Horse With No Name Page 12

Merrick nodded and then glanced at her. "Stay there." He walked closer to the front door, looking down, examining the ground for footprints, Julia guessed. He searched on both sides of the walkway. If the well-trod ground revealed anything to him, he didn't say.

  When he was finished he went to the door and, grasping the knife in his left hand by its large wooden handle, pulled. The knife resisted for a moment and then came away, the rabbit with it. Merrick pointed the knife down at the ground and the animal slid off. He held it by its back legs and turned to look at Julia.

  "Do you want some help cleaning up your doorstep?"

  Julia was surprised by this offer. It seemed beyond the scope of Merrick's official duties.

  She shook her head. "I need to get to school. I'll have to do it later."

  He nodded once and then adjusted the knife in his hand. He seemed to be thinking about what he was going to say next. If he was embarrassed about his state the day before, he didn't show it. And unlike her, he didn't look green around the gills. "I want you to check in with me regularly. No going off riding without letting me know. No walking alone after dark. Are we clear?"

  "Yes. Thank you, Merrick."

  "I mean it, Julia." His expression was stern. "I don't know what the hell is going on, but someone clearly means to do you harm." He looked down at the knife and then back up to her. "Or at the very least, ensure you are afraid. I need you to keep me apprised of your movements until I figure out who did this." His gaze was steady, his eyes dark.

  A drop of rain landed on Julia's face, and then another on her arm.

  "I promise," she said.

  Merrick nodded once. "C'mon. I'll walk you to school."

  ***

  Between Julia's hangover and her shattered nerves, it was all she could do to hold it together for the day in the classroom. The children sensed her mood and, for once, didn't capitalize on it. They were quiet and subdued. The rain began in earnest as she opened the school doors. Her idea for a nature walk was dashed, so she had the students working on assignments quietly at their desks. She was not in a space where she felt competent enough to teach at the front of the room.

  The children ate lunch inside. The rain came down in sheets, huge, fat drops one could see falling through the air, turning the schoolyard to a soupy swamp. By two o'clock the heavens took a break, and Julia made a spur of the moment decision to release the children early, yet again.

  For the next several days Julia was never alone. The community made sure of that. That night Betty and Christopher had her over for dinner, though it was a strained and awkward affair since it turned out Christopher was still in Betty's bad books and Betty was hardly speaking to him. The appearance of peace at the Harvest Festival had been for show. On Tuesday, Betty and Julia received permission from Mr. Hunter to make soup at his home and tidy up. He was spending long days at his shop, trying to organize the mess that had been created when all the gears and clock workings had been swept onto the floor, as well as catch up on the repair jobs that were awaiting him.

  The two women went to his shop after school, their arms weighed down with baskets of ingredients for soup.

  Hunter looked at them over the counter, listening to the proposal to tidy up his house while they were there. He began to object but Betty pressed on, relentlessly. Julia suspected Betty was invested in this mission of mercy because she wanted desperately to be out of her own shop and away from her husband.

  After a few moments of cajoling, Julia could almost see the resistance draining out of Hunter. He began to nod his head and then, to stop the incessant flow of Betty's argument, said, "Fine. Yes. Go ahead. The door is open." As an afterthought he added, "Thank you."

  Julia and Betty let themselves into Hunter's home, lit the fire in the kitchen and then set to work, chopping vegetables and boiling water.

  As they stood side-by-side at the table in Hunter's kitchen, each armed with a sharp knife, the rhythm of their chopping echoed around the room. Julia asked how things were going between Betty and Christopher.

  Betty sighed, "Not all that well. I'm making him sleep in the guest room these days."

  Julia sliced the top off of a carrot and began chopping it into chunks. "Does he have a plan for collecting any of the money he's owed?"

  "He says he does. But I'm not sure he can follow through. Although, Albert Grimes was in the shop yesterday and wanted to use credit to buy his supplies. Christopher refused since he already owes us nearly twenty dollars."

  "That's good, isn't it?"

