Power in the Blood (127 page)

Now Omie had only one uncle. The handsome one was gone, lying in a sprawl no different from those of the men who had killed him. She kept thinking of a hummingbird, but did not understand why. No one else was looking at Drew. They were all trying to push the statue off the train. It would tumble down and splash into the roaring waters so very far beneath them, and be lost forever. But they could not move it. Omie threw the weight of her inner self at the elk, and saw it shudder. The others felt it too, and without being aware that it was Omie who caused it to shift, they leaned against it with all their might. Omie had to smile crookedly at that. They were not capable, all three, of doing with their bodies what she knew she could do without even touching the elk. She poured hatred into it, for the death of Drew, and for the men who had done it, and for the fathers who had left her, and the man dressed as a woman who had come to kill her, and for all that was not good among the teeming pastures of the earth.

And the elk began to lean outward, its antlers like toppling trees, its hooves on the near side lifting free of the flatcar’s planks. It trembled on two legs, perfectly balanced, until Omie gave it a final contemptuous shove. The elk fell stiffly over the edge without even touching the bridge, and by the time everyone but Omie had rushed to see it hit the water, the elk had already vanished, the commotion of its landing whipped away instantly by the rushing torrent below. It was as if the statue had disappeared into the very air of Sky Gorge, disassembled its own trillion atoms for dispersement on the wind.

With its passing came an end to the misadventure. They returned to the cab, and Clay mimicked Drew’s various manipulations of the engine’s levers until he discovered how to throw the train into reverse. The driver sat as before on his seat, eyes fixed on the tracks ahead even as his train returned to the snow shed. He was not aware of the passengers in his cab, nor of their careful removal, as the locomotive stood and panted steam, of a young dead man from the flatcar. He did not react when Clay climbed back into the cab and set the throttle for a slow climb up the grade again, this time with the intention of reaching Glory Hole.

Clay jumped down when the wheels began to turn, then lifted and carried his brother away into the trees where the horses were tied.

55

Leo was waiting at the station when his train arrived more than an hour late. It was in fact just half a train, and its engineer rammed the locomotive slowly into the barriers at the end of the line. The man was found to be in some kind of trance, from which he was not to recover for several days, and even then he was unable to recall anything, including the two dead men on an otherwise empty flatcar that should have carried a golden elk. The ropes and chains were there, but the elk was not.

The boxcar contained more dead men. As the crowd that had gathered to see the elk milled about the train, a telegram from Leadville was handed to Leo. It explained the missing boxcar and caboose, but contained no word on Leo’s elk. Subsequent investigation along the track before the day was done found three men by the Glory Hole end of the snow shed. These men, like the engineer, were without coherent memory of the events that had left them where they were found. Three bodies, one female, were discovered at the Leadville end of the shed. The circumstances surrounding their deaths were explained by the Pinkerton agent in charge, although he could not deny the three had attacked the train with nothing more lethal than snowballs.

In the days following the arrival of the half-train, Lovey Doll waited with some trepidation for Leo to make known to her his wishes concerning their future together. She drank heavily while waiting, knowing he must have been driven almost to the point of madness by the disappearance of their precious elk, as was she. When finally he did arrive at her door, he bore a bottle of champagne tied about the neck with a red silk ribbon.

“I’ll hear not a single word tonight about The Mystery,” he said, employing the term the newspapers had coined. “Not a word, do you hear?”

“Yes, Leo.”

“One of those fellows they found, he was your friend, the one who gave you the casket. Can you tell me what in heaven’s name he was doing out there?”

“I understood you wanted no mention of the incident, Leo.”

“Answer me!”

“I … have no idea why he was there.…”

“So you had no part in this business,
Lovey Doll
?”

It was the first time he had used her real name. Lovey Doll wondered if this represented a new and more honest beginning for them, or the end of whatever it was that Leo felt for her. But if he had come with finality in mind, why had he brought champagne?

