Not knowing the full truth didn’t keep them from trying to find out. Barring that, they made up their own facts, out of convenience, nosiness, and a general lack of entertainment. Even poor, pregnant Miss Dickerson stared after Fletcher a moment, though hers was a longing look at someone roughly her age who seemed to have much to look forward to, free of a life on whom so many mouths depended.
Of all this, Fletcher was oblivious. He was also still livid, tired of feeling ill-used by everybody and everything; even the place in which he found himself felt as though it jeered at him. He was sick of these games, and he would get to the bottom of it all, by gum, as old Teaberry, the night cleaner at the bank, would have said when he found Fletcher still hard at it. Fletcher was often burning the lamp low in hopes of impressing the big men in their big offices.
And yet here I am, thought Fletcher, stomping along the sun-puckered puncheons of the boardwalk toward Millie’s. He was armed with a bag of dust-smothered clothes, newly presented guns—three of the awful things no less—as well as a nonsensical letter. Not least of all, however, he had been given the knowledge that two people pictured in a gold locket were indeed his long-lost parents.
They were the two people in all the world, if he dared admit it to himself, that to this day he still pined to know. But why had he been denied a childhood with them in a loving or hating household?
He had also gained not only an aunt who was not really an aunt, but, worst of all, the knowledge that the very thing he had ventured out on this grand quest for, the “significant inheritance,” was nothing more than the wreckage of a broken-down old woman’s broken-down sordid old business and its attendant sordid dealings.
The very notion of owning a brothel made him shudder. Yet perhaps it also intrigued him. Was he not, indeed, a man, young and in his prime years? But this deluge of newfound information, of revelations, was overwhelming.
Then a thought stopped him two strides before Millie’s front door. The letter had said the money had dried up. What money? The money, it had said. The money that had paid for his life, the money he’d received without cease all these years from what he’d been told by the man at the bank was a trust account set up by someone who wished to remain anonymous and who had taken considerable pains to remain so.
He’d pursued the matter very little after being told that some dozen years before, mostly because he didn’t want to lose the money he’d come to expect and depend on to live. It had been a comfortable crutch his entire life, and now, the letter told him, it was gone.
Of course, he’d assumed once he received the letter from this mysterious “aunt” that she had been the one behind the money all those years. But he had harbored the deepest hopes since receiving the telegram and on the journey west that she was a fabulously wealthy woman who wished to meet him one last time, perhaps, but certainly one who intended to leave her entire vast fortune to him and him alone. A final act of magnanimity.
And he supposed from Millie’s point of view, that was the case.
Fletcher transferred the now-weighty satchel from his left to his right hand and pulled back his free hand to rap once more on the big old door of Millie’s. He paused, held his knuckles poised. Why knock? Was he not, after all, the heir, the new owner of the business and, so, of the building in which it was . . . transacted?
With a snarl, he snatched the brass handle and thumbed his way in. The door once more swung inward and squawked for want of oil. This time he hesitated not a whit, but slammed the door behind him, wiped his shoes once each on the frayed ornate runner, and stomped up the stairs.
He could not say later what came over him at that moment, but he began shouting as he mounted the steps. His shouts raised footsteps and he was greeted at the top of the stairs by the same woman who’d greeted him on his first visit but a few hours before. Behind her was another woman, shorter, thicker, though younger, and with a great swoop of red hair piled poorly atop her head.
“Just what are you doing, mister?” said Hester.
At the top of the stirs, he shoved past her. “I demand to speak to Millicent Jessup right now!”
“No. She sleeps in the afternoon. She’s not well,” said the second woman.
“And at this very moment, neither am I. And as her time is limited, my time for gleaning answers from her is also limited. Do you understand?”
Before she could answer, Fletcher said, “I really don’t care if you understand.” He shoved past her, too. He twisted the knob on Millie’s door, pushed inward, and closed it promptly behind him.
