Boots and Bullets

“What was he doing at the old hospital?” Andi asked.

“He stopped by to visit his room.”

“Seriously? Don’t you think that is a little macabre? Maybe he died there, you know, went toward the light but was pulled back and now he’s trying to call up the other side.”

“Or maybe you’ve been spending too much time planning the haunted house,” Kate suggested.

Her friend laughed. “Swing by and I’ll show you the fabric. I also have some old white curtains I can use for the ghosts, but I want your opinion first.”

Kate was tired and dirty from hauling dusty old furniture, but she agreed. “See you in a minute.” She hung up and on impulse, circled around the block and made a point of driving back past the hospital.

The pickup with the Colorado plates that had been parked behind her truck was still there, which meant Cyrus Winchester was still inside the hospital.

What was he doing in there?

THE HOSPITAL ROOM was exactly as he remembered it. Cyrus had quit asking himself how he knew that. Obviously he hadn’t been unconscious the entire time.

When he’d opened the blinds, he’d seen Kate Landon sitting in her truck. Was she worried he wouldn’t lock up? She couldn’t be worried that he’d steal anything, since clearly there was nothing left in the building to steal.

He’d dropped the blinds and searched the room, not sure what he was hoping to find. Of course there was nothing either in the room or the bathroom but dust. How quickly the building was falling into disrepair.

When he peeked out the window again, the Second Hand Kate’s truck was gone. He had wanted to question her further, but had warned himself not to ask too many questions that would scare her.

She looked too much like the murder victim not to have some connection. He would have to find out what he could about the Landon family.

Leaving his former hospital room, he walked down the hall, his boot heels echoing. The place had taken on an eerie feel. He stopped to listen as if he thought he could tap into the building’s history, feel all the lives that had traveled through here from birth to death and all the broken bones and illnesses in between.

But of course he couldn’t. He wasn’t psychic. He’d seen someone switch two baby boys in the nursery and then become a murder victim. That was a far cry from being able to tell the future.

He thought about calling Cordell and telling him about Kate Landon. But he knew his brother would try to come up with some reason Kate looked so much like the murder victim.

“You must have seen her before you were attacked, before the coma, and unconsciously put her in your dream,” Cordell would say.

Unfortunately, everything that had happened between his last memory of driving to Montana and waking up was lost. Except for what had happened that one night in the old hospital. He knew that alone should be proof the murder was just a bad dream.

At the nursery, he paused. It was just inside there that he’d found the dead woman. He walked a few feet down the hall, found the door into the nursery and stepped in.

Fortunately the power company hadn’t turned off the electricity yet. He snapped on the light and studied the room, trying to picture where the bassinets and other equipment had been in this room that night.

At the back of his mind, a thought nagged at him. Why was the equipment still here that night? Why were there two babies still here if most everything had been moved to the new hospital?

He shoved the thought away. It didn’t make any sense, but then again none of it did.

Cyrus moved to within feet of the spot where he believed the body had been sprawled. The woman had put up a struggle. In the semi-soundproof nursery and the near-empty hospital, it was no wonder no one had heard it.

Crouching down, he studied the worn tile. There were scuff marks, dust, some dirt and a scrape where something heavy had been dragged out. He wondered if the blood would show up in the thin cracks between the tiles with the luminol crime labs used?

Unfortunately, there was little chance of getting the crime lab involved, since the sheriff’s department wasn’t even investigating the murder.

Because there was no murder. No switching of babies in the nursery. No way you could have seen a dead woman because you were in a coma tethered to your bed by tubes and monitors. All this was just a coma-induced bad dream.

Sometimes he wished he had dreamed all of it so he could just quit this. As he started to push himself to his feet, he was blinded by another flash of memory. The woman lying in a pool of blood, him leaning over her, something on her wrist.

A string of tiny silver sleigh bells. A bracelet. One of the bells had come off and lay on its side in the blood next to her clutched fingers. The woman had put up a fight.

HEAD ACHING and even more mystified, Cyrus left the old hospital and drove down to the main drag. He parked in front of the Milk River Examiner, the local weekly newspaper, and climbed out, breathing in the crisp Montana air. The detailed images that kept flashing through his memory were starting to worry him.

Why hadn’t he remembered all of it the moment he’d awakened? Why did it keep coming to him, little pieces that were so clear …. He shoved his worry away and entered the newspaper office.

It was small and sold paper supplies as well as putting out a weekly edition.

He took a current newspaper—and one from three months ago that would have come out the week he was taken to the hospital and the week after that. From the young clerk behind the counter, he also borrowed the phone book long enough to look up the last name Landon.

The nearby towns along the Hi-Line were all small enough that they’d been put into the same phone book. There was only one Landon in the entire the directory. Kate. What had he been thinking? If she had any female relatives here, they could be married and have different last names.

Returning the phone book to the clerk, he paid for his newspapers and stepped outside. Across the street was a small park next to the railroad tracks. He sat down at one of the picnic tables and opened the first newspaper.

The paper had a lot of local news about who was in town visiting and who had a birthday or anniversary. He paused on an ad for Second Hand Kate’s, complete with an address and news about her recent opening—and her first annual haunted house to be held there Halloween night.

Cyrus realized Halloween was only a few days away.

There wasn’t anything else in the paper that caught his eye, so he picked up one from three months ago. Under the sheriff’s department reports he found the incident that had put him in a coma. It was brief, only a few words about a deputy responding to a call at the Whitehorse Hotel where a man had been attacked and taken to the hospital. The suspect was still at large.

He scanned through the rest of the four-page paper and found the obituary for the man who had died in the hospital the same night Cyrus was there. The man’s name was Wally Ingram.

On impulse Cyrus called 411 on his cell and was put through to Wally Ingram’s home number. He was surprised when it rang. He’d been half expecting to hear the line had been disconnected following the man’s death.

“Hello?” The woman sounded young.

Cyrus quickly explained that he’d been in the hospital the same night as Mr. Ingram and wondered if any of the family had also been there.

“My mother stayed with Grandpa that night.”

He felt his pulse quicken. “I’d like to talk to your mother if possible. Is she around?”

“Martha’s gone to Great Falls and won’t be back until late tonight, but you could probably catch her tomorrow morning.”

He left a message to have Martha Ingram call him and hung up, feeling hopeful. Someone else had been in the hospital that night, someone not connected to the staff.

The answer was in this town, Cyrus thought, and felt a strange sense of apprehension. Little scared him, but he knew at the back of his mind, he was beginning to question his own sanity.

CYRUS CHECKED the newspaper from a week after his accident and read about his brother and another private investigator from California, Raine Chandler, catching some child molesters, one of them responsible for putting him in the hospital.

As he walked back to his car, he felt antsy. The air had cooled down some, the day not quite as beautiful as it had been. He wondered if a storm was coming in.

Sliding behind the wheel of his pickup, he didn’t kid himself about where he was going or why as he drove down the street to the address that had been listed in the newspaper for Second Hand Kate’s. He was relieved to see the Open sign in the window.

Getting out, he climbed the steps of the large, old brick building. Over the door, he could make out the faded letters of the word Library. She’d put her shop in an old library building.