Noah awoke on the same table he last saw Brendan occupying days earlier. He looked from side to side but even that slightest movement worsened the throbbing pain in his head.
The smell of chemicals and cleanliness left no doubt where he was.
“Doc?” he croaked.
“You needed a mess of stitches, Deputy Chandler.” Doctor Richardson’s face poked into Noah’s view like a light-speed sunrise. “Someone whacked you pretty good. Gun butt, I’d say, by the looks of it. Some blunt instrument.”
“Where’s Brendan?”
“You wake up from what could’ve been a fatal attack had your temple been hit and the first person you ask about is that charlatan?”
Noah groaned. “Fair enough. My wife here?”
“That’s better. Your wife couldn’t make the trip, given her soreness, but your father’s waiting outside along with the woman who ran into my office to tell me about you. She and a sheriff’s deputy went to get you. Halberstrom, I think.”
“Harrison,” Noah said.
“Okay, Harrison.” Richardson pointed to the window next to Noah. “He’s literally outside where Cole was massacred. And he’s got plenty of company. Three more of the sheriff’s men and five soldiers on all sides of the property. This place is a fortress. You’re safe.”
“I’m safe? What about that charlatan?”
“For the love of Pete—if that’s what concerns you, fine: I discharged him to Thomas Diggs’s care. And for good measure Diggs has allowed some more deputies and soldiers to patrol his property. I’m certain the only way Brendan will encounter further harm is if that Franklin fellow is in the same room with him.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
“You’re welcome. If you’ll excuse me.”
Noah heard the exam room’s door open and a few muffled words.
His father, Alexander, came into view moments later.
“Of course your wife’s worried.” The elder Chandler dressed like a Southern gentleman preparing to conduct business. Unlike most of his wealthy contemporaries, he sported no handlebar mustache or finely groomed beard. His blond hair made him appear baby-faced even at the onset of fifty. “She about passed out while holding the baby. I believe her exact phrase was ‘We need to escape this God-forsaken wasteland of inbred hatred.’ I can only conclude she was not referring to our family.”
“Yup, that sounds like her lately. With what’s happened over the last week I can’t blame her. But she’ll simmer down once I’m back with her. Doc say when I can get out of here?”
“He said I can take you home. Observation seems unnecessary.” Noah’s father lowered his voice. “What the hell happened out there?”
“I shot one and got jumped by another.”
“Who?”
“The one I shot, I only saw its eyes. I ain’t never seen anything like them. Eyes of a madman, maybe. I only saw them for a split-second and even that was too long. Crazed and angry. What’d Natalie say? Inbred hatred? That’s what I saw today.”
Noah’s father absorbed it all and shook his head, not knowing what to make of it.
“I’m pretty sure they didn’t find anyone but you out there, son. Maybe some rest will assist your memory. In the meantime, the doc says you’re not to return to work until he unwraps you and checks you over.”
“Do what?”
“Feel your head, boy.”
Noah placed his hand against the bandage that Richardson had wrapped around his head, practically covering his eyebrows. He touched the section that hurt the most and felt the warmth of congealed blood stick to his fingertips.
“It probably will leave a scar, Deputy Chandler.” Richardson slid into the examination room. “A little scar. You don’t know how close you came to dying. It literally was a matter of an inch where you were struck.”
Noah propped himself up on his elbows to sit on the table and instantly regretted it as the blood rushed to his head.
“All right, that hurts.” He massaged his temples.
“I think you’ll feel better when you wake up tomorrow,” Richardson said. “You need rest more than anything right now. Are you hungry?”
“Can’t say I am.”
“Drink some water, you need hydration. You were lying in that field a while, may even have a little sunburn, but nothing too bad. That lady had the good sense to tilt your hat on your forehead before she made the entire town aware of her presence.”
“You should thank her, boy,” Alexander Chandler said. “In fact, you will thank her while I settle up with the doc.”
“I can pay my own way.”
“You can pay me back while you’re recovering,” Alexander Chandler said. “Don’t worry about that now. Doc?”
“That’s much appreciated. Come with me to the waiting room and I’ll send in the young lady.”
The door swung open.
“I’m right here.” Doreen Chandler stepped into the room and held open the door so Alexander Chandler and Richardson could leave.
The three men looked at her and back at each other.
“I was listening behind the door. Sorry, I was getting bored out there.”
Richardson chuckled. “Just try not to make it a habit. Patients do appreciate some privacy.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Go ahead, Doc.” Alexander Chandler extended his arm and the two men left.
Each one waited for the other to speak first.
Noah blinked.
“Thank you for rescuing me.”
