  They started down the hill toward the ruins.

  For the third time, and feeling at least three times as nervous, Jay and Lila paid a visit to the Crackerby Boardinghouse. The rear door was still open and no one was around. They slipped quietly inside and then hurried upstairs to Annie and Cyrus’s old room. The door to the room was standing open and a single lamp was burning on the dresser. No one seemed to be there.

  “Okay,” said Jay. “Let’s open those curtains.”

  They tiptoed into the room, past the bed, and up to the window, their hearts racing with anticipation. Jay got only two fingers on the edge of the curtain before— “Well, good morning!”

  The voice behind them made them gasp, jump, and come down shaking. Spinning around, they saw the lanky deputy sitting in a chair behind the door, his six-shooter in his hand. He waited a moment for them to calm their jitters—a hint of a smile helped— then gestured with the gun barrel toward a small couch in the opposite corner. “Have a seat.”

  There was nowhere to run, so they sat.

  “The name is Hatch. Deputy Erskine Hatch. Now who in the world are you?”

  “Jay Cooper.”

  “Lila Cooper.”

  “And where are you from?”

  They looked at each other. “Uh, Wheaton, Illinois,” Lila finally answered.

  “Long way from home, aren’t you?”

  Jay nodded emphatically. “Yes, sir.”

  Hatch stomped on the floor, obviously a signal for someone downstairs. Then he said, “And now here you are in Bodine stealing clothes off clotheslines, climbing up on roofs, falling off roofs, running through walls and falling through floors and all kinds of exciting things. I’d like to hear an explanation.”

  “Uh . . .” Jay groped for words. “It’s a little hard to explain . . .”

  “Well, you can begin trying just as soon as everyone’s here.”

  They heard the heavy, authoritative footsteps in the hall that announced the arrival of Judge Amos Crackerby. When he strode boldly into the room in his night robe looking cranky, sleepy, and disheveled, it was a frightening development but no surprise.

  “Here you are, Judge,” said Hatch. “Just as you ordered.”

  The judge glared at the kids, and then smiled a wicked smile as he told Deputy Hatch, “So your prediction was correct. How did you know?”

  Hatch put his gun away as he replied, “Just had to figure out their motivations. You see, Judge, these kids have been trying to find out what really happened to Annie Murphy.” He looked at Jay and Lila.

  “Am I right?”

  They saw no point in denying it. They nodded.

  The judge eyed the deputy quizzically, so Hatch continued to explain. “A lot of folks are wondering about Annie these days, especially since so many think they’ve seen her ghost.”

  That reddened the judge’s face just as any talk of Annie’s ghost always did. “Deputy! Don’t tell me you’ve fallen under the same ridiculous delusion!”

  Deputy Hatch only shrugged. “Well, Mrs. Crackerby told me you chased these kids until they ran right through your walls, so you’ve seen what they can do. If they’re not ghosts, then I’m sure they have another explanation, and I’m sure you’d like to hear it.”

  That idea impressed the judge and he raised an approving eyebrow. “Indeed I would.” He stepped forward and towered over them, giving them the same intimidating scowl that Annie had captured in the cliff beyond the courthouse. “So. Tell me how you do it.”

  “Uh . . . do what, sir?” Jay asked, stalling a little.

  He bent to meet them eye to eye. “Don’t play games with me, young man! How do you become transparent? How do you manage to pass right through walls and floors and go anywhere you wish?”

  “Uh . . .” Lila tried to answer.

  “Does Annie Murphy have the same ability?”

  Jay replied, “Yes, sir. Pretty much.”

  “Did you learn it from her?”

  “No, sir. Annie didn’t teach us anything. It’s something that just happened to all three of us. But she’s not totally here like we are.”

  The judge bent and met them eye to eye again. “Then where is she?”

  Jay replied, “She’s . . . kind of stuck in between as near as I can tell.”

  The judge pointed his finger in Jay’s face. “Don’t try to hide her, young man! Just tell me where she is!”

  Deputy Hatch cut in, “Uh, Your Honor, I have a question.”

  “Yes, yes, what is it?” the judge growled impatiently. “I thought Annie Murphy was shot, dead, and buried.”

  Jay and Lila could see a hint of trouble creeping into the judge’s expression. He straightened and looked at the deputy. “Well, yes, of course she’s dead.”
>
  “Then why are you asking the kids where she is?”

  The judge looked at Deputy Hatch, then at the kids, flustered, struggling for words that wouldn’t come.

