Seasons of Death Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Seasons of Death

  With thanks to Mildretta and Walt Adams

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Seasons of Death

  By M. K. Wren

  Copyright 2014 by Martha Kay Renfroe

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1990

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by M. K. Wren and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Curiosity Didn’t Kill the Cat

  A Multitude of Sins

  Oh, Bury Me Not

  Nothing’s Certain but Death

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Seasons of Death

  M. K. Wren

  With thanks to Mildretta and Walt Adams

  and Ed Jagels of Silver City, Idaho—

  stewards of the memory and

  champions of the dream…

  Chapter 1

  Ten miles east of Drewsey, the Oregon State Highway Department had thoughtfully put up a sign—white on green in this sienna and ochre landscape—to advise motorists that they were crossing from Pacific to mountain standard time and should set their clocks ahead one hour.

  Conan Flagg held the steering wheel with his left hand while he adjusted his watch: 8:36 June 12. The Jaguar XK-E thrummed effortlessly along a lonely, sagebrush-lined highway under a sun that burned hot even this early in the day. His passage stirred the only wind, a miniature fifty-five-mile-an-hour gale that tossed his hair, black as the sleek Jaguar, black as his eyes behind the dark glasses. The Indian slant was emphasized by his reflexive squint; he was traveling straight into the sun’s glare.

  Conan looked out at the arid, sage-velveted hills, rank on rank, the basalt mesas layered with blood-brown flows, millennia deep, and he experienced one of those moments when something within him roused to demand: what am I doing here?

  Murder. That was the answer, and it seemed vaguely unreal as the erosion-razed landscape spun past him.

  A murder had occurred on a chill autumn night forty years ago, and that was why he was driving into the sun on this warm summer morning and had spent most of the previous day behind this wheel.

  Nearly four hundred miles behind him, across the breadth of the state of Oregon, the sun would be making mist in pine and spruce forests and glinting on silk and cream breakers, but he wasn’t there to look out the windows of his house to see them. Nor was he there to walk the two blocks to the ramshackle, shingled pile that he regarded as his one contribution to the continuity of civilization: the Holliday Beach Book Shop. He wasn’t there for Miss Beatrice Dobie’s inevitable “Good morning, Mr. Flagg,” nor for Meg’s hoarse, Siamese complaints about the tardiness of her breakfast.

  Conan Flagg wasn’t there because in his billfold he carried a card that proclaimed him a licensed private investigator, and because forty years ago a man named Leland Langtry had died when a knife was driven into his heart.

  Conan leaned into the wheel around a long curve and looked southeast over a tumble of arid hills. He couldn’t see the Owyhee Mountains, not yet; they were still two hours beyond the horizon and across the state line in Idaho. On the road map, the Owyhees lurked in the extreme southwest corner of Idaho, and there was little else in that corner: few roads, few rivers, and only a handful of tiny circles designating towns with populations of zero to five hundred.

  One of those circles bore the name of Silver City.

  That had once been a stellar name in the history of the West. The first gold was found in 1863, then the fabulous lodes of the metal that gave the town its name. In the following decades, a cornucopia of silver flowed from its mines and mills surpassed in quantity only by the Comstock lode of Nevada.

  Conan had learned all that from history books in his library, which had also informed him that by 1942 Silver City was in its death throes, the mines deserted, the labyrinthine miles of tunnels left to drown in seeping groundwater or collapse with the rotting of their timbers; the huge stamp mills that once stair-stepped down the mountains, their pounding roar echoing along the valleys, were dismantled, carried off piece by piece, the solid tons of cast-iron machinery melted down to make howitzers and tanks. Now Silver City stood eroding on the high, dry shoulders of the Owyhees, and only its history kept it alive.

  But in 1940 the town was still living by its silver, even if only a few mines and one mill showed vital signs and the end was in sight. And in that year Leland Langtry met his end, and his body was hidden in a deserted, boarded-up mine tunnel.

  That didn’t come out of the histories, but from a letter that had reached Conan’s desk at the Holliday Beach Book Shop the day before yesterday. With the letter was a clipping dated June 3 from Boise’s Idaho Statesman headlined, “Verdict Reached on Ghost Town Murder.” The story behind the murder, as recounted by the Statesman, began in Silver City on the night of September 22, 1940, when Leland Langtry, a partner in the Lang-Star Mining Company, disappeared, and with him his car, his secretary, Amanda Count, and $10,000 in Lang-Star company funds. The police search continued for months, but neither Langtry, the car, Amanda Count, nor the money were found, and it was assumed at the time that Langtry had stolen the money and departed in the car with his secretary, with whom he had had a long-standing extramarital love affair. It was Langtry who was married; Amanda Count, less than half his age, was single.