Noticing the direction of her gaze, Leo said, “To celebrate our betrothal, my sweet.” His smile was meager, but she forgave him. Despite his concerns over what already was being referred to as “The Theft of the Century,” he had come to her with a message of love and reconciliation. She was forgiven her lies, and Lovey Doll decided at that moment she would forgive Leo his deplorable physical assaults upon her person. Now everything would be different, she was sure. Maybe, in some perverse manner, the inexplicable theft of the elk had summoned in Leo the lineaments of a better man, the man he once had been. Lovey Doll smiled with genuine hope as the bottle was uncorked.

“Glasses,” Leo said, and she fetched her finest.

He poured generous measures and they sipped, bubbles touching their noses.

“Please dress yourself in the red gown,” Leo requested.

“Of course, my darling.”

Lovey Doll hurried to her room, and returned wearing Leo’s favorite. She found him standing by the crystal casket, and began to doubt that he believed her claim of noninvolvement. She truly could not understand how a man such as Nevis Dunnigan could attempt so foolhardy a change of profession as to become a train robber, she truly did not.

Leo said, “I wish to see you beneath the glass.”

“Dearest, you know I find it uncomfortable.”

Leo thrust a full glass of champagne at her. “Not with more of this inside you, my darling.” He smiled. “Indulge me, do, just this once.”

“Very well, only for you, my dearest one.”

She quaffed the champagne in one unladylike gulp, then looked at Leo to see if he disapproved of such unfeminine conduct, but he was smiling, this time with conviction, and so she stepped up and laid her body down on the casket’s velvet bed. It was less irksome to perform this task than it had been the first time; scarcely had she arranged herself comfortably than Lovey Doll felt a ring slipped onto her finger. “This,” said Leo, “is the seal of our betrothal.”

Now it was real. Lovey Doll raised the beautiful object to her face and watched the sparkling lights that leaped from Leo’s diamond. The flashes of white fire were beyond comparison with any other thing that might have excited her blood. It had been worthwhile after all, the deceptions and the personal humiliations; Leo wanted her for his wife. Her new ring shone with a splendid radiance, and the hand supporting it became heavy even as she gazed with enraptured eyes. Lovey Doll felt her arm fall to her side, but was not alarmed, since Leo attended to it by arranging it along her thigh. He wished her to be without discomfort. How very kind he was this night, as if determined to atone for his wrongdoing. She forgave him all over again. There was a taste at the back of her throat that Lovey Doll found puzzling, but she could not bring her thoughts to bear upon it. Her eyes were closing with languorous ease. The casket really was a fit place for her to take her rest after all.

Leo watched with detachment as Lovey Doll slid into a narcotic stupor. He had been troubled by the possibility of her detecting the strange taste of his powders, but she had said nothing, had drunk it down like a child her medicine, and now she slept. His doctor had assured him that his troubles of these last few days would be pushed aside by the drug of his prescription, and Leo had given Lovey Doll a week’s dosage.

When she began to snore, he lowered the lid, and made sure that the vacuum screw was tightly in place. As Lovey Doll peacefully exhaled, moisture began building inside the casket, hiding her form behind a fine misting of the glass. Leo watched as her features became lost, made vague by her own breath. It required almost a half hour before the building up of mist inside the casket ceased. He would leave her in the casket’s poisoned air until morning, just to be sure she was really dead, and would sit beside her until then. To maintain a solitary vigil by the deceased was the least he could do, Leo thought.

Drew was buried along the great divide, his grave left unmarked, and the remaining Dugans proceeded to Provo, where Zoe had left her money in a bank vault. Fay left them there, declaring herself sickened by the entire family, their foolishness in allowing a girl to set up a robbery, and their arrogance in throwing away the thing they stole, a thing that had cost Drew his life. She would accept no money from Zoe, and returned to Carbondale, for want of any other place to go. There she met again with Levon. Fay persuaded him to retire from outlawry, and within a month was married to him. They swore a wedding oath never to reveal the location of the elk. Levon did relent and tell his grandson in 1927, but was not believed.

