The Legend of Annie Murphy Read online

  Mac stepped forward. “You saw them . . . complete? Solid?”

  The sheriff nodded glumly. “Saw them just fine. Saw Bodine, too, only the town was quivery again, and so were you.” He grabbed Mac’s shoulder in desperation. “Professor, if you know what’s happening here, would you mind explaining it to me?”

  Jay was so desperate to see his father again that Lila had to grab his arm and pull him toward the shelter of a nearby barn.

  “Let me signal him!” Jay cried. “Maybe he can still see us!”

  “Jay, quick, we have to hide,” Lila reminded him, getting him through the barn door. “We’re solid again!”

  Jay flopped against the barn wall, about to weep from frustration. “We saw him . . . if we could have just grabbed him or something . . .” He wilted, sliding down the wall until he sat in the hay. “He’s gone . . .”

  Lila sat down and put her arms around him, her eyes filling with tears. “No, he’s not gone. He’s still there. He’s just not there now. ”

  “Did you see that other man?”

  “It was the sheriff, wasn’t it? Nobody can find him because he’s in the future with Dad and Professor MacPherson.”

  “We’ve traded places with Sheriff Potter!” Jay’s voice was weak with despair. “What are we going to do?”

  Lila just held him as she prayed, “Dear Lord, you know all about time and space and little people like us. Help us, Lord. Help us get back home again.”

  SIX

  Sleep did not come easily, but Mac and Dr. Cooper had to get some rest after being up all night. They sacked out in Mac’s tent on the cemetery hill while Sheriff Potter kept watch outside. They didn’t wake up until nine in the morning.

  Munching on a quick breakfast of dried fruit and granola bars—the sheriff didn’t care for any—they questioned the sheriff further.

  “Annie Murphy shot her husband in cold blood, three shots with a .40 caliber revolver, right up in their room in the Crackerbys’ boardinghouse,” the sheriff explained. “Near as we can figure, she married Cyrus Murphy just so she could inherit the mine after she killed him.”

  “And so she was sentenced to be hanged . . .” Dr. Cooper prompted.

  “But she escaped from the jail the night before and didn’t show up again until two days later, up in the same room in the boardinghouse where she shot her husband. That’s when I chased her to the cliffs. And then you know what happened: I tried to grab her, but POW! She disappeared and there I was, in the dark and . . . wherever I am.”

  Dr. Cooper asked Mac, “When did those boys see Annie?”

  “Two and a half days ago, which means she was wandering up on this hill,” he looked at the sheriff, “the night she escaped from your jail.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Except she escaped early in the morning.”

  “Which means there’s about an eight-hour difference. When it’s morning in the past, it’s evening in the present.”

  Dr. Cooper asked, “You said she looked like a ghost.”

  Sheriff Potter nodded. “Just like you look sometimes— and I guess like I look to you.” Then he added, “Except she looks flat, like a picture.”

  “Two-dimensional . . .” Mac mused. “She has height and width, but no depth.”

  “Just like a picture hanging on the wall.” The sheriff stretched sleepily. “And now that you guys are having your morning, I’m ready to call it a night. If you’re done using that tent, I could use a few winks.”

  “Sure,” said Mac. “We can talk some more later.”

  The sheriff started for the tent. “It’s not all that complicated as far as I’m concerned. You want your kids back, and I’ve got an escaped killer to catch and take back to Bodine for hanging. That’s the long and the short of it. I’ll leave you gentlemen to sort out the hows and the whys.”

  The sheriff ducked inside the tent and was soon snoring peacefully.

  Dr. Cooper sat close to Mac so they could talk quietly. “I can tell you’re having a brainstorm.”

  “I’ve had theories about this place for a long time,” Mac answered. “When I heard about those boys seeing the image of the weeping woman in the cliff and then sighting a ghost, I wondered if a vortex could have developed.”

  “A vortex?”