He expected the flustered women behind him knew at least as much as he did about his relationship to Millie and that he would want and deserved answers. They did not barge in behind him.
Dusk was falling fast on the dusty little town of Promise, Wyoming Territory, and darkness had claimed much of Millie’s close-smelling room. The window beside her bed, near her nightstand, was open, and a soft breeze made the wispy curtains dance.
Seeing her supine form in the bed, sleeping away the time he felt he deserved, angered Fletcher. “How dare you . . . ?”
His voice came out low, a growl that surprised himself. Then the anger bubbled up once again when she did not move. “How dare you?” he said louder. Louder still, he began to shout, “I want answers, Millicent Jessup—and I want them now! Wake up!”
She did not stir. He mumbled loudly as he set the bag by his feet and fumbled with matches in a short glass holder beside the lamp. One strike, two, and then the match flared. He levered up the globe and lit the wick. The light bloomed bright and filled the space. He lowered the globe and adjusted the wick’s height.
“Now,” he said, turning his gaze once more on the bed, “you had better wake, Millicent Jessup, because I have traveled far too long for far too many days—no, make that far too many years of my life, for that’s how long this journey has been—only to have you tell me scant news in a letter. A letter? How dare you!”
Still, she did not move. He leaned over her, laid a hand atop her shoulder, and shook her, albeit gently. She was an old thing, after all. The lightness of her body when he shook her surprised him. Still, she did not wake.
He pulled her toward him, and her head flopped to the side, eyes wide and sheened with . . . tears? She seemed to be staring up at him.
A puff as light as a girl’s quiet breath bloomed in his face, the same cloying, close smell he’d detected when he’d burst in earlier. For the briefest of moments, he felt pity for her and thought she was crying and unable to answer him. And then he saw her neck.
In the dim light, a ragged stain had bloomed across her neck and gown, covering part of her shoulders and the nightgown’s breast as well as the top of the folded sheet and blankets. One old veined claw of a hand rested half curled atop the blanket as if she’d been about to grasp something or else cuff something away. But Fletcher barely noticed this, for the welling darkness about her neck glistened wet. Between that and the old woman’s eyes, he didn’t know what to think.
But by then somehow he knew that he was in real trouble. This wasn’t just some nearly dead, half-crazy old woman. He felt some sort of allegiance to this woman. She was someone he realized he needed.
“Millie?” He bent low with caution and reached for the blankets to pull them up. Some instinct told him she would be cold. Where he’d grabbed the blankets, his hand felt wet, sticky. He pulled his fingers away, held them up before his eyes. His hand was smeared with the same darkness he’d seen at her throat.
She was not moving, and he knew she would never move again, in fact.
Fletcher’s breath held in his throat. He reached for the lamp, lifted it, and ran it low over her form. The front of her blankets, which he’d grasped and pulled up, he now saw was a smear, a pool, a saturated, sticky, sopping mess. It was blood. Had she somehow hemorrhaged? What was her affliction?
As he stood half bent o
ver her, the light illuminating her torso and the bloody, savaged mess that had been her neck, he saw the cause for what it was now, a brutally sliced throat. The papery, powdery soft wrinkles and folds of the old woman’s neck had been sullied, soiled forever by a savagely dragged knife blade.
His breath was stoppered in his throat once more, and in that pause of quiet, a gasp, then others sounded from behind him at the door. He straightened, surprised, holding the lamp higher, half swinging toward the sound.
There stood Hester and the woman with the mass of piled red hair. Behind them stood others he could not quite see.
“What have you done?” whispered Hester at the fore of the clot of faces. She shuffled forward, her hands before her mouth, her eyes wide and white in the low light of the softly guttering lamp.
“I . . .” His voice was hoarse, catching in his throat. “I . . .” The woman’s words soaked into him as had the blood into Millie’s blankets. “No . . .” He shook his head. “No, it’s not . . . not that. I would never . . .”
