Of Grave Concern Part 3

A week ago, while visiting his sister in St. Louis, he had had a strange dream. In it, he looked upon the body of his brother, dead, in a metal coffin, placed between two chairs. A bouquet of white roses rested on his chest, with a single red rose in the center. The dream was so real that he rushed downstairs, expecting to find Henry's body.

"If only I had realized the dream for the prophecy it was!" the cub pilot lamented. He took from his pocket a carte de visite photograph of his brother and pa.s.sed it to my mother. Henry shared his older brother's strong jaw and high forehead, and the eyes had the same sad but mischievous quality. His hair was wild, as if he had just stepped out of his front door into a hurricane. The boy's clothes seemed two sizes too small for him. His outfit featured a vest whose b.u.t.tons appeared ready to pop, a linen shirt with an irritatingly high collar, and an elaborately knotted silk tie at his throat, as if to keep it all together.

"But may G.o.d bless Memphis, the n.o.blest city on the face of the earth," the student pilot said as he returned the photograph to his pocket. "You ladies have done well. Yesterday a beautiful girl of fifteen stooped timidly down by the side of our second mate, a handsome and n.o.ble-hearted fellow, and handed him a pretty bouquet. The doomed boy's eyes kindled and swelled with tears. He asked the girl to write her name on a card so that he might remember her by it."

"How touching!" my mother said.

"Would it be asking much if your angel affixed her name to a card for Henry?"

Before my mother could reply, the man took the pencil from his breast pocket and handed it to me. The pencil stank of cigars. Then he gave me a card.

I wrote my name in a childish hand.

"Ophelia," he read.

"It means help," I said.

"Thank you, Ophelia Welch. You are too young to know what this means."

He placed the card in the hand of his unconscious brother.

The mud clerk died within the hour.

Of course he had the metal coffin, resting across two chairs, and the bouquet of white roses with a single red one at its center.

But I had not seen the last of poor Henry.

Three nights later, his smiling face appeared in the mirror above my dressing table, undamaged as in the little photograph. But instead of being merely a frozen image, this image was alive. His face was illuminated by an unearthly blue light, his features were animated with mirth, and his hair was buffeted by some unseen gale. The ends of the silk tie danced and fluttered like the tail of a kite.

"O-phel-ia," he called. "O-phel-ia, I see you!"

Then he laughed like a fiend.

I shot out of bed and spent the rest of the night with Tante Marie, who patted my hair and told me that nothing in the mirror could hurt me. Still, she threw a cloth over the gla.s.s the next day. Henry never made any knocks or raps, but he found plenty of ways to show himself when I was alone. His face would appear in a windowpane or on a polished metal surface, or it would form in a bowl of water. Any reflective surface would do.

"O-phel-ia!"

Eventually I removed the cloth from my bedroom mirror. "Horrible Hank" had appeared to me so often that his appearance could no longer shock me. Being eleven years old, and steeped in Tante Marie's stories about magical New Orleans, I a.s.sumed that seeing dead people was not all that unusual.

Besides, Hank told jokes.

"Why is a dog like a tree?" he would ask. "Because they both lose their bark when they die."

Another: "Why has a chambermaid more lives than a cat? Because every morning she returns to dust."

And: "What is the undertaker's favorite sport? Boxing."

These were hilarious to my unseasoned sense of humor. As I grew older, the jokes grew somewhat coa.r.s.e, and I would often catch Hank leering at me from the mirror.

"Stop that," I would say.

But I was never sure if he heard me. If he did, he never gave a sign. Perhaps it was the eternal gale on his side that prevented him from hearing, or perhaps sound didn't pa.s.s from our world through the gla.s.s, or perhaps he just didn't feel like conversation.

Then, one night while I was sitting at the dresser and trying to draw a comb through my tangle of red hair, Hank appeared over my reflected shoulder. The wind on his side had calmed, his hair was positively neat, and his necktie was hardly flapping at all.

"Show me who you love," he said, "and I'll show you who you are."

6.

I must have been asleep, because I didn't know Tom the Jailer, was standing outside my cell door until he spoke.

"Miss Wylde?"

I opened my eyes and saw him there with a newspaper beneath his arm and a cup of coffee in his hand. From the coal oil lamp in the bull pen, half his face was bathed in yellow light.

"Yes, what is it?" I asked, taking Eddie from my shoulder and placing him back in his cage.

"I don't know if you drink coffee, but it is about all that we have here in the jail, except for the bottle of whiskey that the marshal keeps for snakebite upstairs in his desk drawer that n.o.body is supposed to know about. And he gets popped by more rattlesnakes out here than any other man I know of."

"Coffee," I said. "Bless your rustic soul."

"I also brought you yesterday's paper, for the boredom."

"Only dull people are bored. But thanks."

He pa.s.sed me the coffee through a little trapdoor in the bars and I pa.s.sed back my dirty plate and lunch things. I took a drink of the coffee and it was so strong my eyes fluttered in pleasure.

"Too rough for you?"

"Rough? It's perfect."

He smiled.

"Tom," I said, "I have been here some hours and was beginning to wonder . . . well, how am I to attend to personal business?"

