Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River Page 4

  “No other family?”

  She shook her head. She had pinned up her thick yellow braid, and she looked charming, smudges of flour on her nose and forehead, milk-chocolate eyes glistening in the lamplight. “It was just the four of us.”

  “And now it’s just you.”

  She looked up from kneading biscuit dough on the board, and some complicated look flickered across her face. She said, “More or less,” and went back to her biscuits.

  It wasn’t clear to him how she managed it, but they sat down to a Christmas Eve dinner of thick venison stew, fresh biscuits, and what was left of the fruitcake. While the stew was simmering, he told her about the fight with his father, about his weeping mother and his wide-eyed siblings. While the biscuits baked, she told him the story of losing her parents in the influenza epidemic. She said her brother never learned about his parents’ deaths, and at the moment she said it, the phantom rose briefly behind her, making Peter’s heart clutch. Madeleine’s cheeks suddenly flushed, and there was an odd little turn of her head. She didn’t say anything further.

  After dinner, they went out once more to check on the animals in the barn. Madeleine, wrapped to the ears in her coat, said wistfully, “It’s nice to have company.” The snow had eased, but hard small flakes still drifted aimlessly through the darkness.

  Peter gazed out into the empty white prairie, wondering at it. His own home was a forest of tenements and unpainted storefronts. “It’s so big here,” he said. “And clean.”

  “Much better than in town,” she said.

  “But lonely.”

  “I have Hildy.”

  The shepherd had decided, sometime today, that she liked Peter, and she submitted to being stroked whenever she came near him. “Great dog,” Peter said. “I like the horses, too. Bigger than the ones we had in France.”

  Madeleine nodded. “Horses don’t get much bigger than Theo and Big Mike.”

  “I’ve never worked with animals,” he said, though he was reluctant to admit it. He hoped she wouldn’t think less of him. He added, “I’m good with machines, though.”

  “You work with machines?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you could rig a plow so a tractor could pull it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I think I could.”

  ***

  Madeleine liked knowing someone else was in the house, and it was nice not to feel her anxiety rise as the light faded. Of course she didn’t really know Peter Banister, but Hildegard liked him, and that meant something. She gave him her parents’ old bedroom, bringing clean flannel sheets from the cedar chest and making the bed up fresh, with a pile of pillows and an extra quilt against the cold.

  He stood in the doorway to say good night, properly shy, carefully respectful. Mrs. Torgerson would cluck like a hen over unmarried young people sleeping unchaperoned in the same house, but Madeleine didn’t give two pins for that. Mrs. Torgerson hadn’t spent six months with only a handful of animals for companionship.

  It was magical, how different the house felt for the company. Her pillow felt softer. Her quilt was warmer. The creaks of the old house, the whistle of the wind in the eaves, all seemed friendly instead of alarming. Hildegard lay flat next to her as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

  As Madeleine slipped gradually into sleep, she reminded herself that this reprieve was temporary. Peter Banister would repair his motorcar, and be on his way to wherever it was he wanted to go. But, just for tonight, it was lovely not to be alone.

  It was sometime close to dawn when she jolted awake. The house was freezing, and gray light edged the mountains to the east. From the barn the hens were squawking wildly, and the goats bleated with panic. One of the Belgians whinnied, and something yowled in response.

  Madeleine sat up, her skin crawling with terror. It was her worst fear come true. One of the big cats come in search of easy prey, her precious hens, her sweet goats. All she had left!

  Hildegard was scratching at the bedroom door, yipping to get out, to get at the enemy. Madeleine’s heart fluttered in her throat, nearly choking her. She scrambled to get into her trousers and shirt. She had worn her socks to bed, and while she was still doing up buttons, she was on her way down the stairs. Hildegard scrambled ahead of her, claws clicking on the wood floor.

  Peter was already in the kitchen, with his coat on, and his boots. He was opening the door, and she saw he had picked up the Peacemaker from the counter.

  She said, “I’ll get the shotgun.”

  “Let me go first.” He stepped out onto the doorstep.

