Authors: Ed Gorman
We made our way up the short stairs to find another way out of the building before the flames took it entirely. Unlike the previous fire, this one wasn’t going to leave anything intact.
By the time we found a back stairway and had reached the moat, the fire was on the third floor. I was pretty sure that the rest of the grenades were somewhere in the double suite Grieves had occupied. We needed to be even farther away before the fire reached them.
We dove into the chilly water of the moat and swam to the other side. I dragged myself up to the grass and then reached down and pulled Liz up.
We started running for the forest. She stumbled twice and I half-dragged her after that.
We hadn’t quite reached the woods when the fire found the extra grenades. We ran to the cover of the forest and then watched the explosion. Or explosions, plural.
Each one ripped away part of the castle façade. And each one lowered the height of the castle, too. It was exploding and imploding, part of a turret being flung afire into the night, the castle sinking even more.
It was too big a structure to be completely demolished but over the course of the next half hour it was broken and seared into chunks and sections of smoldering ruin.
Liz decided to tear off a piece of my wet shirt and treat the abrasion on the side of my head.
“You could always tear your own shirt,” I said.
“Yes, but that just might give you ideas.”
“The way you tell it, I’m too old to have ideas.”
“Yeah, but you just might surprise me and then what would I do?”
K
nut wanted to have a meeting with the mayor and the rest of the town council so that I could explain what had happened. I also told him to ask Will McGivern, the man who represented the miners.
Knut set the meeting up at the Rotary dining room for that night. It was a long, narrow place with a wine-colored rug and a lighter red shade for the walls. The three paintings were imposing enough, three stout and true men of the West, each of whom had his right hand on his right lapel just the way the painter had told him to. They probably would have been more impressive if I’d had any idea who they were.
I sat next to McGivern. On the other side of me was Liz.
“I know it was you got me invited here. Thanks.”
“My pleasure.”
Just before I was to stand up and discuss everything that had happened—I owed it to the town after Grieves gave the agency such a bad name—Ella Coltrane and Swarthout came in.
They both looked angry. Swarthout said, “I’m not happy, Knut. We should have been invited.”
I said, “I told them not to invite you.”
“You’ve got nerve, if nothing else,” Ella Coltrane said.
“If you’re going to stay, sit down and shut up,” I said to her.
They both looked as if they wanted to express their great indignity at being treated this way but then they decided to just sit down instead.
“Well,” Knut said, “I’m going to turn things over to Mr. Ford here. He’ll explain everything. And after we’ve all discussed it and asked him our questions, they’ll be serving the food. It’s excellent here. Porterhouse steak and mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables and apple pie.”
I’d planned on cutting my explanation short, anyway, but the mention of porterhouse steak and apple pie made me keep my little speech even shorter than I’d planned.
Amazing what you can accomplish in eight minutes if you really put your mind to it. When I was finished, I smiled in the direction of Ella and Swarthout. “There were a few other people who tried to get the grenades and sell them so they could make up for certain business losses—you know, like a mine tapping out—but they didn’t have much luck.”
Swarthout pounded the table with his fist. “You’ll regret those words.”
“No, I won’t, Swarthout.”
One of the council members said, “With the sheriff dead, who’ll be taking his place?”
Another council member said, “Why, Knut, of course. Isn’t that right?”
Knut blushed. I didn’t blame him. Sometimes praise is even more embarrassing than insult.
He stood up when they started applauding. “This is all because of Noah Ford here. We’d all gotten the
impression that all federal men were as bad as Grieves. But Noah taught us better.”
Now it was my turn to blush.
And my turn to stand. I gave them ten seconds of applause then waved them off. “There’s one thing I’d like to finish with.” I nodded to McGivern sitting next to me. “There’s a reward for helping bring Grieves in. We sure wouldn’t have wanted the grenades in enemy hands. And I wouldn’t have known what we were looking for if McGivern here hadn’t given me the information about the explosions Grieves was causing out in the woods.” I knew what I was saying was a bit of fact-twisting—I certainly would have come to the same conclusion without McGivern pointing me in that direction—but given the state of the mines and the miners, I wanted to help them in some way.
