The Clements Kettle Read online

  The Clements Kettle

  Erik Carter

  Copyright © 2017 by Erik Carter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Erik Carter Mailing List

  Author Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Thank You

  Get More Carter

  Barnaby Wilcox Book 2

  The Dale Conley Series

  Also by Erik Carter

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

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  Author Note

  While this novel is set in the American West in the late 1800s, it is in no way meant to be a historically accurate representation of that time and place. It is, in fact, set in an over-the-top, Spaghetti Western version of the Wild West. That said, there are many inaccuracies and anachronisms in this novel, and this is by design.

  Please enjoy the novel as such.

  Desecho, Arizona

  The 1880s

  Chapter One

  I don’t often smell my boots, but when I first met the gal who saved my career, I had my nose half-buried in one. I gave it a good whiff. There was a stench. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the odor was coming from the boots themselves or from the feet within, but either way it was unusual. And unpleasant.

  This is what I had been reduced to—staring at my shoes. I hadn’t had any bites all day. Hadn’t had any the day before either. It had been a long week in a long month in a long year.

  I’d finally come to a conclusion—I was calling it quits. And I meant it this time. Rent was due. Something had to give. After so many years, the notion of giving up the business was a gloomy one indeed, but I’d resigned myself to it. It was too hard to make it as a private investigator in a town like Desecho, Arizona, a town so sleazy it didn’t want investigating.

  But, heck, this could be liberating. At five o’clock when I would close the office, I’d take the keys in and be done with the whole thing. I could take a little time for myself, tour some of the West’s other cesspool towns with Bob, my horse. Play some poker. Do some drinking. Could be great.

  So it was with mild amusement—one hour before I was to close my office forever—that I popped my boot off to get to the bottom of the mysterious smell. It would help kill a few minutes, and by the end of the day, I’d be starting a new chapter in my life.

  Then she walked into my office. And changed everything.

  There was a tapping on the opaque glass window of my door. A small blonde head peeked in. This gal looked as lost as a preacher at a cathouse. She wore a frilly dress that must have cost a hundred dollars and a big hat with little balls dangling from the brim. She carried a wee umbrella. It wasn’t raining.

  Nice figure on her, though.

  She stepped through the doorway, and her eyes quickly scanned about my one-room office—the water stain on the ceiling, the blinds closed tight, allowing only small slices of sunlight that cut across the room, and me, sitting in the shadows holding one of my boots to my nose.

  She looked scared.

  I put my boot back on and flopped my legs on my desk, nearly knocking over a half-empty whiskey bottle. I pushed it aside with my foot, disrupting some stacks of paper. The papers were nothing special, just gambling notes, but there has to be something there when clients walk in. What’s an office without paper? Or a whiskey bottle?

  Upon my first look at her, I was annoyed. She was young, in her twenties. And prissy. I had an hour to go before I began my new life, after only recently coming to terms with it. I didn’t want to spend that last hour with this living doily.

  “Excuse me,” she said. Her voice was as soft as the umbrella she was holding. Imagine a kitten talking. That was her.

  “The beautician’s down the hall,” I said. Maybe. Come to think of it, she might have closed shop a few months prior. I tended to lose track of these things.

  “Actually, I’m trying to find Barnaby Wilcox.”

  “You’re lookin’ at him.”

  She stepped closer to my desk and glanced at my Colt revolver, which was sitting next to the whiskey bottle. She bit her lip. “My, um, family requires your … services.”

  “Did your poodle run off?” Poodle. That was rich. I’d have to remember that one.

  I fished my cigarette case from my pocket. Inside were three smokes and three sticks of licorice. I made my choice and lit a cigarette.

  She looked at my cig. Apparently smoking scared her too. “I’m here because there’s been … well, there’s been a kidnapping.”

  Hello! I kicked my feet off the desk and leaned forward. Consider my interest piqued. “A kidnapping?”

  “My name’s Lilly Cosgrove. My father is—”

  “Lionel Cosgrove. Of Cosgrove Realty.” The Cosgroves were the richest, most influential family in Desecho. That certainly explained her clean clothes, her poised demeanor. And the otherworldly headwear.

  She smiled faintly, in an almost apologetic manner.

  “I’m surprised to see you out here in the real world, Lilly,” I said. “I hear ol’ Cosgrove keeps you on a pretty short leash.”

  Rumor had it the gal’s father ruled her as ruthlessly as he ruled the city of Desecho. Oh, he looked cute, to be sure. Old and wrinkled, about shoulder-height. Had a shiny bowling ball head. Wore a monocle. But don’t expect to see him passing out meals to orphans at Christmastime. He was the kind of man you imagine holding secret meetings with dwarves under bridges.