  The snow had ceased at last, leaving everything glittering in the pre-dawn light, as if the fields were dusted with diamonds. There was silence for a moment, and then another drawn-out cry, the hunting cougar, that made Madeleine gasp and press her hands to her mouth. Hildegard, deadly silent, dashed past Peter and on down the path he had shoveled.

  “Peter! It’s a cougar! It’ll kill Hildy—” But Peter was already gone, flying at a dead run toward the barn.

  Madeleine pulled on her coat, not bothering to fasten it, and seized up the Winchester from the gun rack. She checked that there was a shell in the chamber, thrust her feet into her boots, and dashed after Peter. She ran as fast as she dared on the slick snow, not wanting to slip and fall with a loaded gun in her hands. It seemed to take forever to reach the barn. She heard the chickens’ wild clucking, and she pictured them flapping frantically in their roost.

  The cat could only get to them if it found its way up into the hayloft above the stalls. In summer that was impossible, but now the snow was drifted in great mounds against the sides of the barn. The cat could climb that slope, and reach the unglazed window leading to the hayloft.

  The fury rose in the darkness, Hildegard snarling, the cougar hissing, the goats crying like frightened children. Madeleine, sobbing with fear, skidded around the corner of the barn, catching herself by grabbing the corner post. Peter stood at the foot of the snowdrift, feet set wide apart, the pistol in both hands.

  In the half-light, the cougar was just a streak of tawny gold and black. It crouched at the peak of the snowy mound, from where the window into the hayloft was an easy leap. Hildegard was scrabbling against the snow, trying to climb. The cougar’s eyes glowed golden, and its ears were laid flat against its head. It screamed at Hildegard, showing a maw full of fearsome teeth.

  Hildegard gave a furious bark, tried to leap, and fell backward down the hillock of snow. The cougar turned away, bracing itself to leap through the window.

  Madeleine stopped sobbing. She forced herself to concentrate. In another moment, the big cat would be in the barn, in the midst of her goats and her chickens, and she’d have no chance to save them. She lifted the shotgun, with no time to aim, no time to brace herself. At the same moment, Peter pulled back the hammer of the Colt.

  Madeleine fired the Winchester, and its kick sent her flying backward into the snow. Just as she landed, the Peacemaker barked a deep, ear-bruising sound. The Belgians whinnied alarm and banged their hooves against the walls of their stalls.

  The big cat jerked up, its silhouette outlined against the snowfield, gold and beige and brown against silver-white, then crumpled. It slipped backward down the slope of snow, sliding out of sight. Hildegard charged forward, headed around the drift. Madeleine shouted, “No! Hildy, no!” but the shepherd was already gone.

  Madeleine ran after the dog, but Peter’s long legs carried him faster. He reached the scene first, with Madeleine a close, agonized second. They found the shepherd poised over the big cat. The dog’s tail stretched straight out behind her, and her teeth were bared, ready to attack.

  There was no need. The cougar was dead.

  Hildegard nosed it, then stood back, looking over her shoulder for direction. The snow beneath the big cat’s head was stained with blood. The creature lay limp, head lolling, lifeless eyes staring up into the slowly lightening sky.

  Madeleine said, “I missed.”

  “I didn�
��t,” Peter said. “Head shot. At least it didn’t suffer.”

  “Not many could have made that shot with a pistol. Certainly not me.”

  His voice was as raw as the morning wind. “I’ve had more practice than I care to think about.”

  “It’s sad,” Madeleine said, and she knew she was being obscure.

  “Yeah.”

  “But my animals . . .”

  He gestured with the Peacemaker toward the cougar, lying peacefully now on the snow. “Is this what you’re afraid of?”

  “Oh, this,” she said. “And a thousand other things.”

  “But you came out here with that shotgun, even though you were scared.”

  “My livestock is all I have left, Peter.”

  “You’re a brave girl, Madeleine. Brave as any soldier.” He smiled at her, showing his dimples. Her stomach quivered in an unfamiliar way, and she had to duck her head to hide her blush.

  In her ear, Holland gave a long, low laugh.