  Betty stepped over to the stove and tipped the cut vegetables on her cutting board into a large cast iron pot. "I suppose. But I was standing right there so he had to do it." Betty paused for a moment and then chuckled for the first time in a long time, "He looked like he might cry."

  Julia looked over at her friend. "Oh, no."

  "His face got all red and he stammered and spluttered. I just let him sweat it out. I pretended I was busy with the candles I was sorting."

  "Betty Mitchell, I had no idea you were so cruel!"

  Betty grimaced at Julia. "He has to learn, Julia. He has to figure out a way to not be the good guy all the time."

  "That's not really who he is, though is it?"

  Betty waved her knife around, her voice rising slightly, "He's going to have to figure out how to be that person. If he doesn't figure it out, we'll be living in your back garden."

  When the soup was underway and Betty could manage on her own, Julia left the kitchen and began to dust and tidy around Hunter's small home.

  The house, like his shop, smelled faintly of oil. She suspected this scent came home with Hunter from the clock repair shop, and that he didn't do any work here in the house. There wasn't a workspace laid out anywhere in the small house, at any rate. The smell was not unpleasant and it reminded Julia of her father and the times he had taken her to the shop where he got his pocket watches repaired.

  She took a rag she'd brought and began dusting the living room. There were no photographs on display, though this was not entirely unusual. Photography was a new art and not everyone took the time, money or bother to go to a studio to have portraits made.

  When she finished dusting she found Hunter's broom in a corner of the kitchen and began sweeping all the floors, creating piles of dust and dirt to pick up later. When she reached the bedroom she was especially thorough, noticing that the room didn't seem to have been swept out in some time. She worked the broom well into the corners and moved the tall dresser with some effort to sweep behind it. The bed was a narrow single, which Hunter had tucked into one corner. Julia reached the broom underneath it as best she could and then pulled the bed away from the wall to clean behind it as well. She stood the broom up against the doorframe and pulled at the metal frame of the bed. It shifted slightly but then stopped, caught on something. Julia crouched down and saw a small wooden box tucked all the way to the front of the bed, tight against the corner. The bed's leg couldn't move with the box in the way. Julia got on her hands and knees and reached under the bed, pulling the box back with her. It rattled slightly as she moved it and when it came fully out from under the bed, she saw it was an old apple crate filled with items wrapped in newspaper. Glancing at the bedroom door to make sure Betty wasn't watching her, and feeling slightly guilty, Julia delicately lifted the corner of a piece of yellowed newspaper to see what it held within. A patterned china plate with decorations of red roses around the perimeter and a blue ribbon flowing around them stared back at her. She closed the paper up again and pulled aside a different piece on the other side of the box. The same delicate china pattern emerged, this time on a tea cup.

  Curiosity satisfied, Julia pulled the box across the room and then was able to move the bed. There was an old pair of boots under the bed as well. Julia moved these out into the middle of the room. She made a good job of cleaning under the bed and then put everything back where it had originally been.

  The house began to smell very pleasantly of Betty's soup. When J
ulia finished sweeping her piles of dust outside, she found Betty rearranging preserve jars on the shelves in the kitchen.

  "Hunter won't be able to find anything now," Julia teased her friend.

  Betty glanced over her shoulder. "I can't help myself," she said, "it's the shopkeeper's curse."

  Twenty-one

  The glove was bugging Julia. It had been sitting on her kitchen table for several days, but more than that, it had been preying on her mind. It didn't belong to James Hunter, that much was obvious. And whoever dropped it had not returned to claim it. This convinced Julia that it had to belong to whoever had assaulted the watchmaker. But how was she to find this person?

  She spent Tuesday after school on her hands and knees scrubbing the floorboards in her kitchen. It was a thankless task that had to be done regularly to keep mice and bugs out of the kitchen. It was hard, unrewarding work and she hated it. (Although not as much as she'd hated cleaning the rabbit blood off her front step.) But the repetitive nature of the scrubbing, and the fact that her brain didn't need to be engaged in the task, allowed her mind to turn the problem over and examine it from several angles.

