lines.
“Have either of you seen my daughter?”
“Not at all this morning,” I said, and Rachel shook her head. “She’s not in her room?”
“No, and some of her things are missing. Clothing and her carpetbag.”
“Oh, Lord. You think she may have run off?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. She’s young and restless, she dislikes her life here, and after what happened last night…”
I recalled the adoring looks Annabelle had lavished on James Shock. Was it possible that he’d sweet-talked her into leaving with him? Or that she’d decided to join him on her own?
My face must have betrayed what I was thinking. “What is it, Missus Devane?”
Sophie Murdock asked. “Do you have an idea where Annabelle’s gone?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m afraid I do.”
Boone Nesbitt
I was out in the livery barn, watching Murdock help Pete Dell harness the stage team, when Mrs. Murdock came rushing in. The look of her was both frantic and frightened. “Thomas,” she said to her husband, “Annabelle’s gone.”
“What do you mean…gone?”
“She’s nowhere on the property, and some of her clothes and her carpetbag are missing. But that’s not all. Missus Kraft just told me Joe Hoover was carrying three thousand dollars in a belt pouch, the money her husband was shouting about last night, and that’s missing, too.”
“My God, you don’t believe Annabelle stole it?”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
“She’d never do such a thing. She’s not a thief.”
Mrs. Murdock was looking at the stalls. “The saddle horses…they’re all here.”
“Yes, and she’s not foolish enough to go traipsing off on foot.”
“Missus Devane thinks she may be with the peddler, Shock.”
“What!”
“Missus Devane may be right,” I said. “Shock was in a hurry to pull out this morning. Stolen money in his pocket and maybe the girl hidden in his wagon could be the real reason.”
“What’re you saying, Nesbitt? That he kidnapped my daughter?”
“More likely she went of her own free will, with or without his knowledge.”
Murdock said grimly: “Well, I’ll find out. It’s been less than two hours since Shock drove out and he can’t make fast time in that wagon of his. With luck I can catch him on horseback before he reaches River Bend.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “Shock’s fast with that revolver of his, and a crack shot. Two makes better odds.”
“Three makes better still,” Pete Dell said.
“Murdock and I can do the job. Best if you stay here with the women.”
“You hand out orders real easy, mister. Who put you in charge?”
“Don’t argue with him, Pete,” Murdock said. “We don’t have any time to waste.”
He sent his wife into the house for his sidearm and shell belt; I was already wearing mine. I saddled the rented piebald. Murdock didn’t own a decent saddle horse, but Luke Kraft’s roan gelding was broke enough to let a stranger throw Kraft’s old McClellan saddle on his back and climb aboard. We were out of the barn and on the levee road inside of five minutes.
The road was in reasonably good shape after the storm. Rain-puddled and muddy, so we couldn’t run the animals even though it chafed Murdock not to. I set the pace at a steady lope that was still some faster than Shock could drive that peddler’s wagon of his, and we had no trouble maintaining it.
Mostly we rode in silence, except for one brief exchange. Murdock twisted his head my way and said: “Just who are you, Nesbitt?”
“Does it matter?”
“You talk and act like a lawman. Are you one?”
“In a way. I work for the Pinkertons.”
“So that’s it. That’s how you knew about me.”
“We’ll talk about that later.”
“Does Bellright know yet?”
“Not yet.”
“All for yourself, eh? How much are you getting for me, dead or alive? Five thousand? Ten? More?”
“Later, Murdock. Keep your mind on Shock and your daughter for now.”
The morning was cold and gray, the debris-choked slough waters on both sides receding and mist rising here and there from the half-drowned cattails along the banks. Birds screeched and chattered, frogs croaked long and loud-the only sounds that reached my ears. We had the road to ourselves, but there were fresh wheel and hoof tracks to mark the passage of Shock’s wagon.
I slowed as we passed a side road that cut away through a swampy peninsula to the north. There were no tracks at the entrance to the road, but the grass and pig weed farther on seemed to be mashed down in places. I kept us riding ahead because I couldn’t think of a reason for Shock to have detoured onto a side road-not until we rounded a bend and came on the fallen sycamore.
“That tree’s been down a while,” Murdock said. “There’s no way Shock could have gotten his wagon around it.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “He doubled back to that side road we passed. Where does it lead?”
“Crucifixion River. What’s left of it.”
“Any other way out of there?”
“An overgrown track the sect members used. But Shock wouldn’t know about that.”
“Your daughter does, though, doesn’t she?”
“Yes,” he said, tight-lipped. “Annabelle knows.”
We rode back to the intersection. As we turned onto the Crucifixion River road, I leaned down for a better look at the ground. Up close you could see where Shock had tried to rub out and hide the wagon tracks at the turning. A short ways beyond I spied a pile of horse manure that still steamed in the cold air. We couldn’t be far behind them now, I judged.
I said as much to Murdock, and, riding as fast as we dared, we followed the wagon tracks through the wet grass and swampy earth.
Annabelle Murdock
I sat forward as Crucifixion River came into view ahead. It was an awful, bleak place in the best of weather, and on a dark gray day like this one the look of it made me shiver and hunch up even more inside my black dog coat. Except for marsh birds, the quiet was eerie. You could almost hear the people singing “We Shall Gather at the River,” the way they had been the day they arrived and Dad and Mother ferried them across the slough. I was just a little girl then, but I still remembered the singing and it still gave me chills.
There was a big weedy meadow where the road ended, stretching out along the banks of the mud brown river. At one end were the remnants of the potato and corn and vegetable patches the sect people had started, and at the other was a church or meeting house and about a dozen cabins built back among willows and swamp oaks. There wasn’t much left of the buildings now. After the people moved away, shanty boaters had come in and carted off everything that was left behind. Even doors, window coverings, floorboards. They were all just hollow shells now, some of them with collapsed walls and roofs. Dead things waiting for the swampland and the river to swallow them up.
