The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 10

The rising sun slanted through the small cell window, throwing the shadow of its four iron bars on the floor.

“Ma’am,” Pace said, “it’s sunup. Maybe time you were awake.”

The girl’s eye fluttered, then opened, and this time Sam Pace kept his distance, standing with his back against the far wall.

“I’m the marshal,” he said quickly, before she fainted again.

The girl sat up in the cot and touched fingers to her forehead.

“I feel so dizzy,” she said. “Where am I? What town is this?”

“Requiem,” Pace said. He stayed right where he was, afraid to move.

“The coyotes . . . ,” the girl said.

“Yeah. I scared them away.” He took a step closer to the cot. “Sometimes they’ll do that if they’re really hungry, attack a person.”

The girl looked at him from head to toe, and her eyes widened, then brightened with alarm.

“Uh-huh. I look a sight, don’t I?” Pace said, trying to throw a loop on her fear. “I had a run-in with some cowboys.”

“You’re the marshal?” the girl said, a gasp of disbelief.

Pace smiled. “What’s left of him.”

“What did you call this town?”

“Requiem.”

“Strange name for a town.”

“Well, it’s a strange town.”

“My name is Jessamine. Jessamine Leslie.”

“Sam Pace. Right pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”

“And yours, too, I’m sure.”

The girl rose and her skirts rustled as she stepped from the cell into the office.

Pace followed, carrying the glass of whiskey he’d poured earlier.

Jessamine stood at the window and looked out.

After a long while she said, “The town is empty.”

“Should be,” Pace said. “Requiem is a ghost town.”

“Oh my God,” Jessamine said. “It seems like I ran away from one hell and landed in another.”

“It’s just a town,” Pace said.

He extended the glass. “Drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”

Jessamine took the glass in an unsteady hand, drained the whiskey in a gulp. She passed the glass back to Pace. “What happened here?”

“Cholera,” Pace said. “Three years ago. It took my wife and child and half the town.”

“How did it happen?”

“The well water was poisoned.”

“The well I saw last night? In the middle of the street?”

“Yes. I think it’s still poisoned. I draw my water from the creek.”

“I was going to drink from it,” Jess said.

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Hell, so am I.” The girl looked puzzled. “Why are you still here?”

“The people who didn’t die up and left. But they’ll be back, and I’ll be here to greet them.”

“When are they coming back?”

“I don’t know. Sometime.”

Jess’s gaze searched Pace’s face. “I don’t know you from Adam, mister, and the whiskey has loosened my tongue, but I want to tell you something.”

“Tell away. Call me Sam.”

“I’ll call you Sammy. I’ve always been partial to that name.”

Jess moved from the window to the desk where Pace was sitting.

“It seems to me that you’ve stayed put right here for three years, but you’ve been running all that time,” she said.

“From what?”

“Your memories. But you hope one day to recapture them and see things go back to what they were. That’s why you think the townspeople will return.”

Pace sat at his desk, suddenly irritated. “That’s not the way of it at all.”

“The people might come back, but your wife and child won’t.”

“Don’t you think I already know that?” Pace said. “I’m not that crazy.”

“I think you are,” the woman said.

“And you, Miss Leslie, what are you running from?” Pace said, anger touching his eyes.

“You can call me Jess. It isn’t like we’re kin, but ‘Miss Leslie’ doesn’t sit real well with me.”

“What are you running from, Jess? Your ma and pa?”

The woman smiled and shook her head. “What do you think I am?”

“A frightened, innocent young lady running from something . . . or somebody.”

Jess laughed, a humorless yelp. “Innocent. Lady. Those are two for the book.”

She perched on the corner of the desk and looked down at Pace.

Pace prompted the girl. “You got a story to tell, Jess.”

“Are you asking me that as a lawman?”

“No, as an interested party. Well, maybe a little of both.”

The woman brushed the stray tendril of hair from her forehead. “I never knew my pa, and my ma ran off with a traveling man. I’ve been selling it since I was fourteen; started off down Tucson way.”

“I didn’t know,” Pace said, aware of how lame that sounded.

“How could you know, since I hadn’t told you?”

Pace said, “Yeah, I couldn’t know . . . about . . . that.” He tried to smile. “By the way you look and such.”

Jess gave him a long look, then said, “I ended up in a hog ranch in the Jacques Mountain country. Then the Apaches came and ran off all our livestock and burned the barn and smokehouse.”

“And you fled?” Pace said.

“Don’t ride ahead of me, Sammy.”

“Sorry.”

“The day after the attack a preaching man with loco eyes came in with three wagons. He spoke to Eli Shafer, the owner of the ranch—”

“Pimp, you mean,” Pace said.

“Yeah, you could call him that. Anyhow, the preacher spoke to Eli and Eli spoke to me. ‘Jess,’ he said, ‘I lost my stock, my barn, and my smokehouse an’ money’s tight, so you see how it is with me.’”

The girl uncorked the bottle and poured whiskey into the glass.

“Can’t drink the water around here,” she said.

She drank, then said, “I told Eli to say it plain and he did. He said, ‘Jess, I done sold you to the preaching man fer forty dollars and a side of hickory-smoked bacon.’”

Pace rose and walked to the window, a tall man, too thin, his slumped shoulders sagging under the weight of three years of deprivation and madness.

The morning sun had washed away most of the night shadows, but the alleys remained rectangles of darkness and the aborning light added no luster to the store windows that stared back at Pace with blank eyes.

“What did the preacher man want with you?” he said.

That was a bad mistake.