green edges where they really look torn away. It should only take me a few hours, giving the background wash time to dry before I fake in the rest. I’d naturally feel silly charging anyone for just fooling around like that.”
She protested there was no way on earth she’d ever let anyone go to that much trouble for nothing.
Longarm said, “He’s making a modest profit on the materials. Ain’t that right, Mr. Ramsay?”
The helpful hardware man rose back to his considerable height as he gravely replied, “I am. Let’s consider my helping with the repairs part of the deal. Who knows, I might end up with a whole new line as a wallpaper repair man as word gets around and night riders keep shooting at Deputy Long here.”
The three of them laughed. Longarm was starting to like the cuss in spite of his dumb book about family trees. Longarm asked, “What about the floor, ceiling paper, and such?”
Ramsay raised the new bedding and mattress from one corner of the bedsprings to see daylight lancing up through the floorboards, and said, “Driving in pegs, planing them flat, and staining them to match ought to serve where nobody’s liable to look too closely to begin with. That ceiling paper’s a mite smoke-stained as well as plain. So it makes more sense to just paper over.”
Longarm pointed at the one wall papered with old Confederate and railroad bonds, asking what Ramsay thought they ought to do about that.
The hardware man shrugged and said, “I assumed that engraved bond paper held some sentimental value. Would you like us to paper that wall with some pattern that might harmonize, Miss Mavis?”
She hesitated, shook her head, and decided, “Fair is fair and that was the way I’d hired this room out to Custis here. I’m not being sentimental. You can see, where it’s torn, that I papered over a lot more of those worthless stocks and bonds before we got to the last roll up here in this one front room. But maybe some other time, after I’ve fixed things around here that really need fixing.”
Then she said, “I have to get down to my kitchen and see about a roast I put in just before the two of you arrived. You’ll be staying for dinner out back with us, won’t you, Mr. Ramsay?”
Ramsay looked surprised, but said he’d be delighted.
Longarm was neither that surprised nor delighted. He’d only set out to fix up her house, not fix her up with a cuss who bragged on all the fancy folks he claimed as kin. Sometimes it seemed as if Lexington and Concord had been a waste of gunpowder to some self-styled fine old American families. For it seemed they’d no sooner gotten shed of that stuck-up English peerage than they’d taken to sprouting coats of arms and claiming descent from kings, queens, and other mythical beings.
Longarm was surprised at the tone of his own voice when he allowed he had other chores that morning and might as well get cracking, seeing that the handsome hardware man seemed to want to tether his mules in the shade and help her set the table.
Longarm caught himself stomping as he strode away, and had to laugh at his own natural but foolish feelings. He paused on the cinder path to light a cheroot before moving on in restored humor.
The last thing a man who might be leaving on the evening train had any use for had to be a lonely widow in the market for a strong man to lean on. From the little he really knew about Remington Ramsay, old Mavis was likely as well off leaning on him as any other skirt-chasing son of a bitch in town. The husky bastard was surely fixing to prong her, and somehow Longarm knew she’d take her pronging sweet and submissive, at least compared to that clinical Nancy Calder. But a man had to be a sport about the ones he just couldn’t have, and there was just no way any man could plan on having them all, dad blast it.
So he ambled on over to Doc Forbes to find the doc had gone out on a call but left those carbon copies for Longarm in care of his wife—who wanted to coffee and cake Longarm as well.
Longarm thanked her for the invitation, but said he had other pressing chores. So she let him go, and he went over to the smaller saloon a few doors up from the Red Rooster to order a beer, carry it over to a corner table, and sip suds on his own as he went over the testimony taken down at the inquest that had started all this bullshit.
Longarm had been told more than once about those two cowhands hearing screams from the cellar of First Calvinist as they were on their way into town. Neither claimed to have seen Bubblehead Burnside do it, or even run past them. They just told the same pathetic tale of a pretty gal lying there with her skirts up around her hips and blood all around. Rafe Jennings was the one who claimed she’d told him “Howard” had done her so dirty. Nick Olsen had been riding hard for help as the poor gal gurgled her last in Rafe’s arms.
Longarm lit a thoughtful cheroot as he muttered, “So that’s just one man’s word as to the words of a dying woman.”
Then he got down to the testimony of Timmy Sears, aged seven and hence just within the limits of lawful testimony, who’d been crossing the churchyard on the far side as the two cowhands reined in. Timmy allowed a “big boy called Howard” had dashed out a cellar door on his side of the building when he’d heard Miss Mildred crying real loud.
Longarm wouldn’t have questioned the kid any closer than one of the members of the panel had, once Timmy was asked if he meant he’d seen that half-wit Howard they called Bubblehead. Timmy’s exact words were: “Miss Mildred told us not to call Howard Bubblehead. She said it wasn’t his fault he looked like that.”
Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring and muttered, “It seems the missionaries most anxious to help wind up in the Pot. Folks who won’t associate with anyone out of the ordinary hardly ever have anything extraordinary happen to them.”
He sipped some suds and told the carbon papers spread out in front of him, “All right, despite what Dr. Langdon Down and others say about kids like Bubblehead Burnside being gentle-natured and innocent of horny notions, a dying woman’s accusations work better than some diabolical plot involving two cowhands who didn’t attend her church and a Sunday school kid who did. Those syndrome studies say that there’s no sharp line betwixt them and the rest of us. Some look more Mongol than others. Some are drooling idiots, whilst others may be smart enough to leave home and support themselves. So who’s to say some ain’t as innocent as babies about sex whilst others might at least wonder what those hogs, dogs, and bigger kids are up to? Doc Forbes allows in this autopsy report that it didn’t seem as if the Sunday school teacher had been thoroughly raped. He never said nobody could have tried!”
By now it was getting on toward dinnertime, and Miss Mavis had said something about a roast in the oven. But Longarm saw they’d just laid out a tolerable free lunch at one end of the bar. So he decided to stay put and read over the damned carbons until he saw what he was missing.
On the face of things, he wasn’t missing anything. It was far easier to believe Timmy Sears had seen Howard