The Dugans moved to Washington state and found a large house for themselves by the ocean. Clay walked often along the shore. Zoe invested her money carefully and was able to support them all. Her one indulgence was a small sailboat, which she handled with dexterity despite her missing arm. Omie became uncontrollable during her puberty, and was thought to be connected somehow to the death by unknown means of a handsome boy from the nearest town, whom she had fallen in love with and been rejected by. There being no direct evidence of implication, Omie was not officially charged with any wrongdoing. She refused to discuss the matter with her mother and uncle. The Dugans had always held themselves in isolation, and the rumors drove them further from society.

Omie waited for Drew to appear in some ghostly guise, but he never did, even when Omie begged his spirit to manifest itself. His brother’s nonappearance greatly disappointed Clay; he had somehow expected more of Omie, who thereafter spent much of her time alone. She did, however, warn Clay of a dangerous woman traveling from the east to do him harm. Clay knew who that was, and began carrying a pistol. He would not shoot Sophie with it, just make her go away and allow the dead to sleep apart from the living.

When he was approached on the beach several days later, he knew the woman with her hands buried at her waist inside a fur muff was his wife, come to attempt vengeance again on behalf of their son. Clay intended asking her if the controversy over Omie and the local boy had been the thing that set her on his trail again, but before she had even come within speaking distance, the woman pulled a pistol and began firing. Clay fired back, despite a bullet in his left side, and killed her with his third shot, by which time he had received another wound, to the thigh.

Stooping to examine the face of his attacker, Clay detected a faint shadow of beard growth along the jawline, and took himself up to the house, bleeding steadily, to berate Omie for having got it wrong. Tatum was taken out to sea in Zoe’s sailboat that night, and dumped overboard with a sack of stones chained around his ankles. Nobody in the town believed Clay Dugan had shot himself accidentally, twice, as he claimed, and further notoriety was heaped upon the family. Zoe suggested they move to another state, and Clay agreed it would be wise. Omie said nothing; she knew they would be living in California within a month.

When Clay was able, he resumed his lonely walks along the beach, and one day was surprised to see a man come down from the cypress trees along the shore to join him on the sand. The man waved in a friendly manner, and Clay stopped out of politeness, wondering who he might be. As the man came closer, Clay thought he detected a face beneath the straw boater that was familiar to him, but could not be sure; he must get new glasses, he reminded himself. The man was only a few steps from Clay when a gun was pulled. Clay stared at it in surprise, and watched the muzzle jump and flash as he was shot five times by Sophie, who then turned the pistol on herself and sent the last bullet into her brain.

The two were found later that afternoon by Zoe, who knew now that she had delayed too long in moving. They could have gone elsewhere to live before the house was sold, but she had insisted on waiting, and this was the result. She felt as guilty over Clay’s death as she had over Drew’s, and Omie’s silence on the subject as she assisted her mother to dispose of both bodies as they had done with Tatum, convinced Zoe that Omie considered her guilty too. As Clay and his wife disappeared beneath the moonlit swell, Zoe was tempted to throw herself in after them. Omie broke her silence with one word—“No”—and mother and daughter returned to shore.

The Praetorians gradually succumbed to massive subversion by Big Circle, and the roles of both bodies were subtly reversed, the greater absorbing the lesser, rather than the intruder taking over its host. Rowland Price was among the last of the holdouts who still believed that Leo Brannan might one day be in the vanguard of a new political force in the land, until Mr. Jones took pity on his foolishness and showed him a report detailing the extent to which his dream had become a joke. Rowland had been instrumental in disposing of Lovey Doll Pines’s body after Leo told him the woman had committed suicide, and he expected some reward for having been so invaluable an aide. He hurried back to Glory Hole to plead a sudden need for cash, but Leo, having received the same report by mail, would not involve himself further with a man who had brought him into so inept an organization. Price wished he were able to set Tatum on Jones and Leo both, but the man had disappeared some time before. Rowland Price moved east to protect himself from possible reprisal instigated by these wealthy men, found himself still frightened on Cape Cod, and so took ship for England.

When Zoe died of a heart attack in San Bernardino in 1905, Omie destroyed the inside of their home while sitting in an armchair. She explained the destruction to her cleaning lady the next day as the work of vandals. These vandals struck again several months later, and at regular intervals after that, but by then the police department was not interested in apprehending them. Omie Dugan was a pariah.