Crime at Christmas (19 page)

It was nine
o'clock on Christmas morning, and Angela Willett had just finished her packing.

Outside the
skies were dark and cheerless, snow and rain were falling together, so that
this tiny furnished room had almost a palatial atmosphere in comparison with
the drear world outside.

'I suppose
it's too early to cook the sausages—by the way, our train leaves at ten
tonight, so we needn't invent ways of spending the evening—come in.'

It was Joe
the Runner, rather wet but smiling. He carried under his arm something wrapped
in an old newspaper.

'Excuse me,
miss,' he said, as he removed the covering, 'but a gent I met in the street
asked me to give you this.'

'A turkey!'
gasped Angela. 'How wonderful. . .who was it?'

'I don't
know, miss—an old gentleman,' said Joe vaguely. 'He said "Be sure an' give
it to the young lady herself—wishin' her a happy Christmas".'

They gazed
on the carcase in awe and ecstasy. As the front door slammed, announcing Joe's
hasty departure:

'An old
gentleman,' said Angela slowly. 'Uncle Peter!'

'Uncle
grandmother!' smiled John. 'I believe he stole it!'

'How
uncharitable you are!' she reproached him. 'It's the sort of thing Uncle Peter
would do. He always had that Haroun al Raschid complex—I wrote and told him we
were leaving for Canada tonight. I'm sure it was he.'

Half-convinced,
John Willett prodded at the bird. It seemed a little tough.

'Anyway,
it's turkey,' he said, 'And, darling, I adore turkey stuffed with chestnuts. I
wonder if there are any shops open      

There was a
large cavity at one end of the bird, and as he lifted the turkey up by the
neck, the better to examine it, something dropped to the table with a flop. It
was a tight roll of paper. He shook the bird again and a second fell from its
unoffending body.

'Good God!'
gasped John.

With
trembling hands he cut the string that bound the roll       

'It's
money!' she whispered.

John
nodded.

'Hundred
dollar bills. . .five hundred of them at least!' he said hollowly.

Their eyes
met.

'Uncle
Peter!' she breathed. 'The darling!'

Mr Peter
Elmer, the eminent ship owner, received the following day a telegram which was
entirely meaningless:

Thank you a
thousand times for your thought and generosity. You have given us a wonderful
start and we shall be worthy of your splendid kindness.

It was
signed 'Angela'. Mr Peter Elmer scratched his head.

And at that
moment Inspector Mailing was interrogating Harry the Valet in the little police
station at Carfane.

'Now come
across, Harry,' he said kindly. 'We know you got the money out of the safe.
Where did you plant it? You couldn't have taken it far, because the butler saw
you leaving the room. Just tell us where the money is, and I'll make it all
right for you when you come up in front of the old man.'

'I don't
know what you're talking about,' said Harry the Valet, game to the last.

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signalled)
twist all ready and waiting for you, the final sucker-punch that leaves you
twitching. Sheer class.

Bill also
writes a nifty Western. Secretly, he's hooked on oaters and has been since
devouring copies of
Dime Western, Thrilling Western, Texas Rangers, .44 Western
and a slew of other titles as a
kid. So to tempt him to do an original story for this anthology, it seemed
wisest to hit him where he's weakest.

A Western?
In
Crime At
Christmas
? Ah,
but its hero, John Quincannon, is a fully-fledged, no-nonsense
detective
—who has already appeared,
incidentally, in
Quincannon
(1985) and the ingeniously-plotted
Beyond The Grave
(1986, with Marcia Muller). And it all happens on a wild night in
the Sierra Nevada—the night of 24 December 1894. . .

W
HEN the
snowstorm started, Quincannon was high up in a sparsely populated section of
the Sierra Nevada—alone except for his rented horse, with not much idea of
where he was and no idea at all of where Slick Henry Garber was.

And as if
all of that wasn't enough, it was almost nightfall on Christmas Eve.

The storm
had caught him by surprise. The winter sky had been clear when he'd set out
from Big Creek in mid-morning, and it had stayed clear until two hours ago;
then the clouds had commenced piling up rapidly, the way they sometimes did in
this high-mountain country, getting thicker and darker-veined until the whole
sky was the colour of moiling coal smoke. The wind had sharpened to an icy
breath that buffeted both him and the ewe-necked strawberry roan. And now, at
dusk, the snow flurries had begun—thick Hakes driven and agitated by the wind
so that the pine and spruce forests through which the trail climbed were a
misty blur and he could see no more than forty or fifty feet ahead.

