Horse With No Name (16 page)

"Do you want some help cleaning up your
doorstep?"

Julia was surprised by this offer. It seemed
beyond the scope of Merrick's official duties.

She shook her head. "I need to get to school.
I'll have to do it later."

He nodded once and then adjusted the knife in
his hand. He seemed to be thinking about what he was going to say
next. If he was embarrassed about his state the day before, he
didn't show it. And unlike her, he didn't look green around the
gills. "I want you to check in with me regularly. No going off
riding without letting me know. No walking alone after dark. Are we
clear?"

"Yes. Thank you, Merrick."

"I mean it, Julia." His expression was stern.
"I don't know what the hell is going on, but someone clearly means
to do you harm." He looked down at the knife and then back up to
her. "Or at the very least, ensure you are afraid. I need you to
keep me apprised of your movements until I figure out who did
this." His gaze was steady, his eyes dark.

A drop of rain landed on Julia's face, and
then another on her arm.

"I promise," she said.

Merrick nodded once. "C'mon. I'll walk you to
school."

***

Between Julia's hangover and her shattered
nerves, it was all she could do to hold it together for the day in
the classroom. The children sensed her mood and, for once, didn't
capitalize on it. They were quiet and subdued. The rain began in
earnest as she opened the school doors. Her idea for a nature walk
was dashed, so she had the students working on assignments quietly
at their desks. She was not in a space where she felt competent
enough to teach at the front of the room.

The children ate lunch inside. The rain came
down in sheets, huge, fat drops one could see falling through the
air, turning the schoolyard to a soupy swamp. By two o'clock the
heavens took a break, and Julia made a spur of the moment decision
to release the children early, yet again.

For the next several days Julia was never
alone. The community made sure of that. That night Betty and
Christopher had her over for dinner, though it was a strained and
awkward affair since it turned out Christopher was still in Betty's
bad books and Betty was hardly speaking to him. The appearance of
peace at the Harvest Festival had been for show. On Tuesday, Betty
and Julia received permission from Mr. Hunter to make soup at his
home and tidy up. He was spending long days at his shop, trying to
organize the mess that had been created when all the gears and
clock workings had been swept onto the floor, as well as catch up
on the repair jobs that were awaiting him.

The two women went to his shop after school,
their arms weighed down with baskets of ingredients for soup.

Hunter looked at them over the counter,
listening to the proposal to tidy up his house while they were
there. He began to object but Betty pressed on, relentlessly. Julia
suspected Betty was invested in this mission of mercy because she
wanted desperately to be out of her own shop and away from her
husband.

After a few moments of cajoling, Julia could
almost see the resistance draining out of Hunter. He began to nod
his head and then, to stop the incessant flow of Betty's argument,
said, "Fine. Yes. Go ahead. The door is open." As an afterthought
he added, "Thank you."

Julia and Betty let themselves into Hunter's
home, lit the fire in the kitchen and then set to work, chopping
vegetables and boiling water.

As they stood side-by-side at the table in
Hunter's kitchen, each armed with a sharp knife, the rhythm of
their chopping echoed around the room. Julia asked how things were
going between Betty and Christopher.

Betty sighed, "Not all that well. I'm making
him sleep in the guest room these days."

Julia sliced the top off of a carrot and
began chopping it into chunks. "Does he have a plan for collecting
any of the money he's owed?"

"He says he does. But I'm not sure he can
follow through. Although, Albert Grimes was in the shop yesterday
and wanted to use credit to buy his supplies. Christopher refused
since he already owes us nearly twenty dollars."

"That's good, isn't it?"

Betty stepped over to the stove and tipped
the cut vegetables on her cutting board into a large cast iron pot.
"I suppose. But I was standing right there so he had to do it."
Betty paused for a moment and then chuckled for the first time in a
long time, "He looked like he might cry."

Julia looked over at her friend. "Oh,
no."

