The Black Train

that you were a successful author and quite respected in the community. A local legend, he called you.”

Sute gulped, staring at Collier’s remark. “What a—what a generous compliment. Yes, Jiff truly is a wonderful man.” Sute patted his forehead with a handkerchief, squinting through more unreckonable beguilement. “Say, Mr. Collier? Do you mind if I drink?”

You look like you need to, buddy. “Go right ahead. I’ll be having a few myself.”

Collier ordered a lager while Sute ordered a Grey Goose martini. He’s so flustered he needs booze. Indeed, the mere mention of the name—Jiff—seemed to pack some hypnotic effect on this man. But Collier was getting sidetracked himself. Whatever odd vibe existed between Sute and Jiff wasn’t the point. Collier burned to hear more about—

“And Penelope Gast, the wife? I believe Jiff mentioned that Gast murdered her. Is that right?”

Sute settled down when his first sip of the top-shelf martini drained a third of the glass. “Yes, he did, the day before he hanged himself. And if you want to talk about a person with amplified sexual desires? Mrs. Gast fits that bill quite nicely, and an interesting accompaniment to the nature of the house itself.”

“Are you saying that the house was the reason for her high sexual state?”

Sute mulled it over, with another sip of his drink. “Perhaps, or perhaps the opposite. Some claim that the house didn’t affect her—she affected the house. The sheer evil of her carnality.”

Collier came close to laughing. “Mr. Sute, it sounds to me like she was just another cheating housewife who had the misfortune of getting caught. Being a floozy doesn’t mean her house is possessed. If that were the case, the real estate market in L.A. would be in big trouble.”

“Just another cheating housewife, or something more? No one will ever be able to say for sure,” Sute calmly remarked. “She was reportedly pregnant, and not by her husband. We know this because the local physician had her name in a ledger in his safe.”

“So? Maybe she had an appointment for an earache.”

“She had an appointment for an abortion. The way they did it back then was—” Sute peered up, mildly pained. “It’s uncomfortable to talk about, Mr. Collier. It’s an ugly, ugly story, and not one you’d want to hear before eating your lunch.”

Collier chuckled. “Mr. Sute, my life is so boring in Los Angeles I can’t even see straight most of the time. This is fascinating stuff; I’m really intrigued by it. And besides, it can’t be any grosser than the crime section of the L.A. Times on any given day.”

“So be it. If you want me to oblige you, I’ll oblige you.” The large man cleared his throat. “The way they aborted pregnancies back then was by injecting a distillation of boiled soapberry flowers into the uterine channel. This compound—very astringent—would cause a drastic PH shift in the womb, and usually result in a miscarriage within three days. The town physician’s ledger—and keep in mind, this was a private ledger, for his private activities—plainly listed Mrs. Gast’s appointment as a meeting for an abortion. And prior to that, Mrs. Gast had had three more appointments for the same procedure—at least three on the record; the ledger went back five years. Of course, she didn’t live long enough to make that fourth appointment. Harwood came home earlier than expected—and killed her.”

“How?”

Another pained look. “With an ax.”

“He axed his own wife to death, when she was pregnant?”

“Yes, and he did so in the very room she’d committed all of her infidelities. She had a special room for these trysts. It was kept locked for her—by the family maid, a slave named Jessa. I shudder to think of how many other secrets Jessa went to her grave with—though I don’t suppose she ever really had a grave, not a proper one. See, Gast murdered her, too, when he became apprised of her collusions with his wife.”

Collier peeped over his beer. “I almost hate to ask.”

“She was…well, she was left out in the fields for the buzzards and the crows.”

Sute’s pause irked Collier. “Left? You mean Gast killed her and then left her body somewhere?”

Sute finished his martini, ordered another, and stolidly replied, “Gast had her raped to death, by twenty of his most loyal rail workers. Then her body was discarded in the fields behind the house. The mass rape, by the way, took place in the same room that Mrs. Gast would be murdered in later that day—”

Raped to death. Yeah, it’s hard to get grimmer than that.

“—and I might add, since you insist on some of the more morbid details, that Mrs. Gast received similar attentions from Gast’s roughriders, while he watched, of course.”

“I don’t get it. Mrs. Gast was gang-raped to death, too? I thought you said she was killed with an—”

“She wasn’t quite raped to the point of death—this by Gast’s particular order. After a few hours, and when she was just about to give up the ghost, that’s when Gast put the ax to her.”

“Then she was dumped in the field, like the maid?”

“No. He left her body to rot in the bed. Ironic that she should die by such means in the very room whose purpose she kept hidden from Mr. Gast. No doubt those four previous pregnancies by men other than her husband germinated in that room as well, and I suspect much else.”

“You keep mentioning this room—I wonder which room it is exactly…”

“It’s on the main stair hall. Mrs. Butler doesn’t even rent that one out. Room two.” Sute looked at him. “Which room are you in, Mr. Collier?”

Collier winced at a twinge. “Room three.”

“You’re in an interesting spot, then. To your left is the room where both Jessa and Penelope Gast were murdered. And to your right, the original commode closet and bathing room.”

“What…happened there?”

“He drowned one of his foremen there, a track inspector named Taylor Cutton. Cutton had the bad luck of being one of Mrs. Gast’s secret suitors. Somehow Gast discovered this and drowned Cutton in the hip bath, among other things.”

Eew, Collier thought. I hope it wasn’t the same hip bath I saw Mrs. Butler washing herself in last night…

The topic was at last getting the best of him. When the food arrived, it smelled delicious but he only picked at it. Several more pints of Cusher’s Civil War Lager took some of the edge off the nefarious story that he’d essentially forced Sute to relate. But he did ask, “And this manuscript you wrote, the one too harsh for publishers—do you still have it?”

Sute’s face was pinkening a bit, from a third martini. “Oh, yes. It’s gathering dust on my shelf.”

“And that’s the entire story of Harwood Gast—the entire legend of the man?”

Sute nodded. “And I think a lot of it’s probably quite accurate. Most of the sources are very authentic. Whether you believe the supernatural angle or not, Mr. Collier, you can believe this: Harwood Gast was purely and simply an evil man.”

“Mrs. Butler said the same thing.”

“And she’s well advised. Some of her ancestors lived in this town when all these things were happening, and mine, too. I appreciate your interest, though. It’s quite flattering, I must say. Here’s my card.” He slipped one across the table. “If you’d like to borrow the manuscript, or browse through it, don’t hesitate to ask. But—please— call first.”

“Thanks,” Collier said. “I might take you up on that.”

“I can also show you some of the original daguerreotypes that I didn’t elect to put in any of my published books. There are a few nudes of Mrs. Gast, if you’re…interested in seeing that sort of thing.”

Collier’s brows jiggled, but then he thought, Nudes? “Oh, come on, don’t tell me she did pornography, too. They must not have even had it back then.”

“No, nothing like that, but just as aristocrats of earlier eras would have their wives painted in the nude, the same went when photography was invented. Daguerreotypes and other early forms of photography were very expensive, and reserved only for the very rich. Well, Harwood Gast may have been the richest private citizen in Tennessee back then. He had several nudes taken of his wife, for his own viewing. She’s quite a comely woman.”