Unbury Carol(77)

“Looks like another fool!” someone cackled.

The sheriff, fanning herself with a folded wanted poster, removed her boots from the desk and stood up.

“Who we got here?” she asked, her eyebrows arched like the hands of a clock. Time ticking away.

“Man gave a false name,” Wesley said.

“That right? What name he give?”

“James Moxie.”

The two lawmen snorted laughter but the sheriff eyed Moxie as if they’d brought in something poisonous to the touch.

Moxie said, “I need to be in Harrows.”

“What’s that again?”

“Ordinarily I’d oblige you, but I have business in Harrows.”

The sheriff cleared her throat. “That’s very sweet of you, stranger, but it doesn’t work that way.”

“On what grounds are you locking me up?”

She fanned a hand to the hall of cells. “You see these cells? These are men who claimed they’d be passing through for a night. Albert’s Port is a nice town, you see, and I’m something of the janitor. Call me Sheriff Marge and I’ll call you by your rightful name the moment you give it to us.”

An old man gripped the bars of his cell and snarled at Moxie.

“Did he lie about his name, too?” Moxie asked.

The sheriff’s face grew grave. Then graver. “No, sir. He drowned a woman in the O is what he done.”

Sheriff Marge pulled from her belt a ring of keys. The deputy came in behind Moxie and the sheriff said, “Take his gun, Dep Bill. He’s been fingering it since entering.”

The deputy took Moxie’s gun.

Sheriff Marge unlocked the cell opposite the old killer and looked at the outlaw.

“Consider this a free hotel,” she said. “On us.”

Moxie stepped inside. A vision of the sun going down on Harrows dimmed his mind’s eye.

“Sheriff,” Moxie said. “Please. I don’t have time.”

She locked the cell door.

“Nobody does, stranger. Or shall we call you…No Name.”

Then she walked back to her desk. Her boots hard against the clean wood floor. The deputy, still holding Moxie’s gun, stood before the outlaw’s cell.

“James Moxie, huh.”

Moxie didn’t respond. He was thinking of dirt piled so high it obscured the moon in Harrows.

The deputy talked about the Trick at Abberstown. The way he told it, James Moxie had hired a second shooter, a comrade in the crowd.

“All those toughers had friends in those days. Yessir. Nowadays it’s every man for himself on the Trail. But back then—”

As he spoke, Moxie heard a whisper from the shadows of the empty cell beside his. It was clear the deputy hadn’t heard it and Moxie turned and saw the silhouette of a man lying down on a bunk.

“What kind of man turns his back on a sick woman? What kind of man leaves her that way?”

The whisper was steady, the syllables like small bullets fired.

The deputy went on. “James Moxie might be the most frightening outlaw the Trail has ever known because he’s the only one who’s been able to keep his secret. You hear what I’m saying, No Name? You know he was never properly put away?” The deputy shook his head, studied Moxie’s gun in his palm. “You sure picked a poor name to give.”

The man in the cell beside Moxie’s sat up and Moxie recognized his face.

Silas Hite, he thought. The man whose house he’d carried Carol’s limp body to the first time he’d feared she’d died.

“I told you that night behind the barn,” Silas said, his voice like stirring milk. “I told you a man can’t quit someone he loves because he’s scared. I told you so…but you did…didn’t you? You broke her heart ’cause she was sick, James.”

“Hey, Wesley!” the deputy called. “What do you think James Moxie looks like? You think he looks like this man here? Red shirt and tired?”

Wesley laughed from his desk.

Silas Hite stepped to the bars adjoining Moxie’s cell. “Look at you…here…in jail…just when you’re trying to do right.”

“Bad men feared him,” Deputy Bill went on. “Good men feared him, the law wanted him—”

Sheriff Marge got up again and joined the deputy in the hall of cells. “He’s still a wanted man,” she said.

“This long after?” Bill asked.

Sheriff Marge looked at Moxie with a mix of sarcasm and suspicion. As if she hadn’t quite ruled out that it was him. “Just because we’re on the side of the law, Dep Bill, don’t make us any less curious how it was done. Not to mention a man did die that day.”

The deputy carried on from there, studying the gun as he spoke: the fine woodwork, the shine of the old steel. Behind him, the old crook who’d drowned the woman in the O told what he knew about James Moxie, the stories he’d heard. And Silas Hite went on.

“You let her rot, James. You broke her heart and a better man came and held her ’cause she was sick…sick, James…”

“Leave me alone,” Moxie said through clenched teeth.

The sheriff looked at him quick and hard. “What’s that?”

Moxie kept quiet and Deputy Bill continued. Sheriff Marge started telling all that she’d heard other sheriffs say about Moxie. The old killer giggled and crowed and Moxie kept still, the town of Harrows diminishing, Carol’s burial coming at him too soon, too fast.