  The glove was well-worn and constantly used. It was the glove of a working man, not a gentleman. Someone from a ranch, not from town. The mark across the palm was, she was sure, the groove of a reign, as she and Walt had discussed. It had to be. The trouble was that any man, anywhere, could own a glove like this. It had no distinguishing marks and nothing that made it different than a thousand other working gloves that must be in every house for five hundred miles around.

  So what else did Julia know about it? She sloshed her scrub brush around in her bucket and thought. It was leather. It was an average size. Larger than Hunter's hands but pretty average for a normal man who wasn't as slight as Hunter. It was handmade, but that was not remarkable either. Nearly every article of clothing everyone wore was handmade. It was the right-hand glove. If the owner was right handed he'd be likely to hold his reins in his right hand.

  So he worked with horses, that much Julia could be certain of. And the reign mark was so worn into the palm it had to mean the glove's owner was probably in the saddle more often than he was out of it.

  Hunter still refused to speak about what had happened. A few times while Julia and Betty had been caring for him she had gently tried to approach the subject, but Hunter immediately closed down and clammed up. He still claimed he didn't remember any details from the attack, but Julia was convinced he was not telling the truth about that. Why he was hiding or protecting his attacker, she couldn't say. He was a reserved and private person, but this went beyond the need for privacy. He was actively discouraging Merrick and Julia from finding out who had attacked him. She was convinced this meant Hunter knew his attackers.

  And yet, that didn't make sense to her. Hunter was not someone who was prone to being in conflict with others. He kept himself to himself. The very penchant he had for privacy was the thing that made it absurd that anyone had attacked him. He was the person in town least likely to cause upset or to offend. Julia just couldn't imagine Hunter upsetting anyone enough that they would try to resolve the problem by physically attacking him. It was like assaulting a straw man. Whoever did this was a coward, Julia realized. Anyone with any courage would see that picking on Hunter was totally unfair; like shooting fish in a barrel.

  The most logical explanation, given how little she knew, was that the attack was retaliation for Hunter helping her out on the night of the dance. Reluctantly, she brought to mind details about her attackers; their smell, their way of speaking, their size and height. She thought about their hands curling around her upper arms, their breath on her cheek and neck.

  They had been drinking, and the memory of the smell of alcohol made Julia's throat close over. But she sat back on her heels, held the scrub brush away from her skirt, closed her eyes, and forced herself to focus.

  Her fear and the pungent smell of fermented grain filled most of her senses. But there had to be more. In her mind's eye, she groped past the obvious and searched for the more subtle pieces of information that were there. She pictured the blackness of the night, the sound of the outhouse door closing behind her. She heard boots crunching on the dirt, not just her own boots, but others as well. The footsteps of the men behind her.

  She shivered in the kitchen, but forced herself to keep her eyes closed and stay with the memory. One of the men, the one she thought of as First Man, had pressed the length of himself into her side once he had grabbed her arm, crowding her, using his size to intimidate her. He was wearing a long canvas jacket, she had sensed that it fell below his knees. They were both wearing hats, though she wasn't sure what kind. She had just a vague impression of this.

  The scrubbing brush dripped water onto Julia's skirt. She had forgotten it. Were the men who attacked her the night of the dance and the person who attacked Hunter one and the same? There was no way to know. The two incidents could be totally unrelated. Hunter's beating could, in fact, be connected to his past. It might have nothing to do with Horse at all.

  The glove's owner must work on a ranch. A drover or a ranch owner. She thought about the ranches around Horse and the operations they each performed. Not many ranches were yet able to hire employees. More often the owners did all the work themselves. Outfits such as Gerard Anker's Double A Ranch were the exception, not the rule. Julia suspected that Sabine Anker's money had something to do with that. Who else had a place that was doing well enough to hire help?

  The word coward floated around Julia's mind, repeating itself, annoying her like a black fly. Why did it matter? she wondered. The character of the person who'd attacked Hunter was of less importance than who actually did it.