“The reward is $10,000 and I’m asking Washington to give it to McGivern here to set up a fund so that the miners can feed their families while they’re looking for a silver strike of their own.”
Swarthout and Ella both looked suitably pissed off, which was enjoyable to see. They’d be pushing on, now that they were broke, to find other silver strikes—if somebody would loan them the money.
“So let’s hear some of that applause for McGivern here,” I said.
The meeting broke up then. The entire town council took turns shaking McGivern’s hand. They were all on the same side now. The town needed a silver strike to survive.
Liz had taken notes throughout the meeting. When she finally put her pencil down, she said, “You know something, Noah?”
“What?” I said, expecting that she’d decided I would be a suitable lover after all.
“If you were even six or seven years younger, I think I’d sleep with you.”
“Well, gosh, thanks.”
“But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’m going to make you a supper tomorrow night you’ll never forget.”
I laughed. “You may have to handcuff me to keep me in line.”
“A man your age’ll probably be asleep halfway through the meal, anyway.”
Then she poked me in the side. “There’s always the chance you could get me drunk and I’d forget my principles.”
I
enjoyed the cold air. I sat on the edge of the wooden sidewalk and rolled myself a cigarette and watched the last of the stragglers empty the saloons. The only ones who’d hang on till closing time were the drifters and the town drunks. The stragglers were working men. And dawn came early.
I was thinking back through everything I’d learned that night.
Longsworth came up with his formidable briefcase. “Hear the meeting went well.”
“Well as could be expected.” He set his briefcase between us, sat down, and got his pipe to going. “Tomorrow morning I’m buying myself a train ticket. Friend of mine from law school says there’s a slot open in his office in Cheyenne. I’ve got to go now or it’ll be gone soon. Pretty nice office. Prestigious.”
“I thought you were against prestigious. Figured you for a lone gun.”
“Yeah,” he said, “and look where it got me. I want to settle down with a wife and kids. I’m older than I look. I’ve got to do it now.”
We sat there, Longsworth starting to shiver, smoking and watching the last of the wagon traffic drag by.
“Too bad about Terhurne.”
“Too bad about everybody,” I said.
“I’m still sorry I didn’t get to know Molly. She could’ve had just about any man she wanted in this town. And she wasn’t here that long.”
That made me wonder about something. “How long were they in town before I got here?”
He thought back. “Three weeks, I guess. But everywhere Molly went, you could see men lined up behind her. Knut arrested the old man a day after they got here. The old man was doing some fancy stuff with poker over at one of the saloons. Molly had to plead with him not to put her uncle in jail.” He laughed. “A gal who looked like that, she’d be pretty hard to turn down. And you know Knut and women.”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Everybody around Terhurne liked women just fine.”
“So they were here three weeks, huh?”
“Yep. Just enough time for the old man to try every grifter’s trick in the book.” Then: “Too bad Hayden was over at the café flirting with that new gal. And too bad Knut was over at the livery tryin’ to find out why his horse was limping.”
He said it. It happens that way sometimes. He said it and it went past me. I’m not a wizard. It went right past me.
“Yeah,” I said, “too bad.”
He stood up. “Well, I got to get back and finish my packing.” He put out his hand and we shook.
A decent young man. I wished him luck.
He picked up his briefcase. “Night.”
“Night,” I said.
I slept well. No bad dreams. Not even waking up to piss. In the morning, I went over to the café and ate a breakfast that could have handily fed two. Then I walked over to the livery to see how much I could get for my horse and saddle. We settled on a reasonable price. I spent a good long while with the animal so my goodbye was sloppy and melancholy. He’d done much better by me than a lot of humans had.
At the train depot I bought a one-way ticket to St. Louis for the following day. I didn’t want to miss Liz’s meal later that evening so I had to stay the extra day.
There was a new man behind the front desk at the sheriff’s office. He was middle-aged, running to fat, but in his khakis and his Colt, he looked serious and competent.
“Morning,” he said. “Help you with something?”
“Knut around?”
“Over to the courthouse. Should be back in a while.”
