A settler with the girth of an accountant stood behind the crying women and stared into the wagon, his fine suit covered with clay mud that had dried to a chalky film.
Nate legged himself off the horse and motioned people to clear a path. He climbed into the wagon and hunkered down, pulling the quilt off the dead men. His actions brought a collective outcry from the gathering and a frantic, hysterical pitch to the women’s keening. The younger victim had been shot through the chest; pieces of rib showed from the wound made by a shotgun blast. The older one had been shot in the gut with a pistol, and his face was nowhere near peaceful. Nate turned back to the crowd. “What happened here?”
“My son was murdered.” The large man crossed his arms protectively in front of his own chest.
Nate motioned for his partner to climb up into the wagon, and, after briefly waggling the stiffened joints of the men’s hands, Dr. Tom said under his breath, “They’ve not been dead but a few hours.”
Nate asked the grieving man, “What’s your name, sir?”
“Euphrastus Waller.” Pointing to the corpse of the young man, he said, “That’s my son, Elam.” Spittle hung in threads from his lips, and the rawness of it made Nate want to turn his head away. “He was paralyzed, confined to a chair,” Euphrastus added, almost as an afterthought.
Nate turned a questioning eye to Dr. Tom and pointed to the mud evenly caking the bottoms of Elam’s shoes.
“Who’s this?” Nate asked, indicating the other dead man in the wagon.
“His name is Bedford Grant.” A pale, straw-haired young woman stepped forward. “I’m Jane Grant, his daughter.” She had been crying, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed, but to Nate she seemed very much in control of her emotions and looked more angry than stricken.
Dr. Tom nodded at the wound in Bedford Grant’s stomach and said, “Calling card from McGill.”
Euphrastus Waller’s legs gave out, and his wife and daughter rushed to his side. They struggled to keep him from falling, but the women sank along with him onto the road, their full skirts ballooning out and settling heavily into the dirt. Some of the men moved in to help him to his feet again.
Another settler, his left arm missing from the elbow, moved closer to the wagon and came to stand next to the Grant woman. He hovered by her side, and for a moment, Nate thought he was going to put his one good arm around her.
“Who’re you?” Dr. Tom asked.
“I’m Robert McKenzie. I own a farm just up the road. A man came to Middle Bayou a short while back. Said his name was Bill Carter. He claimed to be the schoolteacher’s brother.”
Jane made an ugly sound through her nose. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”
Nate stepped down from the wagon. “Why’s that?”
Her lips twitched in outrage. “Miss Carter, if that was her name, was an adventuress posing as a teacher. She and Bill Carter were after something they thought my father had.”
McKenzie added, “Yesterday, another man showed up on horseback leading a mule. He told Miss Grant that he was Bill Carter’s surveying partner. The Grants took these people into their home. We entrusted our children to that woman…”
“Nate, we need to move this along.” Dr. Tom climbed from the wagon, impatiently muttering, “Less hide and more meat.”
Nate asked the woman, “What were they after?”
She buried her chin in her neck. “I wouldn’t like to say with everyone listening.”
Dr. Tom abruptly motioned the settlers to move away from the wagon, directing them to see after the Waller women, who had elevated their agonized crying to a more frenzied level.
Jane waited for Dr. Tom to join them and said in a quiet voice, “My father uncovered a few gold coins on an island he owned in the bayou. Bill Carter believed there was more gold and tried to make my father say where it was buried…” She paused, staring at the bodies in the wagon.
Dr. Tom placed a hand on her arm. “What was the schoolteacher’s first name?”
“Lucinda.”
Dr. Tom nodded to Nate and asked, “Where are they now?”
“Miss Carter took my sister, May, yesterday morning in the Wallers’ buggy to Morgan’s Point for the day. They never came back.”
“And Bill Carter?” Nate asked.
“Gone. I don’t know where.” She ran one sleeve across her eyes and nose. “They must have taken my father from the house to the river sometime before this morning. That’s where his body was found. I slept at the Wallers’ last night. I couldn’t abide being in that house alone with those men. Mr. Waller was going to confront them today for my father’s sake, but it was too late.”
