Chapter 16
Since Ellen was easy to satisfy as well as warm-natured, Longarm wound up with a good night’s sleep for a change. The free-thinking librarian didn’t want anyone wondering where she was come breakfast time at the boardinghouse, so she got dressed to sneak back there just as Longarm was beginning to notice how crowded an army cot was unless you were both in the middle.
Once she’d locked the front door upstairs behind her, Longarm lay back with a satisfied sigh, and slept like a log until he heard her now-familiar heels overhead again. She’d opened the library just a tad early after breakfast at the boardinghouse to serve Longarm his own breakfast in bed. He’d have never known it was that long after sunrise if he hadn’t had hot buttered toast, black coffee, and some more of her to wake himself up in that windowless dark cellar. once she had him up, in every way, Ellen said she had to open the library officially. So he let her, taking his own time to put on his clothes and mosey upstairs after her. A couple of schoolgals who were jawing with Ellen at her desk looked surprised as all get-out to see a tall stranger wearing a gun appear out of nowhere. So Longarm nodded casually at Ellen, declared, “I put that travel book about India back where it belongs, ma’am,” and sauntered on out the front door as if he was leaving church on the Sabbath.
First things coming first, he went back to the boardinghouse to clean up and change to a fresh shirt and underdrawers, just as glad to meet nobody upstairs or down until he was fixing to leave.
He found his messed-up room about as he’d last seen it. But as he went back downstairs and out the back door, the Widow MacUlric and old Remington Ramsay drove up the side lane on that two-mule buckboard. Mavis MacUlric had on a summer-weight Sunday dress and sunbonnet. The hardware man was wearing bib overalls and a denim work shirt. The wagon bed behind them was lightly laden with nail kegs, bags and buckets of paint, and Lord only knows what-all.
Mavis MacUlric said, “Oh, there you are, Custis. We missed you at breakfast and I was so afraid you’d come home to find your quarters in disarray. Remington here just sold me on a whole new wallpaper pattern, and I may let him redecorate the whole house!”
Longarm locked eyes with the hardware mogul, who seemed to read minds, because he softly said, “On me. As I was just explaining to Miss Mavis, we in the interior-decorating trade often do demonstration jobs gratis to convince other customers we know what we are up to. Miss Mavis has agreed to let me conduct tours of just her parlor and hallways once we finish up here.”
“Once we finish up?” Longarm asked.
“My helpers will be here any minute with a portable steam boiler we use to peel wallpaper,” the big galoot replied without looking away.
The pretty young widow woman Ramsay was being so good to dimpled down from the buckboard seat and explained, “Remington says it’s best to peel down to the plaster and start all over.” The mighty thorough-sounding redecorator swung down to hold out a helping hand to the lady as he told Longarm, “Three layers of paper and wheat paste are begging for bugs to begin with. But as a matter of fact, as I just told Miss Mavis, those old railroad stocks and bonds her late husband pasted up as good for nothing might just be worth something.”
As he helped her down, the young widow woman said, “Oh, Remington, poor Martin may not have been as practical as some men I know, but he was hardly a fool who’d paper our upstairs wall with valuable stocks and bonds.”
Ramsay gravely replied, “I never found your late husband anything but sensible when we were talking business, ma’am. At the same time, we’ll never have a better chance to steam all that Confederate and Credit Mobilier bond paper off, clean it, dry it, and see just what you’ve had hidden up yonder all this time. You and your Martin were likely right about it being worthless. But it never hurts to ask, and it’s certainly not worth anything, even as wallpaper, hidden under the new patterns you just picked out!”
Longarm said something about having to get on over to the Western Union, and left them to hammer that dumb-sounding dispute out. But even as he walked the short distance to the telegraph office, he wondered whether Remington Ramsay was an easygoing innocent cuss with nothing up his sleeve, or one mighty slick confidence man out to skin a poor widow woman. For it worked either way. Marrying up with a gal sounded like a mighty desperate way to get her valuable wallpaper, while a widow woman who had some of the same would tend to trust a man who came right out and helped her cash in on unsuspected wealth to where he might not have to marry up with her to rob her blind.
Striding across the sandy street in the dazzling morning sunlight and noting it was shaping up to be a scorcher, Longarm muttered, “Gals in love with a sweet-talking lover are likely to sign anything, and Ellen says she was nearly taken by such a bastard earlier!”
He caught himself mapping out a plan of action, and warned himself with a cynical laugh, “Forget it! You’d have never heard about all the woes of a somewhat horny and mighty nice-looking widow woman if you hadn’t wound up playing slap and tickle with another gal entirely. Dropping Ellen like a used snot rag to go after Mavis would be mean to the both of them. It ain’t as if you were planning on staying in these parts. So even if you could save Mavis from that hardware monger for a spell, she’d likely wind up going back to him as soon as your back was turned.”
He entered the cooler telegraph office to find no messages there for him, and sent a slew of his own messages in every direction. Then he said he’d be back, and moseyed up the street to the town marshal’s office. He found it far smaller than the sheriff’s office and county jail on the far side of the courthouse. Pronto Cross was seated at a desk in the middle of the twenty-by-forty-foot frame building. The one holding cage they had, empty at the moment, shared the back wall with the crapper and rear exit. Save for a few extra chairs and the gun racks along one wall, the effect was spartan, and made the modest space seem bigger than it really was.
Cross got up from the desk and said, “You just missed Timmy Sears and his mother. She brought him over to talk to you, like I asked last night. Seeing it was so early and you weren’t here yet, they said they’d be back in a spell. She said something about shopping, and he was asking if she’d buy him some marbles.”
By tacit agreement the two of them stepped outside to the shaded plank walk so the Sears woman would see Longarm was there as she and her kid dashed all over the tiny town in the hot sun.
Longarm offered the town law a cheroot, and got them both lit up before Cross told him, “I didn’t question the boy again about the time he spied Bubblehead Burnside fleeing the scene of his crime. His folks weren’t too happy about the boy having to go over it all again. Tim Sears Senior says little Timmy has been pestering them since the killing about what such words as rape might mean. Seems the other kids have been talking to him about what happened to their Sunday school teacher. But that might be the least of our worries.”
Longarm took a thoughtful drag on his own smoke and said he only had a couple of gentle questions to ask little Timmy. Then he asked what other worries Cross might be talking about.
The town law said, “Two strangers in town. Got off the morning train and vanished into thin air. Never stopped anywhere to order a meal or hire any horses. So where are they at? You know there’s no proper hotel here in town, and I have my two roundsmen canvassing everyone with rooms to let.”