5
T he next morning, fortunately, the mine was not our first priority. Instead we rode back into town to “make inquiries.” Which was fine. I could make inquiries all day if it meant that I was standing in daylight, not gallivanting around at the bottom of a hole.
Once we reached Flatwoods, we split up. Ingold went to find the telegraph office, on the grounds that Ingold could be charming.
Denton and Angus went to find Roger, on the grounds that Denton was the only one who would recognize Roger and Angus was good at talking to the salt-of-the-earth mining types, who might balk at talking to Denton.
“You should probably go with Ingold,” Angus told me. “Two foreigners nosing around, you’ll likely put the wind up their backs.”
“Doesn’t Boston count as foreign?”
“It’s a better quality of foreign, I’m thinking.”
I gave that battle up as lost. “I’m not sure that my skills are really much use in a telegraph office.”
“... Your skills .”
“I have skills, Angus.”
“Oh, aye. I’ve seen ’em. That time in Paris, in the Marais club. Never seen such skills. The gendarmes were verra impressed what you could do with a cocktail onion.”
I coughed and went with Ingold.
The telegram office had the look of a new building outfitted with hastily scavenged furniture, the counter old and scarred and smelling faintly of spilled beer. The woman behind the counter was also old and scarred, but smelled faintly of powder instead.
“We wished to inquire about a man who sent a telegram a month ago,” said Ingold, with a winning smile.
The clerk was not so easily won. “A month ago,” she said flatly. She had glasses on a chain and she pushed them down so that she could look over them at us, an act of aggression to make the stoutest soldier quail. “You expect me to remember a telegram from a month ago?”
Ingold looked at me helplessly. I took a deep breath and summoned my best French accent.
“Mademoiselle,” I said, with all the old-world charm that I could muster, “I expect that you have forgotten more than my friend and I have ever learned. But may I trouble you to look at the telegram, s’il vous pla?t?
My friend is very concerned, and it may help us greatly. ”
“Hmmm.” She surveyed me over the glasses, clearly skeptical.
I tried to look French, which isn’t easy when you are covered in dust. (A proper Frenchman can make dust look exquisite.
Mind you, a proper Frenchman would have died of despair at my accent.) Nevertheless, she pushed her glasses back up and extended her hand. “All right, show me.”
Ingold handed her the telegram. She unfolded it, scanned it for barely a second, and gave a short laugh. “Oh, him ! I’m not likely to forget that fellow.”
I put my elbows on the counter, ignoring the scent of beer. “Please, Mademoiselle, I am all ears.”
“Tall fellow,” she said, placing the telegram on the counter. “Wore dark goggles like a miner, right into the office. And he didn’t talk none, either.”
“Didn’t talk?”
She shook her head. “Wrote out what he wanted to send. Had a bit of slate and chalk. Told him it was going to be expensive, sending a whole long message like this, but he didn’t care. Just shoved a whole pocketful of money at me, and left with never a word.”
***
“Huh,” I said.
“Huh,” Ingold said.
We stood outside the telegraph office, blinking in the bright sunlight.
I wasn’t sure if we’d learned something vital or not.
The miner’s helmet and goggles had apparently covered most of the man’s face, and no amount of French would convince the clerk to describe his jawline and the tip of his nose.
“Do you think it was Oscar?”
Ingold made a helpless gesture. “No idea. But I agree with Denton that Roger couldn’t have written that telegram.”
I suppressed a sigh. I hadn’t really been hoping that the clerk would say, “Oh, the telegram was sent by so-and-so, you know, the one who murdered that Oscar fellow,” but it would have been nice.
For lack of anything better to do, we went over to the hotel bar—or perhaps it was a saloon, I’m not clear on the difference—and had a beer while we waited.
“So how did you meet Denton?” I asked.
Ingold grinned. “He lived upstairs from me. Still does, actually. We passed in the hall more often than not, until one day one of my experiments got a trifle ... ah ... exciting.”
I raised my eyebrows. “It exploded?”
“No, no, nothing that dramatic. Produced a quantity of noxious gas. Probably not fatal, but I thought it was my civic duty to go up and warn him to open the windows. He was really very nice about the whole thing.”
This fit with my experience of Denton as an affable soul. I could practically hear him sigh heavily as he threw open the windows.
