But she seemed glad to see him, and as she let him inside her large one-room library, he saw no signs of the hay she’d been pitching or the gent she’d been screwing. She said she hadn’t known she’d locked the fool front door after her when she’d come back from her noon dinner, and added with a laugh that she’d been wondering why business had seemed so slow. Longarm didn’t ask how come she hadn’t heard him or anybody else knocking. It was a lady’s own business if she wanted to take a nap or play with herself in the back, as long as he wasn’t paying her salary.
He asked if he could use her card index, and it was her turn to be discreet and not ask where a gent who talked so country had learned to scout up reading material in a hurry.
But she couldn’t hold back totally once he’d selected a privately printed local history and a medical tome. She said he could carry them home to read without a regular library card, seeing he was the law, but asked him what he expected to find in those particular mighty tedious-sounding books.
Hefting the heavy textbook and lighter publication, Longarm explained, “I’ve found in my travels that there’s almost always some proud member of a local founding family willing to pay some printer to run off a handsomely bound history of that family. You can’t hardly brag on your own bunch being one of the dozen or less original land-grabbers without saying at least a few words, good or bad, about them. I see this here Remington Ramsay who sells lumber and bobwire seems to feel the noble outline of his own family tree is worth preserving for future generations. I ain’t as interested in hardware as I am hardcase cattle barons who might rate a line or more in here.”
She wrinkled her pert nose and said, “I don’t see why even a snob like Bob Wire Rem would trouble himself with a history of a township less than five years old. That medical casebook you’re holding is even newer. We just got it in a month or so ago.”
Longarm said, “I noticed the publication date. That’s how come I want to borrow it, ma’am. Them alienists who study the human brain are at it day and night. So it’s possible somebody’s noticed something new since Dr. Langdon Down’s famous study of ‘66.”
She looked surprised and asked, “Surely you’re not investigating the murder of that Sunday school teacher in addition to the lynching of a federal prisoner, are you?”
To which he could only reply, “Looks like I’d better. For the one seemed to follow the other as the night does the day. Those so-called Minute Men could have been bent on avenging Miss Mildred Powell, like they said, or they could have been out to cover something else up. I keep telling the rough-justice bunch that once you take the law into your own hands you confuse law and order a heap.”
As he ticked his hat brim at her to be on his way, Ellen Brent took hold of his free sleeve and said, “Wait! You can’t dash off and leave me hanging, as if the last page of a thrilling romance was missing, just as I was getting to the end of it! I agree those night riders were awfully mean and that it would have been better to hold a trial and at least hear the idiot’s side of the story before they hung him. But I don’t see what anyone could hope to cover up by hanging him a little sooner. Are you suggesting they were holding the wrong man? Do you think it likely that a dying woman would accuse a harmless idiot when she had that chance, and only that chance, to name her attacker?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “There’s this old church song I’m sure the late Sunday school teacher must have known. It’s called ‘Farther Along’ and advises us to just keep poking along down the straight and narrow until, sooner or later, we’ll know more about it farther along. I do have my troubles with the straight and narrow, but I’ve sure known more about things farther along. So I try not to guess wild until I have me some solid facts to guess with. I’ll be proud to tell you where I am farther along, Miss Ellen. Right now I have to do some reading, attend that coroner’s inquest this evening, and with any luck, scout up some new sign to follow. What time do you turn in over to that boardinghouse we’re both bedded down in?”
She blinked, dimpled, and said, “I usually trim my lamp by nine or ten, unless I have a good book to read. But we have to be more discreet than that, Custis! It would never do for you to come sniffing around an unmarried lady’s bedchamber after sunset!”
He hadn’t been planning to. But he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. So he said, “I generally have me a smoke out on the front porch before I turn in. I can’t say what time that might be this evening. But if all else fails there’s always breakfast, and if I’ve found anything out, I can walk you to work tomorrow, right?”
She said that sounded more prudent, as if she was expecting him to share some dreadful secret. She’d have really been pissed if he’d told her he hardly ever shared dreadful secrets with anybody. So he nodded as if in agreement and headed back to their boardinghouse.
He got there well before quitting time for the rest of her boarders. So he caught the Widow MacUlric crying fit to bust in her kitchen when he came in the back way.
She shied like a fawn and tried to pretend she’d only been singing to herself, of course. But he’d heard her sobs and seen the way she’d been standing, head down and elbows braced in either corner of her kitchen sink. The sink was filled to overflowing with pots, pans, and greasy suds. Longarm hung up his hat and gun rig, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and quietly said, “I’ll wash if you’ll dry, provided you let me use some sand from your garden, ma’am. We got our pots and pans looking shiny-new with no more than sand and wood ashes in my army days. But no offense, the water out this way ain’t soft enough for that naphtha soap you’re using.”
For some reason, that really made her bawl, and the next he knew, she was stuck to the front of him, crying all over his shirt and vest as she blubbered, “I can’t! I can’t! There’s just so much to do and so few hours in the day, Deputy Long!”
He said she could call him Custis as he held her in a brotherly way, patting her back as she shuddered and wept against him. He told her he’d just been talking with an Indian Agency official, and asked if she’d considered hiring just one Pawnee gal to help out with the less skilled chores for no more than room, board, and a few coins to rub together now and again.
Mavis MacUlric wet his shirt front some more with tears, spit, or snot, and confessed, “I can’t even afford Arbuckle Brand coffee. I’ve figured my expenses to the bone and it’s just no use. I simply can’t keep up the payments and run this place as a boardinghouse on what I take in!”
He asked why she didn’t just charge her boarders a tad more in that case, adding, “Three dollars a week ain’t as much as I’ve seen many a boardinghouse charge in other parts, Miss Mavis.”
She answered flatly, “I’m not competing with anyone in other parts. Three a week is the going price in Pawnee Junction. My few boarders could get room and board for that, or maybe less, from what I hear about one landlady with a bigger house and no mortgage payments hanging over her. Did I mention the county and township fees, speaking of expenses, and these … God … damned … pots and pans!”
He gently disengaged himself from her as he told her firmly, “You worry about rustling up a simple supper whilst I get to work on these dinner pots and pans. You wouldn’t have so many to wash if you’d learn to cook army or cow-camp style. When you open a can of beans and set ‘em in a pan of boiling water can and all, you wind up with your beans just as boiled and a pan you only have to wipe out with a vinegar-soaked rag from time to time. I can give you lots of tips on cooking, Miss Mavis. But right now I’d best go out and scoop me up some scouring sand, hear?”
There was no accounting for female moods. That got her to laughing like hell for some reason. Then she fussed and said it wasn’t right to make a boarder help with housekeeping chores. So he told her nobody had even been able to make him wash pots and pans since he’d gotten out of the army.