Karen Mercury (10 page)

“What did the message say?” Foster asked, thankfully uncaring about the cats.

“That he’d be here later today. So try and stay close to Vancouver House, could you? I really feel, Foster, that Caleb can help find out what happened to Phineas. How she died in the river.”

“If he was really psychic,” said Worth, “wouldn’t he be able to send us a psychic message instead of coming in person?”

Tabitha smiled secretively to herself, thinking about Bettina and Pierre. “Maybe he already has. I’ll leave you two men to your…your washing,” she said and left the bathroom.

She shut the door behind her, as it led onto the main downstairs hallway where Jeremiah or anyone else was liable to wander. But the last thing she had a good eyeful of was Foster smiling brilliantly at her, dignified, his forest green eyes shining.

* * * *

Worth fingered the photographic plate Tabitha had handed to him. Tabitha said it depicted her sister Ivy, Laramie’s telegraph operator, and her husband Neil, Laramie’s marshal. Yet there was a third, sort of transparent fellow, much shorter than Neil and sporting a derby. He was translucent, as though he had moved during the exposure.

“This is what I mean about Harley’s photography,” said Tabitha, pointing to the derby fellow. “This fellow wasn’t even
in
the room when he made the photograph.”

Worth looked at her with wonder. “How…”

Tabitha nodded curtly. “I know. How can that be, right? Now look at this photograph Harley made.”

The photograph was of the interior of a saloon. A fellow stood behind the bar proudly, showing off his rows of gleaming bottles. A dour, sharp-featured woman stood next to him, brandishing a jug of booze as though about to brain him with it.

“And?” Worth prompted. “Was one of these people not really there either?”

“Right,” said Tabitha. “The woman. She was a spirit from beyond the grave, helping them to solve a murder.”

Jeremiah shuddered. “Looks like she was about to
commit
a murder.”

Tabitha smiled. She looked like an angel when she smiled—an angel with pretty little beaver teeth. “I think that was her intention.”

Jeremiah spread out his hands. “Well, I’m having no part in this. I haven’t seen anything ghostly since I stopped taking that whiskey-root cactus, and I intend to keep it that way. Well, up until I saw your ghost dog, Mr. Richmond. I am going to return to Tibbles House to assist Derrick Spiro with his legislative—
oh, jumping Jupiter!
”

Worth laughed. The giant dog had suddenly appeared behind Montreal Jed. It looked as though she poked him in the seat with her nose, he leaped so vigorously like one of his marionettes. Clutching Foster’s arm, Jeremiah squealed, “Git! Go on,
git
, you ghost dog!”

Worth shook Jeremiah by the shoulder. “We need her for the photograph. Now, I want you all to pose over by that window.” He pointed at the parlor window where squares of bright direct sun would not obliterate their figures. Bouncing instead off a bookcase, the sunlight would only light up their faces. “Stand to the side of the window, since I won’t be including it in the photograph.”

Worth inserted the sensitized plate into the camera’s plate holder while his friends arranged themselves stiffly next to the window. Worth racked the lens back and forth until it focused on the ground glass. He wasn’t too worried about having been caught by Tabitha in a compromising position. Unlike Foster, who seemed to worry about everything, Worth was a carefree fellow.

“Can you make Phineas stand?” Phineas seemed to hear him, and from her position sitting in front of Foster, she stood proudly in profile, gloating like a swell. “And stop looking like such stiffs. Montreal Jed, you look like a ghoul.” Jeremiah was pressing himself so far into the wall to stay away from the dog, he seemed intent on popping out the other side.

“Well,” sniffed Jeremiah, “maybe
I
won’t show up in the final photograph either.”

“Try to relax,” Worth advised. “Act natural.”

This admonition only seemed to tighten up Foster, though. While Tabitha leaned into the much taller man and loosely crossed her arms in front of her abdomen, Foster grimaced like a bank robber having his photograph taken before execution.
Well, well. This will be an interesting photograph, indeed
.

“All right. Don’t move.” Worth pushed the shutter release and held it for a count of ten seconds. “OK. You can move now.”

