Name On The Bullet - Edge Series 6 (7 page)

McGowan continued to peer at the cork and made no attempt to sample the whiskey then announced suddenly: ‘You don’t work for me anymore, Edge.’

‘That’s right, feller.’

‘So if you want to get up from this table and go to bed, you feel free to do just that.’

‘No sweat.’

‘Fine.’ He nodded, ended his fixed stare at the cork and raised his glass, swallowed the shot in one belt and showed no reaction to the taste and strength of it. Then he set the glass back down again, stood up and began to move around the room like a newly caged wild animal. One that was not yet enraged but was primed to explode with a fit of violent temper should he be hit by the realisation of something he did not yet fully comprehend.

‘I guess you heard that was my father who showed up drunk at the church this afternoon?’ His voice was a dull monotone.

‘Somebody told me.’

‘It’s the reason the women and me were exchanging harsh words when you got back to the house awhile ago. I reckon you heard us raising our voices?’

‘I heard some talk, feller. Not what was said.’

The farmer shrugged his broad shoulders and shook his head. ‘Martha and Julia don’t like the way I sent him packing. But after Wendell was murdered that way and then my old man showed up drunk . . . And what he told me when . . . ‘ He shrugged again and shuddered. ‘He’s Robert McGowan from down near San Francisco. At one time he was one of the richest ranchers in the state of California, so it was said. Until he got a taste for gambling with the high rollers and whoring with the top grade fancy women down there.’

His tiny, bright green eyes peered at Edge and he waited until he received a curt nod of acknowledgement before he went on with a more fluent flow of words. ‘That’s real good. I must be making some kind of sense and that means the whiskey hasn’t addled my brain yet. You understand what I’m saying, Edge? Because I’ve been known to go off at a tangent or whatever on those few times when I’ve felt the need of hard liquor for something more than medicinal purposes.’

‘You’re making sense, feller,’ Edge assured the anxious man.

‘On account of the way my thinking’s in such a mess after that’s happened today, I was worried I could . . . Anyway, you just get up and make for your bed as soon as you want. Talking to a bottle will be better than just sitting and thinking it over. Over and over, you know what I mean?’

Edge had a mouthful of food and confined his response to another nod when McGowan peered inquiringly at him.

‘I left the old man’s spread just as soon as I was old enough to make my own way in the world. There was still plenty of money coming in way back then but even though I was barely sixteen I could see how things were going to pieces and guess what was going to happen. The way he gambled and womanised and left ma to tend the place. The way the hands were taking advantage of him not being there and having a woman with no head for business for a boss.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I tried to get my mother to leave, too, but she wouldn’t. She never had said a bad word about him and called me all kinds of names for planning to run off the way I was. But I couldn’t take any more of it so I up and left.’

He stopped prowling, looked at the bottle, but shook his head. ‘Five years after that, when I’d started to build up this place and met and married Martha, I heard ma had died in a

‘flu epidemic. Julia was new born by then and even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have got away from here to go see pa. To find out how he was doing.’

He reached out a curled hand for the bottle again, but snatched it back and muttered:

‘Hell, no! That’s no answer, is it? Here, you help yourself whenever you feel the need.’

He pushed the bottle toward Edge.

‘Obliged.’ Edge swallowed the last of his supper, took a sip from the shot glass and dug out the makings. Then gave consideration to another rule in the McGowan house: this concerned with not smoking within its walls. So he held up his poke and arched his eyebrows in a tacit request for permission.

‘I’m drinking without being truly sick, so I guess it’s okay for you to smoke,’ the farmer said evenly. ‘On a day like it’s been today . . . ‘ He shook his head. ‘Well, I never heard nor saw anything of the old man for years after I learned about my ma passing on. Until almost three years ago when Kent Wilson showed up in Broken Falls. He’s the son of the man my pa used to play a lot of cards with in the old days?’

Edge began to roll the cigarette.

‘Kent was two or three years younger than me, but I knew him pretty well when we were both kids and I was old enough to look out for him when he got into scrapes. Anyway, that time three years ago he was up this way looking for new businesses to invest in.’

