Arthur Upfield - The Mountains have a Secret

“I am not yet thinking that far,” Bony answered. “Why were you so interested in my movements that you kept me under observation?”

“That’s easy too. I wasn’t keeping you under observation so much as I was keeping Simpson under observation because he was keeping you under observation. By then I had been getting around some myself. I’d gathered lots of impressions, if you know what I mean. Pa used to tell me before you start in on a guy it’s best to have the feel of his background, and when you came to the saloon I’d got Simpson’s background pretty well lined up.”

“And you think that Simpson has something to hide?”

“He’s got something so rotten to keep hidden that one day he came very near to attempting to shoot you. It was the day you found that bit of quartz with the gold in it. He was watching you for some time before he spoke. Once he half aimed the shot-gun at you and almost made me wing him with a knife.”

Bony sighed. “It seems that you have had to keep me safe from several evils,” he said. “Thank you, Shannon.”

“That’s all right, Mr.-say-Parkes-which will do until you tell me your right name. You see, keeping an eye on characters comessorta easy to me, what with Pa’s training and all.”

“What do you think Simpson is concealing with such earnestness?”

“The murder of my girl and her girl friend.”

“Perhaps that. But what could be his motive for killing them?”

“Having got Simpson’s background, I reckon that what’s behind them girls getting lost is pretty big. Simpson’s a natural killer. He’s got the eyes of a killer and the hands of one too. Pa showed me how to pick ’em, men who are just naturally dangerous.”

“He can play the organ,” Bony said.

“He sure can play the organ.”

“How do you react to the idea of counterfeiting?”

“Not big enough. I’m not much interested in the cause of my girl and her friend being done away with. I’m interested mostly in who killed them. That’s why I’ve concentrated on Simpson and around his saloon. The cause, in my opinion, requires a mighty good barbed-wire fence to keep it in and keep them out who might be wanting to uncover it.”

“Oh!”

“As I said, I’m not concerned with causes, but only with effects. What I aim to do is to locate the effects. I’ve located one, but it don’t rile me as much as I’mgonna be when I find what’s happened to my girl. When she and her pal were first missed, Simpson headed the search for them. I guess thefella that was yardman at the time saw something or added something to something else. His name was O’Brien. He was a little old man with white hair, and he never wore socks. Never wore boots, either, ’cause of his bunions. Ferris told me all about him. A fortnight after the girls disappeared, and when Ferris and her mother were away, O’Brien left. He’s an effect. He’s buried right under where you’re sitting.”

“You Ever Been in Love?”

BONY stared at the lounging American for three seconds before his gaze fell and his right hand conveyed the cigarette to his lips. For ten seconds Shannon noted that the hand trembled.

One of Bony’s burdens, and not the least, was fear of the dead, fear which, during his career of crime investigation, had often leaped from the subconscious to gibber at him, reminding him of the ancient race from which he would never wholly escape.

The American was unaware that it was grossly unfair to spring the information on Bony at this particular time and place, but the whites of the eyes and the trembling hand gave him an inkling of the devil he had loosed. Regret was tinged a little by contempt, and then because there was no tremor in Bony’s voice the contempt was banished by admiration.

“How do you know that O’Brien is buried beneath me?”

“Partly through Ferris Simpson, I came to find out about that,” Shannon replied. “When Jim Simpson was away I used to talk with Ferris, who’s mighty interested in the United States. Knowing there was a yardman employed at the saloon at the time my girl vanished, I asked Ferris what became of him. She told me she wasn’t easy about the way O’Brien left when she and her ma were away on a short holiday, and that her pa kept harping about Jim Simpson firing him for being drunk in the spirit store. Ferris said that on returning from that holiday she went to the spirit store and is pretty certain that no one had been in it since she herself was there the day before she went off with her ma.”

“What made her certain that no one had entered the store during her absence, d’you know?”

“Yes. There wasn’t much stock in the store, and she knew what the stock totalled. There were no broken cases when she went away and none when she returned.”

“Then what?” Bony asked, and Shannon’s admiration remained, for Bony had not moved an inch from his position over the grave.

“One of my jobs was to take the horse and dray into the forest and bring in firewood. I never had to go a mile away to load the wood, but someone, before I went there to work, had brought the dray right out to this place. You can see where the tracks ended, where the dray was stopped and then taken back. So I mooched around some. I said to myself: ‘If I had a body on that dray, where would I plant it?’

“I did a lot of arguing with myself, and I did a lot of trailing around, mostly when the moon gave good light because I could never be sure about Simpson. I came in here one afternoon and seen where a dog had done some scratching and given up. And I went back, not feeling at all good about it.

“You see, if there was a body buried here I couldn’t know whether it was that old yardman or my girl. Naturally, I didn’t want to do any digging if it was my girl, but I-I had to find out.”

Bony shivered. Sometimes imagination is less a gift than a curse. The soft, drawling voice went on:

“I couldn’t go on not knowing which of ’emwas buried here, if one was. Simpson didn’t go off anywhere to give me my chance to find out, and so I came here late one night-and I forgot to bring a spade. You ever been in love?”

Bony’s answer was a slow affirmative nodding.

“Sometimes it hurts, being in love,” Shannon said. “It sort of numbs a guy’s brain and makes him do funny things. It was a funny thing for me to do, to come here that night without a spade, and when I came here I knew that I’d never have guts enough again to come to do what I had to do.

“I set the torch on the boulder over there behind you. I had to shift a deal of sand with my hands and then lift up several stone slabs. I wasn’t thinking of much else but what I’d do to someone with my knives if I-if it was my sweetheart. I kept thinking mostly of how a Chinaman ranch cook showed me to use knives without killing.

“Anyway, when I’d gone down two feet I came to hair. The hair came away in my hand, and I had to get up and take it to the torch, and I wasn’t feeling too bright, not even when I saw that the hair was white and not light brown with a golden sheen in it like my girl’s hair. Still, I wasn’t sure, not knowing what being planted would do to hair, and so I went on digging and came to clothes, and the clothes were so perished that still I couldn’t be sure which one of ’emit was. It was the shoes that proved it. The canvas was rotten, but the rubber soles were sound enough. O’Brien always wore canvas shoes.”

The American used the glowing end of a stick to gain flame for his cigarette, and the vastly grotesque shadow flickered upon the granite ceiling and upon the bulging walls. For a little while he was silent.

“Yes, I guess it hurts sometimes, being in love, I was never in love before I met Mavis Sanky. She was a fine kid. Pa told me to keep smiling till I found out for sure. Well, I been doing my best, and I’m going on that way until I’m sure, sure that she was killed and didn’t just perish in this goddamn country. So I replanted, old Ted O’Brien exactly as he had been, and I went out backwards and smothered out all the evidence and afterwards sneaked in here now and then to see if the murderer had paid a visit.”