High Country Horror (8 page)

Helsa Chatterly pursed her ruby lips and tapped her red fingernails on the table. “What am I to do with you?”

“Anything you want.”

“I’m a lady.”

“Ladies have wants too.”

“You can’t prove that by me.”

Fargo was about to say that he thought he could when someone knocked on the front door.

“I wonder who that can be. I’m not expecting visitors.” Helsa moved past him. “Excuse me a moment.”

Fargo grunted and drained his coffee cup. He hoped it wasn’t the farm-implement salesman. He got up to refill his cup and was by the stove when Helsa returned. She wasn’t alone.

The woman behind her gave the impression of being older than her years. Gray streaked her limp hair and she walked with a stoop yet she had few wrinkles and her eyes, although pools of sorrow, were those of someone half her age. She wore homespun and old shoes and she nervously wrung her hands.

“Mr. Fargo, I’d like you to meet Mrs. Griffith. Susannah Griffith. She very much would like to talk to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Go ahead,” Helsa urged when the other woman hesitated.

“If you don’t mind,” Susannah Griffith responded, “I’d like to talk to him in private.”

“Oh. Naturally. How remiss of me.” Helsa backed from the kitchen, saying, “I’ll be in the parlor knitting when you’re done.”

Susannah Griffith stood watching until Helsa was out of sight; then she came around the table and over to the stove and lowered her voice. “I apologize for coming to see you out of the blue.”

To Fargo it hardly mattered. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

“Is it true you’re working with Marshal Tibbit to try and find the monster who is taking our women? The Ghoul?”

“Word spreads fast in a town this size.”

“I don’t live in town, I live on a farm outside it.” Susannah glanced at the hall. “Does the name Griffith mean anything to you?”

“Can’t say as it does, no.”

“You would think that marshal of ours would have told you.” Susannah muttered under her breath, then revealed, “My daughter was the second to disappear. Tamar, her name is. Or was, since I fear she’s long since dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Fargo said to be polite.

“Almost nine months ago, it was. Hard to believe, the time flies so fast, but Tamar is all I think of, each and every minute of every day. I can’t get her out of my head.”

“That’s to be expected,” Fargo said, although he felt nine months was a long time to drown in grief.

“My husband and I hardly talk anymore. He took to the bottle, after, and hasn’t come out since. Most nights, like this one, he drinks himself into a stupor early and I have to put him to bed.”

“You still haven’t said what I can do for you.”

Susannah Griffith looked toward the hall. Then, to Fargo’s surprise, she unbuttoned the front of her dress and slipped a hand in and pulled out a leather purse. Jingling it, she said, “This is why I’ve come.”

“I don’t savvy,” Fargo confessed.

“There’s eighty dollars in here. All I have in the world. I’m offering it to you as payment.”

“For what?”

“I’ve been told you are a seasoned scout, and tough as rawhide. It could be that you’ll succeed where our feeble excuse for a lawman has so spectacularly failed. It could be you’ll catch whoever took my sweet Tamar.”

“I still don’t savvy what you want for your money.”

“It’s simple.” Susannah swiped at a gray bang and whispered, “I don’t want you to bring him in alive.”

“Ma’am?”

“Do I have to spell it out? If you catch him, kill him. Come see me after the deed is done and the eighty dollars is yours.”

All the years Fargo had been playing poker paid off; he didn’t let his emotions show. “You hate him that much?”

Susannah Griffith’s face contorted like a bobcat’s about to rend prey to the bone. “I hate him more than I hate anything. He took my Tamar. I’d kill him myself if I knew who it was. This way, you do it for both of us and no one is the wiser.”

“Except me.”

“Are you saying you have scruples?”

“I’m saying that if he’s unarmed or gives up or throws himself at my feet and begs me to spare him, I can’t earn your money.”

Susannah thought she understood. “In that case all you have to do is provoke him and claim it was self-defense. No one will hold it against you, and since it will be your word against his, no one can prove otherwise.”

“More good citizens than I know what to do with,” Fargo said.

“Will you or won’t you?”

“I will if I have to.”