  Then on May 14 of this year, a Bureau of Land Management survey party had opened an old mine adit near Silver City and discovered the skeletal remains of a man subsequently identified as Leland Langtry. The cause of death was apparently stabbing: a knife was still wedged between the fifth and sixth ribs just left of the sternum, where it had without a doubt—according to the medical testimony at the Owyhee County coroner’s inquest—pierced the heart.

  The consensus of the jury was that Langtry had indeed planned to abscond with the Lang-Star funds and his secretary, but had been discovered in process of the theft by his partner, Thomas Starbuck, who had been so outraged he responded by stabbing Langtry to death. The murder weapon, the knife, was known to belong to Starbuck and was marked with his initials. The subsequent fate of the money and the secretary remained a mystery, but the jury
reached its verdict with scant delay: they expressed their sympathy for the motive by calling it second-degree manslaughter, but apparently had no reservations in pointing a collective finger at Thomas Starbuck as the perpetrator of the crime.

  But Starbuck would never be convicted; he would never be tried. In 1955 Thomas Starbuck had died of cancer of the liver.

  As far as Owyhee County was concerned, justice was done; the murder of Leland Langtry could be comfortably relegated to history. But there was one dissenting opinion, and it reached Conan Flagg via the letter that accompanied the clipping.

  …I am well aware that this murder is forty years old and the accused man died a quarter of a century ago, but is there a time limit on justice? Tom Starbuck did not—could not—commit this crime, and justice demands that his name be cleared. He was a good man who worked hard all his life to make a better life for those he loved. He does not deserve to be remembered as a murderer….

  Cordelia Becket Starbuck, widow of the accused, wrote with the crafted, regular hand of another generation, one in which the lost art of penmanship was integral to a child’s education; a generation in which dignity and restraint were considered virtues to be cultivated.

  …Mr. Flagg, you are my last resort, and I am grateful to your aunt Dolly for suggesting that I appeal to you. I can’t simply surrender Tom’s good name without exhausting every possibility. Beyond that, there is another consideration—if Tom is innocent, then somebody else is guilty. That person also deserves justice.…

  Conan couldn’t deny the efficacy of that argument, but his initial response on reading the letter was annoyance, not at Cordelia Starbuck, but at Dolly Flagg.

  Conan’s aunt Dolly liked to think of herself as mistress of the Ten-Mile Ranch. Conan might still be majority stockholder—he had in fact been sole heir to that mini-empire upon his father’s premature death—and Dolly’s son Avery might be the chairman of the board and the one who actually ran the incorporated ranch, but Dolly persisted in playing the role of the grande dame. She also considered it obligatory to that role to keep herself fully up to date on the activities, however personal, of everyone connected with the Ten-Mile, and her correspondence—which Conan privately characterized as her newsletters—reached the most remote places of the planet, but especially her “neighbors” in eastern Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. That Conan was a card-carrying private investigator was a fact he did not like advertised. He could afford to be selective about the cases he undertook, and preferred to do his own selecting. He had so informed Dolly on numerous occasions, but to no avail.

  He was thus somewhat biased against Mrs. Starbuck’s case at the outset, although he had to admit it piqued his curiosity. But it was hopeless. What could he do after forty years that the law enforcement agencies of Idaho could not?

  When he reached Mrs. Starbuck by telephone—which took some time; there were only two telephones in Silver City, one at the Idaho Hotel, the other at the General Store—he had every intention of politely but firmly refusing her case. Yet here he was, a long drive from his seaside home on his way to Silver City to undertake an investigation that was bound to be fruitless. He wasn’t exactly sure how she had so deftly changed his mind for him, but no doubt Cordelia Starbuck—Delia, she said; she preferred to be called Delia—was not accustomed to having her requests denied.

  *

  At eleven-thirty Conan crossed the state line into Idaho near the point where the Snake River, after traversing the width of the state, turns north. The Snake had once been a legendary river that inspired awe and fear, but it had been dammed into submission now, its mountain-born waters diverted into millions of irrigation ditches that created a verdant oasis like a garland across the lower half of Idaho. For thirty miles the highway skirted the southern verge of that fertile swath. Lush pastures and fields of corn, sugar beets, onions, and potatoes flashed past on Conan’s left, but on the other side of the highway, beyond the barbed-wire fences, the desert waited always.

  And beyond the desert, the Owyhee Mountains.

  They were no longer below the horizon now; they made up more than half his horizon. They loomed in his vision and in his mind, constantly drawing his gaze away from the gray ribbon of the highway, and finally the highway, as if it also felt the mysterious attraction, turned south, leaving the long oasis behind.

  The name “Owyhee,” according to some historians, derived from “Hawaii,” and indeed both were accented similarity. That exotic association was traced to the 1840s when two native Hawaiians employed as trappers for Hudson’s Bay Company passed through the area. Conan accepted that explanation for no other reason than that he relished the very improbability of it. This was a land of improbabilities. The miles spun monotonously under his wheels as the sun neared zenith. The air had the dry scent of a kiln, and mirages of water shone on the asphalt ahead. At length, he saw a dark, tree-fringed island suspended above a shimmering lake. That would be Murphy, the Owyhee County seat.