“I’d have done it for anyone who deserved it. Listen, Noah, I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about me. I’m not about trying to steal you away from your wife.”
“Wow—I sure hope my father isn’t listening behind the door. Listen, Doreen, you don’t have to explain—”
“But I do.” She moved toward Noah, shaking her hands before her face, as if trying to conjure an explanation that wouldn’t totally humiliate her. “I came off strange back at my house. I know that. It was not my intention. Please understand. I didn’t want to see my husband killed. But at the same time I can’t help but feel unexpected freedom. I don’t know what to do with it. But I am glad I could help you. Made me feel purposeful. That, too, is something new to me. I guess I’m overwhelmed by it all.”
“You have every reason to feel that way based on what you told me before.”
“Thank you. Now, I want you to go home right now and be with your wife and baby. And when you’re able, I would much appreciate your offer to keep an ear out for anything useful I can do around the town. I’ll look myself—I ain’t gonna depend on you to do it for me. Hell, I’ll start tomorrow because I’m already going stir crazy at home. But any help you can offer would be lovely. And when you can, I suppose I would like to know who stole my dead husband, coffin and all, to do God knows what with him.”
A knock at the door stopped Noah from responding.
“Come in,” he said.
Richardson appeared and this time he held open the door.
“Your father’s pulled the wagon around for you. He’s out front waiting. Why don’t you slide off of there and we’ll see how you are on your feet.”
Noah wobbled a bit after planting his boots on the ground. He held the table for support but trudged easily enough into the lobby and out of the building, trailed by Doreen Culliver and Richardson.
“What time is it?” Noah looked at the starry sky.
“Past midnight, I believe,” Richardson said. “You were out a little while.”
“I’ll say.” He turned to the pair. “I’ll be okay. Thank you again, Doc, and you, especially, Doreen. I will do whatever I can to find Robert and bury him proper. I’m assuming you told Harrison about what happened to him.”
“I sure did, after we got you here and the doc went to work on you.”
“Then that means the Sheriff’s Office is already on it. Harrison’s a good man.”
Richardson walked Doreen to her wagon and assisted her into the driver’s seat while Alexander Chandler clicked his two-horse team to take Noah home.
“Try not to bump up and down,” Noah said.
“I’ll keep them as slow as I can, son. Dirt roads don’t make for comfortable rides.”
The wagon trundled onward without the Chandlers speaking until: “Son, what on earth was that about finding that woman’s dead husband? She didn’t bring that part up in the waiting room.”
“What’d y’all talk about?”
“Just that you ran after some men who broke into her home who tried stealing something, and that you chased them into a field and that’s where they took you down.”
“Well, she did leave out a couple of parts,” Noah said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s easier explaining the parts that make sense rather than the parts that don’t. Stealing a dead guy and his coffin falls into the latter category.”
“Maybe these criminals like having sex with dead people?”
“Father!”
“I’m not trying to be indecent, but you might want to consider that.”
“I don’t mind considering it. I just wish you hadn’t suggested it so quick.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It’s just disturbing, that’s all.”
“Corpse-snatching generally is.”
“I’ll bring it up the next time I see someone from work. I expect they’ll come calling on me tomorrow to see what I can remember, which I hope is a lot more than I can figure now. Those eyes, Father. I just can’t explain—”
Noah stopped talking and began sniffing.
“You smell that?”
“I do,” said his father.
“Something’s burning.”
The road led by the Diggs plantation, and as it came into view, so did two fires, both confined but raging next to one another, where visitors would turn to enter the Englishman’s property. Noah identified the clearly visible outline of a wooden ladder, flames licking each rung and rail, next to an inferno.
“Stop the wagon,” Noah commanded his father, who parked the rig upwind from the blaze. Not only did the air reek of charring wood, but the rot of death.
The deputy hopped out of the wagon, nearly crumpling to his feet upon landing, the pain weighing his body down. He regained his composure and walked to the fires, the intense heat keeping him at bay. Two soldiers and a sheriff’s deputy rode their horses up from the mansion and yielded when the heat became too much to bear.
Noah stumbled to his father’s wagon, keeping one hand to his pulsing head, and climbed in the rig’s bed.
“Swing it around. I need a better view.”
Alexander Chandler turned the horses to trot along the road closest to the entrance. The horses winced as they passed scorched air.
“Just a little farther.” Noah stood in the bed, shielding the pulsing heat wave with his arm, trying to identify what fueled the blaze.
“What do you see?” his father said.
“A coffin, and Robert Culliver,” Noah surmised.
Flames swirled skyward from the eye sockets and yawning mouth of a charring skull.