He’d been sitting on the edge of the desk going through a stack of official-looking pages. “You’re the federal man, right?”
“Right.”
He nodded. He put out a hard slab of hand and we shook. “Name’s Dave Evans.”
“Glad to meet you, Dave. Wondered if I could take a look at one of the cells back there. The one Molly Kincaid was in.”
“Sure.”
I carried a cup of coffee back to the cell. Dave walked with me. No idea what I was looking for. And a good thing, too, because I didn’t find anything.
Though a lot of people dispute this, sometimes just sitting in the place where murder happened can give you certain ideas—insights, I suppose—that you couldn’t get
anywhere else. I suppose that’s what I was hoping to get back there at that point.
The door opened up front and a woman, sounding troubled, said, “Knut, Knut, where are you?”
Dave sighed. “That’s Emma, Knut’s wife. She don’t trust him much. She stops in here three or four times a day looking for him. Someday he’s gonna learn how to treat her. Or he better. She’ll leave him if he don’t.”
He went up front while I stayed in the cell a few more minutes. But nothing about Molly’s murder came to mind.
I walked up front to where Emma stood and suddenly, for no good reason at all, a number of things connected in my mind.
Knut had lied to me about being home in bed while Molly was being killed. Longsworth had told me that Knut had been at the livery. Which meant he wasn’t far from the jail during the time Hayden was at the café. And then I remembered the scene with his wife Emma in the alley that morning. Her rage and tears. I hadn’t known till the moment when Emma came into the sheriff’s office that Knut ran around on her. And he’d known Molly since she first came to town—he’d arrested Uncle Bob for cheating at cards. So he’d known her…Known her maybe a lot better than most people realized. But maybe Emma realized it…
But the lie was what did it more than anything. He could’ve stopped in at the sheriff’s office at any time during the period Molly was alone in there…
Emma’s pretty face was fixed with anger. At that moment you couldn’t imagine that this slight, attractive woman had ever smiled or laughed in her life. Quite the opposite, really. She could easily be one of those women you read about who shot or stabbed her husband. She
just went crazy one day and couldn’t take whatever kind of trouble her husband was always putting on her.
“Morning, Emma.”
She turned away from me so I couldn’t see her face. She didn’t acknowledge me in any way. I was interrupting a private conversation she was having with the deputy. She was embarrassed.
I walked straight on out the door, embarrassed for her. I got outside and went over to the general store and got myself a sarsaparilla and sat on the bench in front of the store and started to make my plans.
I’d pretty much convinced myself that Knut had murdered Molly. What I had to figure out was how to confront him with it. There wasn’t any hard proof. But there were plenty of reasons to suspect him.
I
was standing on the courthouse sidewalk when I saw Emma pull up in the buggy. She just sat there. She would look at me and then look at the double doors of the courthouse.
The day was warming up. The shopping ladies looked pretty as spring flowers as they passed by on their way to the various stores. From where I stood I could see the depot and all the people waiting to board the train that was getting ready to depart.
Knut came out alone. He wore a dark business suit and a white Stetson. He carried some rolled-up papers in his hand. He saw Emma before he saw me. He waved to her. She didn’t wave back. I remembered how angry she’d been in the sheriff’s office. She was still that mad, apparently.
When he saw me, he smiled. “I thought you’d be long gone by now, Noah.”
“Not yet. Got one more piece of business to wrap up.”
“Well, good luck with it.” He nodded the Stetson toward the street and Emma. “The wife’s waitin’ on me. We’ve got some bankin’ business we have to do. So I better be movin’ along. You wouldn’t know it to look at her but she’s got a temper.”
He started to walk past me. I grabbed his arm.
He looked startled, confused. “Hey, Noah, what the hell’s this about?”
“You killed Molly.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I laid it out for him quickly.
“And that’s why you think I killed Molly?”
“I’m going to ask the governor to send his own investigator down here. Ten to one he finds out you had an affair with Molly.”
He glanced at the street. As did I. The buggy was empty.
His hand dropped to his holster. “You know I could always arrest you.”
