Holmes on the Range Read online

  “Oh.” Old Red gave my arms a squeeze, then took his hands away. “That’s a shame about Brick.”

  “So,” I said, “have you got everything Holmesed out?”

  My brother nodded, suddenly looking downright cheerful. “Everything. Well, except who was in the office with Boudreaux the other night.”

  I smiled back at him—until his words sank in. “You mean. . . everything except who killed Boo?”

  “Shhhh. Not so loud.”

  He spun on his heel and hustled down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  “Gustav! What—?”

  My brother stopped, shushed me again, then opened the door to the room next to the office.

  “Perkins’s bedroom—just the way he left it,” he said. “Looks comfortable.”

  He continued down the hall, and I caught up just as he pulled open the next door.

  “Well, now,” he said. “Comfortable this ain’t.”

  A small chest of drawers was jammed into one corner of the tiny room, and from the comb and brush and other feminine sundries scattered about, it was obvious who’d made her quarters here.

  “Poor Emily—shoved into this matchbox when there’s a room twice as big one door over,” Old Red said. He pointed to the bed—little more than a cot barely as long or as wide as Emily herself. “No, that’d never do, would it?”

  “I don’t guess a maid’s got much say in the matter.”

  “It ain’t the maid I’m thinkin’ of.”

  Before I could take a step down that trail, my brother slapped his hands together and gave them a rub.

  “Alright—can’t keep ‘em waitin’ any longer.”

  “Well, maybe you should if you still don’t know—”

  But Gustav wasn’t listening. He’d already spun around and headed back up the hall. I followed him feeling like a bull in a stampede—I didn’t know where we were going, and it was too late to stop us from going there.

  When we stepped into the office, we found Lady Clara and Edwards seated upon the ottoman, with Brackwell leaning one buckskin-clad shoulder against the wall nearby. The Duke had wedged himself into the chair behind Perkins’s desk, and Uly had snagged the chair on the other side—much to Jack Martin’s obvious annoyance. He and Spider were standing on either side of the window. Emily was over near Martin, having apparently been escorted in before Old Red and Lady Clara stepped outside to fetch us.

  Gustav closed the door and gave me a stay here look that kept my substantial bulk planted in front of it. Then he walked to the center of the room and set loose a herd of words so massive it almost brought his lifetime head count up around mine.

  There was a glow to him as he spoke that was totally unlike the crabby, quiet Gustav I’d known so well for so long. I think it was pure joy that lit him up so, as strange as that may sound given our predicament. He’d been following the trail blazed by his hero, Sherlock Holmes, and now he was but a hop, skip, and a jump from its end.

  “Alright then,” he said. “I guess it would be best to begin at the beginning, but this matter’s so kinked up it’s hard to even say where the beginning begins. So I’ll just pick it up with yesterday mornin’: We found Boudreaux in the privy with a bullet in his brain. The gentlemen here let me look into how it got there, and it’s a good thing they did, too. Cuz after talkin’ to folks, I stumbled across what you might call an irregularity about Boudreaux’s death. The boys out yonder in the bunkhouse heard the gunshot right around dawn. But our guests here in the house heard it, too—only they say it was hours earlier, in the middle of the night. I turned that over and turned that over and turned it till it wouldn’t turn again. But I couldn’t make any sense of it till I realized the answer was so simple I shouldn’t have wasted a heartbeat’s time huntin’ for it.”

  Gustav paused and looked around, waiting for someone to dare an explanation. No one took the bait. My brother ended his survey of the room facing me.

  “Tell ‘em, Otto,” he said. “Assumin’ nobody’s lyin’, how is it folks in two different places could hear the same gunshot at two different times?”

  I stared back at Old Red, wondering why he’d gone out of his way to humble me by putting me on the spot.

  “Well,” I said, and the second I opened my mouth it came to me that I wasn’t on the spot at all. My lips stretched into a grin, and Gustav grinned back at me.

  He hadn’t thrown that question my way because I couldn’t figure out the answer. Just the opposite. He was filled with faith that I could.

  “It’s obvious, ain’t it?” I said. “They weren’t hearin’ the same shot at different times. . .because they weren’t hearin’ the same shot at all.”

