Wild to the Bone (16 page)

19

F
rom behind the door,
Raven heard the chatter of what sounded like a small child.

Footsteps accompanied the chatter, which was growing louder, and then the door opened, and a slight, young blond woman of maybe Raven's age, maybe a little older, stood before her clad in a plain white muslin blouse and a gingham apron, holding a small towheaded boy on her right hip.

The woman's face was open and even-featured, with widely spaced eyes and a fine, small nose. She was, in fact, subtly beautiful.

Very light speckles were sprayed across her cheeks and her nose. What prevented her from appearing radiant was her harried maternal flush, the sadness of her large, round hazel eyes, and the severe way in which she'd pulled her thick blond hair back behind her head and pinned it into a tight schoolmarm's bun. A few wisps had pulled loose and dangled along her right cheek.

The woman said nothing but merely stared blankly at her guest.

Raven doffed her hat and said, “You must be Mrs. Shirley.”

The woman wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her nose. “Who're you?”

Just then, a door opened at the far end of what appeared to be the parlor, and Duke Shirley stood in that half-open doorway, scowling and saying, “Who is it, Penny?” And then he must have recognized Raven, because he slapped his right hand to his forehead, making a face and shaking his head and saying, “Oh, God! I forgot!”

The woman turned with the gooing and gawing child toward Shirley and said skeptically, canting her head at Raven, “You forgot
this
one, Duke? Surely you don't expect me to believe
that.
”

“She's a Pinkerton detective, Penny.”

Penny glanced once more at Raven, looked her up and down, and said, “Right.” Then she walked through a curtained doorway in the parlor's left wall and climbed a set of stairs, the child still gurgling in her arms.

Raven stood in the doorway, tired of feeling awkward and humiliated to the point where she was getting angry.

“Mr. Shirley, I see that this is a bad time. Perhaps we could get together sometime in the morning, and you could fill me in on—”

Walking toward her, he cut her off with, “I'm very sorry, Miss York.”

“It's Agent York.”

“I'm very sorry,
Agent
York.” Shirley had a brandy snifter in one hand. With his other hand, he drew the door open wider and beseeched her with his eyes. “I became distracted after I returned to the store, and I simply forgot to tell my wife about our meeting.” He glanced around behind Raven. “Where's Agent, uh, I forgot his name . . .”

“Agent Haskell is otherwise disposed. He sends his apologies.”

“Well, it's me who must apologize. Please, come in. We can chat in my office.”

Raven blew a breath and stepped onto the braided rug in front of the door, holding her hat down in front of her belt buckle. She wanted to call it a night, but she also wanted to get a clearer picture of what was happening with the stage holdups, so that she could forget about all the peripheral annoyances and get to work on what had brought her here.

Shirley closed the door, glanced at the curtained doorway, and said, “I apologize for that. Penny's been under a lot of stress with one of our boys fighting a slight fever.”

He looked harried, his handsome, bespectacled face flushed as he glanced around the parlor, which was simply, humbly furnished but a mess of wooden toys and children's strewn clothes. “I also apologize for the mess.”

He sighed, sipped his brandy, and looked at Raven over the rim of the snifter. Behind his round-rimmed glasses, his eyes were bright, as though maybe his current drink wasn't his first of the evening.

Lowering the glass, he thrust it toward the door at the far end of the parlor and said, “Right this way,” and tramped off across the large patterned throw rug that covered most of the floor.

Raven followed him. He held the door open for her. When she'd entered the office—which was nearly as large as the parlor and furnished much like an attorney's office, dominated by a large desk with hand-carved legs, and with several game trophies staring down from the walls—he closed the door and moved to the desk.

“Would you like a brandy, Miss . . . I mean, Agent York?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Shirley.” The way he'd looked at her a moment ago was not unlike the way other men looked at her, and for that reason, she didn't want to suggest that this was anything but a business meeting.

“Well, I hope you don't mind if I have another,” he said, splashing what Raven assumed was brandy from a cut-glass decanter into the snifter, nearly filling the glass to the brim.

Capping the decanter, he glanced at the leather sofa to Raven's right, straight across from his desk, and said, “Please, have a seat. I do apologize if I seem a little, uh, under the weather. I drink when my nerves are shot, and they got more than a little beat up when I returned to the store after meeting you and Agent Haskell and found this waiting for me. My wife had picked it up at the telegraph office earlier, but, distracted by the young ones and the inventory we're in the midst of, she forgot to mention it.”

He sagged into his high-backed leather chair behind the desk, which was a mess of ledger books and sundry papers of all shapes and sizes. Papers were even spilling from the drawers of the three tall filing cabinets flanking him, and more were strewn across the rug, much like the children's toys in the other room. The Shirleys' apartment had an air of desperation about it.

Shirley gave Raven an incredulous look across his desk. “Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink?”

“I'm sure, thank you.” Raven crossed her legs and hung her hat on her knee. “Can I ask what has you so upset, Mr. Shirley? Does it concern your stage line?”

“Sure as hell does—uh, pardon my French.”

“Please don't apologize for your French, Mr. Shirley,” Raven said, trying to keep her impatience out of her voice. “I might look like butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, but I could teach you some French that might set your ears to burning. Now, then”—she uncrossed her legs, took her hat in her hands, and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees—“what seems to be the trouble, beyond what I already know?”

Shirley studied her skeptically, then curled one side of his mouth in a smile. “Sorry,” he said. “I reckon I'm just not used to women, especially such purty ones, bein' so bold.”