“Yeah, you could. But then you’d be in a lot of trouble with the federal boys. And that still wouldn’t change the fact that you killed Molly.”
I recognized the poke immediately. Cold steel. She had come up behind me. She stood only inches away so nobody could see the gun barrel she’d shoved into my back.
“Emma—” Knut started to say. “Maybe this’ll only make things worse.”
“We’re going in the buggy. The three of us. And we’re going to take Ford for a ride in the country.”
Knut looked confused. He knew what she was hinting at as well as I did. A nice ride in the country to find a nice deep burial site.
He leaned in then and ripped my Colt from my holster. He jammed it down the front of his trousers. “I guess this is the only thing we can do.”
At that particular point the sidewalks were clear and there weren’t any more people coming out of the courthouse doors. Emma nudged me with her gun and started me walking straight ahead to the buggy. I assumed I’d
have my one and only chance at the time I was stepping up into the buggy. I didn’t know how I would handle it yet. I’d have to see how it played out.
When we reached the buggy, Emma left and walked around the far side of the vehicle. She got up in the seat and sat there with her gun held low so passersby couldn’t see it. She aimed right at my chest. I should have been nervous but what I was, was curious. She wore a yellow blouse with a black cotton vest over it. The vest was decorated with seven small silver studs on each side. Except one of the tiny studs was missing. The same kind of stud I’d found in the cell where Molly had been murdered.
They were smart people. Knut took her place behind me. “I don’t want to shoot you, Noah. You just get up there and sit down.” He held the gun up against the back of my head for a moment then nudged me to the wagon.
The break I’d hoped for just wasn’t there. Not with two guns on me. No matter what I did, one of them was sure to kill me. I didn’t have any idea how they’d explain killing me to anybody. I doubted they did, either. But right then they weren’t worried about afterward. They were only worried about getting me out of town.
In a different situation, the three of us sitting in the same seat would have been funny. It was a small buggy, comfortable for two, or three if the third was a child. I was a little bigger than most children. So we were all squirming, elbowing each other, sighing, cursing, as we left town.
I was hoping that the sight of us all packed in this way would alert a citizen or two that something was wrong. We got a lot of waves. A lot of “Howdy’s” and a lot of quick interested stares but nobody seemed to see anything odd about us being packed in that way.
We didn’t talk. There didn’t seem to be much to say. Emma knew Knut had killed Molly and I knew Knut had killed Molly and Knut knew Knut had killed Molly. We were beyond Knut pleading to be let go. He knew I wouldn’t let that happen. Leaving him with only one option, finding a good spot to start shoveling.
Knut said, “I’m sorry about this.”
We had just reached the town limits sign. The day was starting to get pretty warm. Spring flowers were cast across the prairie and all the way up into the foothills ahead of us. A fawn stood in the underbrush, watching us.
“If you were sorry, Knut, you wouldn’t go through with this.”
“He wouldn’t have chased women, either,” Emma said. “You don’t know what it was like for me. Every time I’d walk down the street and see a pretty woman, I’d have to wonder if she’d slept with my husband. That’s the sort of thing that can make you crazy.”
She cracked the reins. The horse broke into a trot.
“Was she going to blackmail you, Knut? That why you killed her?”
He seemed confused, not sure what to say. Then, in a soft voice: “No, she wasn’t trying to blackmail me.”
“Then I don’t understand why you’d kill her.”
He stared off across the prairie.
“None of this would’ve happened if he’d been true to me,” Emma said. Her rage was a terrible burden. I knew the feeling. Hating somebody so much that you can’t get them out of your mind. You can only think of vengeance. And you think of it just about every minute you’re awake. But she was doubly damned. She was in love with the man she hated. And that was the worst burden of all.
The site we found was off a trail that wound through dense forest. Loamy soil made digging relatively easy. The river glistened down at the bottom of the hill shining through branches like sparkling diamonds. The forest smelled clean and good with spring.
Knut did the digging. Emma sat on one small boulder and I sat on another. She kept her gun on me the whole time.
