Excerpt: The Ghosts of River's Bend

River’s Bend, Montana Territory, 1867

“This isn’t right, Marshal. This is all wrong. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

Marshal Logan Grant stretched out on his bunk, deceptively relaxed. He glanced through the jailhouse bars at the man sitting in what used to be his office. “You know I’m not going to argue with you there, Pony. But at least they gave me a trial, as mocked up as it was.”

Pony Joe paced the floor in front of the cell. “I can break you out. I don’t think most people in town would mind. No one wants to see you hang.”

“Imported jury? High-priced lawyer? I beg to differ. Someone definitely wants to see me hang.”

He swung his feet over the edge of the bunk and walked over to the bars where Pony Joe was trying to roll a cigarette. Logan reached through the bars and took the makings from his deputy and rolled the cigarette with steady hands.

“Why do you think they let you in here without a guard?” he asked as he worked. “Because you're my friend? They let you in because most of the imported jury was gunmen. There’s a guy with a rifle across the street. He’s sitting in the upstairs window at the bakery. There’s a sure shot loafing out in front, another standing across the street from my cell window, leaning on the saloon banister. There’s another guy with a rifle sitting just inside the door of the Land Management office.”

Logan handed the cigarette to Pony Joe and then rolled himself one. “No, my friend,” he continued, “someone here in River’s Bend wants me dead. Made sure that my verdict wasn’t left to sympathetic town folk. They know there’s a chance you might try to break me out, and they’ve made sure that we never make it past the porch outside.”

He lit his cigarette and drew deeply from it. Pony Joe had not even lit his yet. Logan patted his shoulder. He knew Pony wasn’t in the mood for resignation, but he himself had come to terms with his fate. He was aware that someone had sent a rider to Missoula to the territorial governor, but he was also aware that the group outside, whoever they all were, were not going to wait for word to get back. He walked back to the bunk and set down, taking another draw from his cigarette.

“Look, it’s only been a few short years, but they’ve been good years.” He rose wearily to his feet and walked back over to Pony. “Twenty-eight’s a good age to die at. Look at you. You’ll probably live to be old and withered. You won’t be able to hold a gun. You won’t be able to ride a horse.” He grinned, though the action took great effort. “Hell, the women aren’t even going to want anything to do with you. In my, book, partner, if you’ve lived that long, you’ve lived too long.”

“I can’t believe this all doesn’t bother you,” Pony Joe threw down his unlit cigarette. “You really don’t mind that they’re going to take you out there and string you up?”

Logan handed his cigarette through the bars, and Pony took it and drew from it. They’d been through a lot together in the few years that Logan had been in River’s Bend. Pony reminded Logan a lot of his older brother. They both took life far too seriously. Ripley’s inability to handle what he couldn’t control drove him to hang himself from the strongest rafter in his burned out plantation. It was a good thing their parents had died before the war. What would they think, knowing that both of their sons died at the end of a rope?

“I need you to do something for me, Pony,” Logan said, “because I’m obviously not going to be around to do it. I need you to do a couple of things for me.”

Pony finished the cigarette. He dropped the butt and ground it into the floor. “Anything,” he said. “I’ll do anything you want me to.”

“First off, stop moping. I’m going to die. There’s nothing either of us is going to be able to do about short of an act of God, and the preacher doesn’t think He’s on my side. When I rode for Lee in the war, I decided then that I’d die with my boots on. This is a different kind of war here, Pony but my thinking hasn’t changed.

“Second,” he paused and Pony looked up at him, bothered by the break in Logan’s voice. Logan turned and walked to the bunk, but then turned on his heel and walked back to Pony.

“I don’t want you to give up finding out who killed Annie. When you find him, I don’t want you to rest until he’s dead. She didn’t die easy, Pony. She didn’t want to die and she fought. Someone was angry. Slapped her around. Beat her. Tied that scarf around her neck until she couldn’t breathe. You know as well as I do that she didn’t deserve to die like that.

“There’s something else that you need to know. Annie and I were married.”

Pony stared. “What? The preacher has been telling everyone that you’re finally paying for a sin of forny..forni..”

“Fornication.”