  “Well, that’s just the thing,” Lilly said. “Daddy’s the one who’s been kidnapped.”

  Lionel Cosgrove, the most prominent man in town—kidnapped. My interest was no longer just piqued. It was boiling.

  But I couldn’t get sidetracked. I was quitting, remember? I would humor this girl, nothing more.

  “I haven’t seen anything in the papers,” I said.

  “No one knows. The kidnappers said if I told anyone they’d kill him. They gave me this.”

  She handed me a piece of paper. Letters clipped from newspapers had been pasted together as words to form a message.

  Typical ransom situation. Hostage taken. Will be returned with the appropriate reward. Multiple kidnappers, as the note began with the word we. Usually these guys work in pairs, sometimes threes. The note said to bring the “kettle.” What was meant by kettle? Surely they weren’t talking about a metal pot you use to cook up a mess of beans. There was another part of the note that didn’t reckon—the date, June 8th.

  “The eighth,” I
said, pointing at the note. “That was yesterday.”

  Lilly’s eyes watered. Oh boy. I’d been waiting on this. In fact, I was surprised she hadn’t cried already.

  “I know,” she said and sniffled. “I tried to—”

  “Why don’t you start from the top?” People always want to jump right into their problems without giving you the proper background. I regretted my choice of words, though. Telling a lady like this to “start from the top” might get me a story that began in the crib. I clenched my teeth in anticipation. Thankfully she cut right to the chase.

  “Okay,” she said, dabbing at an eye with her handkerchief. She sat down in the chair facing my desk. “Daddy never came home from work on Wednesday. His employees said two men grabbed him as he left his office.”

  “And the bystanders did nothing,” I presumed.

  Lilly furled her brow. “No, they didn’t.”

  Oh, my town. Never change, Desecho. Never change.

  “Later, I found that note at our door,” she said. “So I got the kettle, and—”

  “Wait a sec. Tell me about this kettle.”

  “Certainly.” She collapsed her little umbrella. “Daddy, as you may well know, collects artifacts.”

  Cosgrove’s collection was legendary. He was one of those rich types who liked to flaunt their wealth with extravagant purchases so grand they made headlines. A priceless oil painting one day, an ancient sculpture the next.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I hear your place is a regular museum.”

  She nodded. “Yes, Daddy loves his toys. That’s what I call them—his toys.”

  “And the kettle?”

  “The kettle is a slave kettle. A Clements kettle, to be precise.”

  “What do you mean by ‘slave kettle’?”

  “Slaves used to set kettles around a room when they’d pray and sing. They’d place them upside down and prop up one side with a piece of wood.”

  I scratched my mustache. I’d heard of people doing some weird things in the name of religion, but inverting a kitchen item as part of a prayer ritual just might trump them all.

  “Was this supposed to channel some higher power?” I said.

  I suppose my question came out a little too harsh because Lilly’s mouth gaped slightly. I hadn’t meant to be rude, but the religious hooey-phooey really got my long johns in a bind.

  “Well, you see, Mr. Wilcox, when they had the kettles propped up like that it would help dampen the sound so the slave owner wouldn’t hear them praying. If they were caught praying they were … whipped.”

  No matter how many times I heard about something like that it still made my stomach drop.

  “Lovely,” I uttered.

  “Daddy’s is the only surviving Clements kettle.”

  “What’s so special about a Clements kettle?”

  “Now, I don’t know any of this for sure. This is just what I was told. Apparently, there was … an incident. Thirty years ago or so. The Clements slaves were caught praying. The slave owner got so mad that he didn’t just whip them …” Presently she turned and looked at the blinds on my window.

  “What did he do?”

  “I, I don’t really know,” Lilly said. “No one does. But four slaves were dead the next day. They were covered in lashes, and their skulls were crushed.”

  My stomach dropped again.

  “What do the kettles have to do with any of this?” I said.

  “Like I said, kettles were used to capture the sounds of their prayers. But the Clements kettles also captured the screams. They captured the deaths. Daddy’s kettle is cursed.”

  Mystic cookware? Now things were starting to go south. “You believe that?” I said.

  Lilly nodded. The poor thing. She really did believe it.

  “Alrighty,” I said. “Go on. So you got the kettle …”

  “I got the kettle and rode out to Dry Rock Basin just like I was told.”

  “All by your lonesome?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ever ridden before?”

  She sat up taller. “I’ve had lessons, thank you very much.”