A blank stare.

"You know," I said. "Private . . . business. The kind the coffee will undoubtedly hasten."

"Oh, sure. There's a thunder bucket in the corner of the cell. All prisoners are supposed to use the bucket. But seeing as how you're a cut above the ordinary inmate, I can escort you to the privy out back."

"For that, I would be grateful. Half an hour?"

He nodded.

"Oh, Tom," I said as he turned to go. "There's another thing I need: a lawyer. I need to clear up this case of mistaken ident.i.ty as soon as possible, so I think a writ of habeas corpus is in order. You must have seen the lawyers in this town at work in police court. In your opinion, who is the best?"

"Best sober or drunk?"

"Best during their normal state of consciousness."

He thought for a moment.

"Towner gives the best show and is a teetotaler, to boot, but he's more concerned with having people think he's smart than doing right by his clients," he said. "Wilbert is good, but his wife died of the fever last winter and he's been unenthusiastic about work and life ever since. So I'd say Potete is your best bet. It's even money whether he'll come to court drunk or sober, but hope for drunk. He's a mean drunk, but one who swings with words, not his fists. He's brilliant right up until he pa.s.ses out."

I sighed.

"Potete, then. Send word."

Tom turned to leave, then paused.

"You might want to save that paper."

Now it was my turn to give him a blank stare.

"In case the Montgomery Ward catalog is all used up."

"Of course," I said. "Always good to plan ahead."

He left and I scooted around so my back was against the bars nearest the lamp. I unfolded all four pages of the Dodge City Times. It wasn't the Chicago Tribune or the New York World, but at least it was something to read. There was a hyperbolic article on the front page that talked about how good the gra.s.s was this year, and I doubt if any big-city editor had ever waxed more purple:

Never in the history of the prairies of Western Kansas has a season been more favorable to vegetation than the present. The rainfall has been greater and more regular, and the gra.s.s, which came earlier, is much healthier, and a thicker crop than ever was known before now covers the earth.

There was a related story about the first herd from Texas having arrived, a herd of twelve hundred cattle from the Red River, and how the cowboys had some trouble with farmers in Comanche County at the quarantine line. Thousands more longhorns were expected in the days to come.

I jumped over to a story about tramp jitters:

Dodge City is just now especially favored by the tramp fraternity. It seems to be the jumping-off place for the Westward-bound tramp (they invariably travel toward the setting sun).

Not a very Christian att.i.tude, I mused.

Then I turned the page and found the following:

THE GHOST STILL WALKS!.

The ghost of the unidentified murdered girl found last month on the century meridian marker continues to walk with uncanny tread along the Santa Fe right-of-way. Police Judge Frost believes that an investigation will reveal some startling things.

For over a week, supernatural manifestations near the railway depot have aroused the community, and the shacks in the vicinity of the ghostly perambulations have been vacated.

On Friday night, Hoodoo Brown, thinking the story of the ghost was humbug, paid a midnight visit to the monument. He had not waited long, when a low plaintive wail a.s.sailed his ears, and almost simultaneously a figure clad in blue gingham materialized on the meridian marker. The ghost was the likeness of the beautiful but unknown girl, down to her long blond hair and the deep slash beneath her chin. At the same time, a light, resembling a calcium ray, shone down on the monument, and the girl rose from her deathly repose and began her nightly walk.

Brown, a good Republican and Union Army veteran, buffalo hunter, and Indian fighter, said that he nearly fainted of fright and has been ill and not eaten well nor slept a whole night since.

Police Judge Frost is considerably wrought-up over the appearance of the astral body. He adheres to the belief that the unknown girl will continue to haunt Dodge City until her killer is brought to justice. He also believes that the poor unknown may have been a victim of kidnap and worse, and that an investigation will reveal startling facts linking her murder to the recent advance of the tramp army into Dodge City.

At least I wasn't crazy. That was good to know, but it led to other troubling questions: Who was she? Who had killed her? And (especially) why had she appeared to me? But I had no time for a murdered girl. My plan was to get the h.e.l.l out of Dodge.

When Tom came back for me, I was finished with the Times, at least for reading. I tucked the paper beneath my arm as he unlocked the cell door. By lantern light, he escorted me to the privy behind the jail. The privy was about the size of the average spirit cabinet. When I opened the door, I discovered it was just about as dark inside.

"Can't see a thing in here," I said. "I'm afraid I'll fall in."

He handed me the lantern, and I stepped in and closed the door behind me. I hung the lantern by its bale from a peg on the wall and then sat and waited.

"Tom, can you hear me?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Then you're too close," I said. "Back away."

While I waited some more, the Times across my knees, I inspected the inside of the privy. There was the usual juvenile entertainment scratched into the wood: stick figures engaged in unspeakable acts, a limerick about a girl named Delores, a graffito Uncle Sam.

Then I noticed something bulky down near my left ankle.

I unhooked the lantern and brought it low.

Tucked beneath the bench was an open gallon of red paint, with a brush stuck in it. I picked up the brush. The paint was still fresh enough to drip like mola.s.ses back into the can.