“And you’re going to tell me that the two of you were married?”

“We were married under that new double proxy law,” Logan said. “I was in Missoula, transporting the prisoner to the territorial prison. Annie was on her way to Kansas to have a child. We thought that if we married before she got to Kansas that when she got back here, no one would know that the baby was…”

“You and Annie have a child?”

“When I talked to Annie that last night, she said she would be back in town as soon as she went to Billings for the papers. She left our son with friends, decided that it would be better if she didn’t bring him in until she came with proof that we were married. These are good people here in town Pony, but there’s no telling how they would treat the illegitimate son of the marshal and a bar maid.”

“Who else knows this?” Pony asked.

“No one, that I know of. Annie said the baby came early. She never actually made it to Kansas. Had the boy somewhere in Ohio, I think. The only other person who knows that there’s a child is Doc Chatham. When he examined the body, he knew she’d had a child. He told me. He thought that maybe she lost a child with the good-for-nothing first husband she had. I should have mentioned then that it was my child, that we’d married, but…” he spread his hands and shrugged. “I was afraid he’d figure out that Annie was with child when she left here, before we married. I wanted to save her reputation. I didn’t think that not mentioning it would get me hung.”

“Where’s the baby now?”

“In Missoula with friends of Annie’s. Which brings me to the next favor I want you to do for me. I gave Annie a gold coin. It’s something that’s been in my family for centuries. It’s kind of odd, flat. Has a raised impression of a king or something sitting on a chair. Other side has and angel and another guy holding some kind of banner. The writing on it is kind of odd. I’m not really sure where it’s from.

“Anyway, I wanted her to take it, to keep it for our son. Tell Doc Chatham that you need to get that coin from Annie’s affects and take it to the boy.”

There were voices outside the front door. Pony’s face paled and Logan turned to look out the cell window. Sunrise. They were coming for him.

“You can’t stop this,” Logan said. “Find whoever killed Annie, Pony. Find him and make him pay for both of us.”

That last conversation played in Pony’s mind, haunting his thoughts. He kept hoping for that act of God, keeping an eye out for the rider from Missoula with a letter from the governor to stop this nonsense. His heart kept begging until the trapdoor swung open beneath Logan Grant’s feet.

River’s Bend, Montana. Present Day.

Mike Fallon took off his hat and set it on the seat next to him as he pulled out a chair and seated himself. He ran a hand through his sandy hair to straighten it then reached over and turned his coffee up right side up. He’d always preferred booths, but his gun, nightstick, mace and cuffs on his belt made sliding in and out of the wooden benches in the Hen House awkward. The tables would have to do when he was in uniform.

Charley was already on her way over with a pot of coffee. Her hair was pinned up differently this morning, a cascade of chestnut curls dripping over her right eye. When she leaned down to put the menu in front of him, a shaky smile on her face, he could see the purple of a new bruise near her eye.

“This usual this morning, Detective?” she asked.

“Probably,” Mike said, “but I’m going to sit here and read the menu first. Just for appearances, of course.”

“Of course,” Charley said. “I’ll have Benji start your breakfast.”

She walked away and he picked up the menu. He never really read it. It just served as a shield, flimsy armor to hide behind until he was ready to face the world. After four months, he still hadn’t quite reached that point.

He couldn’t read the paper. The only paper offered in River’s Bend came from Missoula and it was Missoula he was trying to escape. After all this time, the investigation into Sheriff Kat Ramsey’s suicide still made the front page. Despite what the sheriff’s office and the police department knew about his relationship with Kat, his name stayed out of the papers. It wouldn’t take long, Mike suspected, until someone let slip more information than they should and he’d wake up to a microphone stuck in his face. To the best of his knowledge, only the police chief here in River’s Bend knew why a Missoula police detective had a sudden desire to change his lifestyle and take a job in a town too small for a stop light.

“You need to start bringing a book, Mike.”

Mike looked up at the speaker who was seating himself across the table. “Wouldn’t that be rude?” he asked. “Don’t you think it would look like I’m trying to hide from the general population?”