"His face got all red and he stammered and
spluttered. I just let him sweat it out. I pretended I was busy
with the candles I was sorting."

"Betty Mitchell, I had no idea you were so
cruel!"

Betty grimaced at Julia. "He has to learn,
Julia. He has to figure out a way to not be the good guy all the
time."

"That's not really who he is, though is
it?"

Betty waved her knife around, her voice
rising slightly, "He's going to have to figure out how to be that
person. If he doesn't figure it out, we'll be living in your back
garden."

When the soup was underway and Betty could
manage on her own, Julia left the kitchen and began to dust and
tidy around Hunter's small home.

The house, like his shop, smelled faintly of
oil. She suspected this scent came home with Hunter from the clock
repair shop, and that he didn't do any work here in the house.
There wasn't a workspace laid out anywhere in the small house, at
any rate. The smell was not unpleasant and it reminded Julia of her
father and the times he had taken her to the shop where he got his
pocket watches repaired.

She took a rag she'd brought and began
dusting the living room. There were no photographs on display,
though this was not entirely unusual. Photography was a new art and
not everyone took the time, money or bother to go to a studio to
have portraits made.

When she finished dusting she found Hunter's
broom in a corner of the kitchen and began sweeping all the floors,
creating piles of dust and dirt to pick up later. When she reached
the bedroom she was especially thorough, noticing that the room
didn't seem to have been swept out in some time. She worked the
broom well into the corners and moved the tall dresser with some
effort to sweep behind it. The bed was a narrow single, which
Hunter had tucked into one corner. Julia reached the broom
underneath it as best she could and then pulled the bed away from
the wall to clean behind it as well. She stood the broom up against
the doorframe and pulled at the metal frame of the bed. It shifted
slightly but then stopped, caught on something. Julia crouched down
and saw a small wooden box tucked all the way to the front of the
bed, tight against the corner. The bed's leg couldn't move with the
box in the way. Julia got on her hands and knees and reached under
the bed, pulling the box back with her. It rattled slightly as she
moved it and when it came fully out from under the bed, she saw it
was an old apple crate filled with items wrapped in newspaper.
Glancing at the bedroom door to make sure Betty wasn't watching
her, and feeling slightly guilty, Julia delicately lifted the
corner of a piece of yellowed newspaper to see what it held within.
A patterned china plate with decorations of red roses around the
perimeter and a blue ribbon flowing around them stared back at her.
She closed the paper up again and pulled aside a different piece on
the other side of the box. The same delicate china pattern emerged,
this time on a tea cup.

Curiosity satisfied, Julia pulled the box
across the room and then was able to move the bed. There was an old
pair of boots under the bed as well. Julia moved these out into the
middle of the room. She made a good job of cleaning under the bed
and then put everything back where it had originally been.

The house began to smell very pleasantly of
Betty's soup. When Julia finished sweeping her piles of dust
outside, she found Betty rearranging preserve jars on the shelves
in the kitchen.

"Hunter won't be able to find anything now,"
Julia teased her friend.

Betty glanced over her shoulder. "I can't
help myself," she said, "it's the shopkeeper's curse."

Twenty-one

The glove was bugging
Julia. It had been sitting on her kitchen table for several days,
but more than that, it had been preying on her mind. It didn't
belong to James Hunter, that much was obvious. And whoever dropped
it had not returned to claim it. This convinced Julia that it had
to belong to whoever had assaulted the watchmaker. But how was she
to find this person?

She spent Tuesday after school on her hands
and knees scrubbing the floorboards in her kitchen. It was a
thankless task that had to be done regularly to keep mice and bugs
out of the kitchen. It was hard, unrewarding work and she hated it.
(Although not as much as she'd hated cleaning the rabbit blood off
her front step.) But the repetitive nature of the scrubbing, and
the fact that her brain didn't need to be engaged in the task,
allowed her mind to turn the problem over and examine it from
several angles.