  “A tunnel-like whirlpool in the space/time fabric.” Mac’s eyes glowed with the thrill of discovery. “You see, Jake, gravity, time, and space are all physical properties, linked together. If gravity is disrupted, as we see happening in this canyon, time and space will be disrupted as well.” He took a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket, folded it once to make a crease, then unfolded it and stretched it out flat on his knee. “Imagine that this piece of paper is time and space. Let’s pretend the past is over here near the left edge of the paper and the present is over near the right edge. Now if we were microbes on this piece of paper, the past would be a long way from the present: We’d have to crawl a long distance to get there, and it would take a long time. In the same way, we’re separated from the Bodine of the past by roughly a century. But now here’s what’s happened.” He folded the edges of the paper upward like a book closing until the two sides nearly touched. “Gravity has folded time and space and now the past and present are almost folded against each other. They’ve actually touched in one place: the vortex.”

  “So the vortex acts as a bridge?”

  “A bridge, a tunnel, whatever. It’s the one point where the past and present are entangled, and if anyone stumbles into that vortex, they could cross over from one side to the other, from past to present and vice versa. So here’s my theory . . .” He slipped the paper back in his pocket and looked out over the old ghost town. “Two and a half days ago, right after she escaped from the Bodine jail, Annie Murphy stumbled into the vortex and got lost between time dimensions, between the past and the present. That’s when the boys saw her and thought they were seeing a ghost. She was still in the vortex, visible to both worlds but not physically confined to either one.”

  Dr. Cooper was figuring it out. “Two nights later, we camped out on this hill.”

  “And while we were camping here in the present, the sheriff spotted Annie, looking like a ghost, in the past. He chased her out of town and into that gap in the cliff.”

  “Which had to be when Jay and Lila saw her as well, while they were down in the town getting my other camera.”

  “Exactly. So the sheriff, in the past, chased her while the kids, in the present, followed her.” Mac slowed down a little, leaning forward to show the importance of what he was about to say. “Jake, from what happened next, I have to conclude that the vortex is somehow wrapped around Annie. It goes where she goes. She could even be trapped in it.”

  “So if you find Annie, you find the vortex?”

  “I think so. That’s what the sheriff and the kids did. When they followed Annie into that little room inside the cliff, they were pulled into the vortex and they traded places: The kids were thrown into the past, and the sheriff was thrown into the present.” Mac hesitated, a solemn look on his face. “Which means we have ourselves a real mess. Now the past and the present are tangled up with each other. Part of the past is stuck in the present and part of the present is stuck in the past, and Annie’s stuck in the middle.”

  “So how do we get the mess untangled?”

  Mac thought it over, then shook his head at the size of the problem. “We have to find the vortex, which means we have to find Annie. Then, somehow, we have to get the sheriff and the kids in that same spot at the same moment and repeat what happened the first time. With luck, we’ll switch everybody back to where they belong.”

  Dr. Cooper took a moment to digest Mac’s idea. “How in the world are we going to arrange all that when we can’t get to Jay and Lila?”

  “We have to, that’s all. And quick.” Mac looked grim. “We’ve seen how the sheriff keeps fading in and out and catching glimpses of Bodine in the past. I’m sure the kids are encountering the same thing. It’s the tim
e/space fabric trying to untangle itself, trying to return to normal. Jake, the vortex can’t last. Like any whirlpool or whirlwind, it’ll finally run out of energy and resolve itself. The whole mess will untangle.”

  Cooper was puzzled. “Isn’t that good?”

  Mac shook his head. “Good for us, good for the universe, but not good for those trapped by it. For Annie, the vortex is like a protective bubble keeping her alive outside the time domain. If the vortex dissolves, she could perish. And if we can’t get the kids and the sheriff back through the vortex before it dissolves, they’ll be trapped right where they are with no way to return.”

  Dr. Cooper looked over the desolate canyon and the ruins of the old town. His kids were down there somewhere—a century in the past. “Then there’s nothing else to do but get started. We need to accumulate as clear a picture as possible of what happened back then, where and when.”

  “Every clue will be important,” said Mac. “And who knows? You might actually dig up something about your kids from a hundred years ago.”

  “As long as it helps us find Annie Murphy and get the kids back.”