  Deputy Hatch spoke coolly, accusingly. “Judge, maybe it’s time we all came clean. You know the sheriff never shot Annie while she was trying to escape from the jail. That’s just a story you and the sheriff made up.”

  The judge managed to work up a good smirk.

  “You’re on thin ice, Deputy. How could you possibly know what happened that night?”

  Deputy Hatch gave the judge a little smile. “I cannot tell a lie. I’m the one who let her loose.”

  There was that red face again. “You let her loose?”

  Deputy Hatch answered very casually, “The night before the hanging I just left her the key to the cell so she could let herself out while I wasn’t looking—I could hear her unlock the cell and leave, but I didn’t look. She was very polite about it. She put the key back on the key rack after she was through with it.”

  The judge was aghast. “You didn’t!”

  “I did, because I knew—and you knew—she was innocent. I just needed proof, and Annie needed time.” He looked toward the kids. “Now I don’t know how these kids do what they do, but it’s plain to see they don’t have to be dead to do it.” He looked back at the judge. “Annie isn’t dead either. And you know it.” He put his hand on his gun to back up his words. “Have a seat, Judge, and we’ll have a chat, just you, me, and the kids.”

  There was a faint rattle in the old house’s windows; a vase on the dresser jiggled. The quiver in the floor could have been from a heavy-footed tenant walking the hall.

  But the kids knew what a gravitational tremor felt like.

  In the present, Mac and Dr. Cooper felt the tremor just as they entered the ruins of the old town. Dr. Cooper looked around immediately in case his kids might reappear, sandwiched between time dimensions.

  But Mac touched his shoulder and warned, “That tremor was different. Cross-angular, with a sporadic frequency. I’ve been expecting it, but not this soon.”

  Dr. Cooper could feel his stomach tighten as they felt still another tremor under their feet. “The vortex?”

  “Afraid so, Jake. Time’s up. The vortex is starting to collapse!”

  ELEVEN

  The judge remained his defiant, pompous self even as the quivering in the floor sent him stumbling backward and he plopped on the edge of the bed.

  “Don’t you feel that?” he asked, growing agitated.

  But Deputy Hatch just kept talking. “The sheriff didn’t even know Annie was gone until he came into the office the next morning. Yeah, he took off after her, hoping to track her down, but when he came back with that smelly body wrapped in canvas, I had to wonder a bit.”

  Jay and Lila braced themselves, feeling the tremors. They knew something was brewing: another time shift, another fading between time dimensions, perhaps a weird phenomenon they hadn’t even seen yet.

  Oh-oh. Deputy Hatch’s voice sounded strange. First it sounded lower, then it sounded higher, just like a faulty recording. When he laughed, his laugh sounded low and rumbly. “So I had a little talk with Stanley Hemple the undertaker just yesterday, and guess what? He told me about that side of beef you and the sheriff stole from Abe Smith’s slaughterhouse, and how you had him put it in the coffin that went into Annie’s grave.”

  The judge’s eyes narrowed and his face grew fierce like that of a cornered animal.

  The kids’ eyes were widening, but for another reason.

  Hatch’s voice was going up in pitch, and he started talking faster. “I guess he was happy to meet the first lawman around here who wasn’t on your side. Stanley’s hoping you’ll go to jail so he won’t have to pay you off with any more little favors. Abe Smith feels the same way. But they aren’t the only ones.” Hatch’s image began to waver and his voice drifted up and down in pitch and speed as he spoke to the kids. “The judge here owns most of this town and almost all the mining interests. Around here, if you expect to keep your job, you’d better keep the judge happy.” Then he looked with a cold, piercing gaze at Judge Crackerby. “Until someone else came along and struck it rich. Someone who might want to hire some workers to develop a new mine—one that Amos Crackerby doesn’t own and control. Someone like Cyrus Murphy.”

  The sun was getting low and the shadows long as Dr. Cooper and Richard MacPherson fought against the wavering, shifting gravity and moved the hydraulic lift to a new location.

  Dr. Cooper braced himself against the lift as he looked around the ruins, rechecking the landmarks. “This should be the right place, judging from the old photographs.”

  Mac climbed onto the platform even as it rocked and swayed. “Then let’s get it done before the sheriff knows what we’re up to.”

  Cooper joined Mac on the platform and operated the levers. The lift began to rise, swaying and creaking. “This time we’re looking for the height of that one upstairs window. And if the carving is there, it should be in those cliffs to the west.”

  “Just beyond the site of the old mercantile,” Mac reminded himself, his eyes gazing intently westward.