Her anger was turning again to tears, and Nate gave her a moment to collect herself.
Dr. Tom asked, “Did they get your father’s gold?”
She raised her chin and smiled tightly. “There was no gold.”
Nate thought he had misheard. “What’d you say?”
“There was never any gold.” She took a few breaths, ran her tongue over cracked lips. “Last spring, my father found a few old coins while clearing the island for planting. There are legends here about Lafitte’s treasure being buried in Middle Bayou. My father believed that he had discovered a part of that treasure. He spent months digging but found nothing more. Once he realized the island was empty, he went to Harrisburg and put about the story that there was gold waiting to be found, hoping to sell the land to someone fool enough to believe it. But he talked to the wrong people. I was the only person who knew the truth.”
“Why was he shot?” Dr. Tom asked, jerking a thumb at Elam Waller.
“I don’t know.” Jane brushed her fingers nervously across her face. “There was no reason for him to be shot. He was in the parlor in his chair when I came to Mr. Waller with my fears, but then…he’s always in his chair. He can do nothing else.”
Nate watched her nervous hands and in that instant a thought came into his head that she was lying about Elam Waller’s helpless state. The young man’s shoes were muddied as though he had walked along a soggy riverbank. He asked her, “Who found the bodies? Did anyone see the murder?”
“I did.”
Nate turned towards the voice and saw a black man in work denim approaching them. He was short and broadly muscled, with a meandering scar, like earthworm castings, across one side of his face.
He stood in front of Nate with what looked to be part of a plow harness across his shoulders. “I’m Tobias Kennedy. I live here.” He nodded at the bodies in the wagon and said, “I know how they come to be killed. I saw it. I helped bring the wagon to gather the bodies.”
Dr. Tom asked, “You want to tell us what happened?”
Tobias looked at Jane and then motioned for Nate and Dr. Tom to follow him some distance away. “There’s another body,” he said.
“Another body?” Nate asked, reflexively scanning the surrounding fields. He nervously chewed at the skin on his lips, confounded that one sparse settlement could support so many tragedies in one morning.
“Bill Carter?” Dr. Tom asked.
“No, he’s long gone. It’s Carter’s man. He’s still lyin’ in the river. What’s left of him. The men here just didn’t want to say so in front of the women.”
“Who killed him?” Nate asked, wondering just how high the body count was going to get.
Tobias pointed to Elam Waller and said, “He did.”
Nate shook his head. “Didn’t Euphrastus Waller just say that Elam was a useless cripple?”
Tobias dropped the plow harness to the ground. “Listen here. I served with the Thirty-Third Colored Infantry out of South Carolina. You know what I was? A sharpshooter. I got the best eyes in this whole part of the world.” He pointed to the settlers still gathered, their collective gaze on the three of them. “They told me I had to be lying. But I told the truth. I know what I saw.”
Nate nodded and said, “Show us.”
He and Dr. Tom mounted their horses and followed after Tobias, who walke
d the path towards the bayou. As they rode Tobias talked, turning his chin from side to side, throwing his words over his shoulder.
“I spent last night at the river. I’d put down catfish lines. This time of year, no mosquitoes, the air’s cool, I often sleep out. Pull in my lines before dawn after the catfish bite. A few hours before light, I hear men coming up to the clearing. I’d already doused my lantern, but there was a moon and I hid back in the brush. There’s no good reason for people to be up makin’ so much noise at that hour, especially angry white men in the jug.
“I hear old man Grant’s voice and two other voices I don’t know. But they’re arguin’ all up the path. They’re carryin’ lanterns, and when they get into the clearing, I see Mr. Grant and Carter with his man as surely as I see you.”
After that, Tobias continued his walk in silence until they reached the clearing. Nate and Dr. Tom dismounted and stood at the edge of the riverbank, looking at the blood and footprints left in the mud, while Tobias walked up and down the bank, peering into the water.
