Sketch a Falling Star (2 page)

Eloise didn’t bother to acknowledge her son. Still focused on Rory, she started giggling with her hand in front of her mouth like a little girl. “You know he’s going to miss you,” she said in a singsong rhythm.

“My dog?” Rory asked. Eloise had probably seen him out in the backyard or when they’d gone for walks. “Don’t worry about Hobo; he’ll be fine.” She turned away to close the trunk of the car. “He’s staying with my mom and dad while I’m away.”

When she turned back, Doug Bowman was stumbling up the driveway, holding his raincoat closed and trying to catch his breath. Eloise paid him no mind.

“No, silly,” she said, “I mean your Marshal Drummond.”

Rory felt the blood drain from her face so fast that it left her a bit light-headed. How could Eloise possibly know about Zeke? Although his ability to travel beyond the house had improved exponentially with her reluctant help, he still couldn’t leave the house unless she was with him or at his destination. And unless she’d developed selective amnesia, she was certain she’d never seen Eloise before. It occurred to her that the one variable in this troubling equation was Eloise herself. Unfortunately, Rory didn’t have time to investigate the situation further, but it would definitely be number one on her “to do” list when she returned from Arizona.

“Hi, Rory. Sorry about this,” Doug wheezed as he reached them. He immediately took hold of his mother’s arm as if he were afraid she might slip away again. “Rory can’t visit with you right now, Mom. We’ll come by another time, I promise.” He gave her arm a gentle tug. “We have to get home—Jean’s whipping up some of those pancakes you like.”

In spite of her fragile appearance, Eloise stood her ground. “Don’t you worry, dear,” she said to Rory, giggling again. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

Doug looked from his mother to Rory and back again. “You’ll have to excuse my mother,” he whispered as if Eloise wasn’t standing beside him and perfectly capable of hearing every word. “I’m afraid she hasn’t been herself since the stroke.”

Rory managed to arrange her face into a lighter, “no worries here” expression for Doug’s consumption. “I’m glad your mom and I had a chance to meet,” she said. She would have liked to ask Eloise if she’d mentioned the marshal to anyone else, but that wasn’t possible with Doug right there. At least the Bowman family wasn’t likely to buy any strange tales she might tell.

“Rory, you have yourself a lovely trip,” Eloise said, tucking her arm through her son’s. “Come along now, Douglas. You know I don’t like cold pancakes.”

Doug wished her a good trip as well, looking relieved that he didn’t have to pick his mother up and carry her home like a truculent two-year-old. They set off across the lawn in deference to Eloise’s bare feet.

Rory was about to get into her car when Eloise stopped abruptly and turned back to her. The smile had vanished, swallowed whole by an expression Rory could best describe as sympathy.

“Something terrible is going to happen,” Eloise intoned solemnly. Then quick as a wink her childlike aspect returned, her smile as bright as ever, and without another word she let her son escort her home.

Chapter 1

A
ccording to the map, Tucson was a straight shot southeast on I-10 from Phoenix. What the map failed to indicate was the amount of traffic that plied the route between those two cities on any given day. Rory had been looking forward to an easy drive, during which she could enjoy the unfamiliar landscape of the Sonoran Desert. Instead, she found herself playing the same unnerving game of “dodge the semi” that she played on the Long Island Expressway. However, at speeds of seventy-five and above, it was the expressway on steroids.

Although she couldn’t risk taking her eyes off the road for more than a second or two, she managed to catch glimpses of the desert plain with the hearty scrub that made it unique in the world, according to the tour guide she’d read in preparation for the trip.

Having lived all of her life on a relatively flat island, Rory was enchanted by the way the distant mountains faded into the horizon, like giant roadblocks intended to keep the desert from wandering beyond its allotted space. Everywhere she looked, Zeke was front and center in her thoughts. This was his home, his true place in the world. Or it had been before the twentieth and twenty-first centuries came calling. She wasn’t sure he would even recognize it now. For that matter, she was having a hard time imagining the desert as he’d known it, back when buzzards were the largest things that sailed the skies, and a man alone on horseback had only his gun and his wits to keep him alive.

