Novel - Dead Reckoning (with Rosemary Edghill) Read online

  She opened the gate beside the Postmaster’s cage and walked inside. There was a set of wooden cubbyholes on the wall, a few of them containing letters their recipients would never open. A canvas mailbag hung on the wall, waiting to be entrusted to the next stagecoach that passed through. The schedule would be written down somewhere here; she made a mental note to search for it later. She conducted a cursory inspection of the Postmaster’s station before heading back to the inner office. There was a cashbox with some small change, a collection of stamps and ink pads, two bottles of ink—one red, one black—and several pens. Nothing particularly informative. She moved on. The desk containing the telegraph mechanism faced one probably used by the Postmaster. That desk was neat to the point of meaninglessness, and when she tried the drawers, all of them were locked. She was excellent at picking locks, but that, too, could wait. She turned to the other desk, which was obviously used not merely to send telegraphic messages, but to transcribe incoming ones. There were neat coils of yellow tape held together with latex rubber bands stacked in the “Out” tray, and the “In” tray was empty. She turned her attention to the mechanism itself. The paper tape was motionless and unmarred beneath its waiting stylus, and when she placed her hand against the side of the cabinet she felt no vibration. The clockwork armature that moved the tape past the stylus must have run down. She hunted around in the operator’s desk until she found the winding key. At least she knew no messages had come down the wire in the last day or so, for if they had, the paper would be torn and frayed by multiple punctures of the recording stylus.

  She gave the machine a good winding, but did not release the gear that would cause the tape to move. Time enough to do that when she’d finished sending her own message. She sat down at the operator’s desk, removed the cover from the transmission key, and checked to see that everything was in order. As she placed her hand over the key, Gibbons felt a thrill of wonder that she knew would never dim, for the electromagnetic telegraph was nothing less than the power of human genius harnessed for the betterment of all Mankind. Neither false doctrines nor degenerate kings shall rule us any longer, only Science, and the pure and glorious search for knowledge!

  She began to tap quickly and expertly, using Mister Alfred Vail’s code. Jacob Gibbons, like many wealthy (and eccentric) men, had a private telegraphic line that ran into his own home, and Doctor Gordon checked it frequently for messages, for Jacob Gibbons had many correspondents. Telegraphy operators could decode their message tapes by sight and would discard or ignore tapes not sent to their offices, so the first characters she sent were simply her father’s name and city, over and over. It was also a common practice for operators to wait until the stylus began moving to release the gear of the recording mechanism, in order to save paper, which necessitated multiple repetitions of the message’s “address.”

  ARE YOU RECEIVING ACKNOWLEDGE PLEASE, she sent at last, then lifted her hand from the key to release the gear on the tape machine. Fully five minutes passed before the needle began to move. When it stopped, she tore the tape free and inspected it.

  YES RECEIVING HONORIA IS THAT YOU THIS IS GORDON PRAY CONTINUE.

  She placed her hand over the key again and began to send, transmitting nearly as quickly as she might write a letter. Telegraphic code lacked the ability to convey punctuation—everything, including numbers, must be spelled out—but she inserted “stop” and “question” almost without thought. In a very few minutes, she had transmitted what she knew—she had found the town of Alsop, Texas, utterly deserted—and a request for every scrap of information in Jacob Gibbons’s library regarding the reanimated dead. It was not an unreasonable request on her part: the library of the mansion on Russian Hill filled an entire floor and contained every book or paper ever written about the inexplicable.

  After a slightly longer pause, the needle began to move again.

  DAUGHTER THIS IS JACOB HOW I WISH I COULD BE WITH YOU TO SOLVE THE MYSTERIES OF DEATH ITSELF IS A GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENT BUT ONLY WORTHY OF YOUR GIFTS I SHALL BEGIN MY RESEARCHES AT ONCE AND LET YOU KNOW MY PROGRESS FOUR HOURS FROM NOW YOUR PROUD FATHER STOP.

