Claussen held his prayer book over his heart. “Oh, dear Lord,” he said, “an evil is amongst us. A savage and unholy beast. We pray for your guidance, for your deliverance from—”
“Oh shut the hell up,” Lauters snapped.
Claussen looked as if he’d been slapped. “You, sir, are a heretic.”
“No, I’m just dead tired and don’t want hear any of that Jesus-crap right now.”
“How dare you, sir!”
Wynona stopped snipping.
“You know where I’ll be if you need me, Wynona,” Lauters said, stomping off. “I better get out of here before I make the dear reverend here into another customer for you.”
“At the jailhouse?” Wynona asked.
“No doubt the nearest tavern,” Claussen said bitterly.
Lauters clenched his teeth. “Shut your goddamn mouth.”
“Your words, sir, again fall on deaf ears. The Lord will protect me from violent men with weak minds.”
But Lauters was already gone. Weak mind or not, there was a lot on it.
11
The moon was up now.
It was a fat, yellow orb that painted Wolf Creek up in a grim, pale illumination that reflected off snow and ice and hard earth. Wynona Spence stared out the window at the town from her rooms above the undertaking parlor. She was thinking of Joe Longtree and what he had said, wondering, wondering.
Could any of that be possible?
A beast with the mind of a man?
Unthinkable.
Wynona turned from the window. Candles were lit, spread out almost strategically. They cast a sickly orange light and fed shadows into flesh. As she moved, they danced and swayed and stalked. She had a bottle of whiskey set out. Good whiskey, too, all the way from Baton Rouge, imported via Ireland. Label was even written up in Gaelic. Not the cheap swill they served up in Wolf Creek. Fermented goat piss is all that was. Good enough for the ranch hands and hardrock miners who only wanted to get drunk, fight, and fuck, but hardly satisfying to the discerning palate.
A love of good whiskey, like mortuary science, was something Wynona had inherited from her father. The dead did not frighten her. They were old friends and childhood playmates. She grew up with their staring, gray faces and empty eyes. Spent hours at her father’s side while he stitched and sewed, gummed and glued, snapped and twisted bodies back into something vaguely human that could be cried over at a funeral. In a town like Wolf Creek, there were always plenty of dead bodies. Plenty of shootings and knifings and beatings and the occasional hanging. Then there were the mines, the inevitable quarrels between rival ranching combines. None of that even took into account death by natural causes. Yes, in the end, all roads led to the mortuary.
Those who had spurned Wynona in life always came around to her in the end.
It made Wynona smile.
When she was young and first felt the stirrings of love, of desire for the opposite sex, the boys shunned her. She was never what you would’ve called physically attractive, there was more of the skeleton to her than the seductress. She was thin and bony by nature. Her flesh was cold to the touch. And she was the undertaker’s daughter. The boys picked up on that, of course. They had no more use for her than the girls. Had she been a leper she could have been no more alone, no more shunned, no more banished from their social circles.
Without the benefit of male or female companionship-even her mother had passed on before her tenth birthday and Wynona remembered her father painstakingly preparing mother for the worms-Wynona withdrew more and more until by age sixteen, she was little more than a hermit, spending most of her time with her father and his work. The cadavers became her friends. She developed secret relationships with them, named them. She would sing songs to them and play games with them. Tell them stories, secrets. She was always sad when it came time for them to go.
And in the dark recesses of her brain, an evil seed was planted: One day, perhaps, she would select a special friend. And that friend she would keep with her. That friend would not be surrendered to dank earth and feasting worms.
Wynona had something else in common with her father: She robbed the dead.
Call it desecration if you must, but to Wynona it was merely a way of supplementing her income. Watches, jewelry, silver buttons. She sold them to a jeweler in Nevada City who did not ask questions. Gold teeth to a goldsmith who melted them down and fashioned them into settings for rings, chains for necklaces. Some might have called Wynona ghoulish, but ghoulish or not, she was not wasteful. Now and then she found money on her customers. Usually it was already purloined by the time the body came under her care. But when it hadn’t, she rejoiced. Fringe benefits. Even a fine pair of boots or undamaged hat could fetch a handsome price.
And why, she often thought, should such treasures languish in the ground?
Wynona filled a glass goblet with whiskey and began slowly blowing out candles, until all that illuminated her rooms was the yellow glow of the fireplace and the anemic moonlight which filtered in with ghostly fingers.
She unlocked her bedroom door and sat on the bed, on the purple velvet coverlet, her head reclined against an avalanche of feather pillows.
There was a shape in the bed next to her. It did not stir.
Wynona sighed. “Oh, what a day I’ve had, Marion. What a most interesting and unusual day,” she said, sipping whiskey. “More murders. More business. And a most interesting man. A deputy U.S. Marshal named Joseph Longtree. A fascinating man. What? Oh, don’t act like that, I assure you he means nothing to me…”
12
Deputy Bowes watched the sheriff come in and was glad to see the man was sober for a change. “Another one?” he said.
Lauters sat behind his desk. “Dewey Mayhew.”
Bowes set a cup of coffee before him. “No point in asking the particulars, I guess. I know ’em all well enough by now.”
Lauters nodded. “Same three-toed prints in the snow, spur at the heel. Goddammit.”
“Should we try tracking it?”
Lauters didn’t answer. He stared off into space, his lips moving with silent words. He sipped a third of his coffee away and opened the bottom drawer. He took out the fifth of rye, pulled the cork with his teeth, and poured some in his coffee. “Any excitement tonight?” he asked, wincing as the liquor settled in his belly.
“Not too much. Got a miner by the name of Ezra Wholesome in lock-up.”
“Wholesome?”
Bowes scratched his beard, grinning. “Yeah. Lost five hundred to the house over at Ruby’s. Wouldn’t pay. Pulled his iron.”
Lauters looked up. “Any shooting?”
“No, I talked him out of it.”
Bowes was good. You had to give him that. Lauters never once regretted signing the man on. He had an innate gift for soothing the savage beast, cooling hot blood with carefully-chosen words. He could talk sense to gunmen and crazy injuns with equal ease. Lauters figured he could’ve charmed the habit off a nun.
“You wanna tell me about it?” Bowes said.
The sheriff nodded. “Mayhew was alive when I got there.”
“What did he say?” Bowes asked this intently.
Lauters told him. Then told him what the blacksmith, Rikers, had seen. “Devil, he said. Looked like the Devil.” Lauters drank straight from the bottle now. “Goddamn Devil. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Bowes shrugged. “You think there’s anything to it?”
Lauters shrugged. “Hell if I know. Tomorrow, I’m gonna have Johnson over at the paper print up some bounty posters. It’ll draw some professional hunters in. Couldn’t hurt.”
“It didn’t make any moves against Rikers?”
“Not a one. He came out there with his lantern, frightened it off. Lucky to be alive, I suppose.”