  Mac dug out his cellular phone. “I’ll call my secretary. She and her son are researching Bodine and Annie Murphy right now.”

  “See what they can find out about Sheriff Dustin Potter as well. He’s part of this.”

  “Right.”

  “And the carving in the cliff . . .”

  Mac nodded. “Yes, the carving.”

  “There’s a message there. We just have to figure out what it is.”

  In the Bodine of 1885, Deputy Erskine Hatch stepped into the sheriff’s office after a fruitless day. Sheriff Potter was still strangely missing, and though the deputy had asked Maude Bennett and several others around town, he never found another trace of the two ghostly kids from Chicago. People were talking, though. The whole town was abuzz with rumors about Annie Murphy’s ghost, mysterious rock slides, ghostly kids, and Sheriff Potter. It was frustrating. Asking questions in the course of his investigation only fueled the rumors and speculation, and that made it harder to find out what was really going on.

  Deputy Hatch sank into the chair behind the sheriff’s desk with a sigh. He was getting nowhere, and—

  There was a big gun in a holster resting on the desk. He hadn’t put it there. He reached over and pulled the gun out of the holster. A .40 caliber Colt revolver with three live rounds and three empty shells in the cylinder.

  Hmm. He’d seen this gun before. He sat for a while to think about it.

  In the meantime, Jay was in the alley behind the Bodine Mercantile, shinnying up a drainpipe to get to the roof. It was slow going, and he couldn’t be sure the rusting old pipe would hold his weight without tearing out of the wall.

  “Okay so far,” he called toward the ground. “Now if I can get my leg over that gutter I’ll have it made.” He heard no reply. “Lila?”

  “Up here.”

  He looked up to find his sister already on the roof, giving him a gloating smile. He felt just a little stupid.

  “Okay, how’d you do it?”

  She chuckled as she offered him a hand. “I found a ladder on the other side.”

  He rolled his eyes with embarrassment, took his sister’s hand, and with her help clambered onto the roof.

  The slope of the roof was shallow and not too hard to walk on. The building’s flat fake front jutted up higher than the roof, hiding them from people in the street below.

  “Now just why are we up here?” Lila asked, stepping carefully over the cedar shakes.

  “Mrs. Crackerby said Annie was looking at the roof of the mercantile, figuring something out. I’d like to know what.”

  They reached the ridge of the roof and walked along it to the front of the building where they could peek over. The Crackerby Boardinghouse was directly across the street. As a matter of fact, they could have looked right in the window of Annie and Cyrus’s rented room if the shades had not been closed.

  “Wow,” said Jay. “Great view if you wanted to spy on them.”

  “Yuk!” said Lila, making a face and pointing at the shingles just below the ridge. “Is that what I think it is?”

  The roof was spattered with a disgusting brown gook. Jay crouched low, his nose only inches away from the stuff, and sniffed it. Then he made a face too. “Eughh. It’s chewing tobacco. Somebody’s been spitting up here. Makes me want to barf.” He rose to his knees to get some air.

  “There’s a lot of it,” Lila observed. “All along that edge.”

  “Yeah, and look. Feathers.”

  Lila plucked one out of a crack between the cedar shakes. “Feathers and yukky spit. What do you suppose it means?”

  Jay thought a moment. “It means there was a goose up here chewing tobacco.”

  “Very funny.”

  Jay tried to get serious as he examined the roof closely. “No bird droppings, so this isn’t a favorite bird hangout . . .”

  “Jay . . .”

  He looked up and saw Lila peering over the fake front of the building toward the cliffs, her hand over one eye.

  “Jay, come look at this. Tell me if you see anything.”

  He stood beside her and looked toward the cliffs to the east of town. To any casual observer it would have looked like any of the other rugged cliffs that surrounded the canyon. But having seen the weeping woman and Annie Murphy’s carvings at the boardinghouse, Jay knew what to look for as he covered one eye.

  Lila pointed. “See that old forked tree? Just above it. See a hand?”

  Jay saw the hand right away, carved in different rock formations hundreds of feet apart, but lining up just so to create the image. “Yeah. And the arm . . . and the shoulder.”