Her thoughts circled back to the reason she was there—her promise to find out who’d killed Zeke by putting a bullet in his back a hundred and thirty-four years ago. The marshal didn’t seem to care that the killer was also long dead. He stubbornly refused to move on beyond his present limbo without that bit of knowledge. Rory had done all the research it was possible to do from her home computer, and she’d gone through the newspaper archives in Huntington, but she’d come up empty. Tucson was their last hope.

To set the stage for her trip, she’d told her family that she might be visiting a college friend in Arizona sometime in the spring. She couldn’t very well say she was making the trip to find out who’d killed the ghost in her house, or that she was trying to keep a promise she’d made to said ghost, unless she was also interested in an extended vacation in a nicely padded cell. Thanks to Zeke, she could teach a master class in the white lie. Only this time the lie had turned around and bitten her.

“You’re not going to believe this,” her aunt Helene had said in an enthusiastic phone call three weeks after Rory first mentioned her prospective trip.

Rory had braced herself for whatever was coming. When Helene took on a project, it was total immersion. She’d research it inside out, upside down and sideways. Yet in spite of all her work and best intentions, she often wound up jumping off a cliff without considering the impact of her landing.

“When you said you wanted to go to Arizona, I had this lightbulb moment,” her aunt went on.

Uh-oh. The warning sirens were starting to blare. “I haven’t actually made any plans yet,” Rory said, hoping to defuse whatever bomb was ticking away in Helene’s mind.

“That’s what I figured. So I’ve taken care of it for you.”

Too late.

“All you have to do is pay your share and show up at the airport.”

Her share? Of what? What had Helene signed her up for? With a tangle of questions fighting for air time, a bewildered “What?” was all Rory managed to get out.

Helene was only too happy to fill in the details. It seemed that some of the actors from her Long Island acting troupe, the Way Off Broadway Players, had decided to go on vacation together between productions. But where to go? Enter Helene, stage right, armed with tour books and a soliloquy about the wonders of Arizona.

Once she’d convinced the group that any other destination couldn’t possibly measure up, she’d gamely taken on the job of travel agent. She’d spent hours online and then on the phone, but it was all worth it in the end, she’d proclaimed, since everyone was thrilled with the tour package she’d arranged for them.

Rory hadn’t bothered to point out that “everyone” couldn’t possibly have been thrilled, since “everyone” hadn’t been consulted. Of course, she shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d learned when she was still quite young that Helene sometimes took hostages when she plunged off a cliff.

In the end, she’d decided not to object. Her aunt’s intentions were honorable; plus, she’d freed Rory from the work of planning the trip herself. For all she knew, traveling with the Players might even turn out to be fun. She would simply bow out of their side trip to Gray Wolf Canyon, in the high country near the town of Page, and head down to Tucson on her own.

Zeke had been pleased to hear that she would soon be back on the trail of his killer but somewhat less thrilled about the prospect of rattling around in the house all alone for seven days.

“It’s one week—you spent decades alone before Mac moved in,” Rory had reminded him. “I’m sure you’ll be able to manage.”

“Well, I expect I could drop by from time to time to see how you’re doin’ out there,” he’d said, as if the idea had just occurred to him.

So this was where the conversation had been leading all along.

“It’d be mighty nice to see my home again,” he’d added with a nostalgic sigh.

Nice touch, Rory thought, not buying any of it. He’d clearly had the whole little act worked out before he’d even opened his mouth. Since he’d improved considerably in the art of traveling beyond the confines of the house, it had become more difficult for her to lobby against his trips. He had the posture and gait of the living down cold. And he hardly ever made the mistake of walking through walls anymore when he was out in public. He’d even updated his wardrobe with some slacks and a few nice shirts so as not to draw attention, although he made no bones about how much he disliked the cut and fit of modern apparel. In the house, he always reverted to the clothing he’d worn when he was alive.

“I understand that you’d like to go back home for a visit,” she’d said evenly, “but I’ll be able to concentrate better on the investigation if I’m not constantly expecting a three-ring circus to march into town.”

“You’ve got nothin’ to worry about, darlin’,” he’d assured her. “I’ll be stealthy as a coyote with a hankerin’ for rabbit.”