Behind her, the other faces drew closer, two or three women in dresses and corsets and thin shawls crowded into the room. They shoved closer to him, and he looked back over his shoulder and saw the sight for what it was: the gore-riddled body of their mother hen, their protector, their madam.
She’s now dead, as dead as dead can be, thought Fletcher. Not only would he never get to know her, but he would never get to hear the answers to so many questions he had for her. For the one person in all the world who could have answered them.
And then the screaming commenced. It seemed to set others off, and they, too, screamed, at least three of them. It stopped when he held up his hand. He saw in the lamplight that the hand he held aloft glowed like an eerie, sticky crimson glove of gore.
“No!” he shouted, as much to stop the infernal screams as to somehow bring himself back to himself. His breath felt hotter than it should, as if scorching him from the inside out.
“What’s going on here? What’s the trouble?”
It was a man’s voice, a familiar voice.
Fletcher turned and saw a man behind the women. Though hatless and surprisingly bald, the marshal was still recognizable in part by his drooping mustaches.
“It’s Millie!” shouted Hester. She looked at Fletcher. “What have you done? Oh, Millie!” She rushed toward him, but the lawman had shoved his way forward and stepped before her, edging her back.
Fletcher noted the marshal was clad in only his long underwear, his boots, and, oddly, his vest, which hung from one shoulder, the silver star glinting in the lamplight. As soon as he saw the bloody mess that was Millie’s body and bedclothes, his eyes widened and his breath hitched as he tried to speak. Finally he looked up at Fletcher.
“Apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” he said, his eyes narrowing on Fletcher. Then, without turning, he said, “Dominique, go fetch my gun belt. Hurry now.”
That was when the situation finally resolved itself in Fletcher’s mind. He was in a very bad position, found standing over a dead woman, freshly so from the looks of things, and his hand sticky with blood.
“What did you mean?” he said, looking at the lawman.
“I knew your father, and you’re the only stranger we’ve seen around here for days. Nobody else came or went. Everybody in town liked Millie.”
“But she was my . . . aunt!”
“Yeah, well, we all know the score on that. Besides, you busted on in here all angry-like, and we all heard you shouting at her.”
“You?”
“Yeah, I did. Me and Dom— Aw, hell, that is not the point!”
As if he’d had his head dunked in a cold mountain stream, Fletcher’s thoughts sharpened. He saw how this looked, and he saw how this was going to play out. A beloved woman of the town was dead, and he, a stranger, was found standing over her with blood on himself. The marshal’s gun belt, just arrived, was thrust through the gaggle of women by a fleshy unclad arm.
Fletcher saw all this as if time had slowed. The free man inside him, the innocent man, the clerk, the businessman who valued law and logic and decorum and decency above all else rebelled at what he could foresee was about to happen.
He bent, snatched up the loop handles of his satchel that sat by his right leg. As he stood, he blew out the lamp as the lawman grabbed for his gun belt.
Fletcher heard gasps as the room went all but dark in the gloaming of the dusk. He thrust the lamp clumsily aside atop the bedside table as he bent low and hoisted a leg up and over the windowsill.
“Hold! Hold there!”
But the young dandy had no intention of holding or stopping or slowing or doing anything except getting the heck out of that room of death, a room filled with people who thought he had done something awful, perhaps the most horrific thing anybody had ever done or could ever do.
He managed to pull his second leg up and over the windowsill. It wasn’t until that point that he remembered he was somewhere on the second floor of a tall house. And it was near dark. . . .
A thunderous noise sounded, echoing at his left ear, and another followed it, along with sizzling sounds and thunking close by. “Hold there, I say!”
That mad marshal was shooting at him!
Another boom and sizzle and the glass windowpanes shattered; then the frame by his head blew apart. Slivers of wood and glass stabbed his face, and he gasped and stifled back a shriek as he shoved his way out the window.
