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“I was a coward,” he said softly.
“No,” Cody said firmly, “you behaved rationally. You would have been able to go for help if Milo and his men had gone on a killing spree. One more body wouldn’t have done anyone any good.”
Alex found herself grateful for his support, and Levy looked a little less as if he wanted to jump out of the loft.
“Be that as it may, Alexandra, I won’t be letting you down again,” Levy said grimly.
“Well, thank God we’re all fine and the danger is gone,” Alex said, smiling.
Neither man offered a smile in return.
“Shall we get down from the hayloft?” she suggested brightly, determined not to dwell on what might have been.
Beulah was waiting outside the back door when they headed up to the house.
She swatted Levy with a dishrag. “You had us scared half to death, Levy!” she said, but then she hugged him. Finally she drew away and looked into his eyes. Something in her expression told Alexandra that the cook was satisfied with what she saw there. “All’s well tonight,” Beulah said softly.
They had barely entered the house when Brendan Vincent burst through the front door. “You better come, Cody,” he said.
“What’s happened?” Alex asked.
“Bit of a problem down the road, that’s all,” Brendan said.
He looked like such a civilized man, she thought, with gentle eyes, yet he was riding with Cody Fox, and Fox handled weapons like a man accustomed to battle. Not that he seemed particularly violent. He just moved with lightning speed and had a strength that was like steel.
“What problem?” she asked.
“There’s a fellow … well, the outlaws got him,” Brendan said.
“We’ve got to see who it is,” Alex said. “Doc Williamson must be around somewhere,” she added, and started for the door.
Brendan looked at Cody and blocked her way.
“There’s no reason for you to be seeing this, miss,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I might be able to help. I’ve seen my share of war injuries. I’m not in the least delicate.”
Behind her, Cody Fox cleared his throat. “I’m a medical doctor with a Harvard degree. If he needs help, I’ll be there to do what I can.”
Alex wasn’t about to be stopped. “I’m going with you,” she said stubbornly.
She saw Brendan look at Cody, waiting for his approval before moving. She wondered what was so powerful about the younger man that Brendan deferred so readily to his authority.
“Whatever you wish,” Cody said impatiently. “The situation is undoubtedly dire, so we need to hurry.”
With Brendan in the lead, they headed along the woodplank sidewalk that had been built beside the main street to let people avoid the mud and muck of the broad dirt road. When they reached the end of the walk, they headed out into the street and across to the building that housed the combination dentist and barber shop.
A crowd had gathered there, but no one had approached the man lying facedown on the ground.
“Coming through,” Brendan announced.
The crowd backed away, white-faced and tight-lipped.
“Why isn’t someone helping him?” Alex asked, looking around the crowd. She saw people she recognized, who quickly lowered their eyes.
Cody hunkered down by the man, turning him over. Alex felt a quickening in her heart, followed by relief when she realized she didn’t know the man. He was about forty, and he wasn’t going to need a doctor. He had a huge bloodstain on his shirt, and his eyes were open and unseeing.
“Is he from around here?” Cody asked, looking around.
“I don’t know him,” Alex said.
A man stepped forward. One she did know. Jim Green, the local mortician and photographer.
“He’s not one of ours,” Jim said. He was a kindly old fellow with silvery hair and matching old-fashioned muttonchops. “He must have come in with the outlaws.”
“Who shot him?” Cody asked.
Another man cleared his throat. Ace Henley, who ran the livery. “I was up in my loft, and I got in a few shots when they were whooping and hollering and blowing holes in the sky.”
Cody studied him and nodded. “That’s good. That’s what we’re going to need—a plan to get everyone into a position from which to fight, for next time they come in like they did.”
“What’ll we do with him?” Brendan asked, nodding toward the corpse.
Strange question, Alex thought. He was a dead man. Bury him. Even an outlaw had to be buried. What the hell else were they going to do with him?
“The usual,” Cody said, rising, dusting his hands on his jeans.
“It’s getting dark,” Brendan commented.
“So it is. I’ll get him over to the mortuary. Fellows, you got a place we can bury him?” Cody asked, looking from person to person in the crowd. “Might as well get him in the ground tonight.”
“There’s no preacher tonight,” Jim said. “Though I don’t rightly know if a preacher would say the words over … such a … one.”
The two men exchanged a meaningful look, as if acknowledging a shared but unspoken truth. Alex wondered uneasily what was going on and whether it had anything to do with the strange state of affairs she’d found at the boardinghouse when she arrived that afternoon. Garlands of garlic decorating the windows and wardrobes, and an abundance of crosses hung in every room. Just what was going on here?
“He was a man, a man who had a soul at some time,” Cody said. “We can say some words, and when a preacher comes, he can say those words all over again. Now, let’s get him out of the street before night comes on.”
“Right,” Jim said, and cleared his throat. “It’s all over town how you two saved the place, mister. We’re right grateful.” He doffed his broad-brimmed hat in Cody’s direction and nodded to Brendan. “I’m Jim Green, mortician and photographer, at your service. We’re mighty glad to have you.”
“Thank you,” Cody told him. “Anyone seen the sheriff yet?”
“Him and the deputy went off just about an hour or so ago—there was talk of some cattle rustling out at Calico Jack’s. That would be John Snow’s trading post,” Ace clarified.