Edge held back from lighting the cigarette to ask: ‘Wilson ain’t no pauper?’

McGowan grimaced. ‘His pa was one of the top bankers in Frisco and after he died Kent took over everything. The same way I was supposed to inherit my pa’s spread if there was anything left of it. But that never entered into it because my old man didn’t die. And, according to Kent, even if he had, there wasn’t anything much left to take over. Because after my ma passed on, he went from bad to worse with his high living: and it was only the Wilson bank that was keeping him just about solvent.’

Edge lit the cigarette and promised himself that when it was smoked he would finish what was left of the whiskey in his glass and take up McGowan’s invitation to leave the kitchen and head for bed. But then the farmer looked like he would make such a move unnecessary: sighed and gave a body wrenching shudder, fixed Edge with a vacant stare and seemed about to bring the one-sided conversation to a premature end himself.

‘Damnit! My daughter’s been widowed on the day she was wed! And that was only hours ago – yet it’s me who’s wallowing in the worst kind of self-pity!’

‘If talking to me helps you to handle it, go ahead, feller,’ Edge said. ‘I’ve got nothing else to do until I’ve finished this smoke.’

McGowan was too pre-occupied to infer cynicism. ‘Don’t reckon there’s anything can help, the truth to tell. Except the passing of time, maybe. That kinda dulls the lousy feeling after something bad has happened, doesn’t it? I know that for a whole lot of reason. Oh hell, why not?’

He poured himself a second shot of liquor, took it at a single swallow and made a sound of deep satisfaction. Then poured a third but left this on the table as he began to prowl aimlessly around the room again. ‘You know why my old man showed up in Brogan Falls today, Edge? Not to see his only granddaughter get married like a regular grandfather would. No, not him: the sonofabitch planned to stop the wedding. Figured to talk Julia out of getting hitched to Quaid so she’d still be free to be wife to Kent Wilson.’

Edge paused in the act of raising his glass, then grunted and took a sip before he asked: ‘I guess he didn’t have any legal reason to stop the wedding?’

‘No, he didn’t! No legal reason!’ As with the bottle earlier, now with the glass: he reached for it, then jerked his hand back just before he would have touched it.

‘The time Kent Wilson was through here a few years ago he sure took a shine to Julia. And she liked him and his smooth and flashy ways well enough for awhile.’ He shrugged and sighed. ‘They took some walks together, went to a church social and she invited him here to the house for her twenty-first birthday supper. But he was a lot older than her and it didn’t take long for Julia to see the gap in their ages was a reason they could never be more than just fiends, as far as she was concerned.’ He shook his head and ran the back of a hand along his jaw-line. ‘She told him so and he didn’t take kindly to it. He was real put out and reckoned as how she had led him to believe they were all but engaged to be married.’

Edge said on exhaled tobacco smoke: ‘The feller had it bad, sounds like.’

‘He sure did and when he left Brogan Falls all of a sudden to go back to San Francisco he was real bitter about the way things had turned out between him and her. Plain for all to see how much he was smitten by my daughter?’

‘A feller used to getting his own way?’ Edge answered the implied query with a rhetorical question. ‘Did he stay in touch after that?’

‘He wrote Julia some letters and she answered them at first. She was just being friendly but he took her writing to him as a sign that she was still interested in having him for a husband. So then she stopped answering his letters and we all of us thought that was the end of Kent Wilson badgering her. Until today.’ He needed another drink but sank just half the contents of the glass this time and shook his head ruefully as he said: ‘Hell of a thing. The reason I had to send my old man packing from the house – because he told me how he was glad about what happened to Quaid. That it got him out of a spot. Seems he’d come to Brogan Falls on Wilson’s say-so: to stop the wedding by reasoning with Julia and pointing out to her how much better off she’d be for the rest of her life if she was married to Kent Wilson.’

McGowan pursed his lips, like he was about to vent a low whistle: but didn’t ‘Better off married to the president of a big San Francisco bank instead of a small town banker like Wendell Quaid. But he reached town too late: did too much drinking over in Pine River and had to sleep it off. Did some more drinking between there and here and was too crazy drunk to string more than a couple of words together when he staggered into the church after the wedding was all but over.’ He sat down carefully at the table now and looked much older than his age as he peered across at Edge then at the glass he gripped tightly in both hands and asked: ‘Like I’m getting close to being, uh?’