Somehow the image had brought her no comfort at all.

Rory was so lost in her thoughts that the voice of the GPS startled her with a reminder that the exit for Tucson was coming up. It was a good thing she’d insisted on having a car with a navigation system; Zeke was already messing with her mind.

The Arizona Historical Society Library and Archives was situated just outside the campus of the University of Arizona. Rory parked in a nearby garage and walked the two short blocks to the building, carrying a pad of paper, a pen and a bushel of determined optimism. She wound her way through the exhibits, enjoying the overview of Tucson’s past, but it was in the small library that she found her first lead.

When she walked in, the librarian rose from her chair behind the front desk. She was somewhere in her middle years, dressed in a long, gauzy skirt of coral that was topped off with a blouse of similar style and fabric. The name tag she wore introduced her as Wanda Shaw.

She welcomed Rory in a hushed voice, although no one else occupied the library at that moment. Even the smile Wanda produced was low-key, as if more gregarious facial expressions were also discouraged there.

Taking her cue from the librarian, Rory whispered that she was doing research on crime in late-nineteenth-century southern Arizona and that she was hoping they might have newspapers from that era.

“Yes, of course,” Wanda replied, “but they’re much too fragile to be handled. Luckily, they’ve all been copied onto microfilm. You’re welcome to view them that way if you’d like.”

Rory assured her that the microfilm would be fine and that she was primarily interested in newspapers from January through October of 1878.

Wanda excused herself, disappearing through a door in the back where a sign read “Library Personnel Only.” When she returned a few minutes later, she was holding several small boxes.

She came out from behind the desk, her skirt swishing softly around her as if it too respected library etiquette. Motioning for Rory to follow, she led the way to a room so tiny that it had probably started life as a supply closet. There was barely enough space to accommodate the desk that held the bulky microfilm reader, a low-tech dinosaur from the days before microprocessors gave birth to sleek computers. Rory couldn’t help thinking that if the reader seemed anachronistic to her, then Zeke must be shell-shocked from watching the world’s innovations hurtle by him over the years.

Given the room’s modest dimensions, Rory watched from the doorway while Wanda threaded the film into the machine.

“I’ve started you off with the
Arizona Citizen
,” the librarian whispered as she and Rory did a little do-si-do to switch places. “It’s probably your best bet. It was a weekly newspaper published Saturdays here in Tucson.” She pointed out the control for scrolling through the film, then left Rory to her work with a reminder that she was nearby if she was needed.

Rory started scanning through the pages searching for articles about John Trask, the man wanted for abducting and murdering a series of young girls, the man Zeke had been tracking when he was killed. Given the circumstances, Rory figured Trask was responsible for the marshal’s death as well. But according to Zeke that wasn’t possible, since the bullet had slammed into his back while he’d had the outlaw in his gun sights.

As Rory worked her way through the microfilm, she kept thinking how much simpler it would have been to do a word search on a computer. That thought was quickly followed by another about how beggars can’t be choosers, and that she ought to be grateful to have even this kind of access to the old papers.

Two hours later, she pushed her chair back from the desk with little to show for her time and effort. Although she’d gone through every reel of microfilm Wanda had given her, the few articles about Trask were short and grim. Back in the nineteenth century, with no modern forensic tools, the marshal had had little to help him as he’d hunted for the killer. According to the articles, he’d probably only known Trask’s name and that he was a loner, a predator who roamed the Arizona and New Mexico Territories, where too few lawmen patrolled far too vast an area. The one valuable clue he’d had was a composite sketch of the killer. Rory stared at Trask’s image for several minutes, glad to finally have a face to go with the name. Not much to show for the eyestrain and pounding headache she’d developed from reading the small print, which had already started to fade by the time it was transferred onto microfilm.

Instead of answering her questions, the research had actually added a new question to her list. What had become of John Trask? Although the
Arizona Citizen
had reported the marshal’s death, it never mentioned Trask again. Back home when she’d searched the Huntington newspaper archives she’d come across an article that said he’d been wounded in the gunfight that killed Zeke but had escaped. If there was an answer to be found, it might literally be buried somewhere on Long Island.