An Archaeological Mystery
Skagway, Alaska, June 2002: Archaeologist Cassie Mitchell finds a human skeleton under a historic grocery store. It couldn't have been put there before or after June of 1902. Can she figure out who the guy was and who killed him based on the evidence in his grave?
Skagway, June 1902: Rip Travers thought his marshalling days were over when he helped run the Soapy Smith gang out of Skagway in 1898. When his replacement as U.S. Deputy Marshal, John Snook comes by one raining morning in November 1902, he can't say no to putting on a badge just this one more time. After all, who can resist a cabin with a pool of blood in the middle of the floor and a message written on the wall, crying out "STRIKERS DIE!" Not Rip Travers.
Rip's next few weeks take him and his horse Buck up White Pass, through Dead Horse Gulch, and as far away as Victoria, British Columbia in search of not only suspects, but a body drained of blood, as well. Can Rip solve a murder mystery without a murder victim, a conspiracy to commit murder when he doesn't even have a body?
DEAD MEN TELL TALES
An
Archaeological
Mystery
By Cody Grant
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DEAD MEN TELL TALES
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[excerpt] CHAPTER ONE THE HUMAN REMAINS DOG WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 1992. “Mowley,” I said as I glared. Then I shut my mouth. The word brought the misshapen beast to his feet. Festooned in cotton strings, that simple action threatened disaster to eight hours of my painstaking work. “Nice dog,” I crooned, replacing the fierce command that I started with a soothing, sing-song, why-don’t-you-just-lie-down-and-go-back-to-sleep-until-I-cut-off-those-string-lines tone. Instead, the slobbering monster started to wag his tail, catching up another line and pulling up a stake with it. I felt a growl vibrating in my throat. What the hell was that dog doing in the middle of my dig site? I’m not usually given to swearing, not even in my thoughts, but that dog has a tendency to bring out the worst in me. Especially when he shows up right after I’d just spent a whole day setting up the excavation grid with stakes and string lines. Calmly, I assessed the situation. Growling might just work. I knew better than to yell. He’d long ago done the damage. Bart, I’d yell at. Bart, Mowley’s cursed human partner in crime, would take the punishment, not a dog that had the misfortune to have acquired such a poor specimen of humanity as master in the first place. Bart, being an archaeologist himself, should know better than let a half basset, an animal that placed digging in the dirt as one of his Top Ten Favorite Things to Do, run around free. Not when our dig had started up in town. Whoo Boy, was Barty-Boy gonna’ pay. “Down, Mowley, you wretched beast,” I growled, inching forward in a crouch to avoid hitting my head on the bottom of the floor joists under Verbauwhedes’ Confectionery and Grocery, a decrepit old building that some architect working for Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park had jacked up just barely far enough for me to do my job. I’d been working here in rain-soaked Skagway, Alaska for four days now, trying to get this site thawed out and ready for my archaeological crew to start excavations, and I’d been running into more obstacles than usual. It all made me a teensy bit cranky. Archaeology always has its problems, especially when you’re eighty miles by dirt road from a city with any sized population, and that a Canadian one, reached by way of a dirt road and a customs post. ‘Course I could fly to Juneau, capital of Alaska, ninety miles and a hundred dollars away, but that makes even camera batteries expensive, and I’m a taxpayer, too. I sorta’ like being economical with the public’s money. I mean, archaeology and problems just sort of go together. You never know what you’re going to run into from one day to the next, and what’s going to break down or what sort of gizmo you’ll need to fix it. That’s what’s so fun about the job. But dogs? Dogs you think you can control for, especially if their masters work for you. Here, in the early 1990’s, Skagway has like eight hundred people living in it, but you can see as many as five thousand on a summer day when three cruise ships sit at the docks. They dump off tourists to gawk at glaciers and visit the grave of desperado Soapy Smith, whose gang was rounded up by U. S. Marshal Rip Travers back in 1898. God, I love Rip, he’s my one and only real-life hero. Some of the tourists ride the narrow gauge White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad and buy curios, not hardware. The one little hardware store only carries one or two trowels a year, and sells only so many batteries