“Aren’t you?” Rory Henning was a big man who looked more like miner than a restaurant owner. He leaned his giant forearms on the table. Mike wasn’t a small man, but he tended to look that way in Rory’s presence. “You’ve been hiding since the day you rolled into town.”

“Give me a few more months,” Mike said. “I’ll get over it. And speaking of hiding, your niece looks like she’s got some fresh bruises this morning.”

Rory shook his head. “I wish I could do something for Charley,” he said. “But what can I do. It doesn’t matter where she goes, her father is going to find her and bring her back, and it will be worse for her when he does. She won’t press charges because she’s terrified of the repercussions. I can’t help her until she can help herself.”

“It’s an old story,” Mike said. “I’ve seen a lot of it.” He glanced back over his shoulder at Charley who was having a good-natured argument with the cook. “I’ve also stood over a lot dead women who tried to escape. It’s hard to know what to do for them.”

“As bad as this is going to sound, I’d always figured my brother would end up a child molester. I’ve asked Charley if he’s ever laid that kind of hand on her. She looked just surprised enough for me to believe her when she said no. I just know that when Becca died and I heard he was going to be raising that little girl alone, I had a really bad feeling.”

“He apparently gets his rocks off somewhere else. Are you sure he’s that type?”

Rory shrugged. “Not anymore. I know he keeps a gal in Dixon and one in Kalispel. Wanda doesn’t know about them. And I’m willing to be they don’t know about Wanda. And you know what really pisses me off. Wanda’s the type of woman who would hit back, fight back, you know? But it’s Charley he beats on.”

“Men who beat their women tend to be intimidated by strong women,” Mike said. “They always beat up on the ones who don’t fight back. What happened to Charley’s mother?”

“He didn’t kill her. She was sick, really sick. Some kind of auto-immunity problem that kept her on various medications and in hospitals. I think it was pneumonia that finally got her, but I’m not even sure of that. I never even got the chance to meet her, not that she’d want to meet any of the Hennings after being married to Frank. Hell, I didn’t even meet Charley until she was five years old.”

“It’s good to know she has a place where she can feel safe,” Mike said. She was taking a plate from the cook that looked like it might be his breakfast. “She always seems happy here.”

“I’ve seen her go from a shivering little lump of terrified to someone with a little more self-confidence. I’ve kept her working here just so I could see that grow in her. It’s been slow. She’s twenty-five and still living at home with her father because she’s afraid to leave. I’m hoping she has the confidence to walk out before she hits thirty.”

Rory got up from the table as Charley approached with Mike’s breakfast. She put it on the table in front of him and snatched the menu from him in one smooth movement.

“You won’t be needing that anymore,” she said, sweetly. “I’ll be back with more coffee.”

The police station was situated toward the middle of town not far from the original marshal’s office. Mike sat in his car and glanced down the street at the old office and jail house that now housed a small museum. There was a lot of history here for Mike Fallon. His great-great-grandfather had been a marshal here. He’d been hung for killing his lover.

Mike pulled a gold coin out of his pocket and turned it over in his fingers. He’d heard the story of Logan Grant. He’d read things about him online, heard about his from his grandfather, from his father. He’d heard the story from Logan Grant himself.

Logan was sitting in the passenger seat watching Mike toy with the coin. He hadn’t changed in 140 years, yet he didn’t look like he would have been out of place in modern-day River’s Bend. He wore a blue flannel shirt, jeans and western-cut boots like he’d stepped from on old John Wayne movie. But, then, everyone in Western Montana looked like they’d stepped from the same film. Even Mike, when he wasn’t in uniform.

“It’s best if I don’t get involved,” Mike said finally.

“With Charley?” Logan asked. “Why not?”

“I can’t always be there to protect her.”

“You don’t have to be.”

Mike shook his head. “Someone has to be. If she’s alone, her father will find her and he’ll beat her to death eventually. That’s a hard way to die, Logan. Have you ever seen anyone who was beat to death?”

He glanced over and caught Logan’s frown. “Sorry,” he said. “Bad question. I wasn’t thinking. I just keep going over in my mind what I could do to help her. The entire situation is on the verge of driving me crazy.”

“Crazy?” Logan asked. “Mike, you're talking to a ghost. You're already crazy."