  She opened her eyes and bent forward again, dipping her brush into the bucket to her right. Absently she ran it along the floor, no longer focused on her task. Something was gnawing at the edge of her consciousness but she couldn't bring it forward.

  And then her father's face came unbidden to her mind's eye. His greying mustache and beard, his furrowed brow and eyes that watched sternly during his cases but until recently had almost always looked at his daughter with pride and love. She heard his voice in her head. Bullies, he had said to her more than once, are, at their heart, cowards.

  She dropped the scrub brush into the bucket and stood up, pulling off her work apron. "Right you are, Father," she said to the kitchen and went to find her hat and riding gloves.

  Twenty-two

  She had to sneak out of town.

  She wasn't sure where Merrick was that evening. But she was sure she needed to stay out of his sight. She took an indirect route from her house to the livery, avoiding the main street and the risk that Merrick would see her from his office.

  While she groomed and saddled Stanley, she kept her ears attuned to Walt's rhythmic hammering from next door. It was almost like the drum in a band; the clang-clang as regular as clockwork.

  When Stanley was saddled, she led him out of his stall. The animal automatically began to turn toward the front of the building but she guided him the other way, whispering to him. "This way today," and together they walked all the way down the center aisle and out into the paddocks at the back of the building.

  Earl and Nelson were there, snacking on the hay Walt put out for them. They both looked up, eyes and ears interested, and watched as Julia and Stanley crossed to the far side of the enclosure. She opened the gate and led Stanley through and then closed it behind them. She glanced toward the back of the forge and listened. Walt was still tapping out his steady rhythm. She gathered Stanley's reins, put her left foot in the stirrup and floated lightly up into the saddle. When her skirt was adjusted, she clucked to Stanley and they trotted away, up the gentle slope that led out of town.

  ***

  Alan Cecil worked at the O'Brien Ranch, and it was him she was looking for. The word coward, with its insistent poking at her, and the memory of her father's belief about bullies, finally made her think of
Alan Cecil.

  She didn't know the man, really. All she knew of him was how she had seen him interact with his wife, Lily. And how Lily had reacted to him. That, it seemed, was more informative than his own behavior.

  He was charming. He had exuded charm that night in the Finnegan's kitchen. Julia hadn't thought anything of it at the time, but when she pictured the scene, she remembered that Lily's demeanor had been odd. She was not a relaxed woman, by any stretch of the imagination. And what had bothered Julia at the time was that even when Lily’s husband had been having a pleasant, jovial conversation with Julia, Lily hadn't relaxed.

  It was subtle, and Julia didn’t want to notice at first, but Alan Cecil seemed to have a strong hold over his wife. He had made that backhanded comment to her at the harvest festival, which seemed unkind. But it was the way he had been gripping his wife's arm in the kitchen at Finnegan's that stayed with Julia. It bothered her at the time but she had been distracted by Alan's subsequent charm and she hadn't let the moment register in the front of her consciousness. Now, though, it wouldn't leave her alone.

  Alan Cecil worked with horses. This, combined with what Julia suspected was a slightly cruel nature covered up by a thin veneer of charm, was enough to make Julia want to talk to Cecil. It was the slenderest of threads, but it was all she had. If she was totally honest with herself, she would realize that she was really on a wild goose chase. One that kept her from thinking about the poor rabbit on her front door and the danger to herself that this implied.

  She had no information whatsoever that Hunter and Cecil even knew each other. Hunter was a refined, almost delicate person. Julia had never seen him on a horse. She wasn't sure he owned one. He spent his time, it seemed, within the town limits, working on his clocks and watches. Julia's limited experience of Alan Cecil was the polar opposite. Burly, ill-mannered, coarse, but with that vein of charm that appeared when needed. As far as Julia knew they had no friends in common other than Lily. Cecil lived and worked on the O'Brien ranch and stayed with Lily in her room at Finnegan's as often as his work would allow.