  The windows of the old boardinghouse were beginning to rattle and the floor was creaking as Deputy Hatch continued. “You wanted Cyrus Murphy’s mine, so you and the sheriff arranged to have Cyrus killed and Annie blamed for it so she could be hanged. Then you rigged the auction so you could buy their mine. Only problem was, Annie escaped before you could hang her. You tried to fake her death anyway, but she came back.” Then he added with a glint in his eye, “Came back to this very room and nearly scared Mrs. Crackerby to death.”

  Jay piped up, “Yeah! Mrs. Crackerby thought she’d seen a ghost!”

  Both Hatch and the judge stared at Jay a moment. The judge’s voice was low and wavering as he asked Jay, “What’s wrong with your voice?”

  Deputy Hatch stayed on the subject. “But you knew it was no ghost, and that’s why you sent for Sheriff Potter to try and catch her. You knew she was back, and you knew she’d figured out what really happened. Well, you were right. She knew. And she’s been writing her story for the last few days—or I guess I should say, carving it.”

  Hatch looked at the kids again and said to Lila, “I saw you hanging from the roof of the courthouse, saw you fade like a ghost and fall, saw everything. I already had the ladder handy, so I climbed up to see what you were looking at. You were admiring some of Annie’s artwork, am I right?”

  Lila nodded.

  “Same as you found from up on the roof of the mercantile?”

  Now both Lila and Jay nodded; they were impressed. The deputy had been doing his homework.

  The judge was impatient, as always. “Hatch, just what are you talking about?”

  Deputy Hatch exchanged a knowing look with the kids. “Carvings, Judge. Carvings in the cliffs all around town. Remember, Annie Murphy was a sculptor who couldn’t read or write. So she did the only thing she could do to tell the world.” He chuckled. “Now all those rock slides we’ve been having make sense.”

  The judge was finally starting to look nervous. “Carvings in the cliffs?”

  Hatch nodded. “Helen Billings showed me Annie and Cyrus’s faces above the Murphy cabin; I found your face above the courthouse and Annie’s above the jail. I stood on the roof of the mercantile and found a carving of Cyrus Murphy shot in the back—shot three times, with a .40 caliber revolver, remember?”

  He reached into a cloth sack on the floor and brought out a revolver. “Remember this? It’s supposedly the revolver that Cyrus owned and Annie used to shoot him. Only it’s not his gun. Same manufacturer, same style, but a different serial number. Three rounds fired.” He held it up as a display. “Turns out this one belongs to Sheriff Potter. I checked and found out he got it special delivery just a few days before Cyrus was killed. The .40 caliber slugs taken from Cyrus’s body were a major piece of evidence in Annie’s trial. They were supposed to
prove Cyrus had been killed with his own gun.”

  The judge looked a little pale now. “Where did you get that?”

  “I found it on the sheriff’s desk just the other day.” Hatch’s eyes narrowed. “I think Annie left it there to get my attention. I imagine since she can pass through walls and go just about anywhere she wants, she’s probably learned a lot of things the rest of us need to know.”

  The higher the lift went, the more unstable it became. By the time Dr. Cooper had raised it to the level of the boardinghouse’s upstairs window, it was swaying dangerously. He asked Mac, “Do you see anything?”

  Mac carefully scanned the cliffs to the west. “Are you sure of the location?”

  “Quite sure. We should be exactly at the same point in space as the window to the Murphys’ room in the Crackerby Boardinghouse.”

  The lift rocked crazily, and they grabbed the safety railings to steady themselves.

  “We’d better find it soon if we’re going to find it at all,” Mac warned.

  “It has to be here!” Dr. Cooper insisted, searching the cliffs.

  The judge glared at Deputy Hatch with cold, hate-filled eyes. “Regardless of what you think you may have found, you still have nothing but the word of a convicted murderess.”

  The deputy shook his head. “I have more than that. I have tobacco spittle on the rooftop across the street, a witness who heard gunshots coming from that rooftop, a prisoner in my jail who knows how you rigged the trial, plenty of people who’ve already seen Annie’s carvings, another gun just like Cyrus’s . . . and this!”

  Deputy Hatch stepped over to the window and threw the curtains open.

  “Got it!” said Dr. Cooper, pointing. “Just above that dark fissure, about one o’clock.”

  The kids were amazed but not surprised as they looked at the image in the early light of dawn. They could hear a low, murmured curse from the judge behind them.

  Deputy Hatch looked back at the judge, smiling with deep satisfaction. “Sheriff Potter always was a lover of chewing tobacco . . . and a very good marksman.”