“There he is.” Tobias pointed at something floating in the river, caught in some reeds. “Gator got him. Dragged him off the bank.” He waded into the river to midstream carrying a long branch. The water came up to his chest but he moved easily, and after a few tries, he snagged the floating object and pulled it behind him out of the water.
It was a man, or the top half of a man; the legs were gone. Dr. Tom kicked the truncated bundle over and said, “Jacob Purdy. McGill’s man.”
Tobias watched Nate stone-faced as he stumbled away, gulping air and swallowing the bile rising in his throat. Nate had seen dead men before, mauled and mangled, but they had been mostly whole. Behind him he heard Dr. Tom ask, “You want to tell us now what happened?”
“Grant was drunk,” Tobias said. “So drunk he couldn’t hardly stand. Carter kept at him to say where on that island over yonder his gold was buried.” He pointed across the water to a promontory of land with steep clay edges and a dense stand of elm. “Kept goin’ on about the gold. Finally, Carter quit yellin’ and pulled a pistol. Threatened to shoot the old man if he didn’t talk.”
Tobias raised his chin to a bloody patch on the bank. “Grant fell on the ground pleadin’ like a man who knows his time is near, and I hear a voice say, ‘Hold there.’ I see a man walk into the lantern light and it’s Elam Waller, so help me God, carryin’ a pistol in one hand. Elam walks right up to them, within a few feet. Carter’s taken by surprise, ’cause he’s only ever seen the boy in a wheeled chair. Carter’s man pulls up his shotgun and, blam, both guns go off. Young Elam goes down hard and the other man staggers off into the water holdin’ his throat.
“It spooks Carter but he says to Grant, ‘We have your daughter. You don’t tell me where that treasure is, I’m goin’ to kill her myself.’
“Grant is crawlin’ on his hands and knees cryin’. Says there is no treasure. Never was one. That’s when Carter leans over the old man and shoots him in the belly. He stands for a while just watchin’ Grant die. Then he rides away. I stayed hidden for a good long while before I had the legs to go get help. I’ve seen some bad things, but I never saw anyone so keen on watchin’ someone die before.”
Tobias pulled a derringer out of one pocket and handed it to Dr. Tom. “Mr. Elam’s gun. I know that boy was a cripple. I never saw him so much as move a finger, but he reared up out of those weeds and died to help Mr. Grant.”
Dr. Tom nodded his thanks to Tobias and pocketed the derringer. He stood at the river’s edge, the water reflective but cloudy like mercury glass. Nate joined him and they watched the oily, humpbacked shapes of darkly speckled fish feeding just below the surface and the armored leathery shapes with eyes swimming at the far side of the river.
“Goddamn it,” Dr. Tom said. He pulled the familiar flask from his back pocket, an inch or so of liquid staining the bottom, and drained it dry. He pitched the flask into the water, watched it as it was caught up in a circular current. “That’s us. Travelin’ in circles, like water down a drain. I don’t even think I remember how to ride in a straight line. I’m about played out, Nate. And it’s not just the pleurisy.” He gingerly pressed one hand along his ribs. “There’s somethin’ else growin’ in here…” He looked at Nate. “I sound like an old woman.”
“You’re gonna need more medicine.” Nate hoped that someone in the settlement would have more “banishment in a bottle,” as Dr. Tom called it. Unless his partner stayed behind, now was not the time for him to try to quit the opiates.
Dr. Tom put a hand on Nate’s arm. “I need you to stay resolved if you’re going to help me end this. Resolved as in no hesitations and no second-guessing, which means that you’d shoot through me to get to McGill if that was the only shot you could take.” His fingers loosened their grip on Nate’s arm and he ran them across the top of his head. “My thoughts aren’t as they should be…”
Nate, keeping his eyes away from Purdy’s corpse, said, “The Grant woman talked about Morgan’s Point. That’s Galveston, I’m thinking. You gonna make it?”
“I’m not going anywhere on a boat. The only thing I’m afraid of is deep water. We can ride like hell and take the bridge train from Houston. Load the horses on a cattle car. We need to find him before he leaves the island and heads for somewhere else.”
