Unbury Carol(79)

Sipping his imaginary wine, Dwight smiled at how much John Bowie in the washroom looked like John Bowie in the grave.

Unboxed.

“If anybody finds it odd that we’ve taken in a show on the same day of the funeral, I’ll simply explain to them the power of art for the grieving.”

Dwight rose and tossed his unseen glass over the ledge of Harper’s Hill. North of Harrows, Harper’s was as north as many Trail folk had ever been. It was usually barren of people, there being no business to conduct or friends to see; the hill wasn’t on the way to anyplace else.

“Martha? What is it? Do you need something? Need something…from me?”

It was a good feeling. Being needed. Surely Dwight would find a woman just like Martha. Perhaps there was one at the wake yesterday afternoon. Perhaps a woman felt sympathy for the widower and the hidden machinations behind all romantic convergences had already begun to tick.

Like a clock.

Dwight looked to the coach.

Sheriff Opal had questioned him good on the Trail. Scared him something fierce. But that mirror…he wondered if Carol would have realized that he’d gotten the mirror trick from the very show they’d seen in Griggsville. The man on stage made a donkey disappear. John Bowie was so delighted he howled and stood up and an usher had to ask him to settle down.

But poor John Bowie was dead now. Didn’t get to see Dwight’s trick. A simple slanted mirror. Good enough to fool a lawman.

“Maybe we should ride farther south than Griggsville, Martha,” Dwight said, still eyeing the coach. “Maybe we should leave the Trail altogether.”

He knelt and rolled up the blanket and when he looked up to the edge of Harper’s Hill he imagined himself leaping. He could end this now. Squeeze himself out of this vise-grip of anxiety by running off the edge of the Trail’s highest peak. Carol would wake when she woke and life in Harrows would go on without him.

“Martha?”

But there was no Martha, no dutiful wife. Only the independent, brilliant, and beautiful one who’d long made him feel small every time he saw her reflected large in someone else’s eyes.

Carol.

Carol’s shadow.

Hide your lady.

The stranger in his bedroom. The shape he’d shot.

As he laid the blanket upon the driver’s seat, Dwight saw many faces appear then disappear on the skull of the stranger he woke to.

There was Opal demanding to meet Alexander Wolfe, that figment-doctor, invented by Dwight and Lafayette in Lafayette’s shack in south Harrows.

Lafayette herself, demanding Dwight rehearse his lines again. Advising against hiring someone to follow Smoke.

Smoke, whom Dwight had never seen before but whom he imagined as having black eyes, leather skin, teeth as hard as tombstones.

Hardly recognizing that he was driving now, that the gray steeds were carrying him back toward his home, more faces came. And with each one, anxiety rekindled.

Farrah Darrow. How much did she know? Anything at all? Surely not enough to send Dwight to the hang-rope, but…enough to worry Opal?

The messenger boy who had brought him the news that Moxie was coming.

Opal again.

Dwight shook at the thought of returning home to find Opal in the parlor.

Sorry, Evers. I, too, was at that show in Griggsville. John Bowie nearly threw up on my badge.

Another face. Another Dwight had never seen.

James Moxie.

James Moxie knew magic. Had to know it better than John Bowie and certainly knew it better than Dwight.

Perhaps he had mirrors of his own? How could Dwight be sure that the willows he rode past weren’t the reflections of the willows across the Trail? That James Moxie wasn’t set to leap out from behind a false setting, gun already firing?

Dwight searched the base of the trees. Scanned the shadows.

“Relax,” Dwight told himself. “Dammit! Relax!”

What did Moxie look like? It was easy to imagine a solid brick of a face. Chips in the mortar from duels on the Trail. A thin line of a mouth that barely spoke. Cavernous eyes from which black winds erupted. And a mind behind those eyes capable of firing guns without drawing them.

“STOP IT!”

Dwight’s voice sounded limp among the clatter of the horses’ hooves. The creaking of the coach.

And the coach door swinging open and closed. Open and closed behind him.

“What?”

Dwight pulled up hard on the reins. The steeds came to an unnatural stop, both whinnying as they adjusted, the dust rising muzzle-high.

Dwight leaned over, peered around the coach’s side.

The door slowly swung closed, connected with the coach, then swung open again.

Dwight looked back down the Trail.

Carol’s body? Was it there in the dirt?

“Oh,” he moaned and quickly, rabbitlike, got down from the driver’s box.

The coach door was swinging closed again and Dwight grabbed its handle and opened it.

Carol was sitting up, eyes open, both hands raised as if reaching for him.

“Oh, no!”

Dwight leapt back from the coach and the door swung closed again. Carol vanished behind the black wood and Dwight stared long at the window.

But the window only reflected the willows behind him.

“Carol?”

Dwight wondered if perhaps he’d snapped. All those faces, all those plans.