  Gibbons decoded the slightly garbled message easily and with a certain amount of resignation. If she did not solve this mystery quickly, the next thing that would happen was that someone would attempt to sell Jacob Gibbons a zombie—or some mechanism for making one! At least she could use the telegraph to convey the solution to the puzzle to her father as quickly as she found it. She sent a last short message: THANK YOU I SHALL AWAIT YOUR REPLY STOP LOVE YOUR DAUGHTER GIBBONS STOP.

  That task completed, she stopped the tape again and got to her feet. Now to see what Jett and White Fox missed! The three of them had only been looking for survivors during their previous exploration, and had undoubtedly missed vital clues to the true nature of Alsop’s attackers.

  She decided to begin with the church, for it was the only building none of them had yet searched. She hoped to find some survivors gathered there, even though she knew that was a faint hope indeed, since anyone possessing the use of their limbs—or their hearing—should have declared themselves upon hearing the sound of the Auto-Tachypode’s arrival, or Jett’s gunshots.

  The church itself was entirely ordinary, its arched windows empty (as yet) of glass but secured by wooden shutters. The doors were closed, but of course not locked, and the first thing she did upon entering was to unlatch the shutters and throw them wide. The sunlight revealed precisely what she had expected to see: rows of polished wooden pews, a gleaming wooden floor, choir stalls and a piano, a pulpit beside the altar rail, a white-draped altar behind them, and a plain wooden cross affixed to the wall above it.

  “Hello?” she called. Nothing but silence answered.

  Her shoulders slumped just a little. Gibbons realized she’d been hoping more than she’d been aware of to find someone here. Not just because people would mean more witnesses who could provide precious data, but because the disappearance of all the townsfolk was more depressing than she wanted to admit, even to herself. This was the first of the “disappeared settlements” she’d seen with her own eyes, and Alsop had stood vacant for less than twenty-four hours. But Honoria Verity Providentia Gibbons was neither to be daunted by adversity nor sidetracked by tragedy. She squared her shoulders, set her jaw, and did a quick investigation. Nothing was out of place, and that told her the attack had run its course so quickly no one had been able to flee to the church for safety. While she still didn’t credit Jett’s story of zombies, she did believe Jett had been here at the beginning of an attack by … someone. That fact was irrefutable, the empty town and Jett’s bruises both bearing mute testimony.

  Her next stop was the belfry. The church bell was rung from the vestry, but she could gain access to the bell tower from there as well. She had spent enough time in the “wild” West not to think it strange that a congregation that could not afford glass for its church windows should have a fine bronze bell in its belfry: the bell would not merely be used to summon the congregation to Sunday services, but to give warning to the town in case of trouble. The ladder looked wellmade and sturdy, so without qualms she grasped its sides and began to climb. The belfry was at least thirty feet above the ground, making it the highest point in the landscape for several miles around. She would be able to gain a good overview of her surroundings from here.

  At the end of her ascent she climbed out onto the narrow platform surrounding the bell and looked around. From this vantage point she could see faint pale scars across the desert entering and leaving the town, marks left by stagecoaches and freight wagons, for their routes were blazoned and they followed the same path each trip. To the south, she could see a small graveyard, one of the “Boot Hills” so beloved of dime novelists. A disease which rendered its victims feverish and delusional might account for what Jett had seen, but there were no fresh graves in the graveyard, and if a sudden plague were the source of the problem, at least a few individuals would have succumbed to it before it reached epi
demic proportions. The only other feature of the landscape was a sturdy wooden house that undoubtedly belonged to the minister. And his wife, she emended mentally, for there were several clotheslines strung on wooden trees behind the house. Aside from the house and its accompanying outbuildings, all she saw was desert, scrub bush, and the distant glitter of Burnt Creek amid its stand of sheltering cottonwoods. East and west were similarly featureless, and to the north, the town of Alsop was much as her earlier reconnaissance of it had indicated it to be: a single street with buildings along both sides. There were a few backhouses, another set of clotheslines behind the boarding house, and a small building—probably a pump-house—behind the general store. All the water for the town would come from that pump or from the few water barrels she saw, though it was hard to believe it ever rained here enough to fill them. But aside from the tracks across the desert, where Alsop stopped, the marks of Civilization ended as abruptly as if severed with a knife.