He lost his balance, slipped too far to the right, and felt himself falling. Here it is, he thought. I am going to die in a fall from a window, chased down as a killer. They’ll find me collapsed and broken, bleeding out my last. . . .
But that was all the time he had for fanciful thought, because he landed. Not on the hard-packed earth, but on something even less forgiving. The roof of a shed or shelter or lean-to of the house itself, he knew not which.
He slammed and clattered and rolled with it. Or tried to. The layered plank roofing bucked and sounded like thunder as it bounced beneath him. He heard a slight cracking and didn’t know if it was his bones or the roof. He kept tumbling as though he might never come to a stop. And then he did—right at the edge.
He calculated he’d dropped a mighty distance, enough that the rest of his journey to the ground could not be that far below. He jammed the heels of his boots hard against the roof to find some footing.
But then he slid forward once more and felt the roof disappear beneath his legs, then his backside. Then his right side pulled down hard, careening him off the roof into nothing. He was falling again, and he hit hard once more, collapsing in a pile on the earth. His wind was knocked from him and he groaned, spitting sand and fighting to pull in a breath.
He saw flecks of bursting light before his eyes and thought for a moment he was seeing a town as if from on high. Then they disappeared as a ringing in his ears increased. The wood and glass pocking his face throbbed, and shouts grew louder with each moment.
Shouts? His plight came back to him in full and he shoved himself to his feet, wincing at new pains. His left ankle had most definitely felt sturdier mere minutes before. He also realized he still held the cursed satchel clutched in his right hand. Why hadn’t he left it behind? It could only slow him down, laden as it was with guns and useless papers and a trinket with likenesses of people who hadn’t cared enough for him to survive.
“Survive”—that last word struck him as though it were an open hand. There were the shouts, from the marshal, no doubt, and women, too, the women from the bordello. That would make them . . . prostitutes. And other voices, lights, lanterns flickering off to his left. From the shadows, it seemed he might be looking down an alleyway, perhaps between the buildings of the main street, such as it was.
Great, thought Fletcher as he spun, running away from the lights, away from what he guessed was the town proper. I’m in this hellish, fo
rsaken place for less than a day, and I’m to be set upon by a seething mob of locals. What did they call them? A posse? And all led by outraged, vengeance-seeking prostitutes on the warpath.
As he stumbled, caroming off a rough-sawn plank fence, he saw the faces of the women in the room, in the dim light of that lamp, saw their pure confusion and sadness and anger and, yes, even fear. Of him!
He had caused that. Somehow he had caused all this; he was as sure of it as he was certain he was soon to be caught and lynched for something terrible, something terrible that he had not done.
Fletcher J. Ralston ran. Despite the blood streaking his face from the gashes and punctures of the wood and glass from the gunshot-ripped window frame, despite the swollen lump that was his left ankle, despite his cramped fingers, and despite the heavy satchel slamming his legs, he ran away from the little town of Promise.
Fletcher had no idea where he was headed, but he ran there just the same.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Skin had forgotten that he had always liked the way it felt to lay a blade to someone’s throat and saw away. He’d done it to the old bird and it had indeed felt fine. Like a long pull of water after walking across a desert. It was a feeling he’d experienced several times on the trail since he left prison. Now he was here finally, the pit of the place, the center of the canker that had plagued him all this time.
He settled back against the wall, confident that the busted-down stagecoach beside him hid the glow of his cigarette from the crazy folk running back and forth down a ways from him on Main Street, Promise.
He hadn’t expected them to pin his slicing job on somebody else, and quick, too. He’d no sooner slipped out of that old crow’s bedroom window and made it to the roof when he heard some crazy man shouting in there how he wanted answers from her.
Why, it was all Skin could do to keep from sliding off the roof outside that window, he was laughing so hard into his hand! He felt like saying, Sonny, you can shout all you want to, but that old whore’s talking days are through!
Ralph Compton Guns of the Greenhorn Page 7
