“Where did he teach?” Sam asked. “Here in town?”
Baird gazed out the car window as they cruised the quiet streets of Cedar Wells. A couple of times they saw people carrying guns, and had to watch them for a minute or two—long enough to make sure they weren’t flickering and didn’t have any visible fatal wounds—before deciding they were real people and not a threat.
“No,” Baird said finally, after waiting so long that Sam couldn’t remember for a second what he had asked. “No, he had a little schoolhouse on the ranch itself. There were a dozen of us kids, most times, that needed schoolin’, so they took care of it right there. Too far to come into town for school.”
“How far out was it?”
“Oh, no more than six or seven miles, I guess,” Baird said. “But you can cover that a lot faster now than we could when I was young.”
“But it’s still within the range of the killings,” Sam said. “And the distance from town people can travel.”
“I think the sheriff said the cutoff was fifteen,” Dean said. “That’s about where the deputy got it.”
“Yeah, it’s within the town limits of Cedar Wells,” Baird said. “Always had a Cedar Wells mailing address, anyhow.”
Sam’s mind raced, trying to find another way to unlock the secrets that must have died with Neville Stein. “Did he have any notes, that you know of?” he asked. “If he was planning to write a book, he must have had some notes, right?”
“Now you mention it, I believe he did,” Baird said. He scratched his temple and blinked his tiny black eyes. “He used to have some journals or something like that, in the schoolhouse, that he always warned us kids away from. Most probably that’s what it was, the things he was keepin’ for his history of the ranch. Sometimes I’d see him talkin’ to some old cowboy or another for hours, writing down things the cowboy’d tell him.” He chuckled. “Lies, like as not.”
“Maybe they were,” Sam said. “But even so, he’d have to keep the records of those interviews somewhere. Do you know who would’ve ended up with them after he died?”
“I can’t imagine anyone would have wanted ’em. Most folks thought he was crazier’n a jaybird, even talking to those old cowboys. Much less writing down what they said, or thinkin’ anyone would ever care to read what he wrote.”
“Then where would they be?” Dean asked. “Had to end up someplace, right?”
“They’re probably still there.”
“Still where?” Sam asked.
“In the schoolhouse.”
“The schoolhouse is still there?”
“Sure it is,” Baird said.
Dean braked the car to a sudden stop and slammed his open palm down on the wheel. “We asked you before if the ranch was still there!”
“It ain’t,” Baird said. He didn’t look like he even understood that Dean was angry with him, much less what had prompted that anger. “Ranch has been divided and subdivided, made into a housing project and smaller ranch properties and little ranchettes and what have you. But part of the land is still there, and some of the buildings. Schoolhouse was put in a rocky canyon nobody much cared about because there wasn’t no good grazing back there. You don’t build a school on land that has commercial value, do you? Same reason, nobody else has bothered to build on it, so what’s left of the building is still standin’ there. Least, it was last time I went through there. That’s ten, twelve years gone by, now, but I can’t imagine anyone much goes back there.”
“Can you take us to it?”
“You’re drivin’, Dean,” Baird said. “And I reckon your eyesight is a lot better’n mine. Why don’t you take us to it?”
Sam could almost hear the sparks of Dean’s fuse burning. “Because…I…don’t…know…where…it…is.”
“Well, I can tell you that.”
“That’s a good idea, Harmon,” Sam said, hoping to intercede before Dean threw Baird into the road and ran over him. “You tell Dean where to drive, and he’ll drive there.”
“That’s right.” Dean’s voice carried the false cheer that he used to disguise sheer fury. “You tell me where to drive. I’ll drive. Okay?”
“Sure enough,” Baird said. “Turn left up here at the corner.”
As it turned out, they couldn’t drive all the way. Paved road led to within a few miles of the old schoolhouse, and then dirt road—which hadn’t been traveled much lately, by the looks of it—got them another mile or so closer. After that they had to travel on foot, cutting across snow-covered fields, climbing barbed-wire fences, all while carrying their weapons.
Baird directed them toward a rocky ridge. When they reached the ridge, they had to scramble up it at a relatively low point. It looked like Kaibab limestone to Sam, like the upper layer of the Grand Canyon itself. From its peak they looked down at a short drop to a wide valley with another, similar ridge maybe a mile or two away. Both semiparallel ridges ran into the distance, where they grew closer and seemed to funnel the valley floor into a canyon.
