The Deadline Read online

  “Where’s your glass?”

  “I’m not drinking tonight,” she said, drawing light circles on T.J.’s twitching snout with a blade of grass.

  “Finally hopped on the wagon, eh?” he teased her.

  In fact, Claire never drank much. Two glasses of wine usually made her a little silly. Three made her laugh at her husband’s jokes. “What finally pushed you over the edge? An afternoon giggle bender?”

  Claire demurred as Morgan caressed her sun-tanned shoulder. There was something more, he quickly realized. He stopped teasing when she didn’t answer.

  “Claire ... what is it?”

  “Well, you know how you missed your deadline again today? I guess ... I mean, I kind of missed a deadline, too, a few weeks ago.”

  She choked back a sob and spoke too fast.

  “You were busy trying to get the paper off the ground and we were trying to settle in, and I wasn’t sure, and I wanted things to be better between us, and I didn’t want you to worry about me, too ...”

  Morgan touched his wife’s cheek, confounded by her sudden burst of emotion. His first thought: He’d broken the promise he made when they left Chicago, to work less and leave more of his work in the newsroom.

  “What deadline? Claire, sorry if I messed up ...”

  She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. Suddenly, she was impatient and angry with her husband, a normally resourceful observer who nonetheless seemed to miss every subtlety in her communication.

  “Jesus, Jeff, I missed my period. Okay? It’s been almost two months since my last one. I went down to the corner drug today and got one of those home tests, and now I think I ... the goddam dot turned blue and I just sat and cried all afternoon. Oh, God, I don’t know if I’m ready for this again.”

  He knew what she meant.

  It wasn’t just that Claire was thirty-eight years old, or that she hadn’t dreamed about having another child in an awfully long time. No, she still had nightmares about Bridger. After all this time, she would wake up crying every few nights. She’d asked Morgan to bring strawberries from their backyard garden to the hospital on the morning Bridger was born, and she held Bridger’s hand on the rainy Chicago night when he died in that same hospital. And she never wanted to let him go.

  She never would.

  Morgan knew she was scared. He was, too. He wasn’t sure himself if he could ever love so fully and lose so completely again. In the two years since he died, they couldn’t bring themselves to scatter their little boy’s ashes. They were still sealed in a small cardboard box in the top drawer of Claire’s mahogany armoire, a beloved heirloom passed down through four generations of her Midwestern family. The fifth generation was entombed in it, for now, while Claire and Jefferson Morgan mourned in their incomplete way. For them, no place had ever seemed a proper place for Bridger, except with them.

  He let the wine bottle slip from his fingers. It spilled into the grass as he put his arms around his frightened, pregnant wife.

  She smelled faintly of sweet strawberries.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A low stone wall marked the way to Mount Eden. It began where the blacktop ended and shadowed more than a mile of the winding South Road.

  Jefferson Morgan bumped along, dust billowing behind him in a choking cloud in the late-afternoon light. Few Perry County roads were well marked. Unconsciously, he turned down the volume on his car’s hoarse speakers, Sweet Home Alabama fading out as he slowed down to watch for landmarks.

  Finally, up ahead, he saw the legion of Lombardy poplars that guarded the shaded lane to Belleau Wood Cockins’ country retreat.

  Mount Eden occupied twenty thousand rolling acres against the foothills of the Powder River Mountains, five miles south of Winchester. Although it was a fair spread, even by the standards of Wyoming’s unbounded ranges, Old Bell wasn’t a true rancher. A gentleman farmer, at best, he ran a few nominal head of cattle and had started grazing buffalo in recent years, but much of Mount Eden was leased out for grazing to families that needed the land worse than he did. Other than that, it was a ranch in almost every way except its name and its brand: A fig leaf.

  Like The Bullet, Mount Eden was more a place for Old Bell’s soul than his sustenance.