  My brother gave me a wink, then packed away his smile as he swiveled around to face everyone else again.

  “Exactly. There were two gunshots—the earlier one closer to the big house, the later one closer to the bunkhouse. The hands didn’t pay any mind to the one they heard, as Mr. Brackwell made a habit of early-mornin’ target practice. But it’s harder to figure why our guests wouldn’t react to such a noise. Visitors from parts East are usually looking for Cheyenne braves under their beds, yet nobody so much as poked a head out after hearing a bang in the dead of night.”

  “It was more of a thump than a bang,” Edwards said. “It didn’t sound like a—”

  Gustav silenced him with a raised hand. “I’ll get to that. Bang or thump, no one stepped out to investigate. Well, with a little cogitation I could think of a reason for each and every person to keep to their beds. Lady Clara—she’s been known to dabble in affairs usually fenced off to those of her gender, yet she still might leave any actual danger to servants and menfolk. As for them, Mr. Edwards had his bad back, and Mr. Brackwell . . .” Old Red shrugged apologetically at our young friend. “I do believe he was drunk as a skunk.”

  Brackwell returned an embarrassed shrug of his own that said, True enough.

  “As for the Duke,” Gustav went on, “I suspect he was. . .let’s say ‘entertaining a visitor.’ ”

  I puzzled over which “visitor” Old Red might mean until I realized he’d skipped someone who’d been in the house that night—Emily. That brought to mind his comment about the size of her cot. And then there was her gossip about the St. Simon family’s habit of dallying with the hired help, not to mention the deep sleep from which it was so hard to rouse the Duke.

  My brother turned toward the maid now, and though he said nothing, his eyes blazed a question at her.

  “I. . .I. . .,” she stammered before pursing her lips up tight. She said no more, but the blush that came to her round cheeks spoke loud enough.

  “You disgusting insect!” the Duke spat, hoisting his girth halfway from his chair. No doubt he had more names for my brother, but he didn’t get a chance to sling any of them on account of Edwards, who took the extraordinary step of interrupting the old man.

  “Why should it matter who was doing what inside the house?”

  “Because that’s where Boudreaux was murdered,” Old Red replied. “Here in this very room, in fact.”

  The Duke was struck dumb, and it was left to Edwards to blurt out “Preposterous!” for the both of them. The McPhersons threw out their own protests, Uly’s being “Hogwash!” and Spider’s a less genteel “Bull-shit!”

  “Nope, it ain’t preposterous or hogwash either one,” Gustav said, ignoring Spider’s contribution to the discussion. “Jack, you get a whiff of the powder burn, don’t you? Our guests might not have the nose to pick it out, but surely you can.”

  Martin’s nose twitched like a hare’s. “Well, I’ll be damned,” the lawman mumbled before he could stop himself.

  “If you need more convincin’,” Old Red said to Edwards, “there’s a bloodstain about one foot beneath your behind.”

  Edwards bent to look underneath the ottoman. His back was obviously still paining him, for his doughy face twisted into a grimace. The Duke, Martin, and Uly all leaned forward to get a better look at the
rug, as well.

  “That stain could be months old!” the Duke hollered.

  “Looks like ink to me,” said Uly.

  “He put it there himself!” Edwards declared.

  Gustav sighed.

  “Amlingmeyer didn’t make the stain,” Brackwell said, finally speaking up from his perch against the wall. “I was here when he found it.”

  “It makes no difference,” the Duke shot back. He had his teeth sunk into that two hundred pounds like a Gila monster on a fellow’s foot, and he wasn’t going to let go. “This proves nothing.”

  “It don’t?” Gustav countered with a little chuckle that turned the old man’s already flushed face beet red. “I’d say it proves Boudreaux was killed by somebody here in the house.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Edwards, his eyes going droopy behind his spectacles, as if humoring my brother had him all tuckered out. “A stain on the rug? A scent most of us can’t even smell? Please.”

  “Oh, there’s more proof than that. You’ve seen it already, Mr. Edwards.”

  Suddenly, Edwards’s eyes weren’t quite so droopy.