“Oh,
thank God!
” Jeremiah cried and strode to the camera, shaking his hands as though he was covered with spiders.

Foster exhaled mightily in a whoosh, as though he’d been holding his breath. When Worth looked back to their little tableau, the only figure remaining at the window was Tabitha. Phineas had disappeared, and Foster was at the sideboard pouring a whiskey. While Worth removed the plate from the camera, Tabitha cried,

“Oh, look! Phineas is out in the garden playing with another dog!”

Foster strode over without his whiskey, even putting a protective hand on Tabitha’s back. “That’s not a dog. That’s a
wolf!
”

As much as Worth wanted to see the wolf, he had to get the plate into Harley’s darkroom to rinse it. He had taken stock of the darkroom earlier, so he poured and rinsed quickly, then immersed the plate in a tub of potassium cyanide before returning to the parlor.

Worth looked over Tabitha’s head. “Yes, that’s a wolf,” he agreed.

“And they’re
playing!
” Tabitha cried. “Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Not really,” said Jeremiah, who had allowed himself to peek one eye out the window at the diabolical sight. “Once you’ve seen a bear wrestler throwing snowballs at a lynch mob, you’ve seen it all.”

“And those jesters cavorting on your knees,” Foster reminded him.

“Yes. Those were vexing. This wolf is really no big hill of beans compared to that.”

Sure enough, out on the lawn, Phineas was romping happily with an enormous white wolf. The wolf’s fur gleamed richly in the full summer sun, and Phineas’s fur seemed to flow over her muscles as she got up on her hind legs and wrestled happily, drool flying.

Tabitha opened the window and leaned on the sill. “Funny. Can you hear only the wolf gnarling? Phineas doesn’t seem to make any sound.”

“Yes,” said Foster. “The only sound I’ve heard Ghost Phineas make is those woofs to alert us of something. She doesn’t snarl or burp or even seem to breathe. Her toenails make no noise on the floorboards.”

Worth asked the scout, “Have you ever seen a wolf playing? With a breed other than its own, I mean. I haven’t.”

“Neither have I. They seem to be having fun, though. And the wolf can hardly hurt Phineas when she doesn’t really have a body.”

All at once, though, as though the wolf suddenly became aware it was playing with a human’s pet, the wolf froze, its tail puffy. A ridge of fur arose up its spine, and suddenly it turned tail and ran. Poor Phineas was left standing there, cocking her head in wonder.

“What happened?” cried Tabitha. “It looked as though the wolf suddenly became afraid.”

“Yes,” said a calm male voice in the room behind them. All four spectators froze, their eyeballs on the big black dog. The voice continued casually, “The wolf suddenly realized Phineas is no longer of this plane. He became afraid and ran off.”

Jeremiah was the first to turn, petrified like a cigar store Indian, and face the stranger in the parlor. “Now who in the world—” he started, but immediately his eyes rolled up into his skull and he collapsed in a heap on the floor.

The fellow in the parlor looked like some albino Indians Foster had seen. His skin was white as china, almost translucent in its cadaverous, papery quality, as though you could see through it to bones. But his curly, shiny hair was a changeable mixture of red, brown, and silver streaks so bright it almost hurt the eyes.

And his features didn’t seem Indian. His round button eyes were pert and gentle, his forehead broad and well-developed. He didn’t have the elegant, flowery accent of any Indian, either. He spoke just like a white man from back East. Only he was clad in a buffalo robe painted with representations of Indians slaying bison, and his headdress of eagle quills and ermine skins gave him the status of a medicine man. He brought to Foster’s mind those berdache Indian fellows who were neither men nor women.

As Foster himself ran about clad in buckskin and moccasins, he could hardly find fault with this fellow, who he reckoned was the visionary Caleb Poindexter. Although Foster would never have stooped to such native depths as to wear two small bison skulls slung on thongs over his shoulders, like Caleb did. Leave the Indians to their Indian stuff, that was his motto. There was particularly no sense in pretending to be one when they would soon be wiped off the face of the earth.