  Morgan turned off the county road beneath an iron gate bearing Mount Eden’s name. He maneuvered his gutless 1984 Ford Escort, an afflicted heap dying an undignified death, around a few muddy sumps on the lane, uncertain if their tranquil surface hid a darker, deeper rut. Gravel crunched under his tires. It reminded him that he’d need a four-wheel drive truck soon, maybe this fall, as soon as he could scrape together enough cash or credit to buy one. The purchase of The Bullet and the house took all they had, cash and credit. Not much was left anyway after paying all the expenses of Bridger’s illness that the insurance didn’t cover.

  They’d paid well over six hundred thousand dollars for the newspaper, its building and presses. Most of the income in the first month were payments on old ads and didn’t belong to Morgan. He paid his workers’ wages with some cash sales, subscription payments and the small rainy-day account he’d set up at the bank. Now, toward the end of his first month, every day was rain. Reporters never had to worry where the money came from; publishers did. Morgan hadn’t even written his own first paycheck yet and his first payment on The Bullet’s bank note was due in a few days. Claire estimated they could survive another week or so on the last of their savings.

  The lane forked one way to an enormous garage and workshed, the other way to a semicircular drive in front of a long, arcaded portico. It wrapped around the front half of the three-story white house, which rose before a thick forest of ancient poplar, spruce and boxelder trees, like a white jewel wrapped in green velvet.

  The house’s architecture was a pleasing if peculiar blend of Italianate and Southern revival: the tall, round-headed windows of Tuscan villas, ornate green shutters, fancy hand-carved brackets beneath elegantly sloped eaves that seemed to lift up like wings at the corners, two towering chimneys, and a porch swing for summer nights. Bright marigolds and geraniums spilled over the sides of large clay urns set at regular intervals down the long porch.

  But there was something more.

  The house at Mount Eden was octagonal. It was almost like a carousel at rest, topped with a lantern-like cupola of windowed walls that provided eight views of the surrounding countryside.

  Jefferson Morgan unfolded his six-foot-two frame from the cramped car, looking over the marvelous house as he stretched his legs. The Escort continued to sputter, even after he’d closed the door.

  Mount Eden’s main house was built by Bell’s father in 1920, the year after he was born. A gift to his war-bride mother, it was the only home the old editor had ever known. Over the years, he’d bought more land, here and there, from neighbors who were destitute or had lost their passion for working a hard land, until Mount Eden had grown to its present size. To Old Bell Cockins, an eight-sided house was no more remarkable than a heated henhouse.

  An arthritic Irish setter, graying around the muzzle, lay on the porch, too sleepy to bark. Morgan opened the squeaky screen door and knocked a few times, but nobody answered. He’d called ahead from the newspaper office that morning, and he was surprised nobody seemed to be expecting him.

  The warm breeze was fresh. Morgan had spent his day in the stale air of the newspaper office, trying to get ahead of the next deadline. Although he’d cooled off significantly since the day before, he still chided his two reporters about their slowness, while they glanced sideways at one another, annoyed at his insensitivity to their needs. In the end, they just shrugged and went back to shuffling papers on their desks.

  Morgan rubbed the dog behind its ear. Feeling like he had landed on a serene prairie island, Morgan stepped off the porch and found a flagstone path toward the back.

  It led him across an unmowed expanse of lawn, into an acre-wide windbreak of ancient trees behind the main house, so thick he couldn’t see t
hrough. The stones soon gave way to a wide trail of chipped wood and bark. Morgan came upon another rock wall beside the meandering path, then a small creek no more than a foot wide where someone had recently crossed with a small cart or wheelbarrow. Its water trickled musically down the gentle slope to join the chorus of some unknown river.

  Morgan crossed the brook and followed the path through the grove. Suddenly, the man-made forest gave way to a man-made meadow, a luminous garden like Morgan had seen in photographs of old English estates, except wilder. Colors drifted like bright snow, embracing the light, reflecting the warmth of the day, and melting into deep pools beside the path.

  The garden easily covered two acres. The silence beckoned him into it, to walk among the flowers and ornamental grasses that overflowed their appointed but irregular spaces, all girdled by low stone walls no more than a foot high.

  It was Eden in the middle of the wilderness.