“That’s not good enough. Yes or no?” Susannah demanded. When Fargo didn’t answer she grabbed his hand and shoved the purse in it. “Take the money now if that’s what it will take to persuade you. I want him dead, you hear me? I want him dead like my Tamar is dead.”

Fargo tried to give the purse back but she pushed it away.

“Listen,” Susannah said, and leaned in so that her lips practically brushed his ear. “I know something no one else does. Something I’ve never told my husband or the marshal. Something that might help you.”

“Why tell me and not anyone else?”

“Because it would drive my husband deeper into the bottle and I can’t trust Tibbit not to let the secret out.” Susannah bit her bottom lip. “It’s not the kind of thing you want to get around. It’s about Tamar. She—” Susannah stopped and closed her eyes and trembled as if she were cold, or deathly afraid.

“Here,” Fargo said. He guided her to a chair and eased her down. “Anything I can get you? Coffee? Water?”

“No.” Susannah bowed her head. “God, this is hard. I’ve kept it in so long and here I am confiding in a stranger.” She gripped his wrist, her nails digging deep. “I want your word. I want your solemn promise that this will be between you and me and no one else.”

“You have it.” Fargo had to admit he would like to learn what had upset her so deeply.

“My Tamar. She was the sweetest girl you’d ever want to meet but she wasn’t—” Susannah groaned, took a deep breath, and said in a rush, “She wasn’t pure.”

“Pure?”

“You know.”

The revelation tore one of Fargo’s earlier hunches to shreds. He sat down across from her. “Your daughter slept around?”

Susannah’s head snapped up and she looked ready to bite him. “Goodness gracious, no. What do you take her for? What do you take
me
for? She didn’t sleep with a lot of men. Only one. She was in love, or thought she was. I caught her sneaking out one night and threatened to tell her pa if she didn’t tell me where she was off to.” Susannah put a hand over her eyes and her shoulders slumped. “I figured she was traipsing off to see one of the neighbor boys. But it was worse than that. A lot worse.”

“She was going to see a girl?”

Again Susannah’s head snapped up. “God Almighty, the things that come out of your mouth.”

“Then what?” Fargo asked. The answer hit him even as he asked the question.

“She was going to meet a man. A
married
man.”

Fargo stared.

“That’s right. My precious Tamar took up with a man who had a wife. The shame of it cut me to the quick.” Susannah gripped her chair as if afraid she would fall off. “I tried to make her see sense. I talked myself blue in the face but she refused to listen. She said that he loved her as much as she loved him and when the time was right he was going to leave his wife for her.”

One of the oldest lies around, Fargo reflected, and the girl had fallen for it.

“I tried to find out who the man was,” Susannah continued. “I asked and pried and snooped in her room but there was never a clue. All she would say was that he was handsome and a gentleman.” Susannah snorted in derision. “The vermin seduced my little baby and she called him a gentleman.”

“How long had she been seeing him?”

“Tamar wouldn’t say,” Susannah said. “She clamped up and gave me that look of hers that told me wild horses couldn’t drag it out of her. I was worried sick. ‘What if you become pregnant?’ I asked her. She said the man promised to leave his wife right away if that happened and they would go off together to live happily ever after. Her exact words. Happily ever after. What do you think of that?”

Fargo had learned long ago that people were as stupid as they wanted to be and nothing anyone could say could change them. “It’s too bad you couldn’t find out who it was.”

“I know. I know,” Susannah sadly agreed. “You can imagine my predicament. I was the only one who knew her secret. My husband went on with his daily routine, thinking everything was fine, and I didn’t dare confide in him. It would have destroyed him to think his pride and joy could stoop so low.”

“And then she disappeared,” Fargo said.

“Yes.” Susannah grimaced with inner hurt. “I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse but it did. She vanished. We searched and searched. Our neighbors helped and townsmen came and Marshal Tibbit organized them, the one thing he’s done right. But there was no trace of Tamar anywhere.” She looked at Fargo. Tears had formed at the corners of her eyes and were trickling down her cheeks. “I didn’t know what to think. Was the married man to blame? Or was it whoever took the first girl, Felicity? And then when those other girls went missing—” She stopped and shook her head. “It’s all so confusing.”