and wooden stakes. If you’re doing anything but being a tourist, you sorta’ need to anticipate, something hard to do when you don’t know what mysterious treasures lay around under the ground. So, when I stuck my head under this decrepit old building, one with rotting piers for foundations, now sitting on jacks about four feet above the ground at some architect’s concept of the perfect height to allow archaeologists under it, it should not have surprised me to see one more unexpected piece of trouble. This trouble was spelled “Mowley.” Pronounced “mow” as in “mow the grass,” not to rhyme with “cow.” Named after Farley Mowat, the guy who wrote that great book, Never Cry Wolf. Don’t get me started on the permutations. It’s not pleasant. It’s sufficient to say that Mowley is half basset and half malamute. Even looking at him yells out trouble. I debated what to do. Call the ugly beast to me? He’d drag that entire mess of string and wood with him, and possibly more of the still-intact grid system. Nope. Better go to him and see if I could cut him loose. But hell, having to deal with this stupid dog before I’d even stuck a trowel in the ground just seemed like too much. I can usually handle this sort of crisis later on in a project, but I just hadn’t gotten into the routine yet. When I dropped down to crawl under Verbauwhedes’ store, I hadn’t even been thinking problems. I was still trying to warm up, my thirty-five year old body not moving very quickly on the cold ground. True, a whistle from the direction of the carpenter crew working on the historic building next door meant I still had something for them to appreciate. I had smirked as I disappeared under the building, feeling pretty good about myself. That lasted long enough to catch sight of Mowley tangled up with my stakes and string. What an ugly mutt. A basset’s short legged body with shaggy gray and white fur. Droopy ears and eyes, and those mismatched, like his malamute dad. Mowley didn’t inherit any smarts from his father. He got all his brains from his basset mom. Anyone who owns a basset knows how few of those they possess. Thirty-five percent of the cranial matter is devoted to smelling and sixty-five percent to filling the stomach attached to the nose. Stupidly, not knowing I’d be dealing with Mowley on this day, I had no food on hand, not even a stick of chewing gum. As I crawled towards the mutt, his tail, waving madly ever since I had poked my head under the building, tripled its beat. He stood up and did his usual in-place prance. “Ah, no, Mowley,” I complained, wiping dog slobber onto my thighs and watching the string attached to the wooden stakes get more tangled around his humungous paws. “Stay!” I barked, with what I meant as a commanding tone, silently begging him to, one, understand me, and two, obey. “What’s up, Cassie?” Derek chirped, coming through the opening at the side of the building and obliterating what little light seeped through. Derek Chavez was the reason doing archaeology in Because of Derek, the park historian, I’d never had much trouble getting my job done in I sure would have liked to dig up the crib’s original location in the red light district. Most likely, I’d find nothing but candy wrappers and cookie tins here. Boring. Oh well, a job’s a job. It pays the rent. We archaeologists like to say, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. “The question’s more like who’s in major trouble?” I grumbled. With impeccable timing, Mowley asserted himself. He gave off one of those typical squeaky-toy whines, the kind of noises bassets make when no one’s feeding them. “Uh, why’d you let Mowley in here?” Derek asked, a totally innocent look on his face. I glared. “Because I haven’t figured out a way to kill him yet.” “Piece of cake.” Before I could yell “No!” Derek produced a candy bar from his pocket. He didn’t even need to say the word “Food.” Mowley bounded forward joyfully, dragging the rest of my strings and stakes in that quadrant of the dig with him. The nastiest of my language was about to erupt full force when I saw what, exactly, the dog had found so comfortable. Mowley had been lying on top of the worst of his misdeeds. Smooth, rounded, ivory-colored and clean as, well, a bone. That’s because it was a bone. A forehead bone. A skull. No animal has a skull shaped like that. Mowley had uncovered a human skull. CHAPTER TWO
THE BLOODY CABIN
TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1902. Rip Travers, a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man with mussed, iron-gray hair sat hunched at the counter of his bicycle shop. He raised his bushy eyebrows when
“John. Fine morning. How’s the family?” Rip pushed the pile of hardware in front of him aside with relief. He hated counting nuts and bolts.