  “Of course, it’s under about eight feet of water now, but all we need’s a rope and a hook to drag it up,” Old Red continued. “When a valise and an iron go missin’ right before a feller with a boogered-up back drags himself out for a nine-mile buggy ride, all so he can ‘picnic’ next to a pond . . .well, it hardly requires any deducin’ at all, does it? I assume there’s a freshly fired derringer and a couple bloody pillows in that handbag, too.”

  Edwards barked out a mirthless laugh of disbelief. “Are you actually accusing me?”

  Old Red shrugged. “I ain’t the one doin’ the accusin’, exactly. Lady Clara just about spooned the whole thing on my plate for me.”

  “She what?” the Duke roared, whipping around to face his daughter.

  She ignored him, instead fixing Edwards with a deep, unblinking gaze—a look of devotion mixed with regret.

  “When Amlingmeyer came to me a little while ago, he told me he had suspicions about your buggy ride yesterday—and about my motivations in asking that the wager be abandoned. He was”—the lady’s long, dark lashes fluttered, and her eyes flicked toward my brother for an instant—”extremely persistent. I finally had to admit that I knew more than I’d said.”

  Her eyes took on a shimmery shine as tears welled up and threatened to streak across her pale skin.

  “There were two gunshots. I heard the second one, as well. It was faint, but I was already beginning to awaken, and the noise was enough to draw me to the window. And I saw you, George—I saw you running back to the house. When that man’s body was found, I prayed that it wasn’t what it appeared. But I couldn’t be sure. And when Amling-meyer told me his theories. . .told me where you went yesterday. . .”

  Edwards shook his head slowly. But the bellowed protests for which I steeled myself never emerged. His expression changed, righteous indignation giving way to something like relief.

  “There’s no use lying anymore,” he said. “Yes. . .I killed that man.”

  The words were like buckets of water sloshed in our faces, and everyone came spluttering to life to gasp or mutter curses or blurt out “What?” The exceptions were Old Red, who took in Edwards’s words with an unnatural calm, and Lady Clara, who was still fighting to keep her tears in her eyes and not on her face.

  My brother said something I couldn’t catch through the commotion. It must have been “Tell us what happened,” for that’s what Edwards proceeded to do.

  “The pain in my back kept me from sleeping, so I came downstairs. We’d been reviewing the Cantlemere’s books, and as long as I was awake I thought I’d go through a few more files. I’d been here perhaps thirty minutes when that ghoulish-looking Negro walked in—pointing a gun. He wanted jewels, cash, anything valuable. And he. . .well. . .” Edwards’s expression turned sour, as if the next words were too bitter to hold in his mouth. “He demanded to know which rooms the women were in.”

  Brackwell and Martin frowned and shook their heads, and the Duke muttered, “Animal!” The men’s reaction seemed to boost Edwards’s confidence, and he continued his tale with more dramatic dash.

  “I knew I had to act. I wasn’t facing a mere thief. I was facing a fiend. Fortunately, I wasn’t as helpless as the blackguard assumed. I had with me a gift from the Duke—a derringer pistol. I concocted some folderol about a safe in the desk, and when the Negro walked around to take a look, I ‘got the drop on him,’ as the cow-boys say. I had no choice but to shoot, for it was plainly his life or mine in the balance.”

  “Of course,” the Duke assured him. “Bully for you, Edwards!”

  “Thank you, Your Grace. But I couldn’t be sure everyone would be so understanding. Law in the West is a capricious business. Every day, murderers are set free because their neighbors refuse to convict them, while honest cattlemen can’t raise a finger against ‘rustlers’ lest they be lynched by some bloodthirsty mob. There could be no ‘jury of my peers’ for a gentleman like myself. If the man I’d killed was well-liked, if he had enough friends, allowing myself to stand trial would be suicide.”

  “You needn’t have worried about that, mister,” Martin said. “A man like yourself shoots a thievin’ nigger? Nobody’d blink an eye.”

  “I wish I’d known that two days ago,” Edwards said. “But I didn’t, so I moved to protect myself. When no one came to the office to investigate the gunshot, I knew I had a chance to hide what I’d done. I decided to leave the body someplace outside—hopefully, it wouldn’t be discovered until we’d left the Cantlemere. But before I got far, I saw the ranch cook heading toward the house. I had to hide the corpse quickly. I threw it into the outhouse, slipped around the side, and waited for the man to leave. Once he was gone, I discovered to my dismay that the outhouse door was stuck. Fortunately, I was able to keep my wits about me, and I soon had a new plan.”