‘It could happen, feller.’ Edge finished his own drink, stood up and moved to the cold range, opened the grate and tossed the cigarette butt on to the dead ashes. ‘Are you saying you figure your pa and Wilson had something to do with gunning down Quaid?’

There was a deep melancholy in McGowan’s small, dull eyes as he raised his gaze to meet that of Edge. ‘The women won’t hear of it, which is the reason we were yelling at each other in the parlour just now.’ He shook his head and swallowed hard. ‘I’m not claiming it’s what happened. But it could have been, the way my old man had the gall to say what he did to me while Julia was still out of her mind with grief after the killing.’

‘You told me, feller.’

‘Yeah, he said Wendell being dead was a good thing and Kent Wilson would be just as happy to marry a widow as a spinster. Said how Wilson money in the family would help him out of . . . Hell, I told him to leave these parts real fast, Edge. In case I forgot who he was and killed him with my bare hands. Which about puts the right kind of ending to the dealings me and him have had over the years, wouldn’t you say?’ He raised the bottle and made to refill Edge’s glass.

‘None for me.’

‘Whatever you say. I’m gonna have another, though. To toast the bride: for that was surely what my daughter was for a couple of minutes today, right?’ His voice was a little slurred as he poured, lifted the glass and looked at Edge for a response.

‘Whatever.’ Edge moved from the range to the door. ‘There’s not a thing I can say or do to help you, feller. I hope you find some kind of answer in the bottom of the bottle, though I never did the times I tried to go that route myself. But I figure for awhile it can be the right kind of medicine for what ails a man who feels as bad as you do.’

McGowan turned sharply in the chair, a non-drinker who was already drunk after so few belts. And he seemed about to snarl an angry retort, but was not too liquored up to recognise the futility of this. ‘Yeah, like I said, it’ll have to be time that does the healing: slow as that cure is. But there’s no substitute for it.’

‘Night to you.’ Edge pulled open the door.

‘And to you, if you really won’t stay and drink with me,’ the disgruntled farmer muttered. ‘After I’ve toasted the bride, maybe I’ll drink a few more to the memory of Wendell.’

Edge closed the door gently and started toward the foot of the stairs as he murmured in the silent house: ‘A wake sounds right for you, McGowan. Me, I need sleep’

CHAPTER • 4

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EDGE EXPERIENCED a disconcertingly unfamiliar feeling of incompetence after he
had abandoned the liquored-up farmer to his lonesome mourning and headed for his room to make preparations to leave. And as he climbed the stairs he was troubled by regrets he had not left earlier. Before he became enmeshed as an ineffectual outsider in the family’s grief: allowed himself to take a helping hand in trouble that was none of his concern after he’d done what he could to track down the pair everyone else was convinced killed Quaid. It ought to have ended right there and then. He should have made his deposition to the weary marshal, gotten Earl Mann to open his grocery for long enough to buy some trail rations, returned to the house for the few personal belongings stowed in his room and ridden off into the night. Held his hunger in check until he was far enough out along the Sacramento turnpike to make camp without feeling a fool for turning his back on the comforts of the nearby McGowan house. All it needed was the strength of purpose to ignore his feelings for the grieving family. Hell, in the old days he would not have thought twice about indulging his own needs to the exclusion of whatever anyone else felt. But he . . . He cursed under his breath as he reached the top of the stairs, irritated yet again with himself for recollecting the kind of man he once had been and what he may well have done in days long gone. Those days would never return, that was for sure: but if he wanted to be again like the man who lived through them, he had to change his way of thinking. Then, as he started along the landing and heard a woman softly weeping and the low tone of another speaking comforting words, he resolved to do just that right here and now. Get the hell away from this house so he would at least be able to make a fresh start on being his own man again: a long way from the remnants of the violent trouble that had ended his peaceful, summer-long stay in Brogan Falls.