“Tom, I’ll say this one more time. We need someone else on this. Local sheriff, maybe.”
“And I’ll say this one more time. George and me started this and I plan to be the one who kills that evil son of a bitch before he leaves Texas. It’s just McGill now.”
“You think he’s not gonna hire more men?”
“Not without money, he’s not. I think he was counting on that gold. He hasn’t pulled a job in a while, which means his getting-around funds are low.”
“You know your way around Galveston?”
Dr. Tom ducked his head briefly. “I know my way some. We leave now, we’ll make it.”
Nate looked over at Tobias and asked, “Anything else you need to tell us?”
Tobias’s hand searched the scar on his face in a thoughtful way. “Miss Carter? She’s somethin’ more than a schoolteacher, if you take my meaning. She talked to me about goin’ to New Orleans.”
Nate cast a cautious eye at Dr. Tom and he nodded.
“She’s a smart woman; had all these people eating from her hand,” Tobias said. “But she’s not gonna live long with that killer.”
Nate thanked Tobias and mounted his horse, then waited patiently for Dr. Tom to clear a coughing fit and mount his own. They headed off for Houston—rushing past the astonished settlers still gathered uncertainly around the wagon—and when they arrived, they sold the saddle off the grulla mare and then the horse itself to a cotton trader with more money than sense. Then they bought the tickets for the train to the island.
Chapter 19
Using the last of Mrs. Landry’s money, Lucinda took a room at the Republic Hotel in Galveston. She had arrived that afternoon off the train from Houston and gone to wait at the hotel, as she had been told to, for Bill to arrive. It was extravagant, but what did it matter? There would be gold enough to see them in comfort for a long time, perhaps years.
She bathed and washed her hair, leaving it down to dry in the warmth from a small corner stove, and through the window, she watched the traffic up and down the Strand. A block away she could see the burned-out shell of the old Tremont Hotel, still standing in partial ruins five years after the fire that destroyed a good part of the town.
She opened the windows, letting in the sharp damp air and the sounds from the wide, evenly spaced streets below. Earlier, she had stepped from the train and walked westward a few blocks to the pier, where she stood looking out at the bay. The island behind her and to the south was flat, devoid of even small hillocks, so that when she confronted the water, the horizon appeared alarmingly elevated and it seemed impossible that the ocean would not rush to overtake the land and everything perched on it.
&n
bsp; She watched the ships crowding the harbor: steamers; sailing vessels of every color, size, and dimension; and pilot boats ferrying passengers and crates to and from larger ships anchored far from shore. Stretching her arms along the hand railing, extending them fully to either side, she constructed in her mind a line from her right arm taking her towards New Orleans and from her left towards Mexico. After a while she closed her eyes, feeling the bracing wind at her back and the lowering sun on her face, and imagined herself a kind of polestar drawing Bill to her. “Azimuth,” she murmured, refining her thoughts. I am the bearing of the polestar from which the surveyor takes his plotting.
Then she had walked back through town, stepping quickly alongside the men and women, native-born and immigrant, who spilled over the sidewalks into the streets. She watched the progress of two Celestials burdened with massive bundles, the men’s braids swinging in tandem, until they disappeared into an alley. Entering the hotel lobby, she heard half a dozen languages, and she made mental notes of which new style of hat and waist cincher she would have created once they had settled in New Orleans.
A clock tower down the street gave the time as four o’clock and she had begun to doze when she heard a key in the lock. The door opened, and there was the customary pause that Bill practiced before walking into any room. He passed through the doorway and looked at her before turning his head, searching, and finding no one else there. He knows, she thought, without even asking, that May is gone.
He took off his coat, draped it onto the bed, and sat in a nearby chair, observing her. Crossing his legs, he then stared out the window, his chin resting on the back of one hand, his fingers curled. She looked closely for whitening or tension around the knuckles, but found none.
Through the window came the sound of a boy calling the newspaper headlines from the afternoon paper. “Edward Rulloff, Bavarian Butcher, hanged in New York! Ulysses S. Grant says Georgia to rejoin Union!”