  “Ever ridden by yourself before?”

  “No,” she said and sank back down. “But I was doing just fine until I was attacked. Right before I got to Dry Rock Basin, five men on horseback started trailing me! I tried to get away from them, but I was driving a buggy and much slower than them. They circled me. The main bandit comes up to me, pointing a gun. I was so scared. He says, ‘Hand over the kettle, girl.’”

  She said the last part in a gruff voice. It really painted the picture for me.

  “They knew why I was out there,” she said. “Somehow they knew about the kettle. Then he put a gun to Francois’ head.”

  “Who’s Francois?”

  “That’s our horse.”

  Francois? For the love of all that’s wholesome …

  “He told me that if I didn’t hand over the kettle, he was going to kill Francois. I’d be stranded in the desert, and the kidnappers would still kill my father.”

  “So you gave it to them.”

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Then I went to Dry Rock Basin. I heard this guy yelling for me. I went over to him, and, sure enough, it was the kidnapper.”

  “The ransom note says ‘we’ as though there are multiple kidnappers.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Apparently his partner was somewhere in the caves with Daddy.”

  Okay, so there were only two kidnappers. This was doable. “Go on.”

  “He was none too pleased that I’d lost the kettle,” she said. “He gave me four days to track it down. If I don’t, they’re going to kill Daddy.”

  “Why didn’t you just offer him some money? You’ve got enough of it.”

  “I tried, of course,” she said and narrowed her blue eyes. “He wouldn’t accept the offer. He only wanted the kettle.”

  “So go to a general store and buy a matching kettle, give that to him.” I hated to state the obvious.

  “I wish I could. See the Clements kettles all have words stamped into their handles. They say ‘Clements Plantation.’”

  “Not too easy to swing, I imagine.”

  “No. And there’s a certain way the letters are written, and … Oh, you could never fool someone who knows what he’s looking for.” She released a deep breath of exasperation. It was hard to tell whether she was weary from the gravity of the situation or from her enthusiastic recreation of the story.

  “Looks like you’ve got yourself a real dandy of a situation here, Miss Cosgrove.”

  “Yes. That’s why I need your assistance. I only have four days to get the kettle to them. Otherwise they kill my father.”

  She looked at me now. Expectantly.

  I took another drag from my cigarette. In the time Lilly had told her story, I’d completely forgotten that I was planning on closing my office down, giving up on private investigation. I let the smoke drift out the corner of my mouth. I’d been in this business for the better part of two decades. That’s a long time.

  I’d also forgotten about the stench from my boot. I sniffed deeply. It was still there, floating in the air. Lilly surely smelled it too. Probably scared her.

  I looked at the boots now. Blemishes covered every square inch. The long scratch on the top of the left one came from a barbwire fence, the end of a misadventure in tracking a train robber, while a vicious prostitute had made the tear at the top when I’d tried to collect a client’s back payments. The large stain on righty came when I was tracking a cattle rustler. There are several ways a fella can get stains on his boots when he’s deep undercover in a herd of Hereford cattle. The details aren’t important.

  So here it was—I could either take the case or close shop. Could I give up this life? Could I end the adventure? Could I be just another guy?

  Hell no.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you so—”

  “Can you describe the kidnapper?�
� No time for pleasantries. It was time for business.

  “Not really,” she said. “It was night. And very, very dark. He had a black bandanna covering his face. I couldn’t make him out at all. He was wearing a duster. Had a deep voice.”

  “That could be a thousand different people. What about the bandits? Can you describe them?”

  “No. They wore bandannas too. Theirs were a really pretty blue. Kind of a sky blue. But I’m sure that doesn’t help either.”

  Blue bandannas. Jimmy Blue Eyes, perhaps? Wouldn’t that be something? Man oh man, I’d love to get another chance at that guy.

  “Actually, it might be helpful indeed,” I said.

  She smiled wide and took a deep, relieved breath. She leaned back in her seat and crossed her legs, one cream-colored calf revealing itself. I traced its gentle curve up to her dress. Lilly blushed and looked away.

  “I’ll need to come by your house in a bit,” I said, “to look at the old man’s things.”

  “Okay, we live on the other side of the lake by—”

  “Everyone knows where you live.”

  “Right.” Lilly stood up. “I’ll let the butler know you’re coming. Thank you so much.”

  Very grateful, this gal. I gave her a nod. She smiled big then floated out the door.

  There was a strange silence. There’d never been so much pink and powder and squeaking in my office before. I took a final drag of the cigarette and blew the smoke about the room. Better.