From award-winning author Loren D. Estleman comes The Undertaker's Wife The undertaker's wife waits, she weaves, she builds. The undertaker practices his art, the Dismal Trade, with consummate skill. He has raised it to an art through the high craft of the Connable Method. Through it, he has managed to transform the ugliness of death into a thing of dignity and beauty. Victims brutalized by war, street fights, tavern brawls, ambushes, fires, every hazard in a raw West―these in his hands become presentable. Everywhere on the frontier, which erupts with life and death, he offers his skill: to the rich of San Francisco, the bawds and ruffians of the Barbary Coast, to Kansas cowboys, outlaws, soldiers, and sheriffs. He is devoted to dignifying the dead. She is devoted to making her marriage whole, in spite of the tragedy that surrounds it; and most especially in spite of the tragedy that in one terrible afternoon strikes at its center. Today the undertaker is called to disguise the suicide of a famous financier. It is high drama, for only his art can save American's financial markets. Her task on this day is secret, an act of understanding and dedication. In the end it is the undertaker's wife who, through love, is able to transcend death. Loren D. Estleman is the author of more than eighty novels, including the Amos Walker, Page Murdock, and Peter Macklin series. The winner of four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards, he lives in Central Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan. The Undertaker's Wife By Estleman, Loren D. Forge Books Copyright © 2010 Estleman, Loren D. All right reserved. ISBN: 9780765326126 Chapter One Elihu Warrick entered his first-class stateroom aboard the Michigan Central, laid out his cigars and placed his portable bar in its morocco-leather case on one of the seats, removed his shimmering silk hat and gray Chesterfield, and gave them to the porter for brushing. When the porter returned forty-five minutes later, carrying the items in a new pair of white gloves, he found Mr. Warrick slumped on the seat opposite the bar and cigars, indisputably dead. Certainly the porter, who had performed as an orderly in a Negro troop hospital during the war with Spain, was disinclined to dispute the fact. There was the matter of the pallor of the overfed face, like tallow in contrast to the weighty black moustache, too obviously a beneficiary of Dr. Rose’s Old Reliable Hair and Whisker Dye, and then there was the confirmation of the round blue hole in the right temple, burned and puckered at the edges, and Mr. Warrick’s thumb inside the trigger guard of the Forehand Perfection Automatic Five-Shot Revolver in his lap. The porter laid the folded coat on the seat next to the bar and cigars, stood the silk hat atop the coat bottom side up to protect the brim, leaned across the body, and opened the window to let out the sulfurous stink?of the exploded cartridge combined with the passenger’s voided bowels, not of the cigar, which continued to emit a pleasingly expensive masculine perfume from the smoking stand where its owner had placed it half-smoked. The young Negro was mildly upset. Mr. Warrick was reputed to be a generous tipper, and he’d neglected to lay out a gratuity. To help himself to a cigar from the open silver case violated railroad regulations as well as the porter’s own standard of conduct. Instead he poured an inch of brandy into a small silver-plated cup from the crystal decanter strapped inside the portable bar, flipped the brown liquid down his throat, polished the cup thoroughly inside and out with his handkerchief, and returned the cup to its loop inside the lid. With the spirit’s heat spreading up from the floor of his stomach, he went to find the conductor. HAIRLINE CR ACKS radiating from the death by his own hand at age fifty-four of the well-known Chicago speculator, railroad investor, and meatpacking magnate reached as far north as Ontario, where he’d maintained mining interests, and as far south as Venezuela, where his gifts to several key cabinet members had secured extensive investments in the trade in rubber and balata, a principal ingredient in the manufacture of guttapercha and chewing gum. The Texas cattle industry was concerned, as were his associates in New York City, who through their attorneys moved swiftly to demand an audit of all his books; for in the world inhabited by Warrick and his class, suicide had but two motives, money and women, and as the second was invariably tangled with the first, it little mattered which was the specific cause. This latest disaster, occurring when the bloody gash of the 1893 Panic had not yet healed completely, further eroded stomach linings already worn as thin as vellum. As it happened, the news reached John C. Broughty at Windvale, his twelve-acre estate on Long Island, just as he was showing an early holograph manuscript of John Donne’s 1624 poem "No Man I