He sipped his brandy. He took a deep pull, as though the liquor were beer, and then he smacked his lips and ran his fingers down his thick auburn mustaches and across his mouth.

He said, “The telegram was from the superintendent of the Blue Moon Mine up along Rainey Creek, sixty miles northwest of here in the foothills of the Big Horns. It's a small Texas-owned outfit, not real profitable, but lately they've been chipping out some nice color. They smelt it themselves and send the bars via my stage down to Douglas and then by train to the U.S. Mint in Denver.

“So far, only one of my stages hauling their gold has been robbed. Fortunately, it was insured by Wells Fargo, as is my line overall, and that's why you're here. So far, I've mainly lost the money for replacing valuables stolen from my customers—only a couple of thousand dollars. Besides the customers themselves, of course, and there's a good many people who use the line, it being the only one out here and no spur railroad lines so far.

“Losing customers is one thing, but losing contracts with the Blue Moon will ruin me. Wells Fargo won't continue to insure them, or my line, if they lose any more shipments or if any more of my passengers are robbed. Business has been tough on me, Miss York. I've funneled a lot of money from my mercantile into the stage line, and so far, I haven't made that money back. If the stage line goes under rather than earn the profit I'd forecast it to do—that I desperately
need
it to do—I'll go broke.

“I started the mercantile before the drought hit, but with several large ranches going under, I can't make it with the mercantile alone. The livery barn across the street was an idiot's mistake. I never should have bought that two years ago. The price had seemed right at the time, but every day I keep it open—even with Sonny working only for fifty cents a day and a place to sleep—I figure I'm losing a good ten or fifteen dollars.”

“Why not close it?” Raven asked.

“Because people depend on the livery and feed service, especially stockmen and drummers drifting through, who also patronize the mercantile. They see the livery barn as a necessary service, and I'd like to keep it open, to keep folks happy, if for no other reason. A town needs a livery and feed service!” Shirley shook his head miserably. “But I won't be able to keep it open much longer, I'm afraid. I have two kids and”—he stopped abruptly to stare down into his glass as though he'd spied a fly in it—“and another one on the way.”

It didn't appear to be something he'd intended to share. Looking chagrined, he covered the look with a sigh, took another swallow of the brandy, ran a hand through his thick hair, and poked his glasses up his nose. “I'm afraid the death of my stage line will lead to the death of Spotted Horse itself.”

He was silent after that, sitting sideways to the desk and staring at the floor. Raven studied him. He was, indeed, a handsome man. No doubt a man for whom looks and charisma had gained him much favorable attention and business success.

And here he was at a place in his life where, almost inexplicably to him and unfairly, his looks and his charisma were unable to help him.

He turned to Raven, and his jaws were hard, his drink-bright eyes sharp with anger. “I need those . . . those
bitches
run to ground. I need that whole gang who've been making my life miserable strung up by their goddamn thumbs. Do you understand me, Agent York?”

“Completely.”

Raven stood and walked to the large map on the wall to the right of Shirley's desk. It encompassed most of eastern Wyoming and western Dakota Territory north to the Montana border and south to Cheyenne.

“Show me where they've hit the stage so far and exactly when each strike happened. Perhaps there's a pattern. At the very least, we'll have an area to begin investigating.”

Shirley got up a little uncertainly and stumbled over to the map. He pointed out each place where the stage had been robbed. So far, it had been robbed eight times over the past two years. As drunk as he was, he could not remember the exact dates of each robbery, but from what he told Raven, she could make out no time pattern.

All she could see was what anyone could have seen. All of the robberies had occurred along a twelve-mile stretch of stage trail between the town of Recluse, seventy-five miles north of Spotted Horse, and Spotted Horse itself. All had occurred in rugged, desert-prairie country gouged, tucked, and folded into the stark, craggy limestone formations knows as the Pumpkin Buttes.

“Nothing much exists out there,” Shirley told Raven, “except a few dry watercourses, coyotes, and prickly pear. Once there were a few ranches”—he shook his head slowly, sadly—“but damn few these days. Even fewer that are solvent.”

Raven turned to an oil painting of a rugged-looking old cowboy with a silver soup-strainer mustache and wearing a high-crowned tan Stetson hanging to the right of the stage-line map.

“Who's this?”

“The old man,” Shirley said, half-smiling admiringly at the painting. “My father—Henry Benford Shirley, his own mossy-horned old self. Poison-mean, school-stupid, and wily as a jackrabbit in a field of coyotes, the old boy carved a ranch out of that country, by God.”

“In the Pumpkin Buttes?”

Shirley nodded. “There was grass out there once. Enough to raise a few cows. Enough open space for an old Missouri outlaw like young Henry to hide from the law. He and Ma raised me and my brother and a sister out there. They're all dead now—both my folks. My sister was struck by lightning when she was picking chokecherries in a ravine, only twelve years old, and my brother got shot by a deputy sheriff over in Dakota—for very good reason, I'm afraid.”

“But you did well for yourself,” Raven said, smiling at him with genuine admiration.

He smiled back at her, and there was that male look again. God help them, men just couldn't help rewarding a compliment with a leer, believing deep down that the compliment meant that the woman wanted nothing more than to climb into bed with them.

“So far, I've done all right,” Shirley said. “So far.”

“You have any idea who might be hitting the line?”

“None at all. I thought all the outlaw gangs had pulled out of this region several years ago.”

Raven considered that, nodded. “We'll figure it out, Mr. Shirley,” she said as she donned her hat and moved to the office door. “And we'll get started first thing in the morning.”