John Snow-on-Leaf, now known simply as John Snow, was part white, part Mexican, part Apache and all entrepreneur, Alex thought. He and his current wife and twenty of his children—a brood whose color went from sable to snow—managed the trading post where the tribes and white folk alike came and went.
Cody nodded, glancing at Brendan Vincent. “All right, anybody sees the sheriff, tell him I’d like to meet him come the morning. Now, let’s deal with the dead.”
He reached down and grabbed the dead man under his armpits as Brendan went for the man’s ankles.
“Lead on, Mr. Green,” Brendan said.
“Right this way,” Jim said.
The crowd broke apart and began to disperse, everyone looking uneasily at the sky, as if they were desperate to be off the streets before dark.
Alex stood there, watching the townspeople and frowning.
Strange—no, bizarre—the way people were behaving.
As if he sensed she was still standing there, Cody paused and turned back. “Go home, Miss Gordon. Please.”
Then he started walking away again, the weight of the dead man suspended between him and Brendan Vincent. Either one of them might have thrown the body over a shoulder and carried it easily.
They didn’t seem to want to touch the blood.
Spooked by the intensity of his insistence that she go home, but too stubborn to just run away without knowing what was going on, she decided to pretend to obey his directive. She walked away and stepped up on the sidewalk, then paused and looked around.
No one was left on the street. It was as if the town were deserted. When she saw Fox and Vincent follow Green into his place of business, she stepped back off the sidewalk and walked swiftly and as silently as she could in their wake.
The door to Jim Green’s photography studio and mortuary was closed by the time she got there, but the curtains were still open at the windows, and kerosene lamps were lit within.
The front room held the photography studio; the mortuary was in the rear. Someone had neglected to shut the door between the two, so she stood to one side of the big front window and peered in.
The men had carried the body through to the back and placed it on a long oak slab—a rudimentary embalming table. Green’s instruments were laid out on a small cart nearby. Since the war, she knew, the art of embalming was in demand.
There were a lot of dead boys making the long journey home.
She continued to stare through the window, carefully trying to shield herself from the men within.
They were examining the body and talking, but she could only catch snatches of the conversation.
“I don’t think so. I really don’t think so,” she heard Cody say.
“We have to think about safety,” Jim said.
“He’s right, Cody—better safe than sorry,” Vincent added.
Cody studied the corpse, turning it, touching the throat and studying it, as if he might find a pulse.
Doctor? Educated at Harvard? A farm boy could see there was a massive shotgun hole in the man’s chest.
“Better safe than sorry,” Cody agreed.
Jim Green handed him a long knife with an edge so sharp it glittered like diamonds in the lamplight.
Cody took the knife.
She nearly gasped aloud as she saw him position himself—then sever the corpse’s jugular.
She clamped a hand over her mouth and leaned against the wall, stunned. Then she turned back to the window again, thinking that her eyes must have deceived her.
Now only Jim Green was standing over the corpse. Or rather, the pieces of the corpse.
There wasn’t all that much blood, but then, the man had already bled out all over the street; a shotgun blast could do that to a fellow.
But now … Now the dead man’s head had been severed cleanly from his body. The face was turned toward her, the eyes staring out at her.
Caught in the glow of the lamplight, they seemed to be alive.
They seemed to be staring straight into her soul.
CHAPTER THREE
ALEX HURRIED BACK to the boardinghouse, deep in thought, the image of the dead man’s eyes burned into her brain. She opened the front door and stepped inside, thinking that the world had gone mad.
Of course, in a way the world had gone mad the day the first shot of the war had been fired. But this was something worse. Worse? What could be worse than a war that was exterminating half the young men of a divided country?
Losing all sanity and all souls.
The thought came to her unbidden, and she shook it off. But what was happening here was strange. People were behaving differently.
Cody and Jim had literally severed the dead man’s head.
“There you are, Alex!” Beulah chastised her as she came through from the kitchen, clasping a hand to her heart. “Don’t you go round worrying me so now, young lady, do you hear?”
Alex stared at her. “Beulah, I was right down the street.”
“Maybe so, but you need to be inside now. It’s dark, and the moon … well, the moon is out.”
Alex smiled, giving her a hug and wondering what the moon had to do with anything. “I’m fine. The bad guys got sent away with their tails between their legs. Tonight we’re all safe.”
Beulah drew back, shaking her head sadly. “Honey child, no time is safe anymore. But darkness? It’s not safe at all.”
Alex stared at the older woman.
“Beulah, what’s going on here?” she asked.
“Evil,” Beulah said sagely.
“Evil?”
“Bad things, very bad things. It’s like the devil himself is trying to take hold here. Oh, honey, I don’t know everything. But it’s like an evil disease. So we just stay inside. Oh, Lordy! Brigsby gone. And Hollow Tree, too, I hear tell … and now Victory. Maybe we thought we’d be spared. Maybe we felt we couldn’t do a thing about it ‘cept run, and for too many folks, this is all we have and there ain’t nowhere to run to.”
“Beulah, I don’t understand you,” Alex said impatiently.
“I don’t rightly understand it myself,” Beulah said, then smiled suddenly, her eyes lighting up. “But tonight … well, that was a miracle, it was, those two fellows turning up when they did. And now they’ll be staying here. What a fine thing that is.”
Beulah made the sign of the cross over her ample chest as she spoke.