He rode
huddled inside his fleece-lined long coat and rabbit-fur mittens and cap,
feeling sorry for himself and at the same time cursing himself for a
rattlepate. If he had paid more mind to that build-up of clouds, he would have
realized the need to find shelter much sooner than he had. As it was, he had
begun looking too late. So far no cabin or mine-shaft or cave or suitable gegraphical
configuration had presented itself—not one place in all this vast wooded
emptiness where he and the roan could escape the snapping teeth of the storm.

A man had
no sense wandering around an unfamiliar mountain wilderness on the night before
Christmas, even if he
was
a manhunter by trade and a greedy glory-hound by inclination. He ought to be
home in front of a blazing fire, roasting chestnuts in the company of a good
woman. Sabina, for instance. Dear, sweet Sabina, waiting for him back in San
Francisco. Not by his hearth or in his bed, curse the luck, but at least in the
Market Street offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective
Services.

Well, it
was his own fault that he was alone up here, freezing to death in a snowstorm.
In the first place he could have refused the job of tracking down Slick Henry
Garber when it was offered to him by the West Coast Banking Association two
weeks ago. In the second place he could have decided not to come to Big Creek
to investigate a report that Slick Henry and his satchel full of counterfeit
mining stock were in the vicinity. And in the third place he could have
remained in Big Creek this morning when Slick Henry managed to elude his
clutches and flee even higher into these blasted mountains.

But no,
Rattlepate John Quincannon had done none of those sensible things. Instead he
had accepted the Banking Association's fat fee, thinking only of that
and
of the additional $5000 reward for
Slick Henry's apprehension or demise being offered by a mining coalition in
Colorado
and
of the glory of nabbing the most
notorious—and the most dangerous—confidence trickster operating west of the
Rockies in this year of 1894. Then, after tracing his quarry to Big Creek, he
had not only bungled the arrest but made a second mistake in setting out on
Slick Henry's trail with the sublime confidence of an unrepentant sinner
looking for the Promised Land—only to lose that trail two hours ago, at a road
fork, just before he made his
third
mistake of the day by underestimating the weather.

Christmas,
he thought. 'Tis the season to be jolly. Bah. Humbug.

Ice
particles now clung to his beard, his eyebrows; kept trying to freeze his
eyelids shut. He had continually to rub his eyes clear in order to see where he
was going. Which, now, in full darkness, was along the rim of a snow-skinned
meadow that had opened up on his left. The wind was even fiercer here, without
a single tree to deflect its force. Quincannon shivered and huddled and cursed,
and felt sorrier for himself by the minute.

He should
never have decided to join forces with Sabina and open a detective agency. She
had been happy with her position as a female operative with the Pinkerton
Agency's Denver office; he had been more or less content working in the San
Francisco office of the United States Secret Service. What had possessed him to
suggest, not long after their first professional meeting, that they pool their
talents? Well, he knew the answer to that well enough.
Sabina
had possessed him. Dear, sweet, un-seducible,
infuriating Sabina. . .

Was that
light ahead?

He scrubbed
at his eyes and leaned forward in the saddle, squinting. Yes, light—lamplight.
He had just come around a jog in the trail, away from the open meadow, and
there it was, ahead on his right: a faint glowing rectangle in the night's
churning white-and-black. He could just make out the shapes of buildings, too,
in what appeared to be a clearing before a sheer rock face.

The
lamplight and the buildings changed Quincannon's bleak remonstrations into
murmurs of thanksgiving. He urged the stiff-legged and balky roan into a
quicker pace. The buildings took on shape and definition as he approached.
There were three of them, grouped in a loose triangle; two appeared to be
cabins, fashioned of rough-hewn logs and planks, each with a sloping roof,
while the bulkiest structure had the look of a barn. The larger cabin, the one
with the lighted window, was set between the other two and farther back near
the base of the rock wall.

A lane led
off the trail to the buildings. Quincannon couldn't see it under its covering
of snow, but he knew it was there by a painted board sign nailed to one of the
trees at the intersection.
TRAVELLER'S REST,
the sign said, and below that, in
smaller letters,
Meals and Lodging.
One of the tiny roadhouses, then, that dotted the Sierras and
catered to prospectors, hunters, and foolish wilderness wayfarers such as himself.