Emma couldn’t let go of it. “You couldn’t keep your word, could you, Knut? You know how many times you promised you’d give it up? I don’t. I lost count by the third year of our marriage. But you’d never last long, would you? Two, three weeks would go by and then you’d start coming home late. You must’ve thought I was pretty dumb, that I wouldn’t know what was going on.”
Knut just kept digging. He wouldn’t look at either of us.
To me, Emma said, “A couple of them fell in love with him. And one of them was married. I almost told her husband. Can you imagine that? I go up to one of the most important men in town and tell him that my husband and his wife are sleeping together?” She snorted a laugh. I hadn’t realized until then that there was a good chance she was insane. I felt sorry for her. Living the way she had, heartbreak after heartbreak and loving him too much to leave—most people would be insane.
“I’m glad we never had no children. You couldn’t bring them up in a household like we had. Their daddy traipsing in at all hours, just reeking of the whores he’d laid down with. I’d wash his long johns and I’d see the stain in the crotch from how he’d finished up with her. And sometimes I couldn’t even pick ’em up. I’d just leave ’em there for days and days and he’d have
to wear the same long johns over and over again.” This time there were tears in the corners of her eyes. “You couldn’t raise a kid in a household like that.”
When Knut got done, he speared the shovel into the ground and said, “I guess we’re ready.” He seemed embarrassed, tried to look at me, couldn’t. A tall pile of dirt lay on one side of the grave.
I readied myself. I had judged that the run between the boulder I sat on and the path was approximately twenty feet. If I rolled over suddenly across the boulder and rolled another four or five feet then stood up and ran—I wasn’t just going to stand up and let them kill me. This was one of those times when getting shot in the back was a medal of honor. At least I’d tried to escape.
“This won’t be easy for me, Noah,” he said. “I mean, if that makes any difference.” Then, “You rather sit or stand?”
And then I did it. Simple enough if I was twenty. Not so simple then when I was forty.
I rolled myself over backward on the top of the surface and then started rolling toward the woods.
He started firing immediately. I was too easy a target on the ground. So I jumped to my feet and started running zigzag to avoid the bullets blazing through the air. None of them striking me.
That was when I stumbled. Point of my boot stuck in a small hole. Enough to drop me to one knee. Enough to give Emma time to run after me. I’d just gotten back on my feet when she started firing.
I reacted without thinking. I fired back, shooting her in the shoulder and then the thigh. I stepped over to her and picked up her gun.
During the ten seconds it had taken me to fire, Knut could have killed me easily. But he hadn’t. And now as I turned to face him, I thought about all the bullets
he’d blasted at me right after I’d started rolling on the ground. None of those bullets had hit me, either.
I faced him now. We were pointing guns at each other.
Emma was sobbing. I didn’t intend to look over my shoulder to see how she was doing.
“One of us is going to be dead real soon,” I said to him. “And it’s probably going to be you, Knut. Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?”
“Tell him the truth, Knut.”
“You shut up, Emma, or I’ll come over there and shut you up!” His anger was ugly. There was something he really didn’t want her to say.
“Put your gun down, Knut, or I’ll have to kill you. I’m tired of this whole thing and right now killing somebody would suit me just fine.”
He said, “I’ve never killed anybody, Noah. I’m not sure I can.”
“You’re a deputy.”
Between sobs, Emma shouted, “He’s real high-minded about not killing people. But it don’t bother him to cheat on his wife.”
When he dropped his gun, she shouted, “Tell him, Knut, or I will.”
And that was when he put his hands to his face and started crying. His shoulders shook with his tears. “This is all my fault, Noah. All my own stinking fault.”
And then I knew what was going on there. I turned to Emma. The shoulder was bleeding pretty badly.
“You killed Molly, didn’t you, Emma?” The jealousy, the silver stud that had fallen off her vest, the fact that Knut tried so desperately to take the blame—
“I’m so sorry, Emma,” Knut said. “I’m so damned sorry for all I’ve done to you.”
I looked back at Knut. I felt almost as sad as he did.
They wouldn’t hang her but she’d be old before she could walk free again. It wasn’t all Knut’s fault—he hadn’t forced her to kill Molly—but a good share of it was. A good share of it was.