  She placed her hand on the side of the bell and shoved gently. It rocked slightly in its carriage and gave a faint mellow gong. She frowned. Anyone seeing or hearing trouble would immediately give the alarm, yet no one rang this bell last night. Jett may be unbecomingly credulous, but she is a keen observer, if an untrained one. If the bell had rung, she would have mentioned it. Why hadn’t it been rung? A good scientist does not theorize in advance of the data, she reminded herself, and began her descent. There was one more place to search before returning to the town itself.

  She pushed open the door of the minister’s house, wondering if she would encounter attackers in hiding, or victims too injured to have hailed the three of them earlier. But it, too, was deserted, and from all the evidence she saw, the family—John and Rebecca Southey and their three children, John Junior, Michael, and Katie—had been elsewhere at the time of the assault. The dining room table wasn’t set, and there was no indication the kitchen had been in use. Most telling of all, all the lamps were still full of oil. If any of them had been lit before the attack, they’d either still be burning now, or they’d have used up all their fuel.

  One small mystery was solved when she found—among the papers in Reverend Southey’s desk—a note from his wife saying she would return from visiting her cousin in a month and sternly enjoining him to take regular meals in town. It was dated a week ago. So he would have been in town when the attack came, and there would have been no one here to ring the church bell.

  She found no particularly useful information in her investigations, unless she were to count the text of Reverend Southey’s most recent sermons. He’d given one two weeks ago which took Hebrews 13:2 as its text: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

  Well, it’s always good advice I suppose, but was Mister Southey warning his congregation to be kind to newcomers—or warning them that such newcomers might be more than they seemed?

  There really wasn’t any way to be sure.

  She walked slowly back into town. The Sheriff’s Office was her first stop, for she hadn’t stayed to search it after Jett and White Fox’s departure, and if there was anything odd going on within a hundred miles, Sheriff Mitchell would probably have known about it. She could only hope he’d left some record. The battered rolltop desk was locked, and none of the keys on the jail keyring opened it, so Gibbons removed her bonnet and extracted two short wooden pins from her hair. A quick twist revealed them to be lock picks. She’d often found it useful to be able to get into—or out of—locked rooms, jail cells, and even handcuffs in the course of her investigations, and even the most dyed-in-the-wool villain would rarely disarrange a female’s hair in search of weapons or tools. For all that the popular press regarded lock picking as some sort of arcane and criminal art, it was actually little more than dexterity, good hearing, and the application of sound scientific principles. Easy enough for one such as Gibbons to master.

  It was less than a minute’s work to gain access to the desk, but the results were disappointing. Not only did the mysteries of an alphabetical filing system seem to be beyond both Sherriff Mitchell and the worthy Deputy Aldine, apparently Matthew Mitchell was a thoroughgoing packrat. The drawers were crammed full of ancient Wanted Posters, mysterious odds and ends—a length of twine, one spur, a candle—and a collection of chewed pencils, a broken penknife, a box of Lucifer matches. In the bottom drawer she found the probably–inevitable tin cup and half-full bottle of whiskey. She’d nearly despaired of finding anything helpful when she reached those items, but that drawer also contained Sheriff Mitchell’s Charge Book. No matter how disorganized he was in other respects, Sheriff Mitchell was a meticulous record keeper. She made a pleased sound of satisfaction and sat down to read.