The glove was well-worn and constantly used.
It was the glove of a working man, not a gentleman. Someone from a
ranch, not from town. The mark across the palm was, she was sure,
the groove of a reign, as she and Walt had discussed. It had to be.
The trouble was that any man, anywhere, could own a glove like
this. It had no distinguishing marks and nothing that made it
different than a thousand other working gloves that must be in
every house for five hundred miles around.

So what else did Julia know about it? She
sloshed her scrub brush around in her bucket and thought. It was
leather. It was an average size. Larger than Hunter's hands but
pretty average for a normal man who wasn't as slight as Hunter. It
was handmade, but that was not remarkable either. Nearly every
article of clothing everyone wore was handmade. It was the
right-hand glove. If the owner was right handed he'd be likely to
hold his reins in his right hand.

So he worked with horses, that much Julia
could be certain of. And the reign mark was so worn into the palm
it had to mean the glove's owner was probably in the saddle more
often than he was out of it.

Hunter still refused to speak about what had
happened. A few times while Julia and Betty had been caring for him
she had gently tried to approach the subject, but Hunter
immediately closed down and clammed up. He still claimed he didn't
remember any details from the attack, but Julia was convinced he
was not telling the truth about that. Why he was hiding or
protecting his attacker, she couldn't say. He was a reserved and
private person, but this went beyond the need for privacy. He was
actively discouraging Merrick and Julia from finding out who had
attacked him. She was convinced this meant Hunter knew his
attackers.

And yet, that didn't make sense to her.
Hunter was not someone who was prone to being in conflict with
others. He kept himself to himself. The very penchant he had for
privacy was the thing that made it absurd that anyone had attacked
him. He was the person in town least likely to cause upset or to
offend. Julia just couldn't imagine Hunter upsetting anyone enough
that they would try to resolve the problem by physically attacking
him. It was like assaulting a straw man. Whoever did this was a
coward, Julia realized. Anyone with any courage would see that
picking on Hunter was totally unfair; like shooting fish in a
barrel.

The most logical explanation, given how
little she knew, was that the attack was retaliation for Hunter
helping her out on the night of the dance. Reluctantly, she brought
to mind details about her attackers; their smell, their way of
speaking, their size and height. She thought about their hands
curling around her upper arms, their breath on her cheek and
neck.

They had been drinking, and the memory of the
smell of alcohol made Julia's throat close over. But she sat back
on her heels, held the scrub brush away from her skirt, closed her
eyes, and forced herself to focus.

Her fear and the pungent smell of fermented
grain filled most of her senses. But there had to be more. In her
mind's eye, she groped past the obvious and searched for the more
subtle pieces of information that were there. She pictured the
blackness of the night, the sound of the outhouse door closing
behind her. She heard boots crunching on the dirt, not just her own
boots, but others as well. The footsteps of the men behind her.

She shivered in the kitchen, but forced
herself to keep her eyes closed and stay with the memory. One of
the men, the one she thought of as First Man, had pressed the
length of himself into her side once he had grabbed her arm,
crowding her, using his size to intimidate her. He was wearing a
long canvas jacket, she had sensed that it fell below his knees.
They were both wearing hats, though she wasn't sure what kind. She
had just a vague impression of this.

The scrubbing brush dripped water onto
Julia's skirt. She had forgotten it. Were the men who attacked her
the night of the dance and the person who attacked Hunter one and
the same? There was no way to know. The two incidents could be
totally unrelated. Hunter's beating could, in fact, be connected to
his past. It might have nothing to do with Horse at all.

The glove's owner must work on a ranch. A
drover or a ranch owner. She thought about the ranches around Horse
and the operations they each performed. Not many ranches were yet
able to hire employees. More often the owners did all the work
themselves. Outfits such as Gerard Anker's Double A Ranch were the
exception, not the rule. Julia suspected that Sabine Anker's money
had something to do with that. Who else had a place that was doing
well enough to hire help?