  As he approached, the lake disappeared and the dark island settled firmly on the ground, but there was still something unlikely about it. The entire town with its population of seventy-five—according to the road sign—was built on the right side of the highway, clustered around a dignified, one-story, brick building of WPA vintage: the Owyhee County courthouse.

  Conan didn’t stop to examine this seat of government more closely. He would be back. The county sheriff’s office was there.

  He stayed on the highway for another five miles until he saw a sign pointing southwest toward the Owyhees. “Silver City 23 miles.” He turned right onto a rutted gravel road striking bravely across a plateau gray with stunted sagebrush no more than a foot in height, mute witness on this summer day to the bitter winds of winter. Over the plateau the Owyhees brooded, a barren, serrated, and cleft mass forged under the incandescent foundations of the continent and possessed of a strangely serene savagery. These granite eminences bore the sky on their shoulders and commanded the clouds. Conan sought the blunted peak that loomed highest in the range: War Eagle Mountain. On its western flank, little more than a thousand feet below its summit, he would find Silver City. At the moment, that seemed incredible.

  *

  It seemed even more incredible by the time he reached the town. That twenty-three miles took nearly an hour and a half to traverse. The road hair-pinned endlessly like a topographic map line, threading the contours of gully and gulch in a continuous, insecure notch above vertiginous drops. In the lower elevations, steep talus slopes were stained with plutonic bursts of red, yellow, and orange; bluffs of basalt rose above and below him, ominous umber black frosted with acid green lichen. But the heights were the realm of granite, that ancient and most steadfast of rock, surrendering so slowly to the inevitable forces of erosion that it seemed to the human mind immutable. The desert scrub was superseded by juniper, and along the creeks cottonwoods and dense thickets of shrubby willows flourished, and chokecherries and serviceberries bloomed. On the high ridges, the road wound through copses of the graceful, tough little mountain mahogany and stands of Douglas and subalpine fir, where in the shadows at their feet bluebells bloomed.

  Conan found himself eating his own dust time and again as the road turned on itself, and he found himself swearing aloud time and again while he eased the XK-E over granite hummocks exposed by the last gully washer. Yet as the miles fell in convoluted loops behind him, he felt a growing exhilaration, a quickening of his senses. These mountains, because of the precious ores they held bound, had been explored and exploited for well over a century, yet it seemed an untouched, primeval world impervious even to time. He had the feeling that at the end of this tortuous trail he would find some sort of occidental Shangri-la.

  Finally, he descended from one more summit into a deep valley, and near the bank of the stream that had cut it, reached a junction. A crude sign pointed west to DeLamar and south to Silver City. He took the left-hand road, which wound along the gravel beds skirting the stream. That would be Jordan
Creek. Farther down its course the first gold had been panned from its waters 117 years ago.

  He passed two small buildings with stout stone walls. Powder houses, undoubtedly, for storing dynamite. On an open slope on the other side of the creek, he saw a cemetery, its white markers leaning back slightly into the hill. Then he rounded a curve and realized he had reached his destination. Ahead on his right were the first houses, precariously hugging the slope, front porches clinging to the edge of the road. A signboard announced:

  WELCOME TO SILVER CITY, IDAHO

  ALL PROPERTY IS PRIVATELY OWNED

  PLEASE DO NOT DESTROY OR TRESPASS

  VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

  —OWYHEE COUNTY SHERIFF

  War Eagle Mountain held magnificent dominion over the town, tawny flanks intersecting the blue of the sky in vast curves rising to their vertex in the southeast, a little to Conan’s left. From this point he could see perhaps thirty structures, most roofed in silvery or rust-red corrugated metal with walls of wood weathered a rich, golden brown, and he was struck then, as he would be many times again, by the serendipitous arrangements of color and texture, of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. To his left, solitary on a high slope, stood one of the few painted buildings, a little church shining benignly white in the sun. Conan had stopped the car, and now he realized he was smiling. No Shangri-la this, but something about it lifted the spirits; a sense of surprise, of discovery.

  That there were man-made structures—and these were undeniably not only man-made but handmade—in these mountains was in itself amazing, and it was astounding to realize that these were only remnants of a human community whose population had once numbered in the thousands; a lively, doughty community that had been the county seat when Idaho was still a territory; had been the terminus of its first telegraph service; and even before the turn of the century, had been lighted by electricity produced in one of Idaho’s first hydroelectric plants; had its own school, newspaper, brewery, and cigar factory; its own hospital and water system; and had produced and shipped out via stagecoach and horse- or ox-drawn freight wagon silver and gold bullion literally by the ton.