  Whereas Edwards had begun reeling out his story mournfully, with an air of guilt about him, by now he was talking fast and with obvious pride.

  “I would leave a gun with the body, and everyone would assume the man had shot himself. I couldn’t leave my own, of course—it would be recognized as one of the derringers His Grace had given to his traveling companions. But I was in luck. While going through Perkins’s drawers earlier, I discovered that he kept a derringer of his own. There was one problem, however: It hadn’t been used. I had no choice but to fire a shot, slide the gun through the ventilation hole in the outhouse door, and run for the house as quickly as I could—which is exactly what I did. I’d already cleaned up the blood with pillows from the closet upstairs, so the next step was to cover the smell of gunpowder that lingered in the room. I attempted to do so by building the biggest blaze I could in the fireplace. After that, I had to dispose of the pillows and the gun, which I did on my ‘picnic.’ All the while, I played along with the Duke’s wager as a show of confidence. It was pure bluff, as was my later change of heart.”

  “Ingenious!” the Duke exclaimed with the same chummy admiration he might use to compliment a fellow nobleman on a well-played hand of whist.

  The old man’s attitude rubbed off on Martin, who shook his head and grinned. “That was some pretty slick thinkin’, alright.”

  “Oh, yes, well done, Edwards,” Brackwell added, not sounding enthused even though he now had grounds to claim two hundred pounds from the Duke. “And well done to you, too,” he said to Gustav with considerably more sincerity.

  Old Red didn’t acknowledge the salute—his attention was focused on Edwards and Lady Clara.

  “Oh, George! If only I’d known!” the lady said, clutching his hands. “Can you ever forgive me?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Edwards replied. “All the shame in this affair is mine and mine alone.”

  Lady Clara’s tears let loose now, and Edwards wrapped an arm around her to offer comfort. That had the Duke looking mighty pleased. Though he’d just lost a smal
l fortune, it appeared he’d soon have access to a considerably larger one—through a new son-in-law.

  “Well,” Martin said cheerfully, “I’ll have to make a report when I get back to Miles, but there won’t be any need to dredge up all the ins and outs of this thing. Mr. Edwards was attacked and he defended himself. That’s that.”

  “No, Jack. That ain’t that,” Old Red sighed, looking like a fellow who’s found half a worm in his apple. “Everything we just heard is pure horseshit.”

  Thirty-six

  THE REST OF IT

  Or, The Truth Comes Out—and So Do the Guns

  Almost everyone in the room blurted out “What the hell?” or words to that effect. Not surprisingly, Edwards’s and the Duke’s protests were the loudest, the former assailing Gustav’s sanity while the latter howled and growled about my brother’s “damnable insolence.”

  “For God’s sake, let him talk!” Brackwell roared at them.

  The two older men swiveled around to stare, momentarily slack-jawed with surprise. Old Red threw himself into the resulting silence while it was still there to jump into.

  “I’d be happy to explain, but it might be best if we sent Emily along first,” he said, turning to the Duke. “I’m sure she’s got things to do, am I right?”

  His Grace gave Emily a brusque nod without looking her in the eye. She curtsied and moved slowly toward the door, her ears no doubt straining to sweep up any additional dirt they could before she left. After she’d pulled the door shut behind her, Old Red’s gaze jumped from me to the door and back again.

  Once again he wanted a roadblock in front of the exit, and once again the roadblock was to be me. I moved to the door and leaned up against it, tucking my hands casually over my gunbelt—leaving my right hand just inches from my .45.

  I figured I knew why Gustav wished Emily scooted from the room: He’d pulled from her what information he’d needed, and now he didn’t want bystanders around if things got hot. And they seemed to be warming up fast.

  Across the room was my mirror image—Spider, leaning against the wall next to the window, his hands resting on his gunbelt. Uly smiled at me from his seat, his fingers clasped loosely on his lap, ready to reach for a trigger in the blink of an eye. Martin noticed our preparations and made his own, sliding back to press himself into the wall, as if he wished to trade in his badge and take up a new career as a filing cabinet.