“That there, that leads right to the Grand Canyon after a few miles,” Baird said. “We used to have to make sure the fences out that way was sound because we didn’t want any beeves to get away and fall down the big drop. Some of ’em found pathways down, and that was even worse because then we’d have to go down ourselves and try to herd ’em back up.”
“But you were just a kid, right?” Dean asked.
“Sure. Anybody ever tells you kids don’t work on ranches, you can tell ’em what they’re full of.”
“And the schoolhouse is around here?” Sam said. He’d been scanning but hadn’t seen anything that looked like a school.
“This is called School Canyon on the maps. You can’t see it from here, though.” Baird started down the slope again, picking his way among the rocks like a mountain goat.
His words took a minute to sink in, but when they did, Sam asked, “You said it’s called that on the maps. Does that mean the locals called it something else?”
“You betchum. We called it Witch’s Canyon.”
Dean stopped short, crossed his arms over his chest. “And it didn’t occur to you to maybe mention that name before now? Considering what we’re dealing with?”
Baird shielded his eyes with his right hand, looking back upslope at Dean. “No. No, it sure didn’t. I apologize if that was an oversight, young man, but you didn’t ask me about no witches, and anyhow, it’s just a name, isn’t it? Lot of places around here have names that don’t mean nothing.”
“But it might mean something,” Sam pointed out. “It’s as solid a lead as anything else we’ve come up with so far. Where’s that school?”
“Follow me,” Baird said. He started down the slope again. Sam followed. After another moment’s petulance, so did Dean.
The canyon floor was mostly tall yellow grass poking up through the snow. Frequent boulders jutted up from the floor, a few scrubby junipers among them. They trudged down the canyon, and finally Sam could see what Baird had insisted all along was there. Almost up against the wall of the ridge they had crossed was what remained of a log structure, its roof caved in, its log walls partially collapsed. Logs stuck out at odd angles. Forget about structural integrity—the place looked like it would fall apart completely if a visiting sparrow flapped its wings too hard.
“That’s a school?” Sam asked.
“It was in better shape when I went there.”
“Hard to believe,” Dean said.
If Baird caught the cutting sarcasm, he ignored it. He approached the ramshackle building, at once anxious and somehow reverent. Sam had the impression that the place had meant a lot to him, once upon a time. It probably hurt to see it in this condition. If it had been within the national park boundaries, it might have been preserved as a historical monument, but instead it had been ignored, left to the not so tender mercies of wind and weather.
There might have once been a door in the doorway, Sam thought, but if so, it was long gone. The building stood open to the elements. The beam over the doorway had collapsed, so instead of being seven feet tall, the opening slanted down at a forty-degree angle, and even Harmon Baird had to stoop to go inside. He didn’t hesitate, though. Sam fished a penlight from his coat pocket, clicked it on, and followed him in, with Dean close behind carrying his own flashlight.
Inside, it looked more like a home for rodents and bats than a place of learning for humans. The floor was covered with dirt and animal feces and vegetation that had been blown through the open doorway, some of which had taken root amidst the ancient benches and desks. Webs clotted the upper reaches, some hanging low enough that Sam had to dodge them or brush them away with his arms. The air was thick with the stink of ammonia and the earthy, fecund aroma of manure.
“Looks like summer vacation lasted a little too long,” Dean said.
“I don’t think anyone’s used the place since I was young,” Baird said. “The Murphys started dividing up the ranch in the early thirties, after the park started drawing people to the area and the demand for real estate started to grow.”
“It’s almost too bad no one took the furnishings out,” Sam said. “They could have been preserved in a museum or something.”
“Been plenty of schools abandoned over the years, I expect,” Baird said. “Some things can’t be hung on to, just got to be left to rot.”
“I suppose that’s true. Do you have any idea where your teacher would have stored his records?”
Baird stood still, looking at the place in the dim light filtering through the door and the openings in the walls and roof. “Mr. Stein, he had him a big old chest made of cedar wood,” he said after a while. “Used to keep schoolbooks and those old journals of his in it, and just about any other treasure he needed to keep safe. Had a big padlock on it, and he kept the key on him all the time.”
“Where was the chest?” Dean asked.
“Front of the room, behind his whatchacallit. Lectern. I remember starin’ at it, day after day, sometimes wonderin’ what marvels he had inside, sometimes wishin’ I could hide in there myself.”
Sam couldn’t quite determine the room’s original layout. “Where was the front?”
Baird pointed immediately to the worst area in the room, where the roof had completely fallen in. It looked like part of the canyon that the schoolroom had been built around. “That’s the front. Right there.”