  Lila gasped. “Do you see the face?”

  “Right above the arm.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He recognized it. “Cyrus Murphy.”

  They pieced together the rest of the image: Cyrus Murphy, lying on his stomach, with three wounds in his back. It was easy to guess that he was dead.

  “How does she do it?” Lila marveled. “That cliff’s at least a mile away, don’t you think?”

  “At least. But the other question is why? Why is she doing it?”

  Lila studied the image further. This was no careless sketch of the man. His face was lovingly rendered, the pain of death etching his features. It made Lila feel sad, which made her wonder how Annie must have felt when she carved it.

  “Jay, I think I know why.”

  He took his eyes off the cliff and looked at her.

  He was listening.

  “What if Annie didn’t shoot her husband? I mean, she carved that bust of him in their room and then this carving of him shot dead. It’s easy to see she did it carefully like it really meant something to her. And then she carved herself weeping over Cyrus’s grave. If she shot Cyrus just so she could take over the mine, she wouldn’t make carvings like this. I think she’s grieving, Jay. She loved him. I can see it. I can feel it.”

  Jay looked across the street again at the window of the Murphys’ once-rented room. “You know, if I were a killer, I could have shot Cyrus Murphy through that window. All I would have had to do was sit up here . . .” he pointed at the tobacco spittle on the shingles, “chewing tobacco to pass the time, and just wait for Cyrus to walk by the window. Then . . .” he took one more careful note of the feathers, “if I shot my gun through a pillow, it would muffle the sound so the people in the street wouldn’t notice it too much.”

  “And that ladder I found. The killer could have used it just as easily as we did to get up here.” Lila’s voice was hushed, the revelation was so overwhelming. “Annie Murphy was framed!”

  Jay nodded, awestruck. “Now what the judge and his wife were talking about makes a lot more sense. Mrs. Crackerby knows what happened, and she’s feeling guilty!”

  “So the judge is in on it, whatever it is!”

  Jay looked toward the cliff again. “Remember what Pr
ofessor MacPherson said about Annie? That she was illiterate. She can’t read or write.”

  Lila caught his meaning. “So she’s trying to tell the world what happened in the only way she knows how: She’s carving it!”

  “And you can only see the carving of Cyrus shot dead if you stand in this one spot. That means she had to be here on this roof when she carved it.”

  Lila could only shake her head in bewilderment. “I just don’t see how she does it.”

  “I bet it’s got something to do with all this time/space stuff we’re experiencing. Professor MacPherson could explain it.”

  “If only he were here,” Lila lamented. Then her nerves tightened with excitement. “But there could be more carvings, Jay. We don’t have the whole story yet.”

  “The auction . . .”

  “Huh?”

  “The auction tonight at eight—that has to be part of the story. They’re going to sell the Murphy Mine.”

  Lila’s eyes widened with recollection. “And the judge said he was going to be there, no matter what.

  Do you suppose he wants to buy the mine?”

  “There’s only one way to find out for sure. We’ve got to be there.” Jay started toward the drainpipe, then remembered. “Where was that ladder?”

  Lila smiled and led the way. “Let’s go!”

  SEVEN

  Sheriff Dustin Potter was still sawing logs in the tent. Dr. Cooper and Richard MacPherson climbed the short distance to the top of the hill and once again stood on the grave of Cyrus Murphy. For a long moment they studied the cliff carving of the weeping woman, almost listening for her to tell them a clue, a hint of what Annie Murphy was thinking.

  “There’s a message,” said Cooper. “There has to be.”

  “Do you understand how Annie managed to create this carving over such vast distance?”

  “She’s outside time and space,” Dr. Cooper answered. “So to her, there is no distance, right?”

  Mac nodded. “If my theory is correct and Annie is truly trapped in a time/space vortex, that would explain her flat, two-dimensional appearance the boys and the sheriff described. And the outside world appears that way to her. Not only that, it would have no depth in actuality. From within the vortex, the cliffs would not only look like a flat photograph, but Annie would also be able to touch any part of them as if every surface, every detail, was the same distance from her.”