“Rip, it most definitely is not a fine morning. I can see why you left this job,” Snook grumbled as he shed his mackintosh. “I don’t have time to visit, but I’ll do it only long enough to down one of your God-awful cups of coffee. Thanks for offering.”
“Harry.” Snook nodded to Rip’s son at the counter along the opposite wall, where the boy worked on a bicycle. “Better go get Buck. Your Pop’s gonna’ need him.”
Harry glanced towards his dad. Rip raised his big, bushy eyebrows once again, wanting to shake his head and finding it impossible. What was it about the law that drew him, irresistibly, into business with which he should never get involved in the first place? Rip’s bad leg twitched, warning him to stay put, but his head paid absolutely no attention. Without another thought, he nodded towards Harry. The young man jumped up and dashed out the door to go fetch his dad’s horse.
Rip limped over to the gray graniteware coffee pot on the stove. He grabbed up a thick, chipped white cup, poured a dark, viscous stream, and limped back to the counter. Snook had perched himself on one of the three-legged stools he kept for the men who came in to shoot the bull. Rip favored his left leg. He’d broken it racing horses in
“Somethin’s on your mind, John, or you wouldn’t be pesterin’ me for such a rotten cup of coffee on such a fine
“We got trouble, Rip,” Snook groaned after he took that first awful sip, screwing up his face and almost spitting it out. He swallowed it, though. Since he didn’t hawk it out, Rip figured he needed the fortification.
Rip groaned, secretly pleased. The townspeople always ended up coming to him when real trouble started brewing. They had from the day the king of the trouble-makers, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith had come to town and caused all that ruckus back in July of ninety eight. At that time they had begged Rip to head up their “Safety Committee,” the closest thing they had to a police department in the days before city incorporation. When Frank Reid, one of Rip’s confederates, and old Soapy shot each other to death on his brother-in-law’s wharf, all Rip could do was wipe up the mess afterwards. Judge Sehlbrede, from the federal court, slapped a deputy marshal’s badge on Rip, told him to round up the rest of Soapy’s gang, don’t let anyone else get killed, and then stepped back to watch Rip do his job.
Which he did, in four days. No one grumbled. Much. Sure, lots of noise and some pretty scared con men, but Rip got them to the jail in
“You know that cabin east of the railroad tracks in the old Tlingit village, the one old man Gressley built during the rush?”
Rip nodded. “George Gressley disappeared last winter. Folks say he went to
“So, maybe he has already.” Snook lowered his chin and stared at Travers over the top of his wire-framed glasses before he lowered the front two legs of his stool to the floor.
“Grab your mackintosh, Rip, and that Colt of yours. Soon as Harry gets back with Buck, we’re takin’ a ride.”
He pulled out a deputy’s badge and slapped it down on the counter top.
“Ah, come on, John,” Rip protested. “You know I resigned when the good folks of this town elected me as city magistrate.
John Snook grinned at his former boss. “You know more about this stuff than I do, Rip, and I’m not going to lose this case.” Rip heard a clatter out in the street. Snook grinned. “Sounds like Harry’s here with Buck. Let’s mount up. I’ll fill you in on the way.”
* * *
Rip thought he would be prepared for what he would see in that one-roomed cabin set below the ridge behind the railroad switches. He could hear the sound of a helper engine backing the train towards
Snook took one look and backed out the door. Rip heard him gagging up breakfast in what passed as a front yard.
Rip stopped just inside the doorway, glad that John had declined to enter. He saw the footprints outlined clearly, even in the subdued light from the overcast day and the heavy curtains over the windows. Rip wanted to pull those drapes back, to let in a little more light, but he was afraid he’d step on some evidence.
“Better stay outside, John. I see footprints and splatters coming out the door. Did
“Drinich was like me, one look inside, and he lost his breakfast. Said he came straight to see me this morning after checking on the place like George asked him to.”