  “Can you grab that shovel, over there by the bench?” someone called. Old Bell stood up, just beyond a tall spray of fine, lavender-colored flowers. The knees of his loose cotton trousers were soiled. Fresh earth clung to his hands.

  Morgan looked around. Old Bell pointed farther along the path. He found it, a rough-hewn wooden pew in a nave of daisies and iris flags. He picked up the shovel and followed the path to the spot where his old editor stood.

  “Damned meadow rue,” he said, passing his hand through the slender, airy stems that grew to his shoulder. “Another Japanese import that ain’t worth a shit except to look at.”

  Morgan stooped to smell the rue’s delicate lavender flowers. Bees flitted among them.

  Old Bell had been using a small hand spade to dig a narrow space just inside the wall for some new irises. Now that he had a proper shovel, he thrust it into the moist, black soil and turned it. A fat earthworm wriggled then disappeared back into the loose clump.

  “Thanks for inviting me up,” Morgan said. “All the time I lived here, I’d never seen this place.”

  Bell didn’t look up from his digging.

  “My mother called it her ‘pleasance.’ Very English. She came from a poor district of London and always dreamed of working the earth of a beautiful garden. My father thought she wanted a big house, but all she wanted was a garden. This was hers.”

  “She must have felt as though she were in heaven.”

  Bell Cockins broke up a clod of dirt with his spade.

  “She died here in ‘Fifty-two,” he said. “She wanted to be buried here, too, at the first sunset after her death. So after my father found her here that day, we carried her inside and my father washed the black soil from her hands and her feet, combed her hair and dressed her in her wedding dress. He built a fine casket that night from lumber left over from the house. All night, I heard him out in the shed, sawing, hammering and crying.”

  The old editor shaded his eyes against the sun and pointed to a small spot in the center of the garden, enclosed by a black, wrought-iron fence. Three headstones rose from a fresh green blanket.

  “We buried her among the sweet woodruff, right over there,” he said. “It’s a crappy little European herb with tiny white flowers. My mother occasionally made wine in the root cellar and used it for flavoring. God-awful tasting stuff. But it bloomed in June, almost always for my mother’s birthday. She picked the spot herself.”

  “Not too many of us get to choose where we’ll end up for eternity,” Morgan said. “She was very lucky.”

  “So she was,” Bell said, moving down the row. He changed the subject and he tilled the dirt, a spadeful at a time. “Now it’s Thursday and you got the paper out — a little late, from what I hear — and you’ve come to me with questions about ol’ Neeley Gilmartin. Sad story, it is, but it made damned fine copy. We don’t get too many like it. It wasn’t about buildings or politics, it was about people. Good and bad people. So what do you want to know about that moldy old story?”

  “He came to see me yesterday,” Morgan said.

  Old Bell stopped digging, his shovel stuck halfway in the ground. He was clearly surprised.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he gusted, flipping back the sweaty bill of his ballcap. His thick white hair pooched out over his damp, incredulous brow. “The son of a bitch finally got out. And he’s here?”

  “He’s dying,” Morgan said. “He wants me to help clear his name, to prove he didn’t kill the girl.”

  Bell Cockins shook his head and snorted cynically, stomping his shovel deeper into the soft soil.

  “Yeah, and I never took the Lord’s name in vain,” Bell seethed, his jowly face flushing redder. “Fuck him, that lying son of a bitch. I wouldn’t give him the sweat off my balls if he was dying of thirst.”

  Neither Old Bell nor his colorful language had faded in retirement.

  Old Bell was a legend around Winchester, mostly because he’d run the weekly Bullet for fifty years.

  And nobody on Main Street had outlasted him. At 77, he’d already lived long enough to fulfill his solemn promise to just about all the self-important big shots who ever challenged or impugned his integrity: He’d survive to write their obituaries.

  Hardly anything escaped his notice, even now in retirement, whether it was printable or not.

  Morgan knew most of the stories about Bell Cockins’ pluck. Some he’d even witnessed. He’d grown up in Winchester and even worked after school for Old Bell back in high school, writing local chicken-dinner fluff and sports stories for forty bucks a week. That was twenty years before.