It was
possible, he thought as he turned past the sign, that Slick Henry Garber had
come this way and likewise been drawn to the Traveller's Rest. Which would
allow Quincannon to make amends today, after all, for his earlier bungling, and
perhaps even permit him to spend Christmas Day in the relative comfort of the
Big Creek Hotel. Given his recent run of foul luck, however, such a
serendipitous turnabout was as likely to happen as Sabina presenting him, on
his return to San Francisco, with the holiday gift he most desired.

Nevertheless,
caution here was indicated. So despite the warmth promised by the lamplit
window, he rode at an off-angle toward the barn. There was also the roan's
welfare to consider. He would have to pay for the animal if it froze to death
while in his charge.

If he was
being observed from within the lighted cabin, it was covertly: no one came out
and no one showed himself in the window. At the barn he dismounted, took
himself and the roan inside, struggled to reshut the doors against the howling
thrust of the wind. Blackness surrounded him, heavy with the smells of animals
and hay and oiled leather. He stripped off both mittens, found a lucifer in one
of his pockets and scraped it alight. The barn lantern hung from a hook near
the doors; he reached up to light the wick. Now he could see that there were
eight stalls, half of which were occupied: three saddle horses and one work
horse, each nibbling a pile of hay. He didn't bother to examine the saddle
horses because he had no idea what type of animal Slick Henry had been riding.
He hadn't got close enough to his quarry all day to get a look at him or his
transportation.

He led the
roan into an empty stall, unsaddled it, left it there munching a hay supper of
its own. Later, he would ask the owner of Traveller's Rest to come out and give
the beast a proper rubdown. With his hands mittened again he braved the storm
on foot, slogging through calf-deep snow to the lighted cabin.

Still no
one came out or appeared at the window. He moved along the front wall, stopped
to peer through the rimed window glass. What he could see of the big parlour
inside was uninhabited. He ploughed ahead to the door.

It was
against his nature to walk unannounced into the home of a stranger, mainly
because it was a fine way to get shot, but in this case he had no choice. He
could have shouted himself hoarse in competition with the storm before anyone
heard him. Thumping on the door would be just as futile; the wind was already doing
that. Again he stripped off his right mitten, opened his coat for easy access
to the Remington Navy revolver he carried at his waist, unlatched the door with
his left hand, and cautiously let the wind push him inside.

The entire
parlour was deserted. He leaned back hard against the door to get it closed
again and then called out, 'Hello the house! Company!' No one answered.

He stood
scraping snowcake off his face, slapping it off his clothing. The room was
warm: a log fire crackled merrily on the hearth, banking somewhat because it
hadn't been fed in a while. Two lamps were lit in here, another in what looked
to be a dining room adjacent. Near the hearth, a cut spruce reached almost to
the raftered ceiling; it was festooned with Christmas decorations—strung
popcorn and bright-coloured beads, stubs of tallow candles in bent can tops,
snippets of fleece from some old garment sprinkled on the branches to resemble
snow, a five-pointed star atop the uppermost branch.

All very cosy
and inviting, but where were the occupants? He called out again, and again
received no response. He cocked his head to listen. Heard only the plaint of
the storm and the snicking of flung snow against the windowpane—no sound at all
within the cabin.

He crossed
the parlour, entered the dining room. The puncheon table was set for two, and
in fact two people had been eating there not so long ago. A clay pot of venison
stew sat in the centre of the table; when he touched it he found it and its contents
still slightly warm. Ladlings of stew and slices of bread were on each of the
two plates.

The hair
began to pull along the nape of his neck, as it always did when he sensed a
wrongness to things. Slick Henry? Or something else? With his hand now
gripping the butt of his Navy, he eased his way through a doorway at the rear
of the dining room.

Kitchen and
larder. Stove still warm, a kettle atop it blackening smokily because all the
water it had contained had boiled away. Quincannon transferred the kettle to
the sink drainboard. Moved then to another closed door that must lead to a
bedroom, the last of the cabin's rooms. He depressed the latch and pushed the
door wide.

Bedroom,
indeed. And as empty as the other three rooms. But there were two odd things
here: the sash of a window in the far wall was raised a few inches; and on the
floor was the base of a lamp that had been dropped or knocked off the bedside
table. Snow coated the window sill and there was a sifting of it on the floor
and on the lamp base.

Quincannon
stood puzzled and scowling in the icy draft. No room at the inn?, he thought
ironically. On the contrary, there was plenty of room at this inn on Christmas
Eve. It didn't seem to have
any
people in it.