Witch's Canyon (25 page)
Authors: Jeff Mariotte
“We are
not
postponing the opening,” Mayor Milner insisted. He had long since moved from simply raising his voice and was at the point of outright, window-rattling yelling. Red blotches rose in his cheeks and he kept tugging at the knot of his necktie as if it was cutting off circulation to his head.
“Donald, you know I’ve done everything in my power to make sure we don’t have to,” Jim Beckett argued. He sat in a comfortable leather chair in the mayor’s office, which was decorated with Navajo and Hopi crafts and antiques—some of which, Beckett was pretty sure, had been acquired outside legal channels—and at the moment he wished he was pretty much anywhere else on the planet. “I just don’t know what else to do.”
“You can’t get the National Guard here to help out? Have you tried the governor?”
“You know we can’t call outside of town,” Beckett 232 SUPERNATURAL
said. He’d been over all this with Milner already, but the man had reached a point where he no longer saw reality for what it was. He wanted things to be his way because he willed them so, and nobody could tell him it didn’t work that way. “And we can’t drive out, either. Trace died trying.”
“So you’re telling me, what, that there’s some kind of magical barrier all around Cedar Wells? Funny, I could have sworn I saw a UPS truck drive by an hour ago. That must have come from somewhere.”
“That’s right,” Beckett said. “We’ve intercepted the driver and told him he can’t leave town until further notice. He’s not happy about it, but he tried to call his dispatcher and couldn’t get through, so he’s on board with us for the time being.” Milner picked up a small clay pot, an artifact from the ancestral Puebloans, from the edge of his desk and turned it around in his hands. “So we’ll have to put up signs on the way into town warning people that if they come in, they won’t be able to leave again? Do you have any idea what that would do to our tourist business? Not to mention the shopping center’s sales?”
“I think it’s unfair to let people come in not knowing about it,” Beckett said. “Warning them away might be bad for the town’s reputation, might even make us a laughingstock. But is that worse than letting people get trapped here and killed, when we could have kept them out?”
“You know there’s no way to get the word out, right, Jim? The mall has been advertising today’s Witch’s
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opening for weeks. Even if we could reach the local radio stations, they’d only be able to notify a fraction of the people who have seen ads and fl yers and heard about it on radio and television. But since Cedar Wells doesn’t have its own radio station, apparently we can’t even inform that many. The best we could do would be to station officers on the roads and have them wave people off before they got too close.” He put the pot down angrily, scowling at it, at Beckett, at the world in general. “Have you ever heard anything so stupid? Can you even believe we’re having this conversation?”
“I wish we weren’t, Donald.”
“Did you try satellite phones? Shortwave radio?”
“I’ve tried everything short of smoke signals, Donald.” He had considered those, but didn’t think he could count on anyone to read them. He’d even considered just lighting a huge fire and letting forest service fi refighters come in to check it out. Finally, he’d decided against that, because chances were they would just get stuck, too.
“Why couldn’t this have happened when Janie Jen-nings was mayor? I’d love to have seen her trying to deal with this sort of thing. She got off easy.”
“Every forty years, Donald. It only lasts a few days, then it’s over. By Monday, probably, everything will be back to normal.”
Milner tugged at his shirt collar. “By Monday?
How many people will be dead by then? How many lives ruined? Will the mall ever be able to attract shoppers after something like this soured its opening?” 234 SUPERNATURAL
“There’s no way to know any of those answers,” Beckett said. “And honestly, they’re not my fi rst concern.”
“Well, I’d like to know what the hell
is
your fi rst concern then, Jim.”
“Saving as many lives as I can. And so far the only way we know how to do that is to spot the killers before they reach their victims and kill them fi rst.” He didn’t point out that they had to be killed with rock salt, of which there was a sudden shortage as more people got the word. Those Winchester boys had called to tell him, and he’d told his deputies, and before long every container of it in town seemed to be spoken for.
“So either way, people are getting killed.” Beckett shook his head, astonished by the mayor’s ability to completely fail to understand the situation.
“They’re not real people, Donald. They’re . . . I don’t know, ghosts or something. But they can kill and they can be killed.”
Milner buried his ruddy face in his hands. His fi ngers were thick enough to be Ball Park franks. Beckett remembered the catch phrase and could barely suppress a hysterical giggle.
They plump when you
cook them!
“Terrific,” Milner said from behind the fl eshy cage. “You want to put up signs on the roads into town saying, ‘Closed on account of ghosts.’”
“I don’t think we need to be that specifi c,” Beckett said. “In fact, maybe we could come up with a more plausible scenario. An outbreak of some kind, or a Witch’s
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chemical spill. Something that would make people want to stay away, but that we could then announce was over, once we know the danger is past.”
“If there are any of us left to make that announcement.”
“That’s a given, Donald. And, unfortunately, it’s a real concern. We don’t know for sure how long it’ll last or if there’s any limit to the number of people they’ll go after.”
“God, I wish one of them would kill me,” Milner said, lowering his hands. “Then this would be someone else’s disaster.”
Don’t wish too loud
, Beckett thought.
It just
might come true.
Reunited with Sam and Harmon Baird, Dean took another look at the rock hidey-hole the spooks had used. No sign remained that anyone had been there—
the snow was disturbed, but only by rock salt, not by footprints or bodies.
“I’m thinkin’ spirits, for sure,” he said. “Just not ones that are like any we’ve encountered before.” He touched his raw cheek again. “And I don’t like ’em messing with my manly good looks.”
“Seems the likeliest bet,” Sam said. “Which still leaves us with the big questions of why and how do we stop them. Harmon, are you sure you can’t remember anything else about that ranch?”