  ***

  They decided the morning was too far gone to go back to bed. The sun glinted above the silvery peaks of the Mission Mountains, and blazed across the snowy prairie to usher in a brilliant Christmas morning. While Madeleine fed her animals, Peter shoveled the blood from the snow so it wouldn’t attract buzzards, then hauled the cougar carcass into a shed where Madeleine said it would freeze, and keep until she got around to skinning it. They went into the kitchen when these things were done. Madeleine washed her hands, pinned up her hair, and began cracking fresh eggs into a bowl. The phantom had reappeared, lurking in corners, grinning at Peter at strange times and making him fear Madeleine would think he was shell-shocked after all.

  He was worrying over this when he heard her hiss, “Holland! Go away!”

  Peter said, “What?”

  She turned with the bowl full of frothy eggs in her hands. Her cheeks were flushed, and a loose strand of yellow hair tumbled over her forehead. “He keeps whispering in my ear.”

  “Who?” Peter blinked.

  She heaved a deep sigh, and set her bowl down. “You’re going to think I’m the one with shell-shock, but I suppose you might as well know.”

  “Know what?”

  “I hear my brother’s voice. Pretty much all the time.”

  “Your—your—dead brother?”

  “Yes.” She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “I wouldn’t blame you if you hightailed it right back to your broken-down Tin Lizzie, but that’s the way it is. I thought maybe I was losing my mind from being alone so much, like those pioneer women you read about, but now you’re here, and I still—that is, Holland is still—”

  “He’s still talking to you.”

  She nodded.

  “So,” Peter said. He turned his body to face the grinning phantom hovering in the doorway. “So, was your brother about your height? Kind of a skinny kid? Laughed a lot?”

  Her eyes widened, and the color receded from her cheeks. “Peter! Can you see him?”

  “I see something,” he said grimly.

  “But you see him? I only hear him!”

  “I was afraid to tell you. That’s how I found the house. He showed me.”

  Holland said, in a tone thinner than any she had heard from him before, “Surprise, Maddie!”

  “Holland,” she said, very low. “What do you mean? I mean, Peter won’t want to—”

  “You were lonely,” Holland breathed. “So—” His voice trailed off, as if he had left the room while he was still speaking.

  She cried, “Holland!”

  “He’s gone,” Peter said. “He’s not there now.”

  She put her hands to her cheeks. “Oh! I was always telling him to go away, but he never listened!”

  Peter crossed to her, and took her hands away from her face. “What were you going to say?” he asked gently. “Peter won’t want to—what?”

  She looked down at their joined hands, and her voice trembled with fresh grief. “Holland always tried to fix things.”

  “Good for him.”

  “He’ll come back,” she said uncertainly.

  “Maybe he doesn’t need to come back.”

  She lifted her face, but slowly, cautiously. “What do you mean?”

  He squeezed her fingers. “He brought me here, Madeleine. To you. I needed someplace, and you needed someone.”

  “Peter,” she said. “Do you think you might want to stay?”

  “Do you think you might ask me to?” He wasn’t smiling, and he watched her face, trying to guess at the emotions whirling behind those milk-chocolate eyes. “You need a hand, I think.”

  “I can’t pay you.” She pushed back the strand of hair, but she held his gaze. Brave, that was Madeleine. Scared, but facing her fear.

  He released her hands, but he stood where he was, understanding he shouldn’t rush her, willing her to see into his heart. “I don’t need money,” he said. “I need someplace I belong.”

  The smile that broke over her face nearly took his breath away, and he had to shove his hands in his pockets to keep from taking her in his arms. He hadn’t known this girl for more than a few wintry hours, but she touched him just the same. She made him want to do everything right.

  Her eyes sparkled as brilliantly as the sun on snow. “Well, then. You can set the table. The flatware’s over there.” She indicated the breakfront with her chin.

  He had to step over the shepherd lying on the rug to do as she asked. He told himself he wouldn’t say anything further, not now. He could wait. But they would have a great deal to talk about in the days to come.