“You must be Bettina,” said Caleb, addressing Tabitha without extending a hand.

Foster had no idea why Caleb would call Tabitha “Bettina,” but it obviously created great anxiety in the poor woman. She clutched at her own throat and said, “No, I’m Tabitha Hudson, Liberty’s sister. What makes you think I’m Bettina? Where did you get that name?”

“Oh, forgive me,” said Caleb, closing his eyes in apology. “Sometimes I get my visions mixed up.” He laughed, a charming sight that seemed to put everyone at ease. “You can understand my confusion when it’s difficult to tell so-called ‘reality’ from so-called ‘unreality.’ I spend half my lifetime in the latter.”

Now Tabitha grabbed handfuls of Caleb’s bison robe. “But who is Bettina?”

Caleb took her hands in his, and instantly Tabitha seemed a bit soothed. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of. I had a vision of you as a Bettina, I believe her surname was Badeaux, after I received your note asking me to come by. I had the impression she was lovelorn, pining for her husband who was away at sea.”

Tabitha clutched the visionary’s white hands. “Yes, yes! I had the same vision! Can you tell me more about Bettina? All I could discern is that she lives in a place called Campeche.”

“Yes,” said Caleb, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. “Campeche was what her husband named their plantation near the Port of Galveston. Texas,” he clarified.

What was all this flapdoodle? Foster didn’t want to interrupt since Tabitha seemed absolutely entranced with this information. She gushed, “Yes, that would make sense. Bettina wrote that there were often hurricanes there. What else do you know about her?”

“I know that her husband Pierre died in 1821 in Campeche the day they were finally reunited after a long separation,” Caleb said serenely.

Foster started smoking. How dare this cracked swellhead come literally barging in here and upset Tabitha about dead husbands all over again? Next, Tabitha would be asking Caleb if there was any message from her own dead husband. “Listen,” Foster boiled, “what does this have to do with anything? We asked you here to tell us about my dead dog, who you obviously just now saw in the
back
garden playing with the wolf, so you were obviously lurking in the bushes to begin with. What kind of hogwash is this about some French people in Texas?”

“I want to know, Foster,” said Tabitha, rattling Caleb by his bison robe. “Caleb, please tell me! What is the significance of us having these visions? What do the lives of Bettina and Pierre Badeaux have to do with us, with the present?”

Caleb said, “I believe these memories of a past life are bursting through the veil right now because you’ve just become reacquainted with Pierre Badeaux.”

Tabitha released Caleb and looked around the room. It seemed to take her many long moments to realize what had immediately struck Foster.
I am Pierre Badeaux
. Her bright sapphire eyes shined with what looked like tears, and her mouth went slack.

“My husband is bringing me a message…” she murmured to herself.

Suddenly Foster, too, was eager to know more. He clapped a palm onto Caleb’s shoulder. “Why was Pierre away at sea? Was he some kind of fearless and gallant privateer?”

Caleb said, “Actually, that
is
the impression I get, although it’s never spelled out for me in plain English. It’s always more like…
impressions
I get, visions of people doing things. Very rarely does a dead person come right up to me and say ‘Caleb, tell Rusty Pipes to watch out for that leaky roof.’”

“Yeah”— Worth chuckled—“‘Foster Richmond, keep your eyes skinned for ghostly spirit dogs.’”

“‘Montreal Jed,’” said Montreal Jed weakly, from his pile of limbs on the floor, “‘don’t ever play with a talking board.’” Everyone looked at him as he pulled himself to a sitting position using the rungs of a chair. “You know,
that
would have been a nice warning, Tabitha, before you ever took that stupid board off the shelf. We wouldn’t be in such an absurd predicament now.” He continued muttering as Worth assisted him to stand. “Sunflowers appearing out of the clear blue sky, dogs named Phineas, photographs of spirits bashing people over the head with jugs of forty-rod… It’s necromancy, I tell you! Raising the dead! It goes against all laws of nature to solicit such fiendish events.”