“Oh, I remember lots about it,” Baird said. “Just nothing that seems like it’s connected to the forty-year.”
236 SUPERNATURAL
“Like what?” Dean pressed. “Anything might help, even if it doesn’t seem like it at fi rst.”
“Let’s get back to the car while we talk,” Sam suggested. “We need to keep an eye out for more of them, just in case.”
The others agreed, so they started crunching through the snow, back toward the road. On the way, Baird talked. “It was called the Copper Bell Ranch,” he said. “Brand was the C Circle B. I think it had some other name before that, but that’s what it was when I was growin’ up there. Outside the ranch house there was a big copper bell made outta copper from the Orphan Mine, right there below the South Rim.”
“In the national park?” Sam asked.
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t know there were any mines inside the park.”
“Not anymore. Used to be. They took copper outta the Orphan, then uranium.”
“Grand Canyon National Radioactive Park,” Dean said with a dry chuckle. “I like it.”
“Used to be,” Baird said again. “Miners’d come out after a shift and drink at the Bright Angel Lounge, right alongside the tourists. Some of ’em probably woulda set a Geiger counter to tickin’. Anyway, I don’t remember what the ranch was called before the folks who owned it when I grew up there took it over, or if it had always been the Copper Bell. But that mine didn’t get going until eighteen and ninety or thereabouts, and the ranch had been around at least forty years at that point.” Witch’s
Can
237
yon
“So the area was settled as early as 1850?” Sam asked.
“Some folks was here then. Not many. Which was why the first owner was able to claim such a big spread.
More people showed up later on, harder it got to hold onto all his land. Then the Murphys, who owned it when my folks worked there, came in and bought a piece of it. The Murphys had twelve thousand acres, but that was just some of the original spread.”
“And the first murder cycle, the one in 1926, that happened while you were living on the ranch? And the Murphys owned it?”
“That’s right, Sam.”
“But you don’t remember anything that happened before that, anything that might’ve set someone off, made them mad at the town or the other settlers?” Dean asked.
“I’ve been tryin’ to,” Baird said. “Come up blank ever’ time.”
They reached the car and Dean opened his door, let Baird in back. Sam climbed into the front passenger seat. “Why did your mother think the ranch was involved, then?” he asked.
“I’m not too sure about that neither,” Baird said.
“Seems like someone told me a reason, either in
’twenty-six or ’sixty-six, but I’ll be doggoned if I can remember who or what it was.”
Dean started the Impala and fed it some gas, enjoying the satisfying growl. When everything else was going to hell, it was good to have something he could count on.
238 SUPERNATURAL
“Sometimes people write histories of those big old ranches,” Sam said. “Even if they’re not published professionally, they’re privately printed. The library might have something like that.”
“Don’t think so,” Baird said.
“Why not?”
“He never fi nished it.”
“Who?” Dean asked, his tone abrupt. “Someone started one? What happened to it? Who was it?”
“His name was Neville Stein,” Baird said. “I remembered it yesterday.”
“Is he still alive? Would he talk to us?”
“He won’t talk,” Baird said with certainty.
“Why not?”
“I shot him yesterday. That’s when I remembered his name. ’Course, he was already dead—died before the first forty-year, back in nineteen and twenty-three or twenty-four, I think. He was a teacher, and some of the local boys didn’t think much of teachers in those days. His last mistake was asking a cowboy’s sister out on a date. A picnic lunch, I think is what he had in mind. Cowboy shot him in the face. I did the same, yesterday. He won’t be talkin’ to anyone.”
“Where did he teach?” Sam asked. “Here in town?” Baird gazed out the car window as they cruised the quiet streets of Cedar Wells. A couple of times they saw people carrying guns, and had to watch them for a minute or two—long enough to make sure they weren’t flickering and didn’t have any visible fatal wounds—before deciding they were real people and not a threat.
“No,” Baird said finally, after waiting so long that Sam couldn’t remember for a second what he had asked. “No, he had a little schoolhouse on the ranch itself. There were a dozen of us kids, most times, that needed schoolin’, so they took care of it right there.
Too far to come into town for school.”
“How far out was it?”
“Oh, no more than six or seven miles, I guess,” Baird said. “But you can cover that a lot faster now than we could when I was young.” 240 SUPERNATURAL
“But it’s still within the range of the killings,” Sam said. “And the distance from town people can travel.”
“I think the sheriff said the cutoff was fi fteen,” Dean said. “That’s about where the deputy got it.”
“Yeah, it’s within the town limits of Cedar Wells,” Baird said. “Always had a Cedar Wells mailing address, anyhow.”
Sam’s mind raced, trying to find another way to unlock the secrets that must have died with Neville Stein. “Did he have any notes, that you know of?” he asked. “If he was planning to write a book, he must have had some notes, right?”
“Now you mention it, I believe he did,” Baird said.
He scratched his temple and blinked his tiny black eyes. “He used to have some journals or something like that, in the schoolhouse, that he always warned us kids away from. Most probably that’s what it was, the things he was keepin’ for his history of the ranch.
Sometimes I’d see him talkin’ to some old cowboy or another for hours, writing down things the cowboy’d tell him.” He chuckled. “Lies, like as not.”
“Maybe they were,” Sam said. “But even so, he’d have to keep the records of those interviews somewhere. Do you know who would’ve ended up with them after he died?”
“I can’t imagine anyone would have wanted ’em.
Most folks thought he was crazier’n a jaybird, even talking to those old cowboys. Much less writing down what they said, or thinkin’ anyone would ever care to read what he wrote.”
Witch’s
Can
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yon
“Then where would they be?” Dean asked. “Had to end up someplace, right?”
“They’re probably still there.”