  In the autumn of 1917, Old Bell’s father was a seventeen-year-old railroad hand on the old Union Pacific when he volunteered to fight the Germans. The Marines sent him to boot camp at Parris Island, where he survived an outbreak of influenza only to be sent to the bloody trenches in Europe. By the next June, the Marine Brigade of the U.S. Second Division — Lance Corporal Ray Cockins among them — found itself in a woodland hunting preserve the maps called Bois de Belleau, Belleau Wood.

  Hours stretched to days, then to weeks as they fought inside that square-mile grove, which had been stripped of limbs and leaves in the first frantic flashes of fighting.

  The gas came toward the end. It seared Ray Cockins’ lungs before he could get his gas mask on. And when his squad ran from the deadly cloud, a Maxim machine-gunner’s bullet ripped through his upper thigh, dropping him face-down into blood-soaked mud. His wound, though serious, was his salvation in the end, for the others were soon cut down in a crossfire farther down the path. By the time the sun settled, the broken branches and torn leaves of Belleau Wood covered his unconscious body, hiding him from sharpshooters. He was the only survivor among them that day, embraced by the dark safety of Belleau Wood.

  An ambulance driver who was lost in the dark found Ray Cockins later that night. He was sent to a hospital in London, where his first days and nights were spent in a morphine haze. But as his leg and lungs healed, he was attended by a warm-centered Cockney nurse, Brigid Lindsey, who changed the dressings on his groin almost every day. No woman had ever touched him there, and it aroused in him more than just a feeling of extraordinary intimacy.

  Before he was shipped home three months later, Ray Cockins asked Brigid to marry him and she accepted. He promised himself, secretly, their first son would be named after the place that would haunt him for the rest of his life, for his limping gait would identify him at great distances to all his neighbors until the day he died.

  His son was born late in 1919 in the small town of Winchester, Wyoming. And when he had recovered sufficiently from his wounds, he laid the foundation of Mount Eden. Beside it, he planted a circular grove of trees as a sort of shrine to the tiny forest that saved his life and loaned its name to his only son.

  Belleau Wood Cockins grew up in Winchester, or more accurately, in the backshop of The Bullet, a staunchly Republican paper that fought off all comers in a day when weekly papers came and went on the wind. He ran copy, set type, mucked out ink wells and sold a few ads. Before he
could shave, he was writing stories, and before he could vote, he was writing biting editorials about politics. Bell Cockins was only twenty-five years old and the paper’s soberest employee in 1945 when he bought The Bullet, lock, stock and barrel, from his drunkard boss. He took hold of the place and never let go for more than fifty years, scattering legends as he went.

  The blood never settled deep in Old Bell, but instead simmered below his collar, ready to boil up into his head at the first sign of either indignance or indignity. In that moment of silence before his tempest, he’d run his craggy knuckles through his wavy cloud-white hair, then let loose like a summer cloudburst, always in a torrent of profanity.

  Morgan himself had been caught in Old Bell Cockins’ storms. Once, assigned to get a comment from the mayor about some local boondoggle, he came back with a few quotes scribbled in the notebook he carried in his shirt pocket, a habit he picked up from Old Bell. The old editor thumbed through them and his brow clouded up like the anvil of a red nimbus.

  “This is all horseshit, kid,” he said sharply, if not loudly. He never had to yell. “The mayor’s a lying sack of shit.”

  “But that’s what he said, word for word,” Morgan defended himself, feeling his face flush hot. He’d taken special care to get the words down right.

  “Kid, if your mother says she loves you, check it out,” Cockins said derisively. He tossed young Morgan’s ragged notebook back to him and walked away.

  But Morgan suspected Old Bell Cockins was neither as tempestuous nor as implacable as his scattered storms suggested. The old man simply knew that complexity of character was considered an imperfection in a small town, so he seldom allowed any other side of himself to shine through.

  Proof of his gentleness existed all around Winchester, but nobody knew it for certain. Morgan’s father ran the only hardware store in town, so he heard all the gossip about local folks by day, and repeated it over the dinner table at night.