“It seems to be,” Fargo said.

Susannah wiped her face with her sleeve. “Then I heard about you and here I am. Will you accept the money or not?”

“Not,” Fargo said, and slid the purse across to her.

“You
do
have scruples.”

“I’m not a paid assassin.”

“I just hate to think he might get away with it. That Tibbit will arrest him and he’ll go on trial and maybe they’ll put him in prison instead of being strung up by the neck as he should be.”

“I’ll do what needs doing,” Fargo said. Beyond that, he wasn’t willing to make a promise he might not be able to keep.

“If that’s how it has to be.” Susannah took the purse and slowly rose, a portrait in misery. “I had such high hopes.”

Fargo walked around and gently gripped her arms. When she raised her head he looked her in the eyes and said again, “I’ll do what needs doing. On that you can count.”

“Oh,” Susannah said, and then again, more happily, “Oh. I see. In that case you’re still welcome to the money.”

“No, thanks.” Fargo ushered her down the hall. As they came to the parlor Helsa met them and escorted Susannah the rest of the way. Fargo returned to the kitchen, refilled his coffee cup, and sat at the table, pondering.

Helsa came back. She filled her cup and claimed a chair and stared at him as if expecting him to say something. When he didn’t, she said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Care to share what the two of you were talking about? I was polite and didn’t listen but I would dearly love to know.”

“She wouldn’t want me to say.”

Helsa sipped and set the cup down and folded her fingers around it. “She said an interesting thing as she was leaving.”

“About?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yes. She looked back and said, and I’ll quote her, ‘He’s a good man, that Skye Fargo.’ You must have impressed her.”

Fargo shrugged.

“Goodness, you talk a body’s ears off.”

Fargo sat back. A notion had occurred to him, and he said, “I’ve got a question for you about the first girl, Felicity.”

“You won’t answer mine but you expect me to answer yours?”

“Is there any chance she might have taken up with a married man before she disappeared?”

It was Helsa’s turn to sit back. “So that’s what Susannah confided in you.” She tapped her cup. “I don’t know. Felicity was attractive, and headstrong. It’s possible, I suppose.” Her brow knit with recollection. “And now that I think of it, my husband was awful secretive about whatever he found out before he disappeared. He mentioned once that he had an idea who was to blame but when I pressed him he wouldn’t say anything except that if he was right it was despicable.” She looked at Fargo. “My God. You don’t think a married man is going around seducing our young girls and then murdering them?”

“Never put anything past anyone,” Fargo said.

“Is that your outlook on life? God, how cynical. If I believed like you do, I’d go around all day in the dumps.”

“I have the cure up in my room and my invite still holds.”

“About having a drink with you? I thought you’d forgotten, what with Susannah’s visit.”

“Some women say it is all men ever think about,” Fargo replied, and grinned.

“After what you said about a married man, I could use a drink. But just one,” Helsa cautioned. “And I want you to promise that you’ll behave yourself. Your solemn word.”

“You have it,” Fargo lied.

Fargo sat on the bed and Helsa Chatterly sat in the chair. She’d brought two glasses and he had filled them halfway. Now she was studying him over her glass. He pretended not to notice and gazed out the window at a patch of sky sprinkled with stars.

“You puzzle me.”

“Works both ways,” Fargo said.

“I puzzle you too?” Helsa downed the whiskey without bat-ting an eyelash. “In what regard? I’m a widow who runs a boardinghouse. My life couldn’t be any simpler.”

“You’re a good-looking widow who runs a boardinghouse. And good-looking women usually have a man around.”

“My husband was murdered a year ago,” Helsa reminded him sharply. “Which you seem to keep forgetting.”

“A year ago,” Fargo said.

“More than enough time to cope with my grief. Is that what you’re suggesting?” Helsa tipped the glass to her lips. “Some of us take longer than others.”

“It must be lonely.”

Helsa emptied her glass and held out her hand for the bottle. Instead of refilling the glass, she swilled straight from it, several long swallows. She didn’t give the bottle back. “Damn you.”