  As he laid the table, something flitted across the kitchen, a shadow, or the ghost of a ghost. He jerked up his head to see it, but it moved too quickly, gone before he could focus on it.

  Madeleine, measuring coffee into the percolator, lifted her head, listening to something. She smiled mistily across the room at Peter. “Holland says, Merry Christmas,” she said. “And welcome home.”

  Peter stood still, his hands full of forks and spoons, and gazed wordlessly at yellow-haired Madeleine Love.

  Christmas. Home. It seemed he would celebrate after all.

  Behind her, her brother’s ghost waved farewell, faded through the wall and disappeared.

  Introduction to “A Ghost of Time”

  Western traditions also fascinate Dean Wesley Smith. Under several of his pen names, he has written amazing Western novels. I keep asking him to write more, but he’s focusing on short fiction at the moment, which is good for those of us at Fiction River. Over the years, he’s written more than 200 short stories, and he’s busily helping WMG Publishing reprint those stories.

  Like me, Dean has never met a genre he couldn’t meld with another genre. The first short story he ever sold, published in a science fiction award volume, was a romance. He has written a lot of romances, under different names, and actually anticipated the futuristic post-apocalyptic subgenre that has now hit the genre.

  As subscribers to Fiction River know, Dean adores time travel. He used his award-winning editing skills to edit our previous volume, Time Streams. His Christmas Ghost story combines his love for time travel with his love of the old west.

  He writes, “Last year I wrote a story from Duster Kindel’s point of view and have always wanted to go back to a story in his world. I was also born and raised in Boise, Idaho, where the mansion in this story is located. And my historical family is named Edwards and they had a mansion in that same area. So I just took all the parts and ran with them.”

  A Ghost of Time

  Dean Wesley Smith

  One

  Sherri Edwards brushed her long black hair out of her face and stared at the beautiful stone mansion sitting back in the oak trees like she had seen a ghost. The front porch wood railings between the polished marble columns shined with a gleam she had only dreamed about. The smooth river-stone walkway that led from the dirt road up to the house seemed far wider than she had ever imagined. And the drapes that she could see
through the huge windows hung perfectly.

  The entire mansion was shaded by huge old oak and cottonwood trees, giving the grounds a feeling of a southern plantation. She could see through the trees and past the main building and carriage house to the Boise River beyond down the bluff.

  She had seen pictures of the Edwards mansion in its glory, but could not believe it had actually existed that way. It was exactly how she hoped to have it look when she finished the remodeling in 2016.

  Yet here she stood in 1898, on the edge of the pathway leading up to the mansion, seeing her own home for herself in all its original glory, seeing it before years of neglect and abandonment had reduced it to something that needed to be torn down, not restored.

  There had been many times over the last year that she had regretted the impulsive buy of the old mansion just because it had her family name attached. No one who had lived in it had actually been a relative, but in her haste to buy the old place in 2015, that hadn’t mattered in the slightest.

  Bonnie Kindle took Sherri’s arm gently as a proper lady in the 1890s would do, to make sure she was all right. “Hard to imagine you are actually standing here, isn’t it?”

  “Impossible,” Sherri said. She had been in the past for three long days now and it still seemed far too much to believe.

  “Not impossible,” Bonnie’s husband, Duster Kindle, said. “You are actually here. You want to pinch her, Bonnie, and prove it?”

  Bonnie glanced over at Duster with a look that only a wife can give a husband as Sherri laughed. “If seeing Silver City before it became a ghost town and the two-day painful horseback ride here to Boise didn’t convince me, no amount of pinching is going to do it. And that’s not to mention just how uncomfortable these dresses are.”

  “Good point,” Duster said, smiling.

  Bonnie and Sherri were dressed in 1890s dresses. At the Boise Hotel, Bonnie had had to help Sherri get into her cotton summer dress of light blue. The women in the West in this time period really wore a lot of clothes as far as Sherri was concerned, far more than was needed for a warm May afternoon. She had a small chest, so she had opted to not go with the bra that felt more like a prison device, but the dress had forced her to wear petticoats.