I asked him, “What does your name mean?”
His eyebrows arched as he replied, “What does yours?”
I hadn’t thought about it until he said something, but his question was as good as mine, weren’t it? “Karen,” I said. “It’s Danish. From my mom. It means ‘pure.’” I held my hands up flat and shrugged. It was what it was. “And Memery, that’s Irish. My dad’s dad was a horsebreaker in Ireland before the potato famine. They came here to escape. I don’t know what it means.”
“Escaping famine,” he said. “My people too have traveled for that. Thousand miles, or more. And horsebreaking, that’s a good trade. My own name means ‘Child of the Sky.’”
“Does that commemorate a deed?”
“Of my namer,” he said. “Not of my own.”
“Won’t you sit?” I asked. “Have some flapjacks and bacon?” The servers still rested on the table.
“Don’t mind if I do,” the Marshal said. He proceeded to pull a plate from the warmer and load it up, finding some beans that I’d missed. “Oh,” he said, discovering the sausages. “Mysteries!”
He handed that plate to Tomoatooah and filled one for himself. The two men fell to as if they hadn’t seen food in a week. Maybe the Marshal treated it like sleep: a requirement of lesser men, until the need came unavoidable.
I knowed the Marshal hadn’t just come for breakfast, so I weren’t surprised when he got past the first flash of hunger, slowed down his fork wielding a mite, and poured himself another cup of still-warm coffee from the pot. Tomoatooah kept eating, chewing each bite meditatively before washing it down with coffee, but never slowing in his pace. Connie poked her nose out of the kitchen just then, saw that we was engaged, and backed out. I heard soft clattering behind the doors and wondered how long it would be before another piled-high covered platter appeared. Connie liked to cook for folk with an appetite.
“Miss Memery,” the Marshal said. He paused and sipped coffee and started again. “Another girl’s dead.”
My mug rattled on the table when I set it down. “Who?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head kind of sideways. Judicious, like. “We don’t rightly know. She was dumped outside Missus Parkins’ kitchen door last night, or more like early this morning. Done up the same way as the other.” That last he said with particular distaste.
I looked at him again — the weather-beated creases at the corners of his eyes, the tight-curled hair oiled and combed into a crinkle, pressed flat in a ring where his hat usually sat. Wrangler tonsure, my da would of said. His skin looked gray under his eyes. Maybe he weren’t so immortal after all.
As I studied the Marshal, I was aware of Tomoatooah studying me. The Marshal broke the triangle, though, gazing off into the distance as if his eyes tracked an invisible killer across an invisible range.
We might still have been there if there hadn’t been a thump and a creak — familiar to me, if not to the gentlemen. I started anyway, tossing my head up like a high-strung colt, and I swear the Marshal actually reached for his gun. Tomoatooah just folded another rasher into his mouth. That was the correct reaction; it was just Signor opening the door with his trick of jumping at the handle. He sauntered in, purring in a self-pleased fashion that about rang the crystal, and proceeded on a circuit of the table. He put a paw into my lap — he was big enough so it wasn’t much of a stretch for him — and butted his big, round head against my elbow. He was begging for my bacon scraps, of course — but the wobble of his belly made a pretty convincing argument that he didn’t need any.
Still, it broke the tension and made me able to talk again. “You think there’s a reason the killer’s doing that,” I said. “Dumping the dead girls that way.”
The Marshal glanced at me, then forked another flapjack and a couple of mysteries onto his plate. “I think it was good fortune and happy happenstance as led me to you, miss. And I think I’ve been an idiot not to realize before now that there’s some link between your nemesis and my murder writ.”
I knowed the word “nemesis.” It turned up in Bullfinch’s Age of Fable, which I’d read cover to cover about five times. I pushed Signor down gently. He reared up again, purring all the harder. In a minute, he’d start to caterwaul louder than a puma. Being deaf as a stone, he didn’t know his own power.
I said, “My nemesis … you mean Peter Bantle.”
“Given how he seems determined to threaten you lot, and you in particular, miss — and the fact that the first dead whore, begging your pardon, was dumped in your rubbish? I’d say it’s a fair guess he’s got it in for you, miss, personally as well as categorically.”
That made sense. I nodded, and when I followed Tomoatooah’s gaze back to his face I found him nodding, too.
“I did tell him to get the hell out of my parlor. And I didn’t let him see I was scared of him, neither.”
The Marshal looked at me with the same look he’d given when he’d said he’d seen folk survive worse floggings than the dead sparrow’d gotten. Like maybe he knew something about folk who needed to see you scared of them. He said, “He’d hate you for that.”
We were briefly interrupted by Connie with a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of corn cakes, of which I took one just to be companionable. I weren’t too hungry, having just had breakfast and all, but a hot corn cake fried in grease, with a good drip of molasses, ain’t to be missed.
Once I’d gotten myself around a good forkful — the rest weren’t going to waste, not with the Comanche’s dedicated trenchermanship at hand — and poured myself some of that fresh coffee, I starched up my nerve and said, “Marshal … I had an idea.”
At this point, Signor determined that he’d get no satisfaction from me and went to bother the Marshal. I winced, thinking of sharp claws and of white fur on black trousers and of how some range men ain’t tolerant of pets. But as I was trying to figure out what order to put the coffeepot down and get my feet under me in, so I could retrieve Signor and eject him from the dining room — not that that ever lasted — the Marshal lifted his arms, leaned back, and made room for the cat in his lap.
I watched in wonderment as all stone and a half of Signor thumped into the Marshal’s lap and tea-cozied up, purring even louder.
Reaching carefully around the cat, who was now rubbing his face against the Marshal’s waistcoat buttons, the Marshal put his cup out. I switched the stream of coffee from my cup to his.
“He don’t usually cotton to strangers,” I said, nodding to Signor.
The Marshal fed him a bit of bacon. “I like critters,” he said. “Can’t be a good horseman if your horse don’t take to you.”
I stared, blushing. That was it, I realized. Though one was black and the other Irish, this man reminded me of my da. It took me several good seconds before I could manage, “Well, you’ve got a cat for life, now. Or at least as long as the bacon holds out.”
The Marshal smiled, sipped his coffee somehow without dragging his mustache through it, and said, “I’m all ears.”
“You’re all mustache,” Tomoatooah corrected, and they shared a tired grin.
“Let’s hear the lady’s plan,” the Marshal said. When I set the coffeepot down, he poured for Tomoatooah and we all drank silently together for a few moments as I collected myself.
“It requires an awful lot of you,” I started hesitantly.
His mustache did that thing I was starting to learn was a silent laugh — a kind of quiver, as if his upper lip was writhing behind it. “Miss,” he said, “I believe I told you how I came twelve hundred miles — as the crow flies; I’m pretty sure I covered half again that — by rail and pony and mule and my own two feet—”