Travers pulled a lantern off Buck’s saddle, the one he’d brought so he could see inside a darkened cabin, and he now rummaged around inside one of the saddle bags. He drew out a slim wooden box, his investigation kit. He’d not had to use it in
When Travers turned off his kerosene lantern and packed up his evidence case three hours later, he knew he had a murder on his hands. Six men had been walking around outside, it looked like. A big guy with size twelve boots had walked through the blood and stood at the front door before leaving. Two men had carried something dripping blood out the door, one with thin-soled shoes, a hole in the right one, and one wearing smooth-soled, medium-sized shoes. A fourth man wore lumberman boots shod with cone-headed nails. One man had moccasins, but he’d been there before anyone else. His tracks had gotten covered up by all the others. Then one guy had some deep treads on his galoshes. They’d be easy to find. One of those had to be from Drinich, the owner’s friend who’d called on Marshal Snook this morning. Rip could tell which tracks were Snook’s, so he discounted those altogether, and he hadn’t even bothered to inventory them.
Moccasins. A few Tlingit still camped out here at the old village in the summer time, when they could get seasonal work in
Only the first three guys had walked out. The man with the shoes had come up the trail from
He’d had Snook scour the moss and wood-chip covered yard for anything that looked out of place. The marshal came up with very little: a small, empty medicine bottle, clear, the kind Florence used for her monthly women’s complaints; a Quaker Maid bottle with a finger of whiskey left in it, lying next to the front door stoop, and four cigar stubs, like a man had waited for someone, filling his time smoking and drinking. Funny smelling whisky, with a faint scent of almonds.
Rip had lifted a few fingerprints, too. The courts didn’t think much of this new science using fingerprints, but many of the private detectives found them valuable. He thought he’d try them out. He had ordered a kit from the Pinkerton Detective Agency in
And then there was all that blood. Aside from the big pool in the middle of the room and the bloody prints leading to the door, there were three sets of them, Rip found that trail of big drops trailing over the steps and off to where the mule had stood by the side of the cabin. No drag marks. At least two of the men had carried that body. Or carcass. Or whatever it was. Rip hoped it was an animal someone had butchered.
The most important clue, though, was also on the wall. Rip had seen a lot of bad things in his long life. He didn’t talk about most of them. He wasn’t sure he should blab this one about either. It would play straight into the hands of the killer. It said everything about motive.
“Did you tell
“Drinich is no fool. While he looked like a ghost, I’ll bet you he’s more scared by what he saw on that wall than what was on the floor. He’ll keep it to himself,” Snook assured him.
Rip grunted an agreement with Snook’s assessment of one of the local labor boys. While he might be given to occasional loud-mouthed singing bouts, Rip had never known Milo Drinich to betray his fellow workers on the railroad. He’d clam up tight for a while. His buddies would wonder why, but they wouldn’t get a word out of him. Rip hadn’t realized that a strike was in the making, but it shouldn’t surprise him. The
“I’d better go have a chat with
“Glad you’re on my side, Rip,” Snook observed. “This is bigger than
Rip took a great lungful of air. He let Buck find his own way along the path back to town, knowing the animal knew the way, grateful he could concentrate on thinking this problem through.
“Could be someone just butchered a pig,” Rip suggested, hopefully.
Snook snorted. “In the middle of Gressley’s cabin?”
Being a lawman, Rip knew he had to suspect the worse. “Guess we should put together a search party for a body or a grave, John. With this leg, I won’t be much good tramping through these woods.”
“No, I want you working on the case, not falling over downed trees and rocks,” Snook agreed. “Leave that to me.”
Rip shuddered, thinking again about what he’d seen on Gressley’s wall, about labor strikes and union busters. He knew the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as “The Wobblies,” were trying to organize in Skagway and that the British-owned White Pass Railroad wasn’t too happy with the prospect. Labor strikes had gotten brutal in other parts of the country, ending in the deaths of dozens of men from both sides of the argument. “Well, if it wasn’t a pig, you’re right, it’s probably bigger than
Hell, not just other parts. Why, only three years ago, Rip had barely averted a violent strike here in
Nope, Rip Travers didn’t want to get involved with union troubles again, but it sure looked like he wouldn’t be able to avoid it. The words painted in blood stood out plain in his head.
“STRIKERS DIE!”