  The Charge Book contained such information as who was jailed for what and what the disposition of the case was—and of more interest, it also contained a daily report, where Sheriff Mitchell wrote down things that weren’t official business (things that didn’t involve anyone being charged, fined, held over for trial, jugged for thirty days, or tried by a jury of their peers) but might become so. There she discovered that in the fortnight before … the incident … Sheriff Mitchell had been under increasing pressure from the local ranchers to find out why (and how) a whole cattle drive had vanished. He’d been wavering between calling in the Texas Rangers and forming a posse on his own, though what they could have done was unclear.

  I do not think even the Texas Rangers could have solved this riddle, Gibbons mused as she read. They are very handy if you are quelling a riot or hunting an outlaw, but detection is not their forte … though I think not even Mr. Allan Pinkerton and his National Detective Agency could have gotten to the bottom of this puzzle. She’d often found that even those dedicated to solving crimes and bringing the guilty to justice were at a loss if a mystery was truly outlandish. Their success came from a broad understanding of human nature, not from an application of scientific principles. Sheriff Mitchell’s reports were one more datum, but she was far from having enough information to begin building her own theory.

  From the Sheriff’s office she returned to the saloon, for enough time had passed that she could attempt to start the Auto-Tachypode again. As she approached her vehicle, her ears were assaulted by the sounds of raucous off-key singing and a piano very badly in need of tuning. She looked in through the doors of the saloon to discover Finlay Maxwell in residence. Lacking any other place to sit, he’d appropriated the piano bench, and had obviously found the lure of the keyboard irresistible. A half-full beer mug—and a half-empty whiskey bottle—provided Gibbons with all the information she needed about what he’d been doing since he’d left the jail.

  Clicking her tongue in exasperation, she returned to her original intention. This time the Auto-Tachypode started smoothly and without difficulty, and she drove it to the livery stable and parked it inside. From there, she resumed her search.

  Over the course of the next few hours, she discovered that every establishment that would have been closed at the time Jett gave for the initial attack—just after dark—was completely untouched. That was interesting, for outlaws would certainly have made the bank, and possibly even the general store, targets of their predations. Even the storefront that served as the dentist’s, barber’s, and doctor’s office was in pristine condition. Dentists kept gold on hand, and doctors kept an inventory of drugs. It was becoming clear that whatever the motive for the attack, monetary gain was not its purpose.

  The majority of her time was spent at the office of the Alsop Yell and Cry (“Bringing Truth and Vital Intelligence to Menard, Concho, and McCulloch Counties!”). She’d been gratified to discover Ahasuerus P. Harrison—the paper’s editor and publisher—kept an extensive “morgue.” He’d pasted each issue of the paper carefully into large scrapbooks. As the Yell and Cry was a weekly four-page paper, each of the scrapbooks covered a year of its publication. There were fifteen of them; the paper had been founded shortly after the Compromise of 1850.
/>   Quickly skimming the last several years of the paper, Gibbons discovered that what had happened to Alsop, far from being an isolated incident, was merely the latest in a long series of puzzling incidents. Entire homesteads had been going missing in the surrounding area for at least two years. The first occurrence had involved a hermit whose name (according to the paper) was “Spanish Pete.” Reverend Southey had discovered his absence as he went to make a monthly delivery of supplies. After that, a new disappearance was recorded every fortnight or so, though none of them had been extensive enough to attract out-of-state attention. In every case, Mister Harrison reported the event not as an unexplained disappearance, but as a “leaving for greener pastures.” That wasn’t surprising: every single episode following that of Spanish Pete had involved a homesteader, a sodbuster, or a sheep-farmer—all people the ranchers would be happy to see gone.

  Then the cattle drive vanished—cattle, cowhands, chuck wagon, and all. The Yell and Cry had published two editions since then. The first devoted a page and a half to the disappearance. Mister Harrison’s editorial called for the return of law and justice to Menard County—and the return of the cattle to their owners. The following week, the Yell and Cry ran a full-page editorial excoriating Sheriff Mitchell and calling for his removal from office if something wasn’t done. It said Sheriff Mitchell put the blame on Indians “to conceal his incompetence in bringing this matter to a swift and favorable resolution.”