“At any rate, he asked what I was doing, and I offered to show him, and we became—ah—friends. Lovely chap.” He took a sip of his beer.
The “lovely chap” had been a little too casual. I was developing a suspicion about what that friendship entailed, but it continued to be none of my business.
Ingold cocked an eye in my direction. “He told me how he met you. I suspect you might tell the story differently.”
I leaned back in the chair. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Although anything he says about me hiding in the library is a filthy lie.”
Ingold smiled. “He said you were as brave as a lion.”
“Well. Denton was no slouch himself.” I took a hasty swig of beer. You shouldn’t just spring earnest praise on a person like that. It’s embarrassing.
Fortunately, at that moment, the door opened and Angus and Denton breezed in.
“Good news,” Denton said. “Hopefully. We’ve found Roger.”
***
I’m not certain what to call the cluster of shacks outside of Flatwoods.
Slum seems overly harsh, and ghetto implies a city, which Flatwoods wasn’t.
This was a cluster of run-down shacks, the remains of a company town from another failed mining venture.
Everything of use to the company had been stripped out, leaving dozens of small, weathered buildings that leaned together at odd angles, as if for warmth.
A man came out to meet us as the four of us rode up, looking both official and suspicious.
“Can I help you gents?” he asked. He was a tall Black man with a battered stovepipe hat.
I could see a nervous-looking woman watching from the doorway of his house.
It was a pose that I was intimately familiar with.
Every time you ride into a village that’s been newly taken or retaken from the enemy, people watch you from doorways like that, wondering if you’re there to do something violent.
I hadn’t been expecting to see it in the middle of America, which was thirty years past any local wars. I draped my hands over the saddle horn and tried to look harmless.
“We’re looking for a man named Roger Clement,” said Denton, sliding down from his horse so that he could address the man face-to-face. “We’re not here to make any trouble for anybody, just looking for my cousin.”
Stovepipe’s eyebrows went up. “Roger’s your cousin?”
“No, no. He works for my cousin. Well, he used to, anyway.” Denton put up his hands placatingly. “Just wanted to ask him a few questions.”
I winced internally at that. Probably there’s a culture where ask him a few questions isn’t a euphemism for beat him until answers fall out , but I’ve yet to encounter it.
Stovepipe pretty clearly knew both meanings of the phrase. His eyes were shuttered. I slid off my mare and approached, wearing my best “talking to civilians” expression of good-natured concern.
“Do you know Roger?” I asked. “Is he doing all right? Hasn’t been hurt, has he?”
Stovepipe looked me over, then grunted. “He’s dead drunk most of the time,” he said, “but I ain’t seen any blood on him. And he hasn’t run afoul of—” He stopped, clearly deciding that we didn’t need to know how that sentence ended. “Why?”
I was very curious what we didn’t need to know, but this wasn’t the moment to press him.
“His cousin’s gone missing,” I said, nodding to Denton, “and the family’s worried something’s happened to him.
Roger was his best friend. We’re just trying to figure out what happened before his aunt”—I jerked my chin at Denton—“has a nervous breakdown and takes it out on the rest of the family.”
“It’s more than my life’s worth to go back to Boston without some kind of news,” said Denton. “Aunt Lydia’ll box my ears so hard that my grandfather will feel it.”
That got a half smile out of Stovepipe. “Up the hill. Last building on the left.” I don’t know if he believed us or if he had decided that Roger wasn’t worth defending against four people. Either way, his role as de facto peacekeeper of the community seemed satisfied.
“Thank you kindly,” I said, and tossed him a coin. I couldn’t remember what the denomination was, but he caught it and didn’t look insulted, so probably it was fine.
We led the horses up the hill, toward the last building on the left. “Thanks,” murmured Denton. “Seemed like he was expecting trouble.”
“I’m guessing not too many people come out here for social calls.”
Roger’s shack was leaning drunkenly against the hillside and a couple of timbers had been shoved in place to brace it there. The front door—well, the only door—was open, and a big black dog lay across the doorway. It appeared to be asleep.
“Roger?” called Denton.
The dog opened its eyes and stood up. I revised my estimate of its size upward from big to huge . It looked at us and made a hoarse coughing noise that sounded like a bear attempting to bark.
From inside the shack, I heard a noise somewhere between a “Huh?” and a snore.
“Roger? Are you in there?”
The dog barked again. Someone—presumably Roger—said, “What? Who’s askin’?”
“It’s Denton, Oscar’s cousin.”
Thumping. More barking. The grunt of someone sitting up, against long odds. “Mister Oscar? Didja find him?”
My heart sank. If we were looking for an easy solution to the mystery, it seemed to have gone by the wayside.
“Get outta the way, Thunder,” Roger said, and the dog sagged back down. Roger appeared behind him, shirtless, with a scraggly growth of beard and the bleary eyes of someone who was on the wrong end of a hangover.
“We’re looking for Oscar,” Denton said. “May we come in?”
“Oh.” Roger slumped. He was wiry rather than big, and with his shoulders bowed, he looked small and sick and old before his time. Not someone I’d have hired to work for me. I wondered what the absent Oscar had seen in him.
“Yeah, you can come in,” said Roger. He nudged Thunder with his foot, which did exactly nothing.
The shack was exactly what you’d expect it to be—small, dirty, filled with empty bottles. It smelled like old sweat and despair. Denton went in. I stayed in the doorway, looking at the dog.
Now, most of us, when we see a dog, think, Yay! A dog! Can I pet it? We do not think, “Hmm, a large predator capable of tearing my throat out in an instant.” This dog, however ... I rubbed my neck, wishing I had a scarf, or perhaps plate mail.
“Can you tell me where you last saw him?” Denton asked.
“Sure. He went into that damn mine again and didn’t come out. I told him not to.” Roger sat down on the bed, his face in his hands. “I told him it was bad.” He sounded on the edge of tears and I revised my opinion from “hungover” to “still a little drunk.”
Despite my better judgment, I crouched down and offered Thunder my fingertips to sniff. The dog’s nose didn’t so much as twitch. He stared at me instead. It was unsettling.
“Did you look for him?” Denton asked.
“Course I looked for him! I went all over that damn place looking! But he must’ve gone down deep and there’s too much there. Couldn’t possibly check it all.” Roger looked away while he said it, and I suspected that, however much he’d loved Oscar, he hadn’t spent very long looking “down deep.”
“Do you think he got lost down there?” asked Denton.
Thunder continued his unblinking stare.
“Lost. Maybe.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“There’s bad stuff down deep. I told him not to go down there.”
I realized that I was now in a staring contest with a dog and looked away to prove that I was the more intelligent species. When I checked out of the corner of my eye, he was still staring.
“What sort of bad stuff?”
Roger rolled his eyes and looked over at me, as if to say, Is this man dim? “If I knew what it was, I wouldn’t just say ‘bad stuff,’ now would I?”
Denton tried another tactic. “Oscar wrote to me to say that somebody was stealing supplies and he found some of them in the mine. Do you think that person might have had something to do with it?”
“Wasn’t a person,” Roger said.
“It wasn’t?”
“Nah. Thunder would’ve had something to say if somebody was sneaking around, wouldn’t you, boy?”
The dog finally turned his head toward Roger, but I don’t think he stopped watching me.
“That’s why I ain’t worried about the bear or whatever it is out there,” Roger said, gesturing toward the world outside.
“Bear?” I asked, curious.
“They say it’s a bear. I dunno. Killed a couple of pigs and then did for old Asa. Tore his liver and lights right out and ate ’em. Everybody’s spooked, but I ain’t. Not with Thunder around. Best damn watchdog in the state.”
Looking at Thunder, I could quite see his point. Any bear encountering Thunder would probably apologize and ask for directions to the nearest road out of town.
“Could a bear have gotten Oscar?” asked Denton.
“Ain’t no bears in the mine, chief. And anyway, this one didn’t show up until recent like.”
Denton asked him a few more questions, trying to nail down the exact day that Oscar had vanished, and how long before Roger had given up and left.
Roger answered, although his recollections were hazy now.
He kept glancing toward the bottle on the table next to him and it was easy to see that he was waiting for us to leave so that he could start drinking again.
Denton promised to be in touch and gave Roger five dollars to thank him for taking the time to talk to us. Thunder watched us leave with frightening intensity.
We had remounted the horses when Roger appeared in the doorway. “Hey, doc.”
“Yes?”
“You oughta stay out of that mine. But I don’t figure you’re going to, so I’ll tell you this. You want to know what happened to Mr. Oscar, you look for